That night, after Mrs. Tupper had retired to her chamber, the black-clad, heavily veiled Sister slipped out to see what she could do for London’s poor.
The famous “pea-soup” fog of London was so thick this night that my own lantern seemed to float like a ghost at the end of my arm, lost in nearly palpable murk. On nights like this, or even in daytime when the air turned to yellow-brown smut-broth, cabdrivers needed to lead their horses on foot, and watermen sometimes stepped off the docks along the Thames and were drowned.
While ordinary pedestrians, even more so than usual, fell victim to foul play. Right now a cutthroat could be standing within six feet of me and I would not see him. Or a garroter –
The thought made me shiver as the dank cold did not, shudder with memory of that fearsome force seizing me from behind, squeezing, strangling – then only blackness, until the blurred memory of some horrid man lifting my veil before I fled. Altogether dreadful, that night, the blackest of memories, as evil as the – the foul device itself, absurdly simple, a stick of malacca wood and a stay-lacing, of all things, still clinging on to me afterward –
Mentally I attempted to push the image away. This was no time to dwell on such a terror, not with the all-but-tangible shadows of London night all around me. Hearkening constantly for any hint of danger, I walked on, not searching for unfortunates tonight, but instead making for a destination; I could stand my own apprehension only just so long. But at the same time I told myself that many more Londoners died of sheer breathing than ever died of crime. It could not possibly be healthful to inhale air that made one’s eyes and nostrils run black. I could bear it; I had been raised in the clean air of the country. But what of those who had been born to breathe soot, to live and die on these grimy streets? London’s poor, I had noted, grew stunted and died soon.
One could hardly begrudge them their gin.
Huddling together to survive the nights, even the poorest folk could often lay hands on a bottle of gin, which they passed around in order to make their cold and wretched lot more bearable.
By day they distrusted strangers, but by night the drink loosened their tongues. This fact, I believe, explains the timing of my strange encounter.
Well laden with my usual supplies, I hurried towards the workhouse, where the poorest of the poor, destitute old women called “dosses” or “crawlers,” spent their days and nights on the stone steps. By longtime custom, they were allowed this small mercy, instead of being knocked about by the police as was the lot of ordinary beggars.
Poor old things, they would be burning street sweepings if indeed they had any sort of fire at all –
Rounding the corner of the workhouse, I halted a moment, astonished. Instead of the expected shadows, I saw upon the workhouse steps a metal washtub in which a considerable blaze merrily burned. There would be no need for me to light one of my tin-and-paraffin devices tonight.
And instead of seeing shivering old women huddled together beneath the blankets I had given them, I saw them gathered around the fire, their gaunt faces grinning.
And with them, a man.
An old man as hunched and crooked as they were, his long grey hair and beard hanging down none too clean, and his shabby clothing even dirtier. Poor as poor can be. Yet somewhere he had got fuel for such a handsome fire, and the unlikely receptacle in which to carry it, and, I saw, a bottle of gin. And for some reason he had chosen to bring these things here.
Close beside him sat the most pitiful of the dosses, her half-naked body and her ringworm-nfested head, along with the rest of her threadbare personage, covered by the waterproof Ivy Meshle had given her two days before.
The waterproof that had previously belonged to a woman selling pen-wipers from a basket.
“Sister!” she called as she saw me approach, her voice enlivened yet slurred by alcohol. “Sister, ’ave a toot o’ gin!”
It was not necessary for me to reply, as the blackveiled Sister never spoke. Nor was it necessary for me to reject the hospitality with so much as a gesture; the dosses were accustomed to my ways. Silently I began handing out bread, et cetera, which the poor women grasped eagerly enough, but not as desperately as they might have under their usual circumstances.
“. . . widowed. I did sewin’ till me eyes gave out,” the woman in the waterproof was gabbling to the old man, who had evidently asked her to tell him her story. As I was unable, due to my “muteness,” to make any such request, I listened with greatest curiosity while pretending not to. “Then I tried peddlin’ flowers in front of the theatre, you know, but when it rained, the toffs wouldn’t stop to buy bookays for their ladies. I stood in the rain anyway and took to coughin’, one jolly mess led to another, I got turned out of me room, and me very first night in a common lodging-house, some ’eartless devil stole me little bit o’ money and all me clothes. Me boots, me dress and apron, me – well, everything except the shift I slept in was gone, and I cried to this one and that one to no avail. So it’s cold an ’ungry on the streets I am, for ’ow can I find work witout any decent covering for meself? No,” in answer to the man’s offer of another swig of gin, “I’ll ’ave no more o’ that or it’s falling over I’ll be, even more so than customary.”
Indeed, I had a few times seen the old women fall when they tried to walk, such was the extremity of their misery.
The greybeard said, “God forbid such ill fortune should ever beset me little Ivy.”
Ivy?
Only the fact that I was already pretending not to listen kept me from giving myself away. Perhaps, actually, I did stiffen or startle – but in the night and the flickering firelight, I doubt anyone saw.
And the ragged, hunchbacked old man was not looking at me, anyway, but at the doss in the waterproof as he said, “Me little granddaughter, no more’n fourteen years on this cruel earth. Less’n a week ago she went out to sell pen-wipers an’ such from a basket – ”
My heart started to pound.
“ – with the tears runnin’ down ’er face, so I ’ear, from ’er misery – ”
I felt the oddest wrenching sensation within my chest.
“ – an’ she hain’t been ’eard of since.”
I wanted to run away.
Therefore, knowing I must show no sign of what I was feeling, I continued to pass out foodstuffs, working my way
towards
the stranger.
Stranger?
In a sense, yes.
“She were wearin’ a waterproof much like that’un yer got on,” he was saying, his accent impeccably lower-class. “Where, if yer don’t mind tellin’ me, did – ”
Before he could complete the question, I thrust a meat pie in front of his nose.
He turned to accept it. In his very dirty face between filthy cap and filthy beard I saw keen grey eyes looking up at me. “Why, thank ye.”
With greatest fervour mentally I reminded myself that he could see nothing more of me than a muffled, mantled, veiled, almost shapeless silhouette in the night.
He asked me, “Ye prowl all through these parts, Sister? Beggin’ yer pardon, would yer chance to know the whereabouts o’ a skinny stick o’ a girl called Ivy?”
I handed him cheese to go with the meat pie.
“Tall for ’er age, she is,” he continued, “but if ye fed her beans, she’d look like yer rosary, she would, she’s that thin.”
One of the dosses told him, “The Sister uv the Streets won’t answer yer. She never says nuttin’.”
“I begs yer pardon.” Something of his genteel courtesy sounded through his Cockney accent. “Thank ye fer the food, Sister.”
In no way could he know how truly he spoke: I was indeed his sister. It was my brother Sherlock.
CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH
THE NEXT MORNING IVY MESHLE, FOR THE first time since her visit to Baker Street, reported to work without fear. No longer did that worthy secretary need to fret, for Sherlock Holmes did not seek her; he was on the hunt for a poor street vendor who had worn a waterproof.
So I felt better, yet worse, for I had heard a quiver of emotion – the genuine article, I sensed, not just an actor’s rendition – in my brother’s voice when he had described me as a skinny girl crying with wretchedness.
Surely he realised I did not actually live in poverty? He knew I had money.
But just as surely Mrs. Hudson had told him how miserably I had been weeping when she let me in.
Confound everything. Intent only on getting my cipher book back, I hadn’t realised how such news might affect him.
How,
how
could I safely reassure brother Sherlock of my well-being?
Such were my troubled musings as I entered the establishment of Dr. Leslie T. Ragostin, Scientific Perditorian.
“Good morning, m’lady!” cried the eager boy-in-buttons as he took my ulster.
“Joddy,” I told him with some asperity, “have you ever considered that other employers might change your rather ridiculous name to James, or Cecil, or Algernon, just to suit themselves?”
“Um, no, m’lady! I mean no, Miss Meshle.”
“Just so, Joddy. ‘Miss Meshle’ is how I prefer to be addressed. Please be good enough to bring me the morning newspapers, and some tea.”
But I scanned the papers without pleasure, for there was still no word from Mum.
Well, surely in a day or two . . .
But I so badly wanted her to advise me about Sherlock. Without benefit of her greater wisdom, how might I take action? Send my brother a letter of reassurance? But – he was so confoundedly clever – what if he somehow traced it back to me?
Place a similar message for him in the newspaper personal columns?
But to do so, even in cipher, would be to make our family difficulties public. I could not risk damaging Sherlock’s pride even worse than I had already. Moreover, surely brother Mycroft – who so far, cold kidney pie that he was, had not much troubled me or my thoughts – surely Mycroft would see such a message as well, and what sort of hornet’s nest might ensue . . . I could not imagine.
I had no idea what to do.
Sitting behind my desk in a shadowed frame of mind, looking over Dr. Ragostin’s meagre correspondence, I found myself doodling on the backs of papers I had set aside to discard, producing a caricature of my brother with his cloth cap and his forelock hanging down. Unaccountably, I felt slightly better. Always, when irritated or uneasy, I feel driven to draw – so, supplying myself with a sheaf of foolscap paper, I began to sketch in earnest. Sherlock again, then Mycroft, then Mum, then others. Faces, mostly. The ragged little girl who had swept a crossing for me. The dosses on the workhouse steps. Lady Theodora in her black jewellery. My mind had gone off in directions of its own. I drew the face of Alexander Finch.
And to my own surprise, I gave it quite a nasty sneer.
What ever in the world?
Sitting back, I closed my eyes and tried to recapture my visit to Ebenezer Finch & Son Emporium. Memories spoke in my mind:
“. . . sort of colours one would expect from a screaming anarchist.”
“She’d been reading
Das Kapital,
and we discussed the exploitation of the masses.”
“She wanted me to show her the proletariat.”
“What I think is, she walked right out the front door and put that ladder there herself.”
Had Alexander Finch’s father merely been releasing choler – or had he been calling his son an anarchist ?
I knew “anarchists” were blamed for dynamiting Victoria Station, attacking the offices of the
Times,
and most recently, attempting to blow up the Tower of London, but other than what I saw in the newspapers, I knew nothing of these foreign assassins, these secret societies. Were anarchists something of the Marxist sort?
Yet Alexander Finch had led me to believe that
Lady Cecily
was a Marxist?
But if so, why had she mentioned nothing of such beliefs in her private journals?
He had asserted that she had put the ladder under the window herself. But, having experienced the pleasure of her dainty acquaintance, he must have known that was simply not possible.
Lady Cecily had met Alexander Finch. Lady Cecily had corresponded with Alexander Finch. Lady Cecily had explored London with Alexander Finch. And Lady Cecily had gone missing.
Surely not entirely a coincidental series of events.
Yet the police had failed to find her through him, and they watched him constantly –
Or so he said.
How foolish of me to accept his assurance, and Lady Theodora’s, that he was kept under constant scrutiny.
How much did I know, really know, about Alexander Finch?
Very little.
I arose from my desk to go talk with him again.