Trollheart

Chapter VI: The Real Story

The next morning was a Sunday and I rose late, having no surgery. I was not in the least surprised to find Sherlock Holmes waiting for me, his breakfast long cleared away and the room full of the smell of his pipe smoke. He looked up as I entered.

“Slept well, Watson?” He winked at me. “I think we helped our friend Lestrade as much as we could be expected to, but not as much as perhaps we might have, had we not other... considerations to take into mind.”

I sat down to my breakfast, tapped my spoon against the shell of my first boiled egg. I sat facing Holmes – it would have been rude not to – and carefully watched his face.

“I knew there was more to this case than you told the Inspector,” I said. His face clouded over, the humour vanishing from it in a moment.

“The truth, Watson, is often not only hard to hear, but is something which must be kept from – ah! That will be our visitor!” A knock had sounded at the door, and in walked a lady I had not personally seen before, but knew from the news reports. It was in fact the very woman whom Holmes had just saved from the gallows, Mrs. Francesca Liebert. She looked somewhat the worse for her time in Pentonville, which was only to be expected – her face was drawn and haggard and her eyes looked those of a much older woman – but she was out of that horrible place now, and the healing could begin. I was aware it would be a slow process. Places like Pentonville are greedy and grasping: they retain a part of the soul, even when the person is freed. From what Holmes has told me, and my own experience of patients who have been inside those forbidding walls, it never really lets go, and the damage can be permanent. However Francesca Liebert was a young woman, and her chances of putting it all behind her seemed to me rather hopeful.

“Come in, Mrs. Liebert, come in!”

Holmes helped her to a chair; she walked with a slight limp, a result of the attack upon her by another inmate when she had been allowed out for her daily exercise. I wondered if, considering the fortune left to her by the passing of her husband, we could expect a case to be brought against the Metropolitan Police and Scotland Yard for false imprisonment and damage to her reputation? Given how voracious the legal system was though, taking all and giving nothing in return, I imagined she might very well be considering putting it all behind her and starting afresh.

“Words cannot express my gratitude to you, Mr. Holmes,” she began, a light long dimmed now shining behind her troubled eyes. “Had it not been for you...” She dropped her head, leaving the sentence unfinished, though its meaning was clear.

“My dear madam,” Holmes told her, waving his hand in a dismissive gesture, “it was my distinct pleasure. Not only was I able to save you, but in the process, as you may have read, we brought to book a multiple murderer. You were not the only one for whom justice has been seen to be done. Apart from that, and looking at it purely from a selfish, personal point of view, the case provided me one of the most interesting conundrums I have had in my career.”

She looked at him, as if there was something she wished to say, but was fearful of broaching the subject. I had foregone my breakfast in respect to her, allowing Mrs. Hudson to take out my uneaten repast. It seemed churlish of me to sit there and eat while she poured out her thanks to my friend.

“Mr. Holmes,” she began, a tremble in her voice, “Please do not think me ungrateful in any way for the wonderful work you have done in clearing my name, and please forgive what must have seemed like my unconscionable behaviour towards you both times you visited me. But I was given no details, other than that I was free to leave that awful place and return home. If my freedom has been bought at the expense of my family's reputation...?”

Holmes took her hand gently.

“You need not trouble yourself about that, Mrs. Liebert,” he assured her. “Your son – Harold, is it not? In boarding school I believe? Yes, well, young Harold need have no fear. Not a breath of scandal shall touch him, nor yourself. For there is no scandal. The good Inspector Lestrade has been told only those details which allow him to tie up the case and not ask any awkward questions.”

Hope seemed to flush her face, a tiny smile broke out on her features.

“Then... then I have nothing to fear?”

“Nothing at all, I do assure you. As far as Scotland Yard, the public press and anyone other than myself and my good friend Doctor Watson here are concerned, you were pursued and harassed by unwanted attentions from a man your husband knew. This man turned out to be a killer, from whom your late husband tried to protect you, losing his life in the process. There are minor details, such as that Mr. Liebert worked with the man you knew as Francis Deschamps in Canada, but not a scrap of evidence to tie him to the multiple killings perpetrated by he whom we now know to have been the Yukon Terror, Charles Emile Baudelaire. No blame attaches to you, dear lady – in fact, you have the full sympathy of the public, though there may be one or two wagging tongues who will give voice to a calumnious belief that the attentions paid you were not unwanted, and that you were having an affaire de couer with the man who killed your husband. Why, they will ask, did you stay silent when you could just have accused the man who was responsible?”

Her eyes went wide at the sudden intimation of a fresh struggle to fight against, but Holmes held up his finger. I noticed of course that he had tapped out his pipe, knowing from her sister of Mrs. Liebert's asthma.

“I have their answer, madam, and it is one you can use to refute and rebuff such fools who may make such claims. It is simplicity itself. When the door was forced, there were only two people found in the room, with no avenue of escape for a third. This is what you will tell, if you wish to respond to any such allegations, those who accuse you. How could you convince the police that there had been a third person in the room, when to them it was patently obvious that there had not been? What use to protest your innocence when the police had already decided you were guilty?”

She relaxed visibly. “You are correct, of course, Mr. Holmes. However I must confess that I am confused. Where did Deschamps – or, what did you call him? Balaire?”

“Baudelaire. Charles Emile Baudelaire.”

“Quite so. Where did he vanish to?”

Holmes stretched his long legs out before the fire, folded his arms.

“Well, Mrs. Liebert, I will tell you. Dr. Watson knows, but as yet he is unaware of the full extent of the scandal which, thankfully, we have banished, but I think we owe it to him to tell him the full story, do you not agree? I can promise you, it will go no further than this room. My friend is the soul of discretion.”

“Thank you, Holmes,” I said, a trifle stiffly. I could speak for myself, after all. I repeated the assurance my friend had given. I also swore an oath, which is why this story has been held for publication until after my death, and is only to be told when the time has come that such matters no longer cause the furore they did in my day. That time may be fifty years in coming, or a hundred (I pray not so long!) but my will makes it very clear that only when such a revelation as would cause a terrible scandal and cause irreparable damage to a family's reputation can guaranteed to no longer have such an effect, may the story be released to the public. Perhaps, even now, it resides unread in my archives, awaiting a more tolerant time.

Reassured by our promises, Mrs. Liebert began her story. Sherlock Holmes listened intently, nodding when something he knew or had divined was mentioned, frowning when new information reached his ears, and occasionally interrupting the lady to ask a question or clarify a point.

“As you already have found out,” she said, “Peter made his money in America. He was apprenticed to a well-known timber merchant in Philadelphia, but chose to strike out on his own when opportunities presented themselves across the border. In the wild Yukon he joined a crew felling huge swathes of forest, and here it was that he met another young lumberjack, a Frenchman called Deschamps. I don't think he ever knew his first name; the man was close-mouthed and secretive, and always went by his surname.”

“Francis, I believe,” Holmes interjected. The lady nodded.

“Well, it matters not. The two became friends, and, well -” Here her eyes dropped and a flush crept up her cheek. “Perhaps more than that. Peter never spoke of his time in Canada, but I always had the feeling he had a secret he would not, or could not tell me. It seems that one day there was a tragic accident. The men were taking their lunch in a local eating spot, a log cabin set up by one of those enterprising breed of woman who had no fear of the new frontier. But things were certainly rough out there, and probably through no fault of her own, the meat was undercooked. Three of the men developed food poisoning from it, and one died. Deschamps was sick for weeks, close to death's door. When he finally recovered, he swore to Peter that the woman had deliberately tried to poison them, and he vowed revenge upon her. He left the camp that very night. Nothing more was heard of him after that.”

Holmes' eyes were hard. "Go on, madam,” he urged our visitor. She lifted the coffee cup to her lips, sipped, spent a moment breathing the steam from the rim, then did as he bid.

“The next morning the woman was discovered dead, murdered in the most foul and horrible manner. Her two helpers, little more than children, had also been killed. They turned out to be, so I am led to believe by yourself, Mr. Holmes, the first victims of the man who would become known to Canadian history as the Yukon Terror.”

Holmes steepled his fingers and leaned back. His eyes were closed in that half-dreamy state he tended to lapse into when considering ideas. “Yes, I believe he waylaid some poor soul the next day, killed him and planted his documents and wallet upon him, so as to fool the police into thinking it was he, and that he had met his own form of rough justice for the killings. He then changed his name, and vanished into the wilds of Canada."

He made that gesture which again told me he had forgotten he was not smoking his pipe, banished the thought with a slightly irritated look, and looked out the window from where he sat. Outside, the faint sound of children playing, the steady clop of hooves and the occasional shout rose up from the street below. The untamed wilderness of the Yukon seemed at that moment even further away than it was, a world away.

“I have followed the career of this man for years,” he told her, “for crime in all its forms is my passion, and none more so than murder. Of course, I could do little to help. We are a long way from the shores of Canada, and I had not been asked to help the police. Had I received such a summons, I cannot say with certainly that I would have answered it. It is many months' journey to Canada, and I am not at all familiar with the place. I feel I might have been quite out of my depth. I have, however, often wondered what was the spark, the spur that drove this otherwise pleasant man – by all accounts, not least that of your late husband – to become a killer. It fascinates me. In general, a man can get up one day and decide to revenge a wrong, or in some other way commit a crime which may result in murder, but on the whole, one does not simply take it into one's head to murder a large number of people over a wide area for no reason.”

“There are the insane, Holmes,” I offered my semi-professional opinion. I am a doctor, but of the body, not of the mind. Holmes sniffed.

“Doubtless you are right, Watson.” His eyes strayed to the pipe on the mantel, but again out of sympathy for Mrs. Liebert's asthma, he kept his hand from it. “There are those who kill because they are mad, unbalanced, psychotic even. But those sort of people do not generally have the sort of mind that allows them to plan further killings, move from place to place, hold a job, and evade the law for over a decade. Even the infamous Whitechapel Killer hunted in the one area. No, the kind of man who kills many people must have some sort of a reason why he begins, and now it seems we have the catalyst for Baudelaire's crimes. Believing the woman had intended to poison him, he took his anger out on her, and her poor staff.”

It was clear to me that such talk was distressing to Mrs. Liebert, but what also shone through was the woman's fortitude, her determination to have the true story told, even if it was only to be for our ears. Holmes, apparently oblivious to her discomfort, went on, talking as if he were giving a lecture on killers to interested students. I confess that I was intrigued, but I did not believe the subject was a fitting one for a lady's ears. Still, this man had been the reason she had lost her husband and been accused of his murder. It was thanks to his cowardly actions that she herself had been incarcerated in one of England's worst prisons, and had her reputation shattered. I supposed she wanted to know all she could about him.

“From that day, Baudelaire seems to have undergone a change. He developed a pathological hatred of women, believing, perhaps, that they all sought to do him harm, and of the seventeen murders which he is known to have committed – I have no doubt at all there are others which were never discovered or reported, or marked off as accidents or natural causes, not least of them our own poor flower girls recently – fourteen of them were women. The only men involved were either incidental – happened to be there when he made his attempt – or police officers, of which two were killed by this maniac, plus our own brave constable, yesterday at the circus. And the unfortunate who was killed to assume his identity in death. For seven years he blazed a trail of blood and terror across the Yukon Territory, eventually crossing over into the United States of America, where Canadian law could not touch him.”

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018