Old Beginnings 17

Historical Mysteries

5 published, 1 . . . not yet. But which one? Sources below.

1. I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In my defense I must say it was an engrossing book, and it was very rare to come across another person in that particular part of the world in that war year of 1915. In my seven weeks of peripatetic reading amongst the sheep (which tended to move out of my way) and the gorse bushes (to which I had painfully developed an instinctive awareness) I had never before stepped on a person.

It was a cool, sunny day in early April, and the book was by Virgil. I had set out at dawn from the silent farmhouse, chosen a different direction from my usual in this case southeasterly, towards the sea--and had spent the intervening hours wrestling with Latin verbs, climbing unconsciously over stone walls, and unthinkingly circling hedgerows, and would probably not have noticed the sea until I stepped off one of the chalk cliffs into it.


2. I remember the day it began because I was impatient for an important letter to arrive. Also, because it was meant to be the day of my engagement to Hattie Blum. And, of course, it was the day I saw him dead.

The Blums were near neighbors of my family. Hattie was the youngest and most affable of four sisters who were considered nearly the prettiest four sisters in Baltimore. Hattie and I had been acquainted from our very infancies, as we were told often enough through the years. And each time we were told how long we'd known each other, I think the words were meant also to say, "and you shall know each other evermore, depend upon it."

And in spite of such pressure as might easily have pushed us apart, even at eleven years old I became like a little husband toward my playfellow. I never made outward professions of love to Hattie, but I devoted myself to her happiness in small ways while she entertained me with her talk. There was something hushed about her voice, which often sounded to me like a lullaby.


3. No one took any notice.

None of the merchants, moneylenders or friars strolling by in the twilight around San Francesco il Grande noticed the slovenly, ill-dressed man who hurried into the Franciscan church. It was the eve of a holiday, a market day, and the inhabitants of Milan were busy gathering provisions for the coming days of official mourning. Under such circumstances, it was only natural that the presence of yet another beggar left them unconcerned.

But the fools were once again mistaken. The beggar who entered San Francesco was not an ordinary man.

Without giving himself a moment's respite, the ragged man left behind him the double row of benches that lined the nave and hurried on toward the main altar. There was not a soul to be seen inside the church. At last he had been permitted to see a painting, The Virgin of the Rocks, that few in Milan knew by its real name: the Maesta.


4. It was November. Although it was not yet late, the sky was dark when I turned into Laundress Passage. Father had finished for the day, switched off the shop lights and closed the shutters; but so I would not come home to darkness he had left on the light over the stairs to the flat. Through the glass in the door it cast a foolscap rectangle of paleness onto the wet pavement, and it was while I was standing in that rectangle, about to turn my key in the door, that I first saw the letter. Another white rectangle, it was on the fifth step from the bottom, where I couldn't miss it.

I closed the door and put the shop key in its usual place behind Bailey's Advanced Principles of Geometry. Poor Bailey. No one has wanted his fat gray book for thirty years. Sometimes I wonder what he makes of his role as guardian of the bookshop keys. I don't suppose it's the destiny he had in mind for the masterwork that he spent two decades writing.


5. LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.


6. Maestro Agnolo di Lorenzo stepped to within a pace of his intended victim. The blond youth, silverpoint and cartone paper forgotten on the bench, flicked a third pebble at the mastiff sleeping in a patch of sun. Agnolo cocked his weapon to shoulder height and swung.

Sandro, with the speed of youth and guilt, leapt away. The staff landed not on his wool-clad shoulders but his backside, protected only by thin linen drawers. He ran across the kitchen howling, then turned to his master. His clear blue eyes filled with penitent tears, and his lips, perfect as a carved putto's, opened to spill out glib apology. "Master! The dog is a better subject awake—"

Saint Luke, patron of painters, deliver me from the only sons of doting mothers! Agnolo prodded his apprentice's chest with the staff. "There are two hanged men in the Prato. Go and sketch them."



Old Beginnings 17

1. The Beekeeper's Apprentice....Laurie R. King
2. The Poe Shadow....Matthew Pearl
3. The Secret Supper....Javier Sierra
4. The Thirteenth Tale....Diane Setterfield
5. Bleak House....Charles Dickens
6. Unpublished....Minion seeking comments