Holmes did not scold me. He never did, as a rule, having found, I think, that a scolding taught me a good deal less than a plain statement of the cost did.
"You gave me a week I did not have to spare, Pike, chasing three sources that were only ever one source dressed up to look like three. I would ask you to remember, the next time you are certain of something, to ask yourself how many mouths a rumour has actually passed through, and how many of those mouths ever troubled to check it themselves."
I have thought of that rebuke far more often than I have thought of most of my successes, which I suppose is the proper punishment for a man in my trade, that his one clean failure should outlast a dozen quiet triumphs in his own memory. I never made quite the same mistake again, though I daresay I made others of a similar shape that Holmes was simply too courteous, or too preoccupied, to point out to me.
There was a matter I have always privately called the affair of the Foreign Prince, though I will not set down here which principality he governed or failed to govern, since the family concerned is still in some position of authority in a part of Europe that changes hands considerably more often than its own subjects would prefer, and I have no wish to make trouble for people who have troubles enough of their own without my help.
He came to London incognito, as such men generally do, under a name that fooled nobody who mattered and everybody who did not, and he had the misfortune, during his stay, of falling into the orbit of a woman who made a very comfortable living out of exactly that class of misfortune. I knew her a good deal better than I knew most of my sources, having once nearly married her myself in my younger and considerably more foolish days, a fact I have never told anyone until this moment and would appreciate Anstey leaving in the final copy, since a dying man is entitled to at least one piece of honesty that costs him something.
Holmes came to me not because he suspected blackmail, which was obvious enough to anyone who read the newspapers with any attention, but because he needed to know, before he acted, exactly how much the lady already had in her possession and exactly how much of it was genuine, since a certain class of professional in that trade has learned to pad a thin file with forgeries clever enough to pass at a glance. I was able to tell him precisely which letters were real, having seen two of them myself some years before under circumstances I will not elaborate on, and precisely which were manufactured, having recognised the hand of a forger she had employed on at least one previous occasion that I happened to know of through an entirely different channel altogether.
Holmes settled the matter within three days, in a manner that cost the Prince a good deal of money and cost the lady considerably more than money, though I never learned the full details of what became of her afterward and did not trouble myself greatly to find out. I remember Holmes remarking, as he left my rooms that evening, that it was a curious thing to watch a man pay handsomely to protect a reputation he had done a great deal, on his own account, to deserve losing. I remember agreeing with him more readily than my own trade generally permitted me to agree with anyone about the folly of the great.
Not every case ended as cleanly, and I think it dishonest, on an evening such as this one, to leave out the ones that did not.
There was a young man, a barrister of real promise, whom I had known since he was a boy at his father's dinner table, and who came under suspicion, quite wrongly as it turned out, of having passed confidential brief papers to an opposing firm for money. I knew, from my own sources, that the true culprit was a clerk in the same chambers, a nervous, overworked little man with a sick wife and debts that had finally overtaken his conscience, and I told Holmes as much within a day of his asking, expecting the matter to resolve itself as neatly as the others had.
It did resolve. The barrister's name was cleared, and the clerk was quietly dismissed rather than prosecuted, at Holmes's own recommendation, on the grounds that the man's wife had done nothing to deserve the ruin a public trial would have brought down on her along with her husband. I thought it was a fair enough ending at the time, and I think so still. But the barrister, once cleared, never spoke to me again, having learned, in the course of his own vindication, exactly how I had come to know the things I knew about his chambers, and having decided, not unreasonably, that a man who trades in his friends' private business for a living is not a man to keep as a friend himself.
I told Holmes about it once, some years later, expecting sympathy or at least the dry sort of comfort he was occasionally capable of offering. He gave me neither.
"You knew what your trade would cost you when you chose it, Pike," he said. "I have watched it cost you a good deal more than one barrister's friendship over the years. I have never once heard you pretend the price was a surprise to you, and I would think a good deal less of you if you started pretending now."