The Lantern's Dance, page 19
Perhaps I could narrow down when the thing was written? I pulled over a scrap of paper and a pencil, to make notes.
Her fountain pen—the text showed none of the characteristic fading-then-dark-again pattern of the dipped quill—could have been manufactured anytime in the past seventy-five years. The paper’s watermark might help—both with the date, and to tell me where she’d bought the journal. The quality suggested it might be one of those noble old firms that kept a record of every customer since their establishment.
Not that I could count on it. Still, I wondered if Délieux was a large enough town for a stationer who sold high-quality papers? If not, a Paris stationer would surely recognise it.
The better evidence came from Lakshmi’s own words. The Red Sea route she and Arjun had taken—by steamer from Bombay, then cross-country to Cairo—put it after 1830 and before the canal opened in 1869. Which would match her years of travel with “Monsieur,” starting in the late 1830s. If that was, as I thought, Horace Vernet, the artist had gone to London more than once, on one of which trips she had met a man who sounded remarkably sympathetic.
I was struck by a thought, and paged back to her entry about going to London: an exhibition in the city that attracted visitors from all over sounded like the Great Exhibition, bringing in millions of people from May to October 1851. She’d been too old for the competition of the Season, at twenty-six. (Odd, I reflected, that I, too, would be regarded as over the matrimonial hill.) This put her birth in 1825, which agreed with her other information.
I was glad that she’d made a happy marriage, unlikely as that might have been, raising the children (no indication of how many, other than the two sons, a “youngest” and his misanthropic elder) to school age before she began to plot her move to independence in her forty-sixth year. That took us to around 1870, when her Indian cousin pounced and destroyed everything.
For an event half a century past, the rage I felt over this wanton destruction of a family was remarkably fresh and alive. I resented Rajiv’s interference. I craved for the tale to have a different ending. I liked this woman, despite her unambiguous attempt to drive me mad. I liked her as a child swimming in the Hooghly River (upstream from the burning ghats, one hoped) and the way she’d stepped into Monsieur’s team as a boy. I liked her standing behind a palm tree to watch the dancers, when the tall blue-eyed English stranger asked her if she had sore feet. I…
Wait.
What year was this?
I snatched up the scrap on which I’d written dates.
Can I have another name? she’d asked her father. Lakshmi, he’d offered, after Loukya. Born in 1825. Spent much of her life around Vernets. One son—the misanthropic lad—was eighteen the year she was blackmailed and driven to suicide. A marriage six months after the Great Exhibition of 1851—and wait, she had dropped one clear reference there, hadn’t she? For those who had eyes…
…explorer Alexine Tinne, who set off from the Netherlands to photograph the White Nile and spent ten years happily outliving her companions, only to be murdered by Tuaregs just three years ago.
I scrambled from my chair and hopped my way into the bedroom, for the book I’d been trying to put myself to sleep with.
One of the books from Dr Henning’s shelves, pushed aside and probably doomed to end up in a second-hand stall, bore the title, Geographical Notes of an Expedition in Central Africa by Three Dutch Ladies. Written by John A. Tinne, the explorer’s son. I ran my eyes down the pages until I found: she had died in 1869.
I sat down with a thump, finding it difficult to breathe.
Unless this was one of Lakshmi’s mis-directions—no names, no dates, an uncertain number of children throughout her journal—it put her death in 1872.
Meaning that her misanthropic, eighteen-year-old son was born in 1854.
The same year as Mycroft Holmes.
Mycroft’s younger brother, Sherlock, had turned eleven in 1872.
The same year their mother committed suicide.
Lakshmi was not simply an employee of Horace Vernet, she was his niece. Not just a friend of the Vernet family, but Camille Vernet-Lecomte’s daughter.
Lakshmi, also known as Louise Estelle Holmes, the woman who brought “art in the blood” into the Holmes line.
Chapter Forty
Holmes
Holmes watched the two men approaching along the Seine embankment, hands tucked behind their backs and heads bent in earnest conversation. The two could only be Academicians. Or possibly Oxford dons, kidnapped mid-debate and dropped down at a different river, but for the sake of argument, Holmes would go with the hypothesis of Academy rather than college.
He thought for a moment the men would walk straight into him, so absorbed were they, but fortunately the younger drew back with a snort and the elder drifted to a stop before he actually made contact with Holmes’ chest.
The younger—a relative term, since he was a good ten years older than Holmes himself—looked offended, but here a scrap of luck condescended to visit a hard-working detective, and Holmes recognised him. Or at any rate, recognised who he had been before twenty years of soft academic life.
“Monsieur Dampierre, isn’t that you? I do not know if you remember me, but we met towards the end of the Dreyfus Affair, when I was here to—”
“Bien sûr, M. Holmes, you look no older than you did then. Albert, this is the famous Sherlock Holmes, English detective. M. Holmes, I follow your exploits with great pleasure.”
“You are too kind, I will tell Sir Arthur he has an admirer.”
Inevitably, the next minutes were more literary than useful, with Dampierre probing for details of cases about which Holmes knew nothing, or could only faintly identify from his own actual investigations, and then proceeding to tell the older man all about the stories, weaving in some elements that seemed implausible even for a Conan Doyle fiction.
Holmes waited until he paused for breath, following the climactic ending of a story in which a mad professor injected himself with monkey glands in an attempt at winning a young woman. Seeing the older Academician’s frown, and hoping to stave off the ensuing discussion of whether or not such injections would manifest in either appearance or behaviour of that sort, Holmes interrupted.
“In fact, Monsieur, I am here in the course of an investigation, although one that does not concern langurs or men climbing in the windows of young ladies. You recently sent four boxes from your storage attics to an artist by the name of Damian Adler.”
“Three boxes and a trunk, yes indeed. An odd affair, that. Do you know—but wait. Are you the ‘Holmes’ mentioned in the letter?”
“I may be, that is why I am asking. Do you know where that letter is?”
“Two letters, although both in the same envelope. They will no doubt have been filed, our clerks are usually fairly efficient.”
“I need to see them.”
“Oh, is this part of a case? How exciting!”
“Now?”
The two Academicians looked at each other, considering. The disapproval on the older one’s face made it clear what he thought of this disruption to their plans, but to Dampierre, the thrill of involvement superseded the unbroken ritual of years. “Would you rather take your coffee now,” he asked his companion, “or set off and I’ll catch you up? This shouldn’t take more than half an hour.”
Grumbling at this untoward act of hastiness on the part of these younger generations, the ancient permitted them to settle him in a pleasant café with a newspaper, and Holmes and Dampierre set off.
It took more than half an hour, but not much more, before Holmes was holding the envelope that had spent its life nailed to a crate of artists’ memorabilia.
Thick, cream-coloured paper. The remnants of sealing wax on the back, too broken up to discern an image. The writing on the front was a woman’s hand, educated and slightly archaic—rather like that of his mother, another woman educated in nineteenth-century France. It declared, as LeGrand had told him, that the boxes were the possessions of the Vernet family, and should be retained until claimed by Adler or Holmes, no titles or honorifics.
One of the inside documents was on paper that matched the envelope, with the same handwriting. It said simply:
One box, two tea crates, and a steamer trunk are left in the custody of the Institut de France and the Académie des Beaux-Arts until such time as a member of the Vernet family with the surname either of Adler or of Holmes should come to claim them. If no such claimant should appear by the year 1950, the contents will enter the possession of the Académie, who can do with them as they wish.
There was no signature.
“Do you know when the boxes—and trunk—were deposited here?”
“Only very approximately. I was made aware of them in the first year of the War, although they have been here longer. They are in the audit our people conducted in 1901, although they could have been placed there anytime in the previous decade. There must be a record, and I have ordered a search, but since both Horace Vernet and his nephew Émile Lecomte worked and lived here, it is possible that no arrival was recorded because the boxes were already here, and were simply shifted from the studios to the attics. You understand?”
Holmes nodded, and picked up the other note.
This was on an uneven scrap of paper, written by a man with a mediocre pen and a careless hand. The contents made his eyebrows climb:
Enclosed please find 500 francs to cover the cost of sending a telegram to the residents of Hooghly House, Convent Road, Chandernagore, India, at such a time that a Holmes or Adler appears. The message is to read: The boxes have been claimed.
“Was the cable sent?” he asked.
M. Dampierre nodded. “It was, and I assume it arrived there, since we were not notified to the contrary.”
Holmes knew India well enough to suspect that if a telegram arrived and proved undeliverable, it might simply have been tossed out. Telegraphists were generally scrupulous; delivery boys less so.
The handwriting was curious. French, but not classically so. As if the writer was from Chandernagore himself.
Interesting.
Chapter Forty-one
I stared down at the journal, fascinated, and horrified.
Lakshmi, the half-Indian girl who’d written this, was Holmes’…mother?
Did he know?
No. He’d have said. I was sure he would have told me.
Wouldn’t he?
(Did Mycroft know? Worse, did Mycroft know and not tell his brother? If that proved to be true, then my already murderous feelings towards my brother-in-law would—)
No. Not that an Indian heritage wouldn’t explain a few things: Holmes’ choice of India as a refuge in the Nineties. His habit of curling up in a lotus position to meditate on a difficult case. His taste for curry—
Oh, that was ridiculous. Lakshmi’s—Louise’s—habit of concealment had indeed become, as Arjun commanded, so ingrained, so bone deep, that you never slip out of it. So complete, not even her brilliant, all-seeing sons had suspected.
Unless, as I’d wondered since the start, this was all some idiotic joke. Some idiotic, convoluted, unbelievably painstaking and coincidence-dependent joke.
But that was improbable. And if one eliminated the highly improbable, what remained must be some form of the truth.
What evidence was there that I had spent the past few days in the company of my mother-in-law?
Holmes’ mother had been named…Louise. Which, to continue the family’s penchant for repeated forenames, was also the name of her uncle Horace’s wife. Interestingly, her journal recorded that Pitaji’s initial thought of an Indian name his child could wear was not Lakshmi, but the near homonym, Loukya.
What about their appearance? I had been picturing Lakshmi as, well, half-Bengali. Holmes’ mother, on the other hand, had been painted as a small, slim, grey-eyed woman with brown hair and an aquiline nose. His grandmother, Camille Vernet-Lecomte, had those same grey eyes, both in the brooch of my miniature and in the portrait I had pulled from the crate in Damian’s studio. Camille’s reddish-blonde hair was similar to mine, considerably fairer in colour than Louise’s.
Was Camille’s skin also lighter?
I realised that I had been picturing a black-haired, dark-eyed child with skin, as she’d said, somewhat lighter than her father’s, but darker than the usual Vernet. In fact, along with dates and names, she had taken care not to describe her own appearance, and there’d been considerable European colouring in her father’s family for her to inherit. Hadn’t she described the portrait of her grandmother as having—not pale skin, but at least paler? Camille’s husband had begun to suspect that the child was not his, but there could have been any number of reasons for that besides the colour of the child’s hair and skin.
It was by no means impossible, that a daughter of Krishna and Camille could have brown hair and grey eyes.
The sharp intelligence and the touch of humour that Horace Vernet had caught, in painting those eyes, was certainly akin to the personality I had spent the past few days with.
There was no disagreement when it came to dates, either.
Both women had married into a family of English country squires. Both had drowned (taking, for the moment, Lakshmi’s statement as other than fiction) in 1872, in response to blackmail. Holmes had told me that his mother’s body washed ashore many days later, and was identified by her husband. She had been buried, in a closed casket, nearly a month after her death. Her widower then burned most of her possessions, and rarely spoke of her after that.
None of them did. The memory was painful to both Holmes and his brother. Any mention of her was invariably brief and followed by a change of topic. I knew that she had travelled as a child, that she spoke several languages, that she was unusually energetic for a Victorian lady, and that she had an unexpected taste for mischief.
Unless Holmes was hiding not his grief, but the truth? Hiding his mother’s true past? Why would he do that?
No. His mother might have deceived her husband, but mine had not done the same to me. That was a possibility I refused to consider.
Nothing he had ever said about her directly contradicted what she herself had said in the journal. Louise left France and became Lakshmi, then returned to Louise again when she met a young man with blue eyes. Holmes’ mother was the author of the journal.
However, that left the conundrum of her final line: I set my face to the horizon, and swam out, and out, and out again.
One does not have to be a Sherlock Holmes, when hearing evidence of a voice from beyond the grave, to suspect a staged suicide.
If her death was faked, either her husband had been a party to the deception, or he was among the deceived. He had died before I met Holmes, and I had always assumed that burning her possessions and not speaking about her had pointed to a grief that was both authentic and profound.
If that was the case, then she had done him great wrong. But perhaps it was simply anger that drove him to throw her things onto the fire? And perhaps, once that faded, it was not heartache that stilled his tongue, but an unwillingness to admit to his sons, who had loved their mother, that he felt a degree of relief, that this eccentric, too-lively wife of his had removed herself from the scene.
I set my face to the horizon.
By writing it into the past, she had been easing herself into the idea of death. Writing it as a fait accompli made it harder to back away from the act.
Or was it part of her game, wishing to plant the idea of her survival in the minds of whoever found the journal? Did she intend to send it, at some future time, to her sons?
Not that she had done so. Had she died before she could carry out her intention? Drowning in fact, not merely in intent? Had she first sent her journal to the Vernets, to keep safe or to hide away? Or did she live another thirty years and place it in the box herself?
And if she had not died on that day, why had she failed to reach out to her sons from beyond the counterfeit grave?
I sighed. This was going to be one of the thornier conversations I’d ever had with Holmes.
Assuming he ever returned. How long did it take to stash a son and his family somewhere a lascar wouldn’t find them?
With that reminder, the anxiety that my translation efforts had been keeping at bay stirred. I cast around for something to take my mind off it. Ah—the possibility of invisible ink. I’d look a bit of a fool if the rest of the pages held a sequel to the puzzle.
I had looked at those final, blank pages, and found no betraying scuffs or indentations from a pressing nib. Nonetheless, I took the journal to the kitchen and tried the more obvious methods of bringing invisible ink to light, but fumes, acidity, and heat did nothing other than threaten the paper.
What about the watermark’s provenance? Perhaps the paper’s maker had something to offer. Maybe even lead to a noble old Parisian firm with a hundred-year-old ledger containing all their customers’ names.
I noticed, to my surprise, that early sunlight was coming through the cracks in the shutters. Good—that meant there would be a window bright enough for my purpose. I opened up an east-facing shutter and held a journal page against the glass, making a sketch of the manufacturer’s mark. As I was carrying my drawing back to the table, I realised that I hadn’t thought to use the cane. My ankle still twinged, a warning against abuse, but it was a relief to feel that I might be able to keep up with Holmes again, a man more than twice my age.
I should have gone with him. Even now, he could be battling for his son’s life while I sat here dreaming over empty pages and expensive-looking watermarks.
