HE WAS TO STAY ON AT THE MELWYN FOR ANOTHER THREE days. He spent the mornings strolling leisurely from shop to shop, in search of replacements for the most necessary of his lost possessions. Which forced him to consider a most welcome question: What does one actually need?
After taking a long lunch alone, Doyle each day returned to the privacy of his room and wrote through the afternoon, letters to Eileen; all the many things he'd wished he'd said to her and hoped he would still one day have an opportunity to say.
Returning from lunch on his last day in London, he found a letter waiting for him at the desk. The envelope was shockingly familiar, identical to the one he had received at his apartment not so long and worlds ago: a vellum cream. The words inside were written in the same feminine hand, not printed this time, composed in a flawless, flowing script, unmistakably the same hand nonetheless.
Dearest Arthur,
By the time you receive this, I will have left England. I hope you can one day find it in your heart to forgive me for not seeing you before I left and again, now, before I go. My heart, my very soul, had been so soon broken when we met, and the circumstances were thereafter so extreme, a moment never came that provided me with either the time or luxury to grieve. That time has come now.
I never spoke of him to you at any length and I shan't now except to say I was in love with him. We were to be married in the spring. I very much doubt if I will ever love a man as much again. Perhaps time will change that in me but it's far too soon to know.
I know that none of us who lived through those days and nights together shall ever see life with the same blind and blinkered eyes with which most around us look out at the world. Perhaps we have seen too much. I only know that your kindness, your decency, your tenderness to me and your courage are a beacon that will guide me through whatever remains of this dark passage.
Please know, dear man, that you will be forever in my thoughts, that you have my love always, wherever the tide may carry you. Be strong, my darling Arthur, I know in my heart, know truly and believe that the light you possess will burn to the great benefit of this world long after our poor footprints have been washed from the sand.
I love you.
Your Eileen
He read it three times. He tried to find comfort in the words. He knew, objectively, that it was offered there. Perhaps he would discover it on some distant sunlit morning. But not today. He replaced the letter in its envelope and set it gently between the pages of a book.
Where I will find it—he thought with startling prescience—quite by accident, many years from now. And thanks to the dependable erosions of time, I will be unable to remember with any reliable precision the soft, exquisite pain of this terrible moment.
Doyle packed his things—two satchels now, beginning again from scratch—and took a train that afternoon to Bristol.
Two months passed in this fashion: traveling by rail to a new town, somewhere in Britain. Taking a room, anonymously. Gleaning what he could about the environs and its history from libraries and circumspect conversations in public houses until his curiosity about the area was satisfied. Then, moving on, at random, without any pattern or plan, each new destination chosen on the morning of departure. He was assured the police no longer sought him; this was his way of avoiding any other interested patties whose intentions were not so reliable.
He read what newspapers he could find as he went, scouring the pages for signs. One day in northern Scotland, he came across an obituary in a two-week-old London paper: Sir Nigel Gull, erstwhile physician to the royal family. The body found in the study of his country home. A presumed suicide.
It was time.
Now late March when he returned to London, he once again took rooms at the Hotel Melwyn and settled into the same routine he had observed before, certain his life could not move forward until he had some word from Jack, equally certain it would not be long in coming.
Late one night after the passing of a thunderstorm, while he was watching the receding lightning spider across the sky from his window, there came a knock at Doyle's door.
Larry stood outside. The dog, Zeus, was with him. Both wet and sodden. Doyle let them in, and gave him towels. Larry removed his coat and took a seat by the fire, accepting Doyle's offer of a brandy. Zeus lay at his feet. Larry stared into the flames and finished the drink in a few draughts. He seemed smaller than Doyle remembered, his face harder and more careworn. Doyle waited for him to speak.
'We left you at the station like that. Didn't like it. Guv'nor said you'd had enough. Done more than enough, too. No reason to trouble you anymore, he said. He's the boss, wasn't he?'
'I don't blame you for that, Larry.'
Larry nodded, grateful for the absolution. 'First thing was, see, we had to give me brother a proper burial. Took him home. Put him in the ground besides our Mum. That was good.'
'Yes.'
'Then Mr. Sparks, he has some business in London. I goes down to Brighton like he asks me, and there I waited. Weeks go by. A month. Mastered every game on the boardwalk, I did. Then here he comes one night wit' news. The movements of a particular schooner. One wot left the port a' Whitby in the first week of the new year. Sailed for Bremen,
that was its destination. That's where we're goin' now, he tells me.
'We catch the next packet 'cross the Channel. Make our way to the German harbor of Bremen. Inquiries are made in that city; Jack speaks the language, no surprise there.'
'No.'
'We're looking for a couple, a man and woman wot boarded in Whitby and disembarked from this schooner. Seems they brung a coffin in the cargo hold. Body of a relative, the captain's told, brought back to be laid to rest in native soil. This couple left Bremen by train, to the south. Here the trail goes cold. Every station, every bleedin' whistle-stop 'tween Bremen and Munich. Saw more of Prussia than the Prussians. No soap. By this time, I'm right keen to get back to a native soil of my own, but the guv'nor, he's got one more notion—'
'Salzburg.'
'That's right, sir, where the brothers as you know went to school. Austria: That's where we're off to now, and we goes over that old town wit' a louse comb. Comes across a driver remembers pickin' up a couple wot answers to our description. Took 'em to a town two hours north. Called Braunau. Braunau am Inn.
'Seems this couple took a house there on the spot, paid cash money for it. Lucky for us there's a nosy parker livin' next door, an old woman's got nothing better to do than peep out her lace curtains all hours of the day and night.
'Yes, she seen 'em arrive, all right. And they did unload a large wooden crate from the wagon. The only baggage they brought wit' 'em, too, save wot she seen 'em carryin' by hand, and that impressed her mind. Kept strange hours, this couple, lights burnin' all hours of the night. Stayed two months and never spoke a whisper to her—not very neighborly, was they?'
'Were they there when you arrived?'
Larry shook his head. 'Gone a week, she says. We goes into this house ourselves. To say it's a right shambles doesn't quite cover it: It was as if somebody held a furnace to the place, melted it halfway down, then let it cool. Everything soft, the walls like aspic ... I can't imagine how they was still standin'.'
Doyle knew these effects only too well: Blavatsky had described it as something breaking through from the other side. 'Did they leave anything behind?'
'That coffin. What was left of it. Scorched, split to toothpicks. Empty. Sitting on a pile of dirt, like wot we seen at Whitby Abbey.'
'No remains inside?'
'No sir.'
Doyle didn't like the look on Larry's face: Something worse was coming.
'What happened then, Larry?'
'We endeavored to pick up their trail again, fresh as it was, only a week past. Led us southwest to a little town in Switzerland, 'tween Zurich and Basel. A resort area, this is, people goes to take the waters, and there's a waterfall folks like to see. Reichenbach Falls. Five cascades. Over two hundred feet high.'
