HE ENVELOPE WAS VELLUM, CREAM. FlNE STRIATIONS, CRISP,
no watermarks. Expensive. Scuffed at the corners, it had attracted grime as it was slid under the door, silently. The Doctor did not hear it, and his ears were keen, sharp as a crone's knees, like all his senses.
He was in the front room, had been throughout the evening, feeding the fire, absorbed in an obscure text. Forty-five minutes earlier, he had glanced up as the Petrovitch woman ascended the stairs, the scrabbly scuttle of her dachshund's claws dragging her back to an evening of heart-heavy sighs amid the torpid musk of stewed red cabbage. The Doctor watched their spidery shadows flit by, dancing off the glazed floorboards under the door. There had been no envelope.
He vaguely remembered wishing there were an easier way to examine his timepiece than extracting it from his waistcoat and cracking it open. That was why, when he spent an evening in, he set it open, on his reading table. Time, or rather the elimination of its senseless squandering, obsessed him. And he had looked at his watch when the rat dog and its scrawny, melancholic Russian mistress shuffled by: quarter past nine.
The text drew him back. Isis Unveiled. Surely this Blavatsky woman was mad: another Russian, like poor Petrovitch with her plum wine. When you uprooted these Czarists and tried to replant them in English soil, was lunacy some inevitable consequence? Coincidence, he reasoned; one heartsick spinster and a megalomaniacal, cigar-chomping Transcendentalist did not constitute a trend.
He turned to study the photograph of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in the frontispiece: the preternatural stillness, that
clear, penetrating gaze. Most faces instinctively shrank from the insectoid jumble of the camera. She reached out and swallowed it whole. What was he to make of this curious tome? his Unveiled. Eight volumes to date, more threatened, all in excess of five hundred pages—and this only one-quarter of the woman's oeuvre—a work purporting to assimilate and eclipse, with a ringing absence of irony, every known spiritual, philosophic, and scientific system of thought: in other words, a revisionist theory of all creation.
Although, according to the biographical passage under her picture, HPB had spent the better part of her fifty-odd years trotting the globe communing with ;this or that occultist ashram, she coyly attributed the book's genesis to divine inspiration, courtesy of a steady roster of Ascended Masters materializing before her like Hamlet's Ghost, claiming that occasionally one of these Holy of Holies stepped inside her head and assumed the reins: automatic writing, she called it. True, the book possessed two distinctly different styles—he hesitated to term them 'voices'—but as to content, the thing was a flea market of mumbo jumbo: lost continents, cosmic rays, root races, evil cabals of black magicians. To be fair, he had in fact employed similar notions in his own writing, but that was fiction, for God's sake, and she was offering this as
theology.
With that debate agitating his mind, he looked up and spied the envelope. Had it just been set there? Had some faint beneath-conscious perception registered as it slipped over the jamb and pulled his eyes to it? He remembered hearing nothing—no approach, no crack of bended knee, no glove on wood or paper, no one receding —and those timeworn stairs announced a visitor as reliably as a brass fanfare. Had immersion in Blavatsky so narrowed his senses? Not likely. Even in the surgeon's theater, with the dying, strapped down, spurting fluids, shrieking in his face, he picked up sounds around him like a restive cat.
Nevertheless, the envelope was there. Could have been there for ... ten o'clock now ... a good forty-five minutes. Or perhaps its courier had only just arrived and remained still standing just outside his door.
The Doctor listened for signs of life, aware of his heart accelerating and the acrid, irrational taste of fear. He was no
stranger to it. He silently drew from the umbrella stand his stoutest walking stick, flipped it deftly in his hand, and with its gnarled, blackened knob poised, opened the door.
What he saw, or didn't see, in the corridor's flickering gaslight would be a subject of internal contention for some time to come: Accompanied by a sharp suck of air as the door swung inward, an enveloping shadow fell away from that hall with the speed of a magician's black silk handkerchief snatched off an ivory tablecloth. Or so in that moment it seemed.
The corridor was empty. He registered no sensory impression of any person having just been present. Nearby he heard the whine of an ill-tuned violin; more distantly, an infant's colicky howl, hooves on cobblestone.
Blavatsky must be having her way with me, he thought; that's what one gets for reading her after dark. 'I am suggestible,' he muttered, as he withdrew to his rooms, locked the door, replaced the shillelagh, and turned his attention to the matter in hand.
The envelope was square. No writing on it. He held it to the light; the bond was thick, unyielding any silhouette. It looked perfectly ordinary.
Reaching into his Gladstone, he retrieved a sharp lancet and, with the surgical exactness that was his custom in all routine procedures, pierced and slit the crown. A single sheet of vellum, thinner stock than the envelope but matched, slipped smoothly into his hand. No mark or monogram adorned it, but this was clearly a gentleman's—or gentlewoman's—correspondence. Folded once, a clean crease, he opened it and read:
Sir:
Your presence is required in a matter of utmost urgency pertaining to the fraudulent public practice of the spiritualist arts. I am told of your sympathy to the victims of just such adventurers as these. Your aid is indispensable to one who may not be named here. As a man of God and science, I beseech your timely response. An innocent's life hangs in the balance. Tomorrow night. 8:00. 13 Cheshire Street.
Godspeed
First of all, the writing: block-printed, clean, and precise, an educated hand. Words embossed deeply in the hearty parchment, the pen gripped tightly, the hand pressed firmly; although not scripted in haste, the urgency was genuine. Written within the hour.
This was not the first such entreaty he had received. The Doctor's campaign to expose fraudulent mediums and their loathsome ilk was well known to certain grateful members of London society. He was not a public man and sought no public recognition, taking measures to avoid such exposure entirely, but word of his work occasionally found its way to those in need. Not the first such appeal, no, but certainly the most dire.
The paper carried no scent or perfume. No identifiable flourishes. The hand was as studiously sexless as the stationery. Anonymity this complete was practiced.
A woman, he concluded: monied, learned, vulnerable to scandal. Married or related to someone of note or station. A dabbler in the shallows of the 'spiritual arts.' That often described those who have recently suffered, or fear they are on the verge of suffering, a profound loss.
An innocent. A spouse or child. Hers.
The address given was in the East End, near Bethnal Green. A mean spot: no place for a highborn woman to venture alone. For a man largely unfettered by doubt amid even the worst uncertainty, there would be none regarding his response.
Before delving back into Blavatsky, Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle made a mental note to clean and load his revolver.
It was Christmas Day, 1884.
The flat where Doyle lived and worked occupied the second floor of an aging building in a working-class neighborhood of London. These were humble quarters, a sitting room and a cramped sleeping chamber, inhabited by a modest man of limited means and a steady, confident manner. By nature, and now in practice, a healer, Master of Surgery these three years, a young man approaching his twenty-sixth year and the cusp of entry into that unspoken fraternity whose members quietly carry on despite conscious awareness of their own mortality.
His physician's faith in the infallibility of science was ingrained but brittle and laced with a spiderwork of faults. Although he had fallen from the Catholic Church a decade before, there persisted in Doyle a hunger for belief; as he saw it, it now remained the exclusive province of science to empirically establish the existence of the human soul. He fully expected science would eventually lead him to the higher reaches of spiritual discovery, and yet coexisting with this rock-ribbed certainty was a wild, weightless yearning for abandon, a ripping away of reality's
