A Ghost From Christmas Past

By Tom Turley

In this story, readers will discover the solutions to several Sherlockian mysteries. Why are there so few cases from the middle 1880s? Why did such a ladies' man as John H. Watson wait so long to take himself a wife? What about those puzzling canonical references to a wife who can't be Mary Morstan? Travel with the Doctor to America, where you'll meet the beautiful young woman who preceded Mary, as well as Watson's “black sheep” brother Henry and characters who figure in such cases as “The Blue Carbuncle” and “The Five Orange Pips.” Here is a literally haunting tale that Publishers Weekly called a “standout.” This is the 13th story from The Art of Sherlock Holmes project and first appeared in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part VII. The artist was Nune Asatryan creating the art from the story. The original painting measures 18 x 24 and is an oil on canvas. You can view the original in The Art of Sherlock Holmes Virtual Gallery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MX Publishing
• Release date: Dec 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781804241172

Book preview

A Ghost from Christmas Past

The Art of Sherlock Holmes 13

Part 1

No doubt it is a sinful thing to rue the Christmas season. I do not mean the day itself, which remains for me—and all mankind—a day of joy, and hope, and spiritual renewal. I am no Ebenezer Scrooge; indeed, the tale of his redemption is my favourite of the many memorable works left to us by Mr. Dickens.

Yet, for the Watson family, the season surrounding Christmas Day has always been a time of sorrow. My mother’s early death, occurring on its very eve in 1858,[1] haunted my father and my brother until their own lives ended, decades later, in misery and squalor. As a three-time widower, I have not escaped the curse. It was but eight years ago, just after Christmas, that my beautiful Priscilla was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill her within weeks.[2] On December 22, 1891, I lost my beloved Mary with appalling suddenness. That remains a story, even now, that I am not prepared to tell.[3]

But it is of my first wife, and an even earlier Christmas, that I shall write today. Hitherto, I have said little of Constance in my memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, so little that some readers, understandably, have confused her with Mary in cases that predate The Sign of Four. My reticence has not been due to a lack of regard for my poor angel, although our marriage was not, by its untimely end, a happy one. Rather, it was the uncanny manner of her death that led me to keep silent. Unlike Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, my friend and literary agent, I am not a believer in the supernatural. I remain quite sure that I myself have never seen a ghost. Yet, on the night that Constance died, I was moved to consider, for the first and only time in my long life, the possibility that ghosts exist.

To tell this story properly, I must begin by writing of my brother. I have done so only once before, and then misleadingly. The Sign of Four contains a passage in which Sherlock Holmes, after deducing Henry’s tragic history by examining his watch, defends himself against my anger by protesting that he never knew I had a brother. That account was fiction. In fact, my friend had been aware of Henry for some years, for Holmes’s substantial loan had financed my attempt to save him. Early in 1884, I left Baker Street to take up residence in San Francisco, California. There my brother and I spent our last days together, and there I met and fell in love with Constance Adams.[4]

In many ways, my relationship with my elder brother helped to prepare me for my relationship with Holmes. Henry, like the great detective, possessed a far more agile mind than I do; he, too, had scant patience with slower-moving intellects. In his youth, my brother had seemed destined for a brilliant future, and it was our father’s final disappointment that he abandoned law to follow me into the army. For a brief time, we served together in Afghanistan. My role as regimental surgeon ended with a wound at Maiwand; Henry, after an unhappy love affair, drowned his promising intelligence career in alcohol.[5] He never recovered, for my brother far exceeded Sherlock Holmes in his capacity for self-destruction. I arrived in San Francisco to find him sick and destitute, having in three years squandered his entire inheritance.

Oscar Wilde, who visited the bayside city shortly before I did, posited that "anyone who disappears is said to