“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“It’s Holmes. I haven’t told a soul yet. You’re the first to hear. But it’s Holmes.”

Bram simply nodded, as if somehow he had expected as much.

“The other day,” Arthur continued, “I had an idea. Have you been to Dartmoor? Those frightful heaths? They’re quite terrifying. I thought it would be a great setting for the old fool. I had this notion of a plot, after my friend Robinson described to me this story about a gigantic hound terrifying the countryside. Ha. Sherlock Holmes on the trail of a terrific hound… Well, maybe it’s too far-fetched. But perhaps it would be a good yarn, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Bram. He appeared content. “It would be an excellent yarn. And the world is short, nowadays, of good yarns.”

Arthur described the plot to Bram, and both men went over the pages. Bram was more than approving; he was ecstatic. He described the tale as a return to form-Arthur was delighted.

The conversation took an odd turn when Arthur told Bram about what else he had written.

“You’ve kept a diary of all…of all that happened?” asked Bram, stunned.

“I needed to put it all down. Oh, don’t give me that look, man! I’m no fool. It’s not for anyone to read. I won’t share it with a soul. But I needed at least to share it with my diary.” Arthur smiled then, his face turning wistful. “Perhaps one day when I pass into the next world, if someone finds the book and reads what happened… well then, what do I care if people know the truth? And what do you? Perhaps the truth deserves to go free at last, one day.”

“You cannot be serious, Arthur,” said Bram angrily. “Your reputation… your worth to generations… It’s not just your name you’re tearing down, don’t you see? It’s Holmes’s. This is about more than just you.”

“Please, calm yourself. Sherlock Holmes will be fine with or without my help.”

“No,” replied Bram. “He’ll be nothing, Arthur, for heaven’s sake, if you don’t destroy that thing. Do you hear me? For your own good. For my good. And for Holmes’s good.”

“Lord, Bram,” Arthur began, before he was cut off by a noise from upstairs. It sounded like a crash. One of the children had done something improper with a table lamp, and the sound of yelling followed. “Excuse me one moment,” said Arthur as he wandered from his study to see what the matter had been.

By the time he came back, a few minutes later, Bram had the most curious look on his face.

“What is it?” Arthur asked.

“Nothing,” said Bram. “Nothing at all.” He was sweating, Arthur noticed. Bram so rarely perspired.

Neither man had any idea at that moment that in those few short minutes a mystery had been laid. And that after the diary had been hidden, it would take more than a hundred years for it to be found.

CHAPTER 46 The Reichenbach Falls

January 17, 2010, cont.

When Harold closed the diary, he realized that he was crying. His tears were dripping onto the hard leather cover of the book, mingling with a hundred years of dirt, dust, and a few specks of blood.

He’d read slowly, making sure that Sarah could follow along with him. Now they both sat freezing on the rocks, and they both knew everything. Sarah placed a hand comfortingly on Harold’s knee, and he found himself crying harder. He pulled the diary to his chest and let his tears fall on the dirt. He didn’t have the energy to conceal them. Neither Harold nor Sarah said a word.

After a few minutes, Sarah stood. Without speaking, she gestured along the path through the mountains. She wanted to walk. Harold didn’t object. He brought himself to his feet, feeling aches forming in his thighs and knees. He followed her in the darkness, up the path, higher into the snowy Alps.

He had no idea how long they walked. It could have been twenty minutes or two hours. They walked under the cover of starlight, through the snow, higher and higher. The exertion warmed Harold a little, and after some time he thought he was close to regaining feeling in his fingertips. Sarah sensed his cold, and despite her own she removed her coat and wrapped it around his shoulders. He didn’t thank her but only walked farther, higher and higher through the thinning air.

He wasn’t sure where they were going, and he didn’t care. He began to appreciate the cold in his bones, the cold freezing the tears on his face. The chill quieted his racing thoughts. He could only feel so much in his head, in his frayed and slow-beating heart, when the rest of his body was frozen. The thought occurred to him that if he lived here, if he set up camp in the mountains and never came down, he might be able to avoid all future feeling altogether. The plan sounded as reasonable as any other.

Before they came upon the clearing, Harold heard the sound of rushing water. Because of the darkness, they didn’t see the waterfall until they were only a few feet away from it. Harold felt the mist from the racing falls spray his face at the same time that he saw the cascading torrent of water through the trees. He could hear the water crashing against the rocks below, slapping against the hard side of the mountain every hundred yards until, somewhere far in the dark distance, the water landed in a churning pool and fed into a lake deep in the valley.

The Reichenbach Falls. They both stopped walking and stared silently off into the distance at what little of the falls they could see.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said.

“Me, too.” Harold didn’t have an ounce of anger left inside him. He wasn’t sure how much of anything he had left inside him anymore.

“Are you happy?” she asked. “Are you glad you found the diary?”

Harold did not need to think in order to answer truthfully.

“No.”

Sarah reached across his body and took the diary from his hand. He loosened his fingers and gave it to her without argument or complaint. She stepped back from the ledge. She pulled the diary behind her, curling her arm like a pitcher, and overhand she threw the diary as far as she could into the darkness. They could almost hear the diary collide with the falls, as it was rocketed downward toward the cragged lake by the force of the water.

And then silence. Stillness. The hum of the waterfall and two sets of breaths, puffing in unison.

“Thank you,” Harold said.

Sarah reached for his hand and held it warmly in her own. There, staring into the night sky, they stayed, fingers intertwined. Harold squeezed as hard as he could, and Sarah squeezed back, each gripping the other’s hand until they felt their fragile bones were about to shatter.

CHAPTER 47 Farewell

August 11,1901

The workmen were tired. They had been at it all day, sweating through the August heat and dampening the armpits of their navy blue uniforms. Two days ago they had finished laying the twenty-foot-long main electrical cables from the Marylebone Station to Baker Street. The mains were thick and quite heavy, two copper tubes placed one inside the other and layered with brown wax. The whole thing was encased in heavy iron, and every time the men lifted a long section of cable between them, they’d grunt and feel the strain in their bulging necks. Yesterday a larger team had come to help raise the cables above the houses, laying them between the lampposts and over the two-story roofs. It had taken twelve men to spread their web of wires outward through Marylebone, slowly west to Paddington. Today only two workmen were left to remove the gas lamps atop each pole along Baker Street and replace them with electric bulbs. Late in the afternoon, as the sun melted into the taller buildings along Montague Square, the two sweaty, exhausted men took turns mounting their one ladder and unscrewing the tops of the gas lamps. One would stand on the ladder’s lowest rung, weighting it down, while the other would climb to the top. The poles had been connected to the nascent grid already, so all that remained was to connect the sockets to the positive and negative lines and then replace the bulbs. The wires kept slipping through their damp fingers, and when they would try to brush the sweat off on their work suits, they would leave finger-shaped stains of wax and dirt on the navy cloth. They were getting very tired.