My Sherlock Holmes Page 5

  It was only the knowledge that Sunday afternoons frequently found her at leisure in the narrow town garden behind 221 Baker Street that induced me to turn my steps along Audley Street. Ordinarily I would never have interrupted her work, which I knew—she being the landlady of two sets of rooms and two single chambers—was both physically demanding and virtually unending.

  I found her, however, as I had suspected, pruning back her roses for the winter preparatory to wrapping the more delicate varieties in straw against the cold, her tall form swathed in a very atypical (for Martha) dress of blue-and-white calico and her fair hair, instead of being confined to its usual firm bun, hanging in plaits down her back like a schoolgirl’s. She greeted me with a smile and a hug, and I sat on the single iron bench in the bare garden until she’d finished, when we went inside for tea. Both her widowed sister-in-law, Jenny Turner, who was living there then (though she moved out not long after), and her maid-of-all work, the egregious Alice, were away for the afternoon. The kitchen was warm and extremely pleasant with its smells of cinnamon and sugar, and we covered a wide variety of topics from John’s birthday (soon) to the shape of this winter’s hats (idiotic) to the progress of John’s novel (frustrating, owing to the demands of making a living for himself, a household, and a dowryless wife).

  “Had he not been wounded and sent home,” I mused, “I think he would have remained with his regiment forever, writing tales of adventure and romance and battle in the hills out beyond Peshawar. For he has never wanted anything else, really. No wonder he drives poor Mr. Holmes to distraction with ‘making romances out of logic.’”

  And the two of us gently laughed. “But had he not been wounded and sent home,” Martha said, “he would not have met Mr. Holmes—which would have been a shame, I think. Your husband is good for him. I know it would never have occurred to Mr. Holmes to seek out a friend, or to work at unraveling the mystery of another human soul as your husband did at unraveling his. Mr. Holmes watches people, the way he will watch the bees among the roses in the summer: fascinated but apart.”

  Which led us, naturally enough, to speculation about why a man of evident substance should be going about Whitechapel buying doped drinks for penniless women.

  “I thought it sounded like the kind of thing that would intrigue Mr. Holmes,” I said, dropping a fragment of strong-tasting brown sugar into my tea. “I would have mentioned it to Dr. Watson, only he worries about me enough going down there—not that I would ever accept the offer of a glass of mild and bitters from a total stranger. Certainly not in one of those pubs.”

  “No.” Martha gazed thoughtfully through the many-paned glass of the pantry window out into the bare yard, her large hands cupped around the blue-and-white porcelain of the cup. “Though mind you, they’re simply neighborhood pubs. If you mind your own business there you’re as little likely to come to grief as you would at the Lamb down the street—unless you drink the gin, of course. Still … It’s curious you should mention the matter. Something of the kind happened—or almost happened—two weeks ago to old Mrs. Orris, who sells flowers, and knitting, and apple dolls about the streets.”

  My whole face must have turned into a pair of raised eyebrows, because Martha went on, “It gave her a turn, because her niece knew Mary Kelly, one of the girls who was killed by Jack the Ripper last year. Mrs. Orris was walking home along Three Colt Street, which as you know is in a very bad part of the Limehouse, when she became aware that someone was following her. She heard the man behind her quicken his steps and she quickened hers, but was too tired to go very fast, for it was late and she’d been walking much of the day. She slowed down to go into the Ropewalk, where there were lights on and people.

  “The man overtook her in front of the Ropewalk, and called out in a hoarse, husky voice, ‘Madam, I should like to have a look at some of your dolls.’ Now, he had been following her all the way from Commercial Road, but when she turned and stood beneath the lights in front of the pub, he came up to her, looked at her face, barely gave her dolls a glance, waved his hand impatiently and said, ‘Oh, I’m afraid my daughter already has some of these,’ and strode away down Ropewalk Fields at once, and disappeared into the fog. As I said, Mrs. Orris’s niece knew one of the girls who was killed last year, and was very upset by this meeting, and perhaps it was that that made her more observant, but she said she did notice that, daughter notwithstanding, the gentleman was not wearing a wedding band.”

  At that moment the bell at the front of the house pealed. I got to my feet, thinking that it might be Mr. Holmes—Martha’s story, added to the two I had earlier heard, had filled me with uneasiness. But from where I stood in the kitchen door looking down the passageway, I saw that it was a man and a woman. The man was tall and burly, extremely handsome and well-dressed in a camels’ hair greatcoat and tall hat, the woman—barely a girl, I thought—elegantly turned out in copper-colored tweed that set off the striking brunette darkness of her hair. I could hear the girl apologizing, while the man snapped, “I distinctly told Holmes to keep me apprised of all and any details he might find.”

  The querulous outrage in the voice, coupled with my acquaintance with Mr. Holmes, struck me as absurdly amusing. After the visitors had gone Martha and I had a discreet chuckle over the thought of Mr. Holmes—who for all his protestations of logic and efficiency loved mysteriousness like a schoolboy—divulging all and any details to anyone, let alone the handsome and arrogant gentleman on the doorstep.

  When I recounted the incident to John that evening he rolled his eyes and sighed, “Mr. Thorne. It has to be. Lionel Thorne has been coming into Holmes’s sitting room almost daily for weeks, full of schemes as to how his missing wife might be found, and Holmes is hard put to persuade him that all his proposed courses of action will succeed in doing is driving her further into the shadows.”

  The first comment that sprang to my lips was that I scarcely blamed Mrs. Thorne, whoever she was, for fleeing from her husband. Though strikingly handsome, he seemed both pettish and managing, if nothing worse; but it was, in any case, not my business. Instead I remarked, “Weeks? That’s unusual for Mr. Holmes, isn’t it? He generally unravels his puzzles within a day or two.”

  “This is a rather curious case.” John tamped the bowl of his after-dinner pipe with his usual meticulous concentration, as if he were cleaning a gun, while the dreamy scent of the clean tobacco mingled with that of the fire in the grate, and of the last few roses Martha had given me to bring home. We do not live richly, John and 1, but after a lifetime spent one half in a dreary Edinburgh boarding establishment, and the other half in such penitential quarters as are alotted to governesses, I find a four-room mansionette in Kensington the summit of well-being and joy.

  “Mrs. Julietta Thorne—according to her husband—has always been a woman of great eccentricity, whose odd ways have over the years given him great concern that one day she would have to be restrained. Six years ago she disappeared, taking with her nothing but the clothes that she wore. Since that time, though she has never applied for a penny, letters have come reguarly to the family man of business—Mrs. Thorne owns considerable estates in Norfolk, her father having been the Viscount Wale, who placed all the lands in trust for his only daughter—and to the Thornes’s only child, a girl named Viola, who is now twenty.”

  “I believe it was her that I saw,” I said. “A dark girl, very pretty?”

  “Indeed. The letters are posted from various European cities—several from Marseilles, one from Hamburg, and I believe from such places as Brussels and Danzig. They are invariably short, handwritten in what Holmes tells me is unmistakably Julietta Thorne’s handwriting. They say that she is well and happy and occasionally give instructions about the estate, of which she has complete control by the terms of her father’s will. I have read the letters—they contain nothing of a personal nature—and find them quite lucid, if a little brusque. But Mr. Thorne has been prey to mounting concern that this stubborn refusal to either return to her family o
r give them any means of communicating with her indicates a gradual slide into madness. A year ago he began making serious efforts to locate her; a few months ago he came to Holmes.”

  “And what has Miss Thorne to say to any of this?” I asked.

  “It was Miss Thorne who insisted that her father come to Holmes. I understand that he was at first reluctant, but he has become a most intrusive client, calling, as I have said, two or three times a week of late and demanding to be kept apprised of every detail of the search. Miss Thorne apparently has very little to say, save that she does not believe her mother to be mad.”

  I tucked my feet up under me, as well as I could in the rather close confines of the chesterfield that I shared with John before the fire. We do, in fact, have two quite comfortable chairs in the parlor, but in the evening after dinner we frequently share occupancy of the enormous old green chesterfield, John with his arm about me as we read the evening paper together. I said, “It’s a pity someone is not out looking for another lunatic in London,” and recounted the story of the Friendly Gentleman with the beard and spectacles, as I knew it so far: “Why would anyone do such a thing?” I asked.

  “I think you have the right of it, my dear.” He puffed at his pipe—which had gone out—and set it aside, drawing my head down to his shoulder. On the hearth the old cat Plutarch (so named for his many Lives) blinked sleep ily into the flames. In the warmth and comfort of the room I thought of women like Mrs. Wolff, and Mrs. Orris, and the little flower sellers and costers’ daughters who’d come into the Settlement House, women who had not more than single unheated rooms near the river on these cold nights, and who trudged the foggy streets trying to sell their flowers or their candies or their dolls until the night grew too bitter to endure. “It sounds like the man is a lunatic, though not a dangerous one, except insofar as the women he drugs are in danger being left unconscious in alleyways.”

  He drew breath to say—I am sure—I really wish you would not go down to the Whitechapel Settlement, and then, God bless him, let it out. After a moment he said instead, “And the women were not harmed in any other way while they were unconscious? Other than Mrs. Wolff being robbed, which as you said might have been done by any of the street Arabs in that neighborhood.”

  “I am certain of it,” I said.

  “It’s curious,” John went on after a moment. “I remember how wide spread the panic was in the city last winter, over the Ripper’s crimes—to the extent that I had serious doubts about your safety when you started at the Settlement House in the spring. But despite all the fears he only took five victims, and they were within an understandable limit: they were fallen women, with whom a man might easily have a grievance for passing along to him some loathesome disease. The crimes were appalling, but they had a—a logic to them. But this … This is simply very odd.”

  “It’s curious,” I said, settling into the warm circle of his arm. “In spite of the fact that the Friendly Gentleman hasn’t done anyone any harm—I thought of the Ripper, too.”

  In the days that followed there were, of course, many other matters demanding my attention: having the chimneys cleaned before the start of true winter, negotiating yet again with Mrs. Robertson next door on the subject of her incessantly screeching parrot, convincing Florrie—the fourth in a long line of barely adolescent maids-of-all-work—not to barter such objects as napkins and towels away to the rag-and-bone man just because he assured her that “Ladies like your missus don’t got no more use for such an old thing as that.”

  Yet the Friendly Gentleman did not leave my mind. When I stopped to buy flowers from the girls in Piccadilly, and chatted a bit with them as they made up their bouquets and buttonholes on the steps of the Fountain, I mentioned a warning about the man. Though one woman shrugged and said, “Coo, lady, for a nice bit of gin I’d take a kip in an alley”—laughed along with her neighbors at this—ot

  hers looked thoughtful, and thanked me for the alert. And at the Settlement House I put the word out among the women who walked about the city with their baskets of chrysanthemums, or feather tips, or knitting slung about their necks.

  There was one woman about whom I worried in particular, who made dolls in her single room on Marigold Walk near the East India docks, and went about the city for miles selling them. Queenie, everyone called her, mostly I think because she spoke more politely than her neighbors. The dolls she made were truly exquisite, their round solemn faces bearing expressions of love, or shyness, or impishness far different from the usual vapid prettiness of a toy. Queenie would scrounge or trade bits of lace and silk from the rag-and-bone men, or beg scraps of satin from the dressmakers of Oxford Street, or beads that the dustmen found, and from these fashion angels that I would have treasured at the cost of my life in my own rather bleak and doll-less childhood. She was somewhat eccentric and absolutely fearless, and would talk to anyone about anything. Some after noons I would see her chatting with city bankers outside the Royal Exchange as she hawked her wares, or in the early mornings with porters at the Billingsgate Fish Market. She could not be made to understand that there were folk of ill intent in the world, or that it behooved a woman alone—and she was not a girl, but a woman, I would guess, in her forties—to be careful about where and with whom she walked.

  “No, but who should wish to harm me?” she asked, regarding me with mild disbelief in her large dark eyes, as the porters and costermongers and vegetable sellers of the Covent Garden market pushed and edged around us: I had encountered her in the market, deep in conversation with a toothless tramp and his dog, near a group of women shelling peas behind a rampart of baskets. “I mean no ill to any man, nor ever have.”

  I could not convince her otherwise, and in time simply bought a doll from her—a most beautiful Columbine with dark silk-floss hair elaborately braided—and went on my way with the flowers I had come there to buy. On my way through the narrow alley between baskets and hampers, stalls and barrows, I glanced back, to see one of the market women watching me closely, a hook nosed, gimlet-eyed harridan in a virulent green plaid shawl. But when I looked again she was gone.

  That evening, however, when I went to the Settlement House, all thought of her and of the feckless Queenie was driven out of my mind. I had finished my little class of shop girls, and was preparing to depart for home, when, coming out into the bare brick courtyard of the gloomy Settlement building, I was nearly bowled over by a rowdy group of the local boys, scuffling and laughing as they dashed about in the cold. Some of these ragged youngsters had been living on the street for years, variously selling newspapers, or holding the horses for gentlemen, or more dangerously darting out into the jostle and clatter of traffic to sweep the horse droppings out of the path of crossing pedestrians who would then give them a shilling. “Give them,” I say, if they were decent folks, though I have been pricked to inner fury by the sight of young men—gentlemen I cannot call them—who would toss the payment out into the path of traffic, to roar with laughter at the nimble antics of the boys as they risked their lives diving for enough money to buy them a night beneath a roof.

  It always astonishes me that these same boys, after twelve or fourteen hours of this, have the energy for games, but of course they do. I sprang back out of their path, but not quickly enough, and one of them collided with me, hurling me back against the brick of the wall and knocking himself sprawling through the open door and into the hall. He was at once on his feet, stammering, “Cor, I’m sorry, Mrs. W.,” while his playmates jeered good-naturedly, “Argh, d’ja pick ’er pocket whilst you was at it, Ginger?” and “Hey, we gotta call ’im Ginger the Cosh!” as they crowded around me making sure that I was well.

  The collision had knocked from Ginger’s shoulder the satchel in which he carried his newspapers, and whatever other treasures he could find in the streets: a top, a bag of marbles (which thankfully had remained tied), and—I saw as he gathered them up again, still apologizing—a tin box that looked suspiciously like Mrs. Wolff’s workmanship. ] s
aid, “Ginger,” and he looked back at me, box in hand, and I beckoned him over.

  “Yeah, you give it to him, Mrs. W.,” affirmed the others, but I gestured them away. I think Ginger saw the direction of my gaze, and the look in my eye, because he hung back until the others had retreated.

  I took the box from his hand. “I don’t think even Dick Turpin,” I said, keeping my voice low, “went in for stealing from old women who couldn’t defend themselves.”

  I suspect he knew from the start that he had crossed the line of even the rough and-ready ethics of the street, because he blushed hotly. At the same time I could see why he hadn’t been able to resist temptation. The box was elaborately wrought of eight or ten different patterns of pressed-tin ceiling tiles, and was startlingly pretty. He mumbled, “Well, she was laid out drunk. I figured she’d just think as how the toff had took it.”

  “You saw him?” Perhaps I should have taken the opportunity to catechize him about how neither the owner’s perceived unworthiness nor the unlikeliness of detection excuses theft, but the question I did ask was likelier to come to some good for someone, and not be a complete waste of breath.

  “Oh, yeah. I was tryin’ to sell the last of me papers, an’ had gone in the alley to get outer the wind. This toff lugs ol’ lady Wolff round the corner, an’ dumps ’er down where the roof sticks out a bit at the back of the Fish an’ Ring, ’cos it was still rainin’, an’ strikes a match. I saw his phiz good. Square face, beard like a holly bush, horn-rims to his goggles, an’ a fair silk hat. He pulls her scarf off her head an’ holds the match down near ’er face, lookin’ at her close. I thought he’d light up his beard or her eyebrows. Then he blows it out an’ heads up the alley, trippin’ over ’er basket. I near laughed out loud, but …”

  He hesitated, and the sharp cock-sparrow bravado wavered from his face, showing him to be, after all, a boy not much more than nine.