Sherlock Holmes (4 page)

“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 connection 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 t 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 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 a 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.”

“He stopped me that very evening in the
Commercial Road, and had I not been warned by my dear Mrs. W. –
Mrs. Watson, that is,” she amended hastily, “I don’t know but what
I might have gone with him for a drink. For in that great beard and
those spectacles I did not recognize him, and he kept his voice low
and husky, and his words short. He knew he had little time. Our
daughter turns twenty-one this month, and he must have guessed –
seeing how she spoke against him in the court today – that his
chance of controlling any portion of the family money would be done
when she reached her majority.”

“The importance of Miss Thorne’s impending
birthday did not escape me,” said Holmes. “What did you intend to
do, when she came of age?”

“I intended to die,” said Julietta Thorne,
quite calmly. “Oh, not actually die,” she added, when both I and
John cried out in horror. “I had made my will, leaving everything
to Viola absolutely and without reference to her father. I planned
to stage-manage an ‘accident’ in Brussels or Hamburg, with some of
my seafaring friends, with sufficient proof that Julietta Thorne
was no more. Only in that way could I be sure of freeing myself,
and my poor child, from the scoundrel I married. It broke my heart
to know that I could never see my child again…”

Her voice wavered, and she forced a smile. “I
saw her at the Assizes today,” she said. “I was in the courtroom –
Did she not look beautiful, as she stood up and told her own tale
of the wrongs she witnessed that he did to me, the abuses she
herself had endured at his hands? There is a girl who will never
know her mother’s foolish belief in a man’s lies.”

She broke off, and pressed her hands to her
lips, her dark eyes flooding with tears. “My poor Viola,” she
whispered. “What she must have gone through, after I fled –
thinking that I would leave her, merely to save myself from
unpleasantness. Now that Lionel is where he cannot get at me, I
shall institute divorce proceedings, which I am sure will be
granted given his attempt at murdering poor Mrs. Watson…”

She held out her hand to me, and clasped my
fingers in her strong, work-roughened grip. “But I fear that I
shall never be able to look my daughter in the face again.”

While Mrs. Thorne had been speaking, I saw
Mr. Holmes turn his head, listening to sounds in the street.
Listening myself, I heard a cab outside, and Martha’s
sister-in-law, Jenny Turner, opening the street door. Moments later
the parlor door opened to reveal the tall slim dark-haired girl I
had glimpsed only once on the doorstep. Mrs. Thorne gave a little
cry, but her daughter only crossed the room in a stride or two, and
took her mother in her arms.

As the two women held each other close John
put a gentle arm around my waist, and led me from the room.

About the Author

Since her first published fantasy in 1982 -
The Time of the Dark
- Barbara Hambly has touched most of
the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror,
mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy,
romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in
Southern California, she attended the University of California,
Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux,
France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger,
and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her
work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don
Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the
well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written
another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara
Hamilton.

A lifelong fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes stories, over the years Hambly has been asked to
contribute to a number of Holmes anthologies. When the character
went into public domain, she added these stories to her
collection.

Professor Hambly also teaches History
part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her
on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

Now a widow, she shares a house in Los
Angeles with several small carnivores.

She very much hopes you will enjoy these
stories.

Other Sherlock Holmes stories by Barbara Hambly, available on
Smashwords:

Lost Boy (Sherlock Holmes meets Peter Pan -
narrated by Mrs. Watson)

The Adventure of the Sinister Chinaman
(narrated by Dr. Watson)

The Adventure of the Antiquarian’s Niece
(narrated by Dr. Watson - this story was written for an anthology
of Sherlock Holmes in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos)