Sherlock Holmes (3 page)

“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, bard like a holly bush, horn-rims to ‘is 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
bear of 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.

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 as a dead cat, not a woman at all. And I dursn’t
laugh. I don’t know what he wanted with Mrs. Wolff, but for a
minute I was afeared…”

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 ‘er 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 rightly
around 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 hard 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 fae 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 vice 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 than 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
Women’s 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.