My Sherlock Holmes Page 6

  In a lower voice, as if fearing that his friends would hear his admission of fright, he added, “He was a bad man, Mrs. W. I couldn’t see much of his face, but there was somethin’ about him, about the way he moved, like he’d as soon hit you as not … . I seen men like that afore. The way he handled her, like as if she was a dead cat, not a woman at all. And I durstn’t laugh. I don’t know what he wanted with Mrs. Wolff, but for a minute I was afraid … .”

  He shook his head, not saying what he was afraid he would see.

  “I’m glad she was all right. That all he wanted was a look at her.” Then, “You won’t tell Mrs. Wolff it was me as pinched ’er box? It’s a crackerjack box.”

  “It is indeed, Ginger,” I said. “And you know how badly she needs the money she’ll make selling it. It will make her very happy to have it returned, for she put many hours’ work into it, and it may make a difference between her having a little coal to burn at night, or going cold. I’ll tell her I found it by the dustbins behind the Fish and Ring.”

  “Narh,” protested Ginger indignantly. “Wot’d you be doin’ by the Fish an’ Ring, Mrs. W.? Tell her I found it, an’ gave it to you.”

  Like Mr. Sherlock Holmes, Ginger had a feeling for the likeliness of a story.

  So troubled was I by this bizarre tale that when the cab came for me, I went, not to Kensington, but to Baker Street. As I gazed at the raveled blobs of yellow gaslights through the thickening fog I could not say what it was about Ginger’s tale that frightened me, for no harm to anyone had actually been done, but frighten me it did. Martha must have seen it in my face when she opened the door for me—either that, or simply the fact that I seldom came calling unannounced by letter at that hour—because she asked at once, “What is it?”

  I said, “Is Mr. Holmes in?”

  She shook her head, and repeated, “What’s happened, dear? Your hands are frozen,” and led me back to the kitchen for some tea. “Mr. Holmes is out,” she continued, as she sat me down in the kitchen by the stove. My hands were indeed frozen, and I had begun to cough. “He’s been coming and going at odder and odder hours, slipping out through the kitchen as often as not. He startled that pea-brained Alice nearly out of her shoes the other night, creeping in dressed as the vilest old Chinese scoundrel. I told him he was lucky I hadn’t set a dog on him.”

  But she smiled as she said it. In his tales John generally underrated Martha’s intelligence, even as he was completely oblivious to her beauty, and to the fact that she was barely a year older than myself. I don’t think he ever did realize that the reason Mr. Holmes never looked at other women was because Holmes and Martha had been lovers for years.

  “So you have no idea when he’ll be back?”

  “No. He didn’t come in last night … .” Her face clouded with the worry that she was able, most of the time, to push aside. “I suspect someone has been watching the house—watching his movements. So there is no telling.” She brought the honey pot to the table to spoon some into my tea, and as she did so I moved my bag aside. It tilted over, the shift in its position causing the little Columbine doll to poke her head out over the rim. Martha startled, nearly spilling the tea, and asked, “Where had you that?”

  “Columbine?” I took her out of the bag and set her against the sugar bowl, then looked up into Martha’s face. “What is it?”

  She signed me to remain where I was and left the kitchen; I heard her footsteps on the seventeen steps up to the floor above. In a few moments she was back, carrying Columbine’s twin sister. Round-faced, enigmatically smiling, silk-floss hair braided in an elaborate chignon of the sort that had been popular about ten years ago …

  “One of Mr. Holmes’s clients brought this here this afternoon,” she said. “Her mother made it, her mother who disappeared six years ago … .”

  “Mrs. Thorne? John told me.” I set the two dolls side by side on the table. The older twin’s clothes were brighter, the laces new and the beads and buttons more expensive, but the same hand had beyond any shadow of doubt wrought both. We looked at each other, baffled and shaken. It was Martha who said,

  “He’s looking for her.”

  “Her husband?” Into my mind sprang the image of a big bespectacled man “with a beard like a holly bush,” bending over a helpless woman in an alley, holding a candle to her face.

  He was a bad man, Ginger had said. Like he’d as soon hit you as not. I was afraid … .

  Martha jerked the bell to summon Billy from his room in the basement, and went to get her cloak.

  We did not have as complete a case as Mr. Holmes might have required, to leap into a cab and take action—but both of us knew that something unwholesome and dangerous was going on.

  As the cab rattled through the pitch-dark streets in choking fog, I related to Martha what Ginger had told me. “It sounds as if Mr. Thorne has been roving the streets in disguise for weeks, approaching any woman selling dolls—and goodness knows there are many—to get a close look at her. Though how he’d know his wife was selling dolls about the East End, and why she would be doing such a thing … Unless she really is insane, as he claims.”

  “Mr. Holmes guessed she was still in London,” said Martha. “How, I do not know. It may be Thorne who has been following him, or trying to. His efforts to come and go in secret began soon after Mr. Thorne first came with Miss Thorne to ‘help with the case.’”

  “Or it could be Thorne’s confederate,” I said. And I told her about the hook-nosed market woman, who had watched me so closely when I spoke to Queenie at Covent Garden that afternoon. “If she saw me speaking with Queenie—and Mr. Thorne could easily have seen me here, that day I came to visit—his confederate will have told him of it.”

  The jarvey shook his head over leaving us in Marigold Walk, which is one of those dreary, narrow alleys leading away from the docks, where the houses lean against one another like the wounded of some endless war and the shadows seem to eat the feeble glim of the gaslights. But we could not be sure when Queenie would return. A public house on the corner spilled ochre blotches of glare on the wet pavement, and though Martha and I agreed that, at last resort, we would take refuge there, we both resolved to wait in the dark doorway of Queenie’s dirty lodging for a time. Not even the usual complement of drunken sailors, ragpickers, coal heavers, and costers roved the chilly streets; only one old woman staggered along the opposite pavement, singing of Anne Boleyn’s ghost in a thin, scratchy wail. It was past eleven, and only the occasional wet clop of hooves from the Dock Road, and the dim musical clank of rigging blocks in the docks themselves, carried to us through the murk.

  I coughed, and drew my cloak more tightly about me. John would never let me hear the end of it, if I came down sick again from this. “Mrs. Thorne has been missing for six years now,” I said after a time. “Why would her husband only begin to seek her now?”

  “He made inquiries for her in Europe before this,” returned Martha quietly. “But her daughter was fifteen when Julietta Thorne fled … .”

  I shivered, remembering my one fleet glimpse of Lionel Thorne’s harsh face. I remembered, too, the fear in Ginger’s eyes when he spoke of the bearded man bending over the unconscious woman in the alley. “Do you think she is in fact insane, as he says?”

  “When a man says a woman is insane,” said Martha, her soft alto voice dry, “what he often means is that she will not do as he bids. It is fatally easy for a husband to have a wife declared insane on no other word than his own, particularly if she has any other eccentricity of manner, which, as you say, Queenie does. Then any provisions her father made for her control of her property would be voided, and her husband would become conservator. I may be wrong, and Julietta Thorne may in fact be mad as a hatter, but living apart from her husband may be the only way she could think of to preserve her liberty until her daughter comes of age. Hark!”

  For we both heard now the muffled leaden click of a woman’s step on the pavement. Peering hard through the gloom I saw nothing, save
the blurry smear of the public-house lights. Then a shadow passed them, stooped and small, hurrying.

  I sprang down the steps from the sheltering doorway, quickened my stride to meet her. I coughed again, and the little figure stopped, but I could see now that it was Queenie. I called out, “Julietta,” and she turned her head sharply, startled, and started to flee—

  And before her, out of the fog, loomed suddenly the dark shape that I knew was Lionel Thorne.

  “Julietta, run!” I shouted, but Thorne was too quick for her. He reached her in a stride, caught her arm, spilling her basket of dolls on the pavement, and in the gaslight from the pub I saw the flash of steel in his hand. I was running, too, by this time and threw myself on the man, shoving against him with all my strength.

  He staggered, stumbled off the curb. He lost his grip on the woman and grabbed me instead. I saw the flash of his knife and dodged, felt the steel tangle in my cloak and grate on my corset stays. Then the next second Martha was on him, dragging at his knife hand, and an instant after that the old woman across the street, suddenly six feet tall and shedding shawl, bonnet, and identity in a welter of old rags, landed Mr. Thorne such a blow on the chin with doubled-up fist that Mr. Thorne’s feet left the pavement, and only connected with it again after the back of his head did. I heard Mr. Holmes’s unmistakable light voice cry, “Martha!”

  “I’m all right … .”

  Then Holmes was on his knees beside me on the pavement—I had no recollection of falling, but I was sitting on the wet flagstones trying to get my breath, with Thorne’s knife beside me, glittering evilly in the greasy light. “My dear Mrs. Watson, are you all right?”

  I managed to nod—I actually felt quite dizzy—and he felt my hands and my face.

  “Is she all right?” asked Queenie’s voice—Mrs. Thorne’s voice—and I blinked at Holmes, with the long gray wig of the evil Covent Garden market woman hanging in unraveled mare’s tails about his face and the breath rolling in steam from his lips. Around us men were shouting as they came out of the pub:

  “Look at this ’ere pigsticker, then!”

  “By God, it’s Jolly Jack at ’is tricks again, I bet!”

  “You all right, mum?” (This to Holmes) “This lady all right?”

  “This man tried to stab me,” I said, keeping my voice steady with an effort, and pointing to Mr. Thorne, still unconscious in the muck of the road. I unfurled the side of my cloak to show the horrible rent. “Me, and this lady …”

  But Julietta Thorne was gone.

  It wasn’t until after the Court of Assizes had remanded her husband to custody—upon my testimony and that of Tzivia Wolff, Gordon “Ginger” Robinson, and two or three other peripatetic hawkers of dolls—that Julietta Thorne came to the Settlement House, and asked me to take her to Baker Street to meet Mr. Holmes.

  “Of course I was mad,” she said, quite calmly, once we were seated in Mr. Holmes’s cozy sitting room: myself, Mr. Holmes, John (who had been spending the evening with his friend while I was at the Settlement House), and Martha. “What other word would you use of a girl who insisted upon marrying a man whom everyone—including her dying father—recognized as a fortune hunter, selfish, calculating, brutal, and cold? My father begged me to wait, did everything in his power to get me to swear on the Testament that I would not marry for five years—for he knew my impulsiveness well, and knew that in a very few years my obsession would pass and I would no more consider wedding Lionel Thorne that I would consider throwing myself off London Bridge. But I would not wait.”

  She shook her head. She did not look so very unlike Mrs. Wolff, being roughly the same height, and like her a brunette. Not until I attended the Court of Assizes did I realize that all the women whom Lionel Thorne had accosted and drugged bore at least that superficial resemblance to one another. Six years of hardship and poverty had taken their toll on Julietta Thorne, as they take it upon all women who must struggle to make their living. But I could see that she had once been quite a handsome girl.

  “Within a few years I knew better,” she continued. “My dear father, thank God, if he could not dissuade me, at least tied up the money and the property so that Lionel could not touch it, this being some years before passage of the Married Womens Property Act. This—and what he called my ‘ungenerosity’ to his little whims and wants concerning railroad shares and slum property—was what quickly brought out the beast in my husband. It was my money, to invest and to manage and to save as I pleased. Rather than seek out a profession of his own—he had been a member of the Life Guards when we wed, but sold his commission almost at once—he plotted ceaselessly how to gain the use of my property, after having wasted his own in quite foolish speculations that always failed, he said, through someone else’s fault and malice.

  “Within a few years of the marriage I better knew the man I had wed. And as the years went by, my disgust and regret turned first to suspicion, then to fear. I remained with him to protect our daughter as long as I could, but when I found in his desk correspondence with various doctors concerning an effort to have me declared mad—and Lionel made conservator of the property—I knew I must flee.”

  “I confess that I have not had much time to observe you, Madam,” said John diffidently, from where he sat beside me on the settee. “Yet what little experience I have had with the mad inclines me to question whether such a judgment could be implemented.”

  “You see me now, Doctor,” smiled Mrs. Thorne. “Had you seen me in the years immediately following my dear father’s death, when I went from Spiritualist to Spiritualist seeking contact with him, seeking absolution and advice—when I spent hours and days locked in my room, making doll after doll as a way of removing my mind from the ruin I had wrought of my life—you might have said otherwise. Even in this country it is easy enough for a husband to have his wife declared a lunatic, particularly if she happens to believe—as I do—that the dead continue to take an active interest in those they loved in life.”

  “And so you fled,” said Holmes. There was no trace left of the evil-looking gray-haired market woman who had stared at me so sharply in Covent Garden—no wonder he had stared, seeing me, of all people, speaking to the woman he had gone to observe as a possible candidate for the missing Mrs. Thorne. Had he been home that day when Miss Viola Thorne brought to his rooms the doll her mother had made, it would have been he and not I who first made the connections between Julietta Thorne and Queenie the Dollmaker.

  But perhaps, not having heard some of the tales going around the Settlement House about the Friendly Gentleman, he would have delayed in seeking her out.

  Mrs. Thorne nodded. “Among the Spiritualists I had met people who would help me, though they had no idea who I was. And after I came to dwell in Whitechapel I came to know a few seafaring men willing to carry letters abroad, to post them from Europe to make it seem that I had left the country. I could not have kept an eye on the estates through the newspapers, had I actually gone abroad. And it was absolutely necessary to let the family man of business—and my dear child—know that I was not dead. How clever it was of you to trace me, Mr. Holmes,” she added, shaking a finger at the detective. “Lionel was a sly one, and he never managed that.”

  “Your husband—and the foreign police he contacted over the years—paid far too much attention to the country of origin of the stamps, and far too little to that of the paper,” replied Holmes with a smile. “Paper and ink were definitely of British manufacture. Moreover, they were always cheap, nothing that a woman living the peripatetic life of the usual fashionable Continental traveler—which your husband supposed you to be—would use. Further, such a woman would not be sending letters from such ports as Marseilles and Hamburg. So from the first my attention was drawn to the East End. Though it was some weeks before your daughter could return to Norfolk to find one of your dolls to show me—as I had asked her to do from the first—she had mentioned at the start of my investigation that you made them. That—and your refusal to have money
sent to you, by which you could be traced—immediately suggested to me a means by which a woman might make at least a bare living in hiding.”

  “And yet you told my husband nothing of this?”

  Holmes was silent for a moment, gazing into the fire. Mrs. Thorne had only come to the Settlement House as the first shadows of evening had begun to fall, so John and Mr. Holmes had been just finishing their dinner together—preparatory to a long promised evening of talk about certain of Mr. Holmes’s early cases which John hoped to write accounts of—when Martha had shown Mrs. Thorne and me up the stairs.

  “Were I the perfectly analytical reasoner Watson likes to make of me,” said Holmes slowly, “I suppose there would be no reason for me not to keep Lionel Thorne absolutely apprised of the progress of my search. One can tell a seamstress by her left sleeve and a cobbler by his thumb, but the marks that evil character leaves upon a man are less easily classified—perhaps because, as Milton so brilliantly points out in the first cantos of Paradise Lost, wickedness takes on manifold forms, though myself I have found that goodness bears as many shapes in the world.”

  “Yet even a little street Arab like Ginger Robinson,” I said softly, “guessed his intent was evil, without knowing how he guessed.”

  “I must improve my acquaintance,” murmured Holmes, “with young Mr. Robinson. Had I been the perfectly cold-blooded and analytical reasoner that the Mr. Sherlock Holmes of the tales appears to be, I would not have allowed mere prejudice to influence me against the way the man looked aside when he spoke of his wife, or the too-smooth accounts of her disappearance—unblemished by the smallest hesitations of doubt as to its motives. For your husband, Mrs. Thorne, is very good at appearing to act from the best of motives.”

  “As I know,” said Mrs. Thorne, “to my grief.”

  “And yet these things, like the weaver’s tooth or the hostler’s right shoulder, are clues too, to which my mind reacted. Very shortly after I began my researches in the East End I became aware that I was being watched when I emerged from the house. There are a number of criminals in London’s underworld who might have reason to do that. But the next time Mr. Thorne came I noticed the reddening on his cheeks and lips left by spirit gum where he fastened his borrowed whiskers. As he did not mention the use of disguise to me I guessed that my pursuer was he. After that I did what I could to shake him from the scent, but I fear that he, too, was doing exactly as I was: searching for you among the thronging humanity of those wretched streets. He showed quite clearly what he meant to do with you when he found you at last, trusting—quite accurately, I regret to surmise—that your death would be put down to the return of Jack the Ripper, or to some other criminal of that ilk. Unless they are particularly heinous, or attended by some sensational circumstance, few spend much time investigating the deaths of the poor.”