The Fifth Heart Read Online Free PDF

French liner the
Paris
. James thought he remembered being aboard her twelve years before, the last time he’d visited America, when he’d hurried home to Cambridge during the period when first his mother and then his father had been dying. Sherlock Holmes refused to take a more modern English steamship since it would mean a stop somewhere in England on the way—the
Paris
paused only briefly in Dublin—and Holmes would not set foot in England, he said, until he was “fully satisfied”. Satisfied as to what, was not further defined at that time, but James had to guess that it related to the subject of the consulting detective’s real versus fictional existence.
    There had been five amazing conversations—revelations, in truth—during the past ten days before landfall in New York, and James had to sort them out not only by content but by the context of where they had been announced.
    The first had been outside his hotel on the Rue de la Paix after their late-evening dining on the night they had met.
    “It is, of course, absurd to think that I can—or should wish to—go to America now,” James had said, holding his umbrella in both hands like a weapon.
    “But you must,” said Holmes in calm terms. “My case depends upon it.”
    “ ‘Case’?” repeated Henry James. “I thought you had left being a consulting detective behind when you faked your own death almost two years ago.”
    “Not a bit of it,” said Holmes. “Even as Jan Sigerson, I did my bit of detecting in Turkey, India, and elsewhere. But that was for my brother Mycroft, for Whitehall, and for England. Now I find I must take up a private case again. Solve what is almost certainly an apolitical mystery.”
    James continued to hold his folded umbrella at port arms. The rain had stopped. “Let me guess,” he said. “In Dr. Watson’s absence, you need me to chronicle your adventures. To be your Boswell.”
    Sherlock Holmes laughed loudly enough that the sound echoed back from the nearby stone buildings. “No, no, not at all, Mr. James. Nor do I think such a role as Boswell would suit you in any event, but certainly not in writing up the details of a mystery.”
    James’s spine stiffened a bit at that. He considered himself capable of writing any sort of story—as long as neither its topic nor style was beneath his dignity. And he had done a few of those stories for money in his youth.
    “What I mean,” continued Holmes, “is that while I have not had the pleasure of reading your novels and shorter fiction, Mr. James, many of my more literary acquaintances—including Watson himself—have. And from what they tell me, your rendering of the most exciting adventures you and I might have in America would end up with a beautiful young lady from America as the protagonist, various lords and ladies wandering through, verbal opaqueness followed by descriptive obtuseness, and nothing more exciting being allowed to occur in the tale than a verbal
faux pas
or tea service being late.”
    James wondered whether he should be—and act—offended, but decided that he was not. All in all, he was amused.
    “Then you could have no conceivable need for my presence in this quixotic jaunt to America you seem about to undertake, sir.”
    “Ah, but I truly do, Mr. James,” said Holmes. “I need you for introductions, for information, for American context, for—what did you call it earlier?—for cover, and for companionship. I shall be a stranger in a strange land and to solve this mystery I shall need your help. Do you wish to hear more of the reasons for this?”
    James said nothing. His thought had already turned away from suicide in the Seine toward the soft bed in his hotel room a few dozen paces and a lift ride from where he stood in the darkness.
    “In March of eighteen ninety-one, almost exactly two years ago,” continued Holmes, either unaware of or indifferent to James’s very obvious lack of interest, “I had a visit at my bachelor quarters at