"Must I, Holmes?" I complained, piqued that yet again Holmes wished me to demonstrate my physical as well as my mental myopia in front of a client.

Holmes laid his hand upon my sleeve. His penetrating glaze seemed to reach deep within my soul. "You have never yet failed to play the game, Watson. I trust you will play it to the end."

I blushed, ashamed of my callous behaviour toward my friend. Was it truly his fault that he suffered from a fear of ophthalmologists? "Oh, very well. If you put it that way, Holmes, certainly I shall read the letter."

Drawing my spectacles from their case and setting them upon the bridge of my nose, I picked up the sheet of violet tinted notepaper from whence it had fallen upon the floor and began reading:

"My Dearest Daughter,
Can you ever forgive me? It is not from shame alone that I have kept from you the disgraceful history of our house. I had hoped to spare you needless suffering, yet I can no longer keep you in ignorance.

I had feared that your infatuation with military men sprang from an unfortunate character flaw bequeathed to you by your great grandmother. So often do women sigh over a uniform as if the man within it was as heroic as red tunic and gold braid make him appear. I refused to consent to your union with Captain Blount because of this fatal tendency. Yet, when I read in your last missive that your Phineas had resigned his Army commission and you were still determined to wed him, I realised with a pang that I had wronged you, and that for you the Wickham curse has nothing to do with Great Grandmother Lydia's giddy recklessness.

Daughter, your great grandfather was that notorious Wickham who, when a militiaman during the Regency, eloped with the daughter of a scholarly but feckless gentleman named Bennet, thus causing consternation to the lady's connections, the proud Darcys of Pemberley. This Wickham later threw over his wife and son eloping with the daughter of the haughty Lady Catherine D'Burgh in the vain hope of acquiring her fortune. Even the august walls of Pemberley could not keep the distressing secret hidden. Mrs Collins, a rector's wife and, until then, Mrs Darcy's own particular friend, rapidly spread it throughout her circle of clergymen's female relations until the daughter of the Reverend Mr George Austen hearing a garbled version of the tale, proclaimed it to the world in a novel. Ever since, the powerful Darcy clan have been implacable in their hatred toward us.

How could I confide to you, yourself a clergyman's daughter, virtuous and sheltered from the temptations of the world, that the gossip of a clergyman's spouse and the writings of a clergyman's daughter had held us up to the censoriousness of thousands?

I grieve to tell you further, Daughter, that I have been as foolish as our unfortunate ancestress. Tom returned from the Tropics with not only the most beautiful blue birds ever seen, but with plans to scotch the Darcy faction forever and to establish us at last in wealth and in Society. His enthusiasm enflamed my passion for retribution and the far spreading fame of our remarkable jasmine scented honey enflamed my greed, seducing me from the narrow way of charity and righteousness. I hoped to become greater than merely an impoverished country parson. Perhaps to have even become a bishop. Then you could have married higher than a mere captain - perhaps even Clarence, the heir of the Earl of Emsworth. The young man is reputedly dottleheaded but he is gaining a reputation in Shropshire as a horticulturist. With your forceful character, you could have been the making of him, and the snob appeal of honey from the roses of Blandings Castle would have made us richer than Lipton, Cadbury and Rowntree combined.

But I regret too late that by our wanton actions, Tom and I have undone the moral and educational fabric of the nation, and set about our own ruin and yours. People wicked and far more powerful than ourselves have used us for their own ends. Secret cabals are using the Wickham-Darcy feud to destroy the lives of everyone concerned. If Pride and Prejudice is revealed as a true factual account instead of as romantic fiction, who will continue to trust in members of the clergy, or in clergymen's wives and daughters? The ever-present fear of their peccadilloes being handed about by the circulating libraries will keep them from Divine Services and therefore from God Himself. Woe will also befall every publishing house within the British Empire. The reading public will turn for inspiration and comfort to the pictorial catalogues of American mail order houses. Commercialism will thus run rampant. The entertaining yet enlightening novels upon which English literature have rested since Shakespeare's day will become worthless paper. Only penny sensation stories and The Strand Magazine will remain. Illiteracy of the masses will cause the decline of Britain as a world power. Who knows then what the harvest will be?

If I could only atone. If I could only turn back time. Tom and I know who they are, yet our enemies and the enemies of our country will stop us from stopping them. God forgive us for what we have done. May the strong arm of your beloved protect you?

Your unhappy father,
Robert Tobias Wickham"

I looked up from the paper, aghast. "Holmes! This is terrible!"

"I agree," Holmes remarked placidly. "The prose style is too 'purple'. The writer has read far too many of the 'sensation stories' he deplores. Yet there are elements of pompous if unintentional humour in the letter that remind me of the Case of the Red Headed League."

Holmes stoked his chin pensively. "Tommy Wickham was dying when he entered this room, with a small red dot on his right arm and the smell of jasmine scented honey or mead on his breath. Someone who sat beside him in the taproom poisoned him - someone whom he trusted near him. Young Tommy Wickham, whose name is known among the lords of the land, was murdered by one of those drunkards we saw, without anyone seeing it done. Or perhaps ... ."

He turned to the police constable. "Jenkins. Why did you immediately say Miss Caroline Wickham was Mr. Tommy Wickham's cousin, and why did you say it was Tommy Wickham and not our genial host who 'fit out a den like this' with its complex lock and its chemical apparatus?"