My Sherlock Holmes Read online

  “She said that?” I asked.

  “She did.”

  “Holmes, think carefully. Did she say she was going to hire a lawyer?” Holmes was momentarily startled at my question. “Well, let’s see. She said she knew what she must do, and I said he’s going to need the best lawyer and the best barrister around to clear himself of this, for all that we know he is not guilty.”

  “And?”

  “And then she said she would not allow him to be convicted. And she—well—she kissed me on the cheek, and she said, ‘Good-bye, Mr. Holmes, you have been a good friend.’ And she hurried off.”

  “How long ago did she leave you?”

  “Possibly an hour, perhaps a bit longer.”

  I jumped to my feet. “Come, Holmes,” I said, “we must stop her.”

  “Stop her?”

  “Before she does something foolish. Come, there’s no time to waste!”

  “Does what?” he asked, hurrying after me as I hastened down the hall, pulling my coat on.

  “Just come!” I said. “Perhaps I’m wrong.”

  We raced out of the college and over to Barleymore Road, and continued in the direction of the Mapleses’ house at a fast walk. It took about ten minutes to get there, and I pushed through the front door without bothering to knock.

  Mr. Crisboy was sitting in the parlor, staring at the wall opposite, a study in suspended motion. In one hand was a spoon, in the other a small bottle. When we entered the room he slowly put both objects down. “Professor Maples depends on this fluid,” he said. “Two spoons full before each meal.” He held the bottle up for our inspection. The label read: Peals Patented Magical Elixir of Health. “Do you think they’d let me bring him a few bottles?”

  “I’m sure they would,” I told him. “Do you know where Lucy is?”

  “She’s upstairs in her room,” Crisboy told me. “She is quite upset. But of course, we’re all quite upset. She asked not to be disturbed.”

  I made for the staircase, Holmes close behind me. “Why this rush?” he demanded. “We can’t just barge in on her.”

  “We must,” I said. I pounded at her door, but there was no answer. The door was locked. I put my shoulder against it. After the third push it gave, and I stumbled into the room, Holmes close behind me.

  There was an overturned chair in the middle of the room. From a hook in the ceiling that had once held a chandelier dangled the body of Lucy Moys.

  “My God!” Holmes exclaimed.

  Holmes righted the chair and pulled a small clasp knife from his pocket. I held the body steady while Holmes leaped up on the chair and sawed at the rope until it parted. We laid her carefully on the bed. It was clear from her white face and bulging, sightless eyes that she was beyond reviving. Holmes nonetheless cut the loop from around her neck. “Horrible,” he said. “And you knew this was going to happen? But why? There’s no reason—”

  “Every reason,” I said. “No, I didn’t predict this, certainly not this quickly, but I did think she might do something foolish.”

  “But—”

  “She must have left a note,” I said.

  We covered her body with a blanket, and Holmes went over to the writing desk. “Yes,” he said. “There’s an envelope here addressed to ‘The Police.’ And a second one—it’s addressed to me!”

  He ripped it open. After a few seconds he handed it to me.

  Sherlock,

  It could have been different

  had I been different,

  I like you tremendously,

  Think well of me

  I’m so sorry.

  Lucy

  “I don’t understand,” Sherlock Holmes said. “What does it mean? Why did she do this?”

  “The letter to the police,” I said, “what does it say?”

  He opened it.

  To whoever reads this—

  I am responsible for the death of my sister Andrea. I killed her in a jealous rage. I cannot live with myself, and I cannot allow Professor Maples, a sweet and innocent man, to suffer for my crime. This is best for all concerned.

  Lucinda Movs

  “I don’t understand,” Holmes said. “She was jealous of Faulting? But I didn’t think she even knew Faulting very well.”

  “She kept her secrets,” I said, “even unto death.”

  “What secrets?”

  “This household,” I said, gesturing around me, “holds one big secret that is, you might say, made up of several smaller secrets.”

  “You knew that she had done it—that she had killed her sister?”

  “I thought so, yes.” I patted him on the shoulder, and he flinched as though my touch were painful. “Let us go downstairs now,” I said.

  “You go,” Holmes said. “I’ll join you in a few minutes.”

  I left Holmes staring down at the blanket-covered body on the bed, and went down to the parlor. “Lucy has committed suicide,” I told Crisboy, who had put the bottle down but was still staring at the wall opposite. “She left a note. She killed Andrea.”

  “Ahhh!” he said. “Then they’ll be letting the professor go.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She’d been acting strange the past few days. But with what happened, I never thought … . Hanged herself?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Someone must go to the police station.”

  “Of course.” Crisboy got up. “I’ll go.” He went into the hall and took his overcoat off the peg. “Ahhh. Poor thing.” He went out the door.

  About ten minutes later Holmes came down. “How did you know?” he asked.

  “The footsteps that you preserved so carefully,” I said. “There were three lines: two going out to the cottage and one coming back. The single one going out was wearing different shoes, and it—she—went first. I could tell because some of the prints from the other set overlapped the first. And it was the second set going out that had the indentations from the walking stick. So someone—some woman—went out after Andrea Maples, and that woman came back. She went out with the walking stick and came back without it.”

  “I missed that,” Holmes said.

  “It’s easier to tell than to observe,” I told him.

  “I had made up my mind about what I was going to find before I went to look,” he said. “The deductive process suffers from preconceptions.”

  “It’s a matter of eliminating the impossible,” I told him. “Then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

  “I shall remember that,” he said. “I still cannot fathom that Lucy was that jealous of Andrea.”

  “She was, but not in the way you imagine,” I told him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you remember that I suggested that you notice Lucinda’s ears?”

  “Yes.” Holmes looked puzzled. “They looked like—ears.”

  “Their shape was quite distinctive, and quite different from those of Andrea. The basic shape of the ear seems to be constant within a family. This was a reasonable indication that Andrea and Lucinda were not really sisters.”

  “Not really sisters? Then they were—what?”

  “They were lovers,” I told him. “There are women who fall in love with other women, just as there are men who fall in love with other men. The ancient Greeks thought it quite normal.”

  “Lovers?”

  “Andrea preferred women to men, and Lucinda was her, ah, mate.”

  “But—Professor Maples is her husband.”

  “I assume it was truly a marriage of convenience. If you look at the bedrooms it is clear that Andrea and Lucy usually shared a bedroom—Lucy’s—as they both have quantities of clothing in it. And I would assume that Professor Maples and Mr. Crisboy have a similar arrangement.”

  “You think the professor and Crisboy—but they …”

  “A German professor named Ulrichs has coined a word for such unions; he calls them homo-sexual. In some societies they are accepted, and in some they are condemned. We live in the latter.
”

  “Holmes sat down in the straight back chair. “That is so,” he said. “So you think they derived this method of keeping their relationships concealed?”

  “I imagine the marriage, if there was a marriage, and Andrea’s adopting Lucy as her ‘sister’ was established well before the ménage moved here. It was the ideal solution, each protecting the other from the scorn of society and the sting of the laws against sodomy and such behavior.”

  “But Andrea went to the cottage to have, ah, intimate relations with Faulting.”

  “She liked to flirt, you must have observed that. And she obviously wasn’t picky as to which gender she flirted with, or with which gender she, let us say, consummated her flirting. There are women like that, many of them it seems unusually attractive and, ah, compelling. Augustus Caesar’s daughter Julia seems to have been one of them, according to Suetonius. Andrea found Faulting attractive, and was determined to have him. My guess is that she and Lucy had words about it, but Andrea went to meet Faulting anyway, while Lucy remained in her room and worked herself into a jealous rage. She didn’t intend to kill Andrea; that’s shown by the fact that she didn’t open the sword cane, although she must have known about it.”

  Holmes was silent for a minute, and I could see some powerful emotion growing within him. “You had this all figured out,” he said, turning to me, his words tight and controlled.

  “Much of it,” I admitted. “But don’t berate yourself for missing it. I was familiar with the idea of homo sexuality through my reading, and several acquaintances of mine have told me of such relationships. I had the knowledge and you didn’t.”

  But I had misjudged the direction of Holmes’s thoughts. The fury in him suddenly exploded. “You could have stopped this,” he screamed. “You let it happen!”

  I backed away to avoid either of us doing something we would later regret. “I knew nothing of Andrea’s tryst,” I told him, “nor Lucinda’s fury.”

  Holmes took a deep breath. “No,” he said, “you couldn’t have stopped the murder, but you could have stopped Lucy’s suicide. Clearly you knew what she intended.”

  “You credit me with a prescience I do not possess,” I told him.

  “You were fairly clear on what she intended an hour after the event,” he said. “Why couldn’t you have rushed out here before?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “Until you told me what she had said to you, it didn’t strike me—”

  “It didn’t strike you!”

  “You spoke to her yourself,” I said, “and yet you guessed nothing.”

  “I didn’t know what you knew,” he said. “I was a fool. But you—what were you?”

  I had no answer for him. Perhaps I should have guessed what Lucy intended. Perhaps I did guess. Perhaps, on some unconscious level I weighed the options of her ending her own life, or of her facing an English jury, and then being taken out one cold morning, and having the hood tied around her head and the heavy hemp rope around her neck, and hearing a pusillanimous parson murmuring homilies at her until they sprang the trap.

  A few minutes later the police arrived. The next day Professor Maples was released from custody and returned home. Within a month he and Crisboy had packed up and left the college. Although nothing was ever officially said about their relationship, the rumors followed them to Maples’s next position, and to the one after that, until finally they left Britain entirely. I lost track of them after that. Holmes left the college at the end of the term. I believe that, after taking a year off, he subsequently enrolled at Cambridge.

  Holmes has never forgiven me for what he believes I did. He has also, it would seem, never forgiven the fair sex for the transgressions of Lucinda Moys. I did not at the time realize the depth of his feelings toward her. Perhaps he didn’t either. His feeling toward me is unfortunate and has led, over the years, to some monstrous accusations on his part. I am no saint. Indeed, as it happens I eventually found myself on the other side of the law as often as not. I am pleased to call myself England’s first consulting criminal, as I indulge in breaking the laws of my country to support my scientific endeavors. But when Holmes calls me “the Napoleon of crime,” is he not perhaps seeing, through the mists of time, the blanket-covered body of that unfortunate girl whose death he blames on me? And could it be that he is reflecting on the fact that the first, perhaps the only, woman he ever loved was incapable of loving him in return?

  At any rate, I issue one last stern warning to those of you who repeat Holmes’s foul canards about me in print, or otherwise: there are certain of the laws of our land that I embrace heartily, and the laws of libel and slander ride high on the list. Beware!

  MRS. HUDSON

  The table was all laid, and, just as I was about to ring, Mrs. Hudson entered with the tea and coffee. A few minutes later she brought in the covers, and we all drew up to the table. Holmes ravenous, I curious, and Phelps in the gloomiest state of depression.

  “Mrs. Hudson has risen to the occasion,” said Holmes, uncovering a dish of curried chicken. “Her cuisine is a little limited, but she has as good an idea of breakfast as a Scotchwoman.”

  —“The Naval Treaty”

  by LINDA ROBERTSON

  Mrs. Hudson Reminisces

  As part of English Fireside Magazine’s ongoing series, “Unsung Heroines,” I recently interviewed Mrs. Jean Hudson, once the landlady and housekeeper for the famous consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his friend and chronicler, Dr. John Watson. After Mr. Holmes gave up sleuthing for a quieter life keeping bees in Surrey, Mrs. Hudson sold her house at 221 Baker Street, the scene of so many of the adventures recounted by Dr. Watson, and moved to a cottage in Perthshire.

  I made the walk from the train station to her home on a fine May afternoon. As I reached the garden gate, I heard a low bark, followed by a menacing growl. On the path beyond crouched an enormous black dog, baring his teeth in a convincing snarl. I was wondering how to talk him out of leaping the fence and going for my throat, when a woman appeared around the side of the house and called to me. “Hello! You must be Miss Gunn. I’m Mrs. Hudson. Do come in. It’s all right, Otto, she’s a friend.” Otto subsided and moved to one side of the path as I opened the gate, but trailed after me suspiciously as I walked through the small, flower-filled garden and followed Mrs. Hudson into the cottage. Once in the sitting room, he slumped with a sigh onto the hearth rug, where he lay watching us and giving an occasional wag of his tail when Mrs. Hudson glanced at him.

  Despite her years, which she admits are “well over sixty,” Mrs. Hudson is a commanding figure of a woman, tall and energetic, her gray hair framing a kind and cheerful face. Over tea and currant cake, which she served in her comfortable sitting room, we had the following conversation:

  E.F. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I feel that I already know you in some way, after reading Dr. Watson’s stories. I’m rather sorry to have missed seeing 221B Baker Street, but you have a lovely place here. Such pretty light, and the garden is simply burgeoning with flowers. And Otto is certainly an impressive dog. You must feel quite safe with him guarding your house.

  Mrs. H. Dear Otto—loyal to a fault, I’m afraid. I’m sorry if he gave you a scare. He was a gift from Mr. Holmes after I settled here. “There may still be enemies,” he said, even though he has long since retired from detective work. I appreciated his kindness, but I can’t say I worry much about such things. But about Baker Street—you needn’t worry about having missed it. There wasn’t anything exceptional about the house, except for its connection with Mr. Holmes. We had so many sightseers the last few years, peering in the windows and demanding to be let in, as if we were a museum. I wish I’d had Otto then. He’s a Baskerville hound, you know. Do you remember Dr. Watson’s story?

  E.F. Oh, certainly. But I thought there was only one Hound of the Baskervilles, and he was killed at the end.

  Mrs. H. Well, yes and no. There was a bit of a story around the Hound, as it turned out. I think Mr. Holmes felt a b
it bad about having to shoot him and also a bit curious about the origin of such an extraordinary animal. After the mystery was solved Mr. Holmes made another visit to the dealer who had sold the hound to that horrible Mr. Stapleton and found out where they had gotten him. As it happened, the dog came from a village, Giles Tor, only twenty miles or so from Baskerville Hall. There are dozens of them there. The villagers say they’re descended from some elk hunting dogs brought over by one of William the Conqueror’s knights—Gilles of something or other Sur Mer, who settled there. His line died out centuries ago, but the dogs have thrived. After the legend of the Hound spread through the area, the local people started calling them Baskerville hounds. The villagers think that it was probably a wandering Basky that Sir Hugo and his men saw. Most of the breed are brindle, actually. Only about one in ten is black like the Hound or Otto here.

  It’s one of the things I miss about having Mr. Holmes around. He knows so many things! It seemed I was always learning something strange and new about the world.

  E.F. Do you hear from Mr. Holmes often?

  Mrs. H. Oh, yes. We’ve stayed good friends. He writes and sends me honey from his beehives, and sometimes pays a visit when he travels to Scotland. The rustic life in Surrey agrees with him, I think. He seems more at peace, and he tells me that he reads and does chemistry experiments now to his heart’s content.

  E.F. Do you know if he still does any detective work?

  Mrs. H. I’m sure of it. Sometimes he comes by as a sort of surprise, you know, as though he were called up here with little warning. And on those occasions he’s been a bit closemouthed about his reasons for coming to Scotland—and he has that look in his eye.

  E.F. What look?

  Mrs. H. I don’t quite recall how Dr. Watson put it—he described it so much better than I can. That glint that used to tell us that, as Mr. Holmes like to put it, “the game is afoot.”