It was not kindness, exactly, what he said to me that evening. But it was honesty, delivered without any of the softening most men think honesty requires, and I valued that combination, across the whole of my working life, far more highly than I ever valued kindness on its own.
I should mention, since I am setting the whole account down properly for once, that I was not only ever visited by the younger brother.
Mycroft Holmes called on me exactly twice in thirty years, and both occasions frightened me considerably more than anything Sherlock ever brought to my window, since a man in my trade learns quickly enough that the private business of dukes and actresses is a small and survivable sort of danger compared to the private business of governments. The first time, he wanted nothing more than a name, the name of a foreign attaché's mistress, given to him with no explanation offered and none expected. I gave it to him within the hour and never learned what became of the information. That, I came to think, was precisely how Mycroft Holmes preferred his transactions to run.
The second time was different, and worse, and I will set it down only partly, since some of what I know even now I do not think it safe to write, dying or not. There was a matter, some years before the century turned, touching a member of the government whose private life, had it become generally known, would have brought down a good deal more than his own career. I had the relevant facts, as I generally did, and Mycroft came to my window in person rather than sending the usual intermediary, which told me, before he had said a single word, how gravely he regarded the business.
"My brother tells me you can be trusted with matters of state as readily as matters of the heart," he said, lowering himself into the chair across from mine with the economy of movement of a very large man who dislikes unnecessary exertion. "I find that an unusual character reference for a gossip columnist, Mr. Pike, and I do not offer that observation as an insult."
I told him I took it as none, and gave him what he asked for. He thanked me in a manner considerably drier than his brother's but no less genuine for the dryness, and I never saw him again after that evening, though I understood, from small things Sherlock let slip over the years that followed, that my name had been mentioned more than once in rooms I will never be permitted to know the location of, let alone enter.
I mention this only to make plain that whatever service I rendered the younger Holmes over thirty years was not, in the end, confined to society scandal and broken engagements, however much of my working life was spent on precisely that lighter trade. There is a version of my career, the one the world knows, that consists of paragraphs about actresses and debts and the private griefs of people who had the misfortune to be born interesting. There is another version, known now to perhaps three living men, in which the same paragraphs, or the same facts that never became paragraphs at all, quietly protected more than a single family's reputation, and on more than one occasion. I do not say this to inflate my own importance in my final hour, which would be a cheap enough trick for a dying man to play and beneath even my own low standards. I say it because it is true, and because I have spent thirty years telling other people's truths for money and find I have exactly one evening left in which to tell my own for nothing.
It concerned my own family, or what remained of it, which by the time of the events in question was not a great deal.
I had a sister, older than myself by six years, who married young and badly, to a man named Everard Coombe who traded, when he traded at all, in shipping insurance of a kind that grew steadily more imaginary as the years went on. She wrote to me twice a year, at Christmas and on my own birthday, letters that grew thinner and more careful with each passing season, the way a letter does when the person writing it has stopped trusting that anything true can safely be put on paper. I knew, from other sources, that Coombe had begun borrowing against policies that did not exist, and that the day was coming, sooner rather than later, when someone would ask him to produce money he did not have.
I did not go to Holmes about it. I want that understood plainly. I was too proud, or too ashamed, or simply too accustomed to being the man other people came to rather than the man who went to anyone, and I sat on what I knew about my own brother in law's affairs for the better part of a year, telling myself it was not my business. That was a lie I had told a great many other people about a great many other families, and I had never once believed it when I told it to them, but somehow managed to believe it when I told it to myself.
Holmes came to me that winter about an entirely different matter, a question concerning the ownership of a shipping firm that had gone abruptly and mysteriously bankrupt, leaving a great many small investors ruined and one large investor, a man Holmes had reason to believe was not entirely honest, conveniently untouched. I gave him what I had on the firm itself, and somewhere in the course of that conversation, without my ever meaning to, Coombe's name came up, attached to a policy that had never existed and a claim that had been paid out regardless.