I smiled. My lengthy list of names had long ago been shortened to ‘Poppy,’ though only relatives and close friends addressed me by my nickname. Victor Trevor, however, the man everyone had expected me to marry, always called me Priscilla.
The third photograph surprised me. It was a photo of Sherlock, Effie, Victor, and me. It had been taken at a dinner party in the spring of 1874, shortly after I met Sherlock. I had a miniature of the photograph that I had intended to place into a locket someday. I had forgotten that, at my uncle’s request, Sherlock had a copy printed for him.
The memories of that year swilled around my mind like the last sweet sip of brandy at the bottom of the glass.
I was with Victor Trevor, who was then a student at Oxford. We were attending the final day of Eights Week, the four-day regatta on the Thames, when Little Elihu bit Sherlock’s calf. Victor and I attended to his needs that day and continued to assist him for several weeks thereafter. Victor and Sherlock became friends and Sherlock and I worked with his brother Mycroft to apprehend the baby farmer about whom I had learned while attending nursing school at St. Thomas. I had overheard a suspicious conversation, related it to my uncle, who knew Mycroft Holmes who, in turn, enlisted me, and later Sherlock, to help with the investigation. That summer, Victor invited Sherlock to spend some time with him and his father at their country estate in Norfolk, not far from my own home, and my affections for him grew.
But a dark cloud hovered over the Trevor estate. A man from the Squire’s past suddenly arrived, a man named Hudson who was married to Mrs. Hudson, who at that time was one of Squire Trevor’s servants. His appearance threw Squire Trevor into a tizzy. Soon after, he received a letter from yet another past acquaintance and he fell deathly ill. When Sherlock set out to solve the mystery that so plagued Victor’s father, he discovered that Hudson was blackmailing Squire Trevor, who had for many years hidden his unsavory past from everyone.
Sherlock summoned me to join him at Holme-Next-the-Sea where he had finally found the truth. He wished to discuss how to proceed - in other words, he actually asked for my counsel regarding whether to tell Victor everything he’d learned about his father. I joined him there and it was then that we finally admitted how we felt about each other. But Sherlock quickly recoiled from this love and the memories of the night we spent together, especially when, shortly after the squire’s funeral, Victor discovered my true feelings for Sherlock - and Sherlock’s affection for me. This ended their friendship and destroyed my relationship with Victor Trevor. Heartbroken, Victor left England to manage a small tea plantation in India that his father owned. Heaped with guilt over betraying his one true friend and infused with distrust of me for so easily having ‘tossed Victor aside,’ Sherlock retreated from me emotionally. He wallowed for a time in self-introspection. Though he was intent on finding the answers to all the riddles of life, love was too nuanced for Sherlock Holmes. He was enthralling, captivating, but unforgiving, particularly of himself, and this experience was yet another grain of sand added to the already vast shore of his knowledge of the unpredictability, absence of logic and disappointing nature of human beings.
I set the photographs aside and rummaged through the remaining papers and newspaper clippings in the cupboard. There were a few newspaper articles summarizing cases on which my uncle had worked with Scotland Yard, some legal documents, and several grisly photos taken during some of his surgical procedures. I was about to close the cupboard when I spied a small book. I took it out and stared, stunned, at the cover. The book was a series of essays concerning Tantric Buddhism. I leafed through it, scanning its contents. “The Truth of Suffering” was the title of the first section. Then the others followed: “The Truth of the Cause of Suffering,” “The Truth of the End of Suffering,” “The Truth of the Path that Frees Us from Suffering.”
All the tenets that I had just learned of the previous afternoon.
I sat back in the chair, pondering. Sappho jumped into my lap and I stroked her long, ivory fur. Purring, she nudged her head against my chest, insisting on a further display of my attachment, so I nuzzled her nose and gently scrunched the fur on her head.
“Sappho, what am I to make of this? Why would Uncle be reading about the very things that relate to these murders?”
The cat arched her back and looked up at me as if to ask, “Why indeed?”
17
I bathed, dressed, made another cup of tea and went to Uncle’s library, where I found several more books about Tantric Buddhism, most of them concerning specifically the Vairocana Buddha and the philosophy surrounding him. I retired to the drawing room, all the while ruminating on my discovery.
One night at dinner, Uncle had mentioned that he was pleased with the new global interest in Eastern philosophy. He gave a synopsis of the works of a German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, who devised a philosophical system based largely upon his studies of it. Uncle was similarly intrigued with Henry David Thoreau, the American philosopher, who had translated a Buddhist sutra from French to English, as well as the works of Henry Steel Olcott, a theosophist, and Lafcadio Hearn, known for his books about Japan. My ears perked up at the mention of Japan as I remembered the many Oriental artefacts and paintings that adorned the walls of Squire Trevor’s library.
But these brief
