Sherlock Holmes (2 page)

“The man overtook her in front of the
Ropewalk, and called out in a hoarse, husky voice, ‘Madame, 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 which 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 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 I, but after a lifetime spent one half in
a dreary Edinburgh boarding establishment, and the other half in
such penitential quarters as are allotted 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
regularly 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 or 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, a 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 sleepily 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 widespread the panic was in the city last winter,
over the Ripper’s crimes – to the extent that I had serous 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 loathsome 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 – others 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 who 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 afternoons I would see her chatting
with the 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 penny. “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 if 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 remained tied!), and – I saw as he
gathered them up again, still apologizing – a tin box that looked
suspiciously like Mrs. Wolff’s workmanship. I said, “Ginger,” and
he looked back at me, box in hand, and I beckoned him over.

“Yeah, you give it to ‘im, 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.”