The Fifth Heart Read Online Free

sincerity that I died with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland.”
    James blinked several times despite his best effort to show no reaction to this. “You have no remorse about lying to your best friend? The press has reported that Dr. Watson’s wife has died in the interval since your . . . disappearance. So presumably the poor man is now mourning the loss of both his wife and his best friend.”
    Holmes helped himself to more fruit. “I did more than lie, Mr. James. I led Watson on a merry chase—pursuing the mythical Moriarty, you understand—across England and Europe, ending at the fabled waterfall from whose waters neither my body, nor Professor Moriarty’s, shall ever be recovered.”
    “That was beastly,” said James.
    “That was necessary,” Holmes said with no anger or emphasis. “I had to disappear completely, you see. Disappear without a trace and in a manner that convinced the multitudes—or at least that small share of the multitudes that has shown interest in my modest adventures—that I was dead. Was there much mourning in London upon news of my demise?”
    James blinked at this and was sure it was levity. Sure, that is, until he saw the serious expression on Sherlock Holmes’s disguised face.
    “Yes,” he said at last. “Or so I hear.”
    Holmes waited. Finally he said, “Watson’s telling of the Reichenbach tale, his story called ‘The Final Problem’, appeared in
The Strand
only three months ago—December of ’ninety-two. But I’m curious about the reaction when the news stories appeared two years ago.”
    James resisted a sigh. “I don’t read
The Strand
,” he said. “But I’m told that young men in London, both when the news of your death was first published and then again this winter when Dr. Watson’s story appeared, started wearing black armbands.”
    It was true that James would never read the kind of cheap-romance fiction and casual science-fact and household gossip that appeared in
The Strand
. But his younger friends Edmund Gosse and Jonathan Sturges both did. And both had worn black mourning armbands for months in solemn memory of Holmes’s presumed death. James had thought it all ridiculous.
    Sherlock Holmes was smiling as he finished the last of his mousse.
    Henry James, still terrified that the conversation would turn back to the contents of his snuffbox if Holmes were allowed to guide it, said, “But why carry out such a hoax, sir? Why betray your good friend Dr. Watson and thousands of your loyal readers with such a ruse if there were no grand criminal conspiracy—no Napoleon of Crime—pursuing you? What could be your motive? Sheer perversity?”
    Holmes set his spoon down and stared directly at the writer. “I wish it had been something so simple, Mr. James. No, I decided that I had to fake my own death and disappear completely because of discovering through my own ratiocination . . . through the inductive and deductive processes by which I’ve become the most famous consulting detective in the world . . . a fact so shocking that it not only irrevocably changed my life but led me, as you found me tonight by le Pont Neuf, ready to end it.”
    “What single fact could possibly . . .” began Henry James and then closed his mouth. It would be the worst of manners and presumptuousness to ask.
    Holmes smiled tightly. “I discovered, Mr. James,” he said as he leaned closer, “that I was not a real person. I am . . . how would a literary person such as yourself put it? I am, the evidence has proven to me most conclusively, a literary construct. Some ink-stained scribbler’s creation. A mere fictional character.”

CHAPTER 4
     
    H enry James now knew beyond a doubt that he was dealing with a crazy person. Something had driven this Sherlock Holmes person—if this
was
the Sherlock Holmes he had met four years earlier at Mrs. O’Connor’s garden party—to and beyond the raveled edge of rationality.
    But the perverted truth was simple and shocking: