Victorian Villainy by Michael Kurland Page B

deep breath. “No,” He said, “you couldn’t have stopped the murder, but you could have stopped Lucy’s suicide. Clearly you knew what she intended.”
    “You credit me with a prescience I do not possess,” I told him.
    “You were fairly clear on what she intended an hour after the event,” he said. “Why couldn’t you have rushed out here before?”
    “I don’t know,” I told him. “Until you told me what she had said to you, it didn’t strike me—”
    “It didn’t strike you!”
    “You spoke to her yourself,” I said, “and yet you guessed nothing.”
    “I didn’t know what you knew,” he said. “I was a fool. But you—what were you?”
    I had no answer for him. Perhaps I should have guessed what Lucy intended. Perhaps I did guess. Perhaps, on some unconscious level I weighed the options of her ending her own life, or of her facing an English jury, and then being taken out one cold morning, and having the hood tied around her head and the heavy hemp rope around her neck, and hearing a pusillanimous parson murmuring homilies at her until they sprang the trap.
    * * * * * * *
     
    A few minutes later the police arrived. The next day Professor Maples was released from custody and returned home. Within a month he and Crisboy had packed up and left the college. Although nothing was ever officially said about their relationship, the rumors followed them to Maples’ next position, and to the one after that, until finally they left Britain entirely. I lost track of them after that. Holmes left the college at the end of the term. I believe that, after taking a year off, he subsequently enroled at Cambridge.
    Holmes has never forgiven me for what he believes I did. He has also, it would seem, never forgiven the fair sex for the transgressions of Lucinda Moys. I did not at the time realize the depth of his feelings toward her. Perhaps he didn’t either. His feeling toward me is unfortunate and has led, over the years, to some monstrous accusations on his part. I am no saint. Indeed, as it happens I eventually found myself on the other side of the law as often as not. I am pleased to call myself England’s first consulting criminal, as I indulge in breaking the laws of my country to support my scientific endeavors. But when Holmes calls me “the Napoleon of crime,” is he not perhaps seeing, through the mists of time, the blanket-covered body of that unfortunate girl whose death he blames on me? And could it be that he is reflecting on the fact that the first, perhaps the only, woman he ever loved was incapable of loving him in return?
    At any rate, I issue one last stern warning to those of you who repeat Holmes’s foul canards about me in print, or otherwise: there are certain of the laws of our land that I embrace heartily, and the laws of libel and slander ride high on the list. Beware!

REICHENBACH
     
    You remember, I assume, the newspaper accounts of the accidental deaths of the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and the eminent mathematician Professor James Moriarty at Kessel Falls at the River Reichenbach in Switzerland. Or perhaps you’ve read Dr. Watson’s account of the confrontation at, as he called it, “Reichenbach Falls” between Holmes and the “master criminal” Moriarty. It seems that everyone in the English speaking world has read of, or at least heard of the incident. And then, you will recall, some three years later Holmes reappeared to Watson and explained his absence and supposed death in some detail. Well, I am here to tell you that almost every word of these accounts, including Holmes’s recantation, is false, and I should know. I am Professor James Moriarty.
    It is not the fault of the newspapers, who published with no more than their usual disregard for the facts, nor of Dr. Watson, who believed everything told to him by his friend and companion Sherlock Holmes. There can be no greater friend than one who believes whatever he is told no matter how strongly it is