Very special thanks to my friend, mentor, advisor and editor, Ruth E. Friend, who spent so many hours proofreading, editing and making suggestions for improvements, and without whom not a single word would have made it to the page.
Last but not least, hugs to Michael, also a First Reader and the love of my life, who is patient and understanding, who puts up with my need to escape to my writing cave, and who has promised to spend the rest of his life bringing me coffee when I do.
Author’s Note
This novel takes place in 1878, four years after the events of the first book in the series, When the Song of the Angels is Stilled. Once again, the narrator is Poppy Stamford, a new fictional character and the sister of Dr. Michael Stamford, the man who would introduce Sherlock Holmes to Dr. John Watson. I was very pleased to read a review by Thomas Turley of the first book, in which he said that Poppy is “the most appealing heroine since Irene Adler.” [Tom, I am glad you still liked like her in Book Two!]
Though I, like many other authors of Holmes pastiches rely heavily upon Baring-Gould’s ‘biography,’ it is nonetheless a fictional chronology and account of Sherlock’s life. There are many gaps in Doyle’s stories, and little is actually known about Sherlock’s family or his background. Doyle never revealed whether he attended Cambridge or Oxford or both (as Baring-Gould asserts). Doyle gives few dates certain in his tales and only a handful of events and landmarks to which we can point as real.
This novel is in part a re-imagining of The Musgrave Ritual, one of Sherlock’s early cases. Some may take umbrage with them being alumni of Oxford and in placing the Musgrave case in 1878 rather than 1879, the year noted by William S. Baring-Gould, the noted Sherlock Holmes scholar, best known as the author of the influential fictional biography, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A life of the world’s first consulting detective. According to Baring-Gould (see Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, published in 1962, at page 41), Reginald Musgrave walked into Holmes’ rooms on Montague Street on October 2, 1879 to ask his former college acquaintance for assistance with a case. It had been several years since they had been undergraduates at Caius College, Cambridge. Baring-Gould quotes Sherlock (at page 28) as stating to Watson, “You never heard me talk of Victor Trevor? . . . He was one of the only friends I made during the two years I was at Christ Church.” But then Baring-Gould admits in a footnote “In his published account of the first case in which Holmes was ever engaged, Watson saw fit to tender this line: ‘He was the only friend I made during the two years I was at college.’” Thus, Baring-Gould speculates where Sherlock Holmes went to college and met Trevor. Doyle never says. I set Sherlock Holmes’ death in the early 1940’s. But Baring-Gould estimates Sherlock’s death occurred on his 103rd birthday. (January 6, 1957). Many other dates have been suggested by other authors.
I do not take Baring-Gould or any other author as gospel (though Baring-Gould is certainly a great jumping-off point), nor do I consider any ‘facts’ in the vast array of pastiches to be ‘cumulative evidence.’ If it is not in a Sherlock Holmes tale scripted by Doyle or in his notes or scribbles or insights into what inspired him in writing the Holmes stories (i.e. Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure-a truly wonderful account of Doyle’s time as a ship’s surgeon), then I do not consider it sacred, untouchable, or carved in granite. Hence, for purposes of this novel, I place the events, including Sherlock’s case with Musgrave, a year earlier than Baring-Gould, and I proffer that Poppy Stamford, who narrates the story, was his only love.
St. Bart’s is, of course, a landmark hospital in London, and I have attempted to depict it as it was in the late nineteenth century. Many of the characters in this book were real people. Oscar Wilde, poet, author and dramatist, lived. Dr. Robert Bridges was a physician at St. Bart’s before he became the poet laureate of England. Charles Bradlaugh served in Parliament. The executioner, some of the employees at the British Museum, Richard Assheton Cross, the Home Secretary, and Sir Charles Edward Howard Vincent, the Director of the new Criminal Investigation Department, all lived. Rabindranath Tagore, poet, activist, musician and author, lived. Tagore enrolled at a public school in Brighton, East Sussex, England, in 1878, and briefly read law at the University College, London, but left school, opting instead for independent study. In 1880, he returned to Bengal degree-less, resolving to reconcile European novelty with Brahmo traditions.
I like to pepper real people, places and events (such as railway disasters in Book One and the Thames collision in this novel) with fiction. I hope readers will enjoy the mix.
Once again, the action in this novel takes place before Sherlock Holmes meets Watson, while he is still a novice consulting detective. Sherlock is still finding his way, and he is more committed than ever to shunning romantic entanglements. As Thomas A. Turley, author of “Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Tainted Canister, stated in his review of my first novel in this series, Holmes might have been a less lonely man had he allowed himself to love.
Hopefully, you will enjoy the journey and begin to understand why Sherlock Holmes became the man he was.
Quote
If only I could stir him once again to joy, light a flame, make him quiver as he once did, and split his stone heart, I would trade castles for dungeons and mansions for huts.
Prologue
27 December 1941
Pearl Harbour is no more.
As my daughter and I sit in her parlour, listening to BBC on the radio and watching the snow silently lace the trees outside the window,
