Our rooms faced east on Baker Street, and on that day I had closed the heavy curtains against the morning sun, leaving the windows behind them cracked open and myself sitting in half light, too hot even to read. Despite my claim that I had become inured to the heat during my army years in India and Afghanistan, I suffered mightily.
I contemplated asking Mrs Hudson for an iced lemonade, but the poor woman was no doubt prostrate on her bed from the heat. A paper fan lay next to me, useless in this oven. My ruminations were interrupted when the postman arrived with a small rectangular package, addressed to me and postmarked Edinburgh.
I welcomed the distraction.
The package was perhaps half the size of a shoebox, and heavy. The sender was a mystery, one ‘E. Carnachan’. I unwrapped it, only to find a smaller box inside covered by another layer of brown paper wrapping, this one stained, faded and tied with string. A note had been slipped under the string.
I removed and unfolded it, my hands sticky with sweat. The handwriting was old-fashioned and feminine, shaky, perhaps with age or illness. I read:
Dr John Watson—
You do not know me, but I am Elspeth Carnachan, a name you may not recognise. Carnachan is my married name, but I was born a Watson and your father’s half-sister. Your father and I parted ways while still in our youth, and I was effectively erased from the family history before you were born. It is doubtful that he ever mentioned me to you.
Your mother, bless her kindly soul, maintained contact despite your father’s ill opinion of me. You can confirm my familial connections if you so choose by public records in Edinburgh.
I am an old woman now and consumption will soon take me. In clearing my affairs, I came upon something in my attic last week that was meant for you. It is enclosed.
When you were only eleven your mother gave it to me for safekeeping with the direction to give it to you on your twenty-first birthday. She was in perfect health when she entrusted it to me, and so I wondered why.
By a strange twist of fate, she died only two days later. Perhaps she was prescient? We shall never know.
I placed it in my attic, intending to deliver it at the designated time. But life intervened and it slipped my mind.
I will now make a shameful admission. Upon rediscovering this last month, dear nephew, I was feverish with the thought that I might have caused some disaster by my careless delay in sending it to you. To quiet my mind, I tried to open your gift, even going to the extent of having several of Edinburgh’s finest locksmiths apply their skills, to no effect.
I hope you will forgive me. I think your mother would have done so. Please receive this in her spirit – she was the soul of kindness and generosity – and not with the judgemental anger so characteristic of your father.
God bless,
Elspeth Carnachan (née Watson).
A tumult of emotions coursed through me. Anger at this woman’s carelessness, her imposition, and my own grief at the reopening of an old tragedy vied for captaincy with tender childhood memories.
My mother. The soul of kindness and generosity. Her unexplained death when I was but eleven was a wound that had never healed. It was mystery that I thought would never be solved. I wiped a rivulet of sweat from my brow.
Elspeth Carnachan, an aunt I had never known, had not only forgotten her promise to my mother, but then tried to open something meant for me. No wonder my father had forsaken this careless and duplicitous creature! I flung down the letter.
I turned my attention to the package, wrapped in aged brown paper. On it, inscribed in delicate handwriting which I recognized as my mother’s, I read: ‘For John, upon the occasion of your twenty-first birthday. I hope you will understand. In my heart always, Mother.’
I tore off the string and paper. Inside was a worn cardboard box with a faded floral label, once containing two fancy bars of soap. I raised it to my nose. A scent from my childhood – Lily of the Valley – emanated from it. It had been my mother’s favourite. I was blindsided with a sudden wave of grief, and my vision blurred. I blinked and regained my focus.
I opened the soap box and discovered within a strange silver box about the size of two decks of cards. It was ornate and complicated. Engraved on its surface in finely traced lines were Celtic dragons, and the box itself was bound up with a dozen flat metal bands of different colours: silver, gold, copper. These were braided and wrapped around it, fastened securely along the front edge in a kind of Celtic knot. The ends of these bands were tucked under the edges of a large lock of a type I had never before seen. At the keyhole of this lock were many scratches, as though a breech had been attempted numerous times.
It was a beautiful object, like something from a fairy tale. But what was within? And why had my mother left this for me?
No key was included. I tried opening it, pressing and tugging here and there in case the keyhole was a ruse. Perhaps the box was locked in some way which could be released by pressing the right spot. But the lock and the metal banding did not move.
A second wave of sadness swept over me. Many miles had passed under my feet since my mother’s tragic and puzzling drowning. Suicide? Accident? But she had been
