I stopped, hat still in my hand. My eyes narrowed. I presumed him to mean “Hi-ho, Watson!”—a greeting he often employed when his mood was good. Yet his mood was terrible. In fact, I was just returning from wandering about the city all day in the express attempt to avoid being caught up in his sulk. It now being over a month since our last case, Warlock was bored, inconsolable and insufferable.
My hand moved slowly as I placed my hat on its hook and ventured a tentative, “Hullo, Warlock. I must say, you seem to be in good spirits this evening.”
“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” he agreed.
“What might be the cause of this sudden reversal?”
“I toog mah medisuh.”
“Medicine?”
“Yah. Medisuh,” he said jovially. He gave me a silly smile and sank back onto the sofa with a relaxation so profound that he seemed almost boneless. His head lolled forward just beyond the arm of the sofa, then suddenly fell. His brow smashed down onto our side table with a sickening thunk, but this drew no protest except for a grunt of self-recrimination, followed by a childish giggle.
Let me tell you: there are few surer ways of attracting a doctor’s interest. I sprang across the room to learn what medicine Holmes had dosed himself with. On the table next to his head stood a wooden goblet. A few sips of silvery liquid remained in the bottom, with fatty white chunks floating lazily in it. The odor it gave forth burned the nose, but had a familiar scent—almost like almonds.
Since there was no apparent source of this medicine in the sitting room, I ran to the door of Holmes’s bedroom and peered inside. On the desk where he kept his alchemical kit lay a paper parcel from our local dispensary. The largest jar of mercury I have ever seen lay open and half empty in the middle, surrounded by a vial of cyanide, an open packet of strychnine, and a half-used cake of Mrs. Hudson’s cleaning lye.
“Holmes!” I cried. “What have you done? You’ll be dead in minutes!”
“Nah,” he scoffed.
“Why, Holmes? Why did you do it?”
“Wadsah, calm dow. Ih has no effeh ohh me.”
“No effect?”
“No effeh.”
“If that is so, lift your head off the table!”
He gave a few feeble flops. His arms and legs seemed not to respond to his will in the least, but his torso could still bend back and forth. He looked like a salmon that had been caught and flung in the bottom of a boat. Holmes endeavored three or four of these contortions, managing only to raise his head a half inch or so from the table, before letting it plonk down once again, beside his deadly goblet.
“Meh…” he said, “I don’d wand do righ now.”
I stood, helplessly racking my mind for a way to save him. Lye I could deal with, though even if life was preserved, terrible and lasting damage was a certainty. Mercury is a comparatively slow killer, but even if I could void it from his belly, some quantity must already have been absorbed into his tissues and could never be purged. Even if he survived the day, madness, blindness, organ failure and death might follow. I could give him tannic acid for the strychnine, yet there was little hope in that. But cyanide? The body absorbed it so quickly that death was certain within minutes and little could be done.
As I panicked, my eye was drawn to the deadly silver semi-circles his goblet had left upon the surface of our side table. They looked to me like four crescent moons: unfeeling, unforgiving and unstoppable. One might as well try to halt the nightly waxing or waning of the moon above as to save the man that had partaken of those four crescents’ deadly brew.
But wait…
Four?
Even if Holmes had spilled some of his terrible “medicine” down the side of his glass on his first drink, he would have then had to put down the goblet and pick it up four more times to have left those marks. Probably, there was a fifth hiding below the base of the glass. Lye is even more notable for its level of pain than for its efficacy. How could he have sat blithely sipping on it for long enough to leave four marks?
“Holmes… When did you drink this?”
“Lungetibe.”
Lunchtime? A glance at the clock on the mantelpiece confirmed that it was now past eight. Even given Holmes’s liberal interpretation of when it might be proper to take the midday meal, six hours must have passed since his first drink.
Well… four hours, anyway.
“Are you telling me you’ve been sipping on this poison for half the day?”
“Yah, buh dond worry, Wadsah. Id has no effeh,” he said. He gave me a broad, friendly smile and lapsed into unconsciousness. His pulse was weak, his breathing shallow and interrupted by strychnine spasms and periods of apnea which lasted sometimes four or five minutes. I can hardly describe the mixture of hopefulness and helplessness I felt as I sat by him that night, wishing that all the medical knowledge I had spent so long mastering would prove false.
It did.
I do not recall dropping off to sleep, but I must have done shortly before dawn. I had no sense that I’d slept at all, only the sensation of jarring back to wakefulness when I heard Holmes say, “Watson, get the door, won’t you? I am indisposed.”
“Huh? Warlock? You’re alive?”
“So very alive! I tell you, Watson, I am renewed; I am rejuvenated.”
“Are you?” I asked, carefully appraising his physique. “Because you seem to be still unable to move your limbs.”
“Pish-tosh! Such pursuits are overrated. I tell you: I am relieved at last. None of the little buggers are whispering to me this morning. Not even Moriarty; I can’t hear him at all.”
“Is that why you drank poison?”
“Of course! Don’t you remember me telling you I had a penchant for poisons, on the day we met?”
“Well yes, but you didn’t mention that you intended to poison yourself!”
“I haven’t. What I have done is poisoned the thousand demons who clamor for my attention at all hours of every day. Yes, sir, I have clobbered them all into comas and I intend to enjoy each instant while they are knocked out. I myself am quite unaffected by such mortal draughts.”
“So you keep saying…”
“Look here, are you going to be argumentative all morning, or are you going to answer the door?”
“What—” I started to ask, but was interrupted by a rapping at the door and Mrs. Hudson’s shrill voice calling, “Didn’t want to knock you gentlemen up, but she insisted. Wouldn’t go away, would she?”
“I am sorry, I’m sure,” said a second lady’s voice, “but the matter cannot wait. And besides, it is nearly ten o’clock.”
The response of any well-bred Englishman to the realization that he has left visitors standing unattended on his doorstep is one of pure horror. I leapt across the room and swung the door wide. I was beginning to form some word of welcome or apology or both, but before I had quite decided on the phrase to use, Mrs. Hudson got a look at me and said, “Oh dear, Dr. Watson.”
I was still in my shirtsleeves from the night before. My collar had come undone and I found a patch of slick, sticky drool stretching from my shoulder, all the way down to the waist of my trousers. As for those trousers, I must have unfastened them at some point in the evening, for they were loose and headed down towards my ankles at a rapid rate. With a gasp, I caught them and pulled them back into place. For a moment I had the horrid realization that this must have been an occurrence straight out of one of Mrs. Hudson’s shameful novels. I was mortified to have stumbled into such a position, sure that she would gain indecent delight from having caught me so. Yet, her expression betrayed no intimate desires whatsoever. In fact, her raised eyebrow seemed only to say, “Meh… I’ve seen better.”
“Oh dear,” she said again.
“Yes… Good morning… I… I fear we are not prepared to receive visitors,” I stammered. “Do come in, though. Do.”
Mrs. Hudson did not come in. Instead, she indicated her companion with a jerk of her thumb, announced, “Miss Helen Stoner”, and shuffled off d
own the stairs.
I could think of no way to explain my situation, so I only said, “Welcome, Miss Stoner; please come in. May I offer you some tea?”
“How generous,” said she. “I would love a cup.”
It struck me as odd that she seemed in earnest when she called the offer generous. In this, the era of Victoria, a cup of tea is not a kindness when hosting; it is a necessity. I am not sure which would be more shocking: to enter a stranger’s home and discover their house had no floor or to enter and not be offered tea. I deduced that our guest was a person unused to kindness or even civility.
Her appearance did not disappoint that assessment. Though she was yet within her early twenties, her hair was shot through with gray and she wore a worried air. She dressed in the style of the country gentry, but there was a threadbare quality to her clothes. Her dress was dark and dour—suited more to an elderly spinster than a young one, I thought. She had a fair face and—given her age and station—she might have been quite the tempting marriage prospect, were it not for the overall haggard and harried look of her.
“Miss Stoner, I am Dr. John Watson. The gentleman on the sofa is my friend and colleague, Mr. Warlock Holmes.”
“Ah! It is him I came to see.”
“I thought as much; I shall attend to the tea. May I first take your coat?”
“Thank you.”
I settled our guest in one of the armchairs across from Holmes. He smiled at her and said, “Good morning, Miss Stoner, I hope you won’t mind if I don’t get up.”
“Of course.”
“I absolutely could, though, if I wanted to.”
“Er… yes, Mr. Holmes, I am sure that must be the case.”
“I’ll be a few moments with the tea,” I said. “Miss Stoner, why don’t you tell Holmes what is wrong.”
She shook her head and averted her gaze to her hands, which lay upon her lap, each fretting with the lace of the other’s cuff. “I am not sure anything is wrong,” she said. “Yet, I am in fear for my very life.”
“Hmmm… mysterious already,” said Holmes. “Do tell us all.”
“Well… I live with my stepfather in Surrey. Until two years ago, my sister lived with us, but she is gone now.”
“Gone?” asked Holmes.
“Dead. Murdered, I fear. And—oh, it is silly—but I have it in my mind that I am next. Julia was my twin, you see. Sisters are always close and twins, they say, are even closer. Julia and I shared the further bond of growing up together without a father.”
“What happened to him?” asked Holmes.
“He died when we were only two. We grew up with my mother. We were comfortable enough; Mama had some family money and my father’s army pension. When we were eight, she married Dr. Grimesby Roylott—that’s my stepfather. God forgive me, but I do not know what she saw in the man.”
I suspended my tea-making long enough to ask, “He has a temper, I presume?”
“Oh, have you heard of him? Yes, his rages are famous throughout Surrey. They joke of him in the taverns, I know it! Only when he is not there, I am sure. When he is present, none would dare to laugh. Dr. Roylott is… Well, I will not speak ill of him, but I hate to think of what he would do if he knew I had come here today.”
There was something particularly dark about the way she said it and I had to ask, “This is off the topic, I know, Miss Stoner, but has your family ever been troubled by scurvy, rickets or polio?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Neither your mother, your sister nor… yourself?”
“Certainly not.”
“Ah well, I apologize for the interruption. How did your mother get along with Dr. Roylott?”
Miss Stoner barked out an angry laugh and said, “Seven years ago she was killed in a railway accident and let me tell you, Dr. Watson, it must have come as a great relief to her. I cannot account for her attraction to the man, or why she would want to go live in his dreadful little house. Now she is gone, just like Papa is gone. And Julia is gone and… Oh, why should I even try to preserve myself? We’re all going, don’t you see? Chance is picking us off one by one and maybe the living are not so fortunate as the dead…”
She was entirely hysterical at this point. Abandoning my tea, I rushed to her side and took her hand. “There, there, Miss Stoner,” I said. “All is well. You have come to Holmes and me now; we will put things to rights, you will see.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Yes, of course. I wonder… is there a place where I might…”
“Just this way, Miss Stoner,” I said, taking her by the arm and leading her to the bathroom. “Take your time. Holmes and I are perfectly comfortable out here.”
I ought to have left her and gone back to the sitting room. Indeed, I gave her every impression as the door closed that I was doing just that, but as soon as the latch clicked, I hastened back to it, as quietly as I could.
“What are you doing?” whispered Holmes.
Unwilling to make a noise, I carefully mouthed “listening” so Holmes might read my lips.
He nodded his understanding, then screwed up his face and a moment later said, “Watson, I’m surprised at you. Listening at the door while a lady uses the lavatory—it just isn’t like you.”
“Holmes! Damn it! I—” I rushed back into the sitting room “—I am not listening to hear her use the lavatory! That is… No! She is hysterical and she is wearing a whalebone corset! Did you see her? She can barely breathe in that thing. I am listening for the sound of her falling to the floor.”
“The floor?”
“Yes. You may be unaware of this, Holmes, but proper English ladies will often ask for a quiet place to compose themselves. Once installed, the constriction of their undergarments often causes them to faint.”
“I did not know that.”
“Well, it would be of little concern, but if she happens to fall in a posture that makes breathing even more difficult, that whalebone corset may prove to be the end of her.”
“Ha! That is a silly way to die, don’t you think?” laughed Holmes.
“Is it? Then why do you suppose it is so very popular?”
I strained to hear if our guest was still on her feet, but presently she ran some water in the basin and I knew her to still be conscious. Warlock gestured me over to him to make a confession.
“I don’t even know why she’s here, Watson.”
“She needs help, can’t you see?”
“But our help?” said Warlock. “I told you of the brimstone thread once, do you remember? How it moves through the tapestry of life, crossing one strand, then the next?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Like cloth, reality moves in distinct patterns, Watson. As such, threads that cross the brimstone must bear some proximity to one another. I myself… how shall I say… I run parallel to the brimstone thread and right along it. Thus, the people who come to me for help usually do so because they—like me—have encountered the brimstone thread more than once. Their problems tend to be ones that can only be addressed by those who have become accustomed to the mystic and the weird.”
“What is your point, Holmes?”
“As yet, Miss Stoner has given no indication that her troubles are… unusual. There seems to be no particular reason she has been brought to me as opposed to, say, Scotland Yard. Should we ask her to leave?”
“Certainly not! Did you see her left arm, Holmes?”
“She’s wearing a long-sleeved dress.”
“Yes, and even so, it is clear that her left forearm curves notably away from her body. Did you observe her shoes?”
“Erm… they’re black?”
“Immaterial. What is important is that the soles are of differing thicknesses. One of her legs is shorter than the other, yet she claims to have suffered none of the bone-deforming illnesses that haunt our age.”
“So?”
“So, at some point, her left arm has been broken and she received no medical care for it. Likewise, her left leg—I a
m guessing her left femur at the distal epiphyseal plate—was broken in her youth, severely enough that it never grew to its proper length. From the little she’s told us so far, I have to presume that this stepfather of hers is to blame. The man is a monster, Holmes!”
“Ah. Well, she’d better stay, then.”
“Quite,” said I and walked back towards our bathroom door to check on our guest. I had taken no more than two steps before I recalled to whom I had been speaking and turned back to say, “Not a proper monster.”
“No?” said Holmes; he looked disappointed.
“It is only a figure of speech. I mean that I presume him to be a normal man whose behavior is abominable. I say this to you now, because I don’t want you to sulk if it turns out he isn’t a minotaur or something.”
Holmes gave me a sour look, but nodded his agreement. Soon, the click of the bathroom lock gave me to believe our guest was returning. She stepped back into the sitting room, calmer and more collected than she had been.
“I’m sorry,” said she. “I’m not even sure why I came here.”
“I know! Neither am I,” said Holmes. “It’s funny, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps I should just return home to Stoke Moran and forget this—”
She didn’t finish. I’m sure if he could have made it to his feet, Holmes would have been on them. He shouted, “Stoke what?”
“Moran?” I said.
“Yes. Stoke Moran. That is our home. It was one of the great houses of Surrey once, but now it’s gone to wrack and ruin.”
“And one may presume the house is named for the family that established it?” I asked.
“It is,” Miss Stoner said. “The Roylott side of the family has had it for a generation or two, but the house was traditionally held by the Morans.”
“That’s why she’s here,” Warlock declared. “I knew there must be a reason.”
“Do you know if any of these relatives might be named Sebastian Moran?” I asked.
“A few, I think. Sebastian is a common name, out our way.”
“May one also presume that Dr. Roylott is far from the only member of the family with a sour reputation?”
“One may indeed,” Miss Stoner agreed, “though I think few of the locals would put it so delicately. The Morans have been hated for generations.”
A Study in Brimstone Page 19
