“But you’re right, I think,” Arthur continued. “I don’t know how any man could feel his eyes burn in the electric light and not also feel the sudden palpability of history.”

Bram smiled. “The ‘palpability of history,’ ” he said, rolling it over his tongue. “I like that.” He paused, looking Arthur up and down curiously. “You’ve been writing again? At work on more stories?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, unsure of where Bram was headed with this line of inquiry.

“You always get a touch more poetic in conversation when you’ve just been writing. It’s something of which I’ve taken notice over the years. Quite charming, really.” Bram held his breath and scratched his beard. Arthur felt that Bram was preparing to broach a delicate subject. And when Bram next spoke, Arthur’s suspicions were confirmed.

“Holmes?”

“Oh, hell, not you, too!” said Arthur. “I get enough bullying about him from my publishers. No. I have not been writing about Sherlock Holmes.”

“As you say. I just had the thought…well, how shall I put this? There was no man who felt your ‘palpable history’ more than Sherlock Holmes.”

“I will not write more Holmes stories, do you understand? I would have thought I’d made that perfectly clear at this point.”

“I don’t care whether you do or not,” said Bram. “But you will, eventually. He’s yours, till death do you part. Did you really think he was dead and gone when you wrote ‘The Final Problem’? I don’t think you did. I think you always knew he’d be back. But whenever you take up your pen and continue, heed my advice. Don’t bring him here. Don’t bring Sherlock Holmes into the electric light. Leave him in the mysterious and romantic flicker of the gas lamp. He won’t stand next to this, do you see? The glare would melt him away. He was more the man of our time than Oscar was. Or than we were. Leave him where he belongs, in the last days of our bygone century. Because in a hundred years, no one will care about me. Or you. Or Oscar. We stopped caring about Oscar years ago, and we were his bloody friends. No, what they’ll remember are the stories. They’ll remember Holmes. And Watson. And Dorian Gray.”

“And your count? What was his name? From that little province…” Arthur trailed off. He searched his mind for the name of that backwater kingdom but couldn’t find it.

“Transylvania,” supplied Bram when it became clear that Arthur did not recall the name. “He was from Transylvania. No, they won’t remember him. He didn’t inspire the imagination of a people as did your Holmes. He was my great failure.” Bram laughed bitterly. “Count What’s-His-Name.”

“I’m sorry, Bram,” said Arthur. “I’m so very sorry. I know well how much of your own blood was in that novel. And I thought it was a grand thing, I truly did.” He paused. “Is that why Oscar’s death has you so battered up?”

“Yes, I suppose it is. We treated the man himself as scrap paper; to be used for a while and then discarded. But the stories we will treasure forever. At least Oscar will have his tales in posterity. What will I have?”

“ ‘The man is nothing. The work is everything.’ That’s what you’re getting at?”

“Yes.” Bram paused. “That’s Flaubert, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And we still remember.” Bram laughed bitterly again.

“My stories,” said Arthur. “The science of deduction. The reasoning detective. The solution delivered patly in a satisfying dénouement. They’re all horseshit.”

Bram smiled. “I know,” he said. “That’s why we need them.”

Arthur considered this. “I’ve moved on,” he offered after a long pause. “I’ve been working at realism. History.”

“Realism,” Bram repeated. “Realism, I think, is fleeting. It’s the romance that will live forever.”

“And what about me? Will my name live on?”

Bram’s face turned sour and grim. “I do not know, my friend. All I’ll say is this: The world does not need Arthur Conan Doyle. The world needs Sherlock Holmes.”

“No!” exclaimed Arthur quite suddenly. “No. I am better than he is, don’t you see? I will not be shamed by him. I will outlive him, and I will outshine him.”

“Arthur-”

“Wilde is dead and already forgotten, you say? We’re all bound for the grave and bitter obscurity? Damn it, no. I will not let Holmes win.”

“He doesn’t even exist!” pleaded Bram, but it was no use.

“And the killer of Emily Davison?” Arthur said. “He exists. And I’ll see him to his grave before I unearth that blasted Holmes from his. Holmes won’t save Emily Davison-I will.”

“Arthur,” said Bram quietly. “No one will save Emily Davison. She’s dead.”

Arthur paused, momentarily speechless, as he blinked under the electric lights.

CHAPTER 38 The Pickerel

January 15, 2010

Harold sulked through the next three days, swimming through glass after glass of bourbon and damp Cambridge mist. He should leave, he knew. He should leave Cambridge, because there was nothing else for him there. But leaving Cambridge meant returning to London, it meant boarding a plane at Heathrow and flying west, past the murder scene in New York all the way to a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles.

The second he left Cambridge, real life would return, minute by minute, until he found himself on his own doorstep, standing on top of a dirty welcome mat that actually read “Welcome.” He would turn the key, lock himself inside, and none of this would ever have happened. The thought was more horrible than Harold could bear.

He should send Sebastian Conan Doyle a message-he knew that, too. As far as Harold was aware, he was still working for the man, and so he might as well let the guy know that the investigation he’d paid for was over. The diary had burned up a hundred years before, and now no one-not even Sebastian Conan Doyle-would be able to profit from it. Harold waited, however. Because if he gave Sebastian a call, if he sent him an e-mail, then he would be one step closer to facing the end of all of this.

But the end was there whether Harold admitted it or not. It couldn’t be held off even with liquor, or long and aimless walks through the university gardens. The end would not be held off by checking his messages, by wondering every few minutes whether Sarah might have called.

So he read through the letters again. Not because he thought there was anything pertinent left in them-he was more than sure that there wasn’t, and he was proved right the more of them he read. Harold read the letters because it was the only way not to leave. For now he could still sit in the same claustrophobic reading room, between the same moistureless walls where he’d been with Sarah. He thought about her standing up, getting her coat, saying something polite, and leaving.

Harold didn’t know where she had gone, or even where she had come from. He knew so little about her, really. And he would never learn more. Like the rest of this adventure, Sarah would be a secret he kept alone. A point of pride, in some small way, that he could never share with anyone.

The Pickerel, an old pub on Magdalene Street, became his home away from his hotel room. It was close and relatively free of shouting, flirting undergrads. It was dark, it kept its “football”-tuned televisions down, and it would do. For three nights it did. Harold kept to himself, and to some books he’d picked up from a shop down the street. They weren’t Holmes. They weren’t even mysteries. Harold wasn’t sure when he’d be able to read anything from the Canon again, but he thought it might be a while.

Strangely, the uncomfortable thought that he would never know the secret within the diaries bothered him less than the thought that his investigations were at an end. He wasn’t plagued by grief over the lack of answers-he was plagued by melancholy over how quickly the answers had come, and how final they appeared to be. Harold found himself pining not for solutions, but for questions. For more. He realized that even after all the stories he’d read, he’d been left completely unprepared for this moment-for the quiet days after the climax when the world ticked onward. He’d read thousands upon thousands of moments of revelation, of grand gestures of explanation in which the torn fabric of life had been stitched tightly shut and patted over. He’d read thousands of happy endings and thousands of sad ones, and he had found himself satisfied with both. What he had not read, he now realized, were the moments after the endings. If Harold believed in the stories because they presented an understandable world… well, what happens when the world is understood and that understanding means nothing to anyone but you and the empty tumbler of bourbon nestled in your palm? Harold had understood that not finding a solution would have been awful, but he had never before thought that finding one, and then having actually to go on living with it, might be worse.