Baskerville by John O'Connell

Author:John O'Connell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books/Marble Arch Press

Chapter 6

So great was Doyle’s confidence in his powers that I am sure he believed, after we had shaken hands and retired to our rooms, that the matter was closed. But it was not.

I felt exploited, fatally charmed. This is what happens, I told myself. This is the consequence of being so deucedly good-natured.

Who was this person who would ‘change the way I saw the world’? With that very phrase Gladys had introduced her pet revolutionary – the straggly Russian fellow in the leather jerkin. I was always being promised audiences with such people, as if my perception were uniquely aberrant; as if I personally were holding the world back through a refusal to open my mind to – what? Nonsense, most of the time.

As for my dreams: how had Doyle known about them? Was there truth in his talk of ‘psychic powers’ or had he simply heard me crying out in my sleep, as I suppose I must have done? (Our rooms at the hotel were adjacent, though they had not been in Ipplepen.)

My brain buzzed with these and other questions.

I slid out of bed and over to the table by the window. The weather was cold for the time of year and I was glad of the thick socks I had brought to walk in.

I lit the lamp. The light it cast through its green shade was wonderfully soothing – a little pool of peace. I forgot my longing for a fire and was able to concentrate on my work.

First, I opened my diary and wrote my account of the day, the account you read in the previous chapter. Then I took out my notebook and started to sketch out a plot for my own Dartmoor story. I decided much of the action would take place here – not just in Princetown, but in this very hotel.

My pen slid across the paper in great scrambling strokes. Within minutes I had the basic architecture mapped out.

I sat back, stretched out my legs, cricked my fingers. This was easy.

Obliging fellow that I am, I had handed over to Doyle my foolscap contributions to what I now thought of as ‘his’ ‘Hound of the Baskervilles’. As yet he had not said whether they pleased him or chimed in any way with what he was writing. Perhaps it was not the great author’s style to give feedback. Or perhaps – more likely, given what I now knew of him – he was forging on regardless, mindful of his needs alone.

No question, Doyle’s behaviour had diminished him in my eyes.

I was very angry that night. But I am ashamed now of the bitter things I wrote in my diary, on pages I subsequently tore out and destroyed lest they be read by someone who did not understand the context.

I wrote that Doyle was not a great writer, just an ordinary one who had struck lucky. Sherlock Holmes was not so very original – an idiot could see that he was one part Monsieur Lecoq to two parts C Auguste Dupin.

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