Henry Lee stops walking out toward the deep. Confused–like, shaking his head some, starts to say me name … then he looks over me shoulder and his eyes go wide, with the moon in them. «She's there," he whispers, «she came back for me. There, right there.» And he points, straining on his toes like a nipper sees the Dutch–biscuit man coming down the street.
I turn me head, just for an instant, just to see where he's pointing. Summat glimmers in the shadow of the dugout, diving in and out of the moonlight, and maybe it's a dolphin, and maybe it's Henry Lee's wife, turning for one last look at her poor husband who'd driven both of their lives on the rocks. Didn't know then, don't know now. All I'm sure of is, the next minute I'm sitting on me arse in water up to me chin, and Henry Lee's past me and swimming straight for that glimmer — long, raking Devonshire strokes, looking like he could go on forever if he had to. And bright as the night was, I lost sight of him — and her too, it, whatever it were — before he'd reached that boat. Bawled for him till me voice went — even tried to go after him in the dugout — but he were gone. They were gone.
His body floated in next afternoon. Gopi found it, sloshing about in the shallows.
Her family turned over every bit of ground around that house of Henry Lee's, looking for where he'd buried her. I'm dead sure they believe to this day that he killed Julia Caterina and then drowned himself, out of remorse or some such. They was polite as pie whenever we met, no matter they couldn't never stand one solitary thing about me — but after she disappeared only times I saw them was at a feria, where they'd always cut me dead. I didn't take it personal.
The will left stock and business to the family, but left both ships to me. I sold one of them for enough money to get meself to Buenos Aires, like I'd been wanting, and start up in the freighting trade, convoying everything from pianos to salt beef, rum to birdseed, tea to railroad ties … whatever you might want moved from here to there. Got two young partners do most of the real work these days, but I still go along with a shipment, times, just to play I'm still a foremast hand — plain Able–bodied Seaman, same as Henry Lee. The way it was when we didn't know what he died knowing. What I'll die knowing.
He left me the recipe for salt wine, too. I burned it. I'd wanted to buy up the stock and pour every bottle into the sea — giving it back to the merrows, you could say — but the family wouldn't sell, not to me. Heard they sold it to a German dealer, right after I left Goa, and he took it all home to Berlin with him. Couldn't say, meself.
I seen her a time or two since. Once off the Hebrides — leastways, I'm near about sure it was her — and once in the Bay of Biscay. That time she came right up to the ship, calling to me by name, quiet–like. She hung about most of the night, calling, but I never went to the rail, 'acos I couldn't think of nothing to say.
Mr. Sigerson
I'm very proud of this storywritten for Michael Kirland's anthology Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Tearsbecause it's my first mystery tale, and so far the only one.
I love reading mysteries, all sorts, and envy their authors almost as much as I envy musicians. I'd give a great deal to have the special mindset that creates a good mystery plot, and then peoples it with characters whom the reader feels don't draw their existence only from the plot. I'm no Holmes expert (though I've known the stories from childhood, and read them all aloud to my children); but I felt I knew the man well enough to chance presenting him through the eyes of a narrator who not only doesn't worship his brilliance but doesn't particularly like him. As much as anything I've done recently, I truly enjoyed being that crotchety, sardonic concertmaster, who admires Sherlock Holmes solely for his musical gifts, and to hell with the rest of the performance.
My name is Floresh Takesti. I am concertmaster of the Greater Bornitz Municipal Orchestra in the town of St. Radomir, in the Duchy of Bornitz in the country of Selmira. I state this only because, firstly, there is a centuries–old dispute between our ducal family and the neighboring principality of Gradja over boundaries, bribed surveyors, and exactly who some people think they are; and, secondly, because Bornitz, greater or lesser, is quite a small holding, and has very little that can honestly be said to be its own. Our national language is a kind of untidy Low German, cluttered further by Romanian irregular verbs; our history appears to be largely accidental, and our literature consists primarily of drinking songs (some of them quite energetic). Our farmers grow barley and turnips, and a peculiarly nasty green thing that we tell strangers is kale. Our currency is anything that does not crumble when bitten; our fare is depressingly Slovakian, and our native dress, in all candor, vaguely suggests Swiss bell–ringers costumed by gleefully maniacal Turks. However, our folk music, as I can testify better than most, is entirely indigenous, since no other people would ever claim it. We are the property of the Austro–Hungarian Empire, or else we belong to the Ottomans; opinions vary, and no one on either side seems really to be interested. As I say, I tell you all this so that you will be under no possible misapprehension concerning our significance in this great turbulence of Europe. We have none.
Even my own standing as concertmaster here poses a peculiar but legitimate question. Traditionally, as elsewhere, an orchestra's first violinist is named concertmaster, and serves the conductor as assistant and counselor, and, when necessary, as a sort of intermediary between him and the other musicians. We did have a conductor once, many years ago, but he left us following a particularly upsetting incident, involving a policeman and a goat — and the Town Council has never been able since to locate a suitable replacement. Consequently, for good or ill, I have been conductor de facto for some dozen years, and our orchestra seems none the worse for it, on the whole. Granted, we have always lacked the proper — shall I say crispness ? — to do justice to the Baroque composers, and we generally know far better than to attempt Beethoven at all; but I will assert that we perform Liszt, Saint–Saens, and some Mendelssohn quite passably, not to mention lighter works by assorted Strausses and even Rossini. And our Gilbert & Sullivan closing medley almost never fails to provoke a standing ovation, when our audience is sober enough to rise. We may not be the Vienna Schauspielhaus, but we do our best. We have our pride.
It was on a spring evening of 1894 that he appeared at my door: the tall, irritating man we knew as Herr Sigerson, the Norwegian. You tell me now that he had other names, which I can well believe — I can tell you in turn that I always suspected he was surely not Norwegian. Norwegians have manners, if they have no cuisine; no Norwegian I ever knew was remotely as arrogant, implicitly superior, and generally impossible as this «Sigerson» person. And no, before you ask, it would be almost impossible for me to explain exactly what made him so impossible. His voice? His carriage? His regard, that way of studying one as though one were a canal on Mars, or a bacterium hitherto unknown to mankind? Whatever the immediate cause, I disliked him on sight; and should I learn from you today that he was in reality a prince of your England, this would not change my opinion by a hair. Strengthen it, in fact, I should think. Nevertheless. Nevertheless, he was, beyond any debate or cavil, a better violinist than I. His tone was richer, his attack at once smoother and yet more vivid; his phrasing far more adventurous than I would ever have dared — or could have brought off, had I dared. I can be as jealous, and even spiteful, as the next man, but I am not a fool. He deserved to sit in the first violinist's chair — my chair for nineteen years. It was merely justice, nothing more.
When he first came to my house — as I recall, he was literally just off the mail coach that sometimes picks up a passenger or two from the weekly Bucharest train — he asked my name, gave his own, and handed me a letter of introduction written by a former schoolmate of mine long since gone on to better things. The letter informed me that the bearer was «a first–rate musician, well–schooled and knowledgeable, who has elected, for personal reasons, to seek a situation with a small provincial orchestra, one preferably located as far off the conventional routes of trade and travel as possible. Naturally, old friend, I thought of you…»