The Perils of Sherlock Holmes by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online Page A

appeared surprised. “Why, yes, it is. I was born Timothy Cratchit. Did you read that in Brook’s?”
    “No, Your Lordship; in Dickens.”
    Lord Chislehurst scowled. “That miserable yarn-spinner! I personally have not read his invasive little story, yet I cannot escape from it. Until I entered the nobility I could go nowhere without some new acquaintance hailing me as Tiny Tim, despite having achieved my full growth, and thinking himself quite the clever fellow. I’d have the meddler in court were he still living.”
    After we had been shown out of the counting-room by Richard, who seemed a personable sort, well-groomed and -dressed within the limitations of a clerk’s salary, Holmes asked me the meaning of the last exchange.
    I was stupefied. “Surely you are familiar with Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’! Every English schoolboy has had the story force-fed to him each December since it made its appearance.”
    “I was an uncommon schoolboy, and I haven’t the faintest notion as to what you are referring.”
    Briefly, in the hansom on the way back to Baker Street, I summarised that most English of Christmas tales and its unforgettable cast of characters: Ebenezer Scrooge, the miserly, holiday-loathing banker; Bob Cratchit, his long-suffering clerk; Cratchit’s loveable, crippled younger son, Tiny Tim; and the three ghosts who visited Scrooge and brought about his conversion to the season of love and forgiveness. Holmes listened with keen interest.
    “I recall telling you once that it is a mistake to imagine that one’s brain-attic has elastic walls, and that the time will come when for every new shipment of information one accepts, another must be sacrificed,” he said when I had finished. “However, I rather think I have an uncluttered corner still, and it seems to me that literature would not be an unwise thing to deposit there. What one man can invent, another can subvert. If you and I are not careful tonight, Watson, your Mr. Dickens may well be an unwitting accomplice before the fact of murder.”
    “Whom do you suspect, and what is the motive?”
    “Chiefly, I suspect Lady Chislehurst and Richard, the clerk. Whether their alliance is amorous or strictly mercenary has yet to be determined, but I am convinced they are in it together, and that Lord Chislehurst’s estate is their object.”
    “But why the clerk? The wife is the sole beneficiary.”
    “It was he who planted the suggestion in the earl’s mind which led to his Christmas Present vision of strife in Richard’s household. Our client was not aware of his subordinate’s dire financial situation before their most timely conversation. There is nothing so effective as a little haunting, abetted by an application of strong spirits and combined with a wife’s reminder of one’s fiscal responsibilities to his family, for bringing a man to a contemplation of his mortality, and to the arrangement for the disposition of his worldly goods.”
    “Are you suggesting he was mesmerised?”
    “I suspect something even more ambitious and diabolical. You may count upon it, Watson, there is skullduggery afoot. I am reminded most acutely of that business at the Baskerville estate during the early years of our association. If there is a ghost involved here at all, it is that blackguard Stapleton’s.”
    At this point Holmes fell into a dark reverie, from which I knew from long experience he would not be drawn until the hour of our appointment with our endangered client. As we clip-clopped homeward through those streets laden with snow, the seasonal spirit was significantly absent inside that cab.
    Big Ben had just struck eight, and the resonance of its final chime was still in the air when a well-built woman in her middle years bustled out the doorway of an imposing pile not far from Threadneedle Street and started down the pavement wrapped in a heavy cloak. This, I assumed, was Lady Chislehurst; and she had not been out of sight thirty seconds