by Angela Misri
I shook my head at her, pointing to an earlier answer I had given on my pad of paper, “I’m fine.”
I had passionately petitioned for my release from the hospital as soon as my burns had healed beyond Watson’s care. I was still taking a veritable cocktail of pills three times a day, but even agreeing to that had seemed like heaven compared to being trapped in a hospital room where friends, family, and the occasional squadron of medical students paraded through to point at the freak who spoke in tongues. So adamant was the good doctor about my pill regimen that he assigned a nurse to drop off my medication once a week at my home on Baker Street. I only agreed with the caveat that Brian’s medication for his burns be dropped off at the same time.
Unfortunately, two days in my own home had turned out to be only slightly better. My grandmother refused to leave my side. Here from morning until she tucked me in at night, and when she went out for even an hour, Annie showed up, or Brian, or his mother, Mrs. Dawes. At least the Dawes were my tenants at Baker Street, living in the downstairs apartment, but Annie had to haul herself in from Spital Street to check up on me and she was too busy for that nonsense. She was writing a story about the ladies-in-waiting who found themselves defending the queen and her king against the common people. The Mistress of the Robes, Ms. Wilans, was the older woman in the newspaper photo who had captured my eye, and according to Annie, she was not the approachable type. Fortunately for my reporter friend, the younger ladies had much to say about the limitations they felt in this new publicly hostile environment.
Even with the distraction of possibly living the rest of my life without sound or speech, it was day two of my being stuck under my grandmother’s watchful eye and I really couldn’t take much more of it.
Nerissa was the only one enjoying my house arrest. The bloodhound snuggled at my feet or pressed her soft, velvety head against my hand until I obligingly petted her.
I wrote the following to my grandmother, “I am going to the Yard before lunch. Then to the college for what I’ve missed, and then home to Nerissa, and ONLY Nerissa. I love you, but I will go mad if forced to live like a watched zoo animal for much longer.”
I gave the older woman a hug before I handed the note to her, hoping she wouldn’t be too hurt by me essentially throwing her out of my home.
She read and then looked up at me, so I squeezed her hand for emphasis. She fetched a deep sigh, taking the notebook from me to write, “Shocked it took this long for you to lose patience. Fine. I need to research better doctors and this revolving door of nurses who show up with your pills is unacceptable. Promise you will rest?”
I read this note, rolling my eyes, but nodding at her affectionately and helping her get dressed to leave.
I closed the door behind my grandmother and said to my bloodhound, “Well, that could have gone much worse.”
Nerissa’s tongue lolled out of her mouth. A perfect response.
CHAPTER 5
WITHIN A HALF HOUR of gaining my freedom from my loving grandmother, I left my Baker Street apartment for Scotland Yard. I had written a note for the motor cab driver before I walked out my front door and handed it to him as I entered his vehicle. The note simply said, “I cannot hear or speak. Please take me to the back entrance of Scotland Yard. Write the fare on this note and pass it back to me when we arrive.”
Despite my instructions, the man continued to talk during the drive, either not believing me or forgetting every few blocks. I listened intently to his drumming rhythmic voice, but could not distinguish any words.
I got out of the cab into the crisp cold air outside the Yard, waving the cabbie away and slowly making my way up the stairs. I passed people, who were smoking and milling about as usual, but the silence was absolute in my head, except for some dull drumming that signalled conversations.
Several officers stopped me as I made my way around desks and chairs, and I was forced to tell my tale again and again using my notebook. Their sympathetic looks felt like spiders creeping over my skin, so I quickly made my way to Inspector Michaels’ door, refusing to make any more eye contact along the way.
I raised my hand to knock and then realized I would not hear any answer if one should be made. I knocked anyway and waited, my ear pressed against the windowed part of the door.
I jumped at the tap on my shoulder, of course not having heard anyone approach me. My partner, Brian, stood there, his eyes anxious as he put a hand on my shoulder and said something I could not understand. I couldn’t help but notice that the purple splotches under his eyes persisted and he looked very tired.
I shook my head, feeling all eyes in the room on us and hating the pity I could almost taste flowing in my direction and it tasted bitter indeed.
I put my hands over my ears in a quick gesture to remind him of my deficiencies.
He nodded, taking the notepad from my hands and leading me to his desk to take a seat.
“We should keep trying, shouldn’t we?” he wrote.
It wasn’t like I was going to fail to spot an improvement in my hearing, I thought with simmering anger. Writing, “There’s no need to test me every time you see me.”
He read my words and then looked up at me, his face apologetic.
I snatched the notepad from his surprised grip to write, “Stop looking at me like I’m damaged.”
I pushed the notepad back at him and folded my arms over my chest. He picked up the pen, his hand hesitant over the page for a second before he wrote, “You have the right to be angry, but I didn’t cause the explosion.”
I looked from the words he had written to his left hand, still bandaged up and stiff, wondering again at his unspoken pain. Especially compared to my loud complaints.
I picked up the pen. “I came looking for my camera and Michaels.”
“Your camera is in evidence and probably beyond repair. Michaels is upstairs interviewing new prospective sergeants.”
So, his promotion came through, I thought to myself, nodding to Brian, and automatically thanking him aloud. He frowned, making me wonder what I had said instead of what I meant to say.
“How is the case progressing? Have you pursued any leads with the IRA?” I wrote. The bomb would be an odd choice for the Irish Republican Army, but the targets might be right for their agenda.“I told you about the protestors, right? The ones from the Irish Feminist League?”
Two constables passed by Brian’s desk as he wrote an answer and I noticed that the younger of the pair had been recently digging by the condition of his knees and the dirt under his fingernails. Seemed a little odd for this time of year, my eyes travelling up his person to his lips, which were actively in conversation with his peer. I stared at his mouth, trying to understand when Brian tapped me again, this time on my hand.
He raised both his hands at me, forgetting his injuries for a second, shuddered at the painful reminder, and slid his injured hand behind his back. He took a deep steadying breath before writing, “The bomb is all wrong for the IRA. I’ll grab the case file for you.”
Suddenly, a chief inspector wearing suspenders ran out of one of the side offices and the twenty-odd men in the room snapped to attention. I watched as the chief inspector pointed at several of the men. They went off scurrying in one direction and another bunch ran off in another direction. I had started to write a note to Brian so that I could find the source of the excitement, but he was already engaged with another group of constables, all looking very serious. None of them paid me any attention and sprang off on different courses, leaving me basically alone in the middle of the empty bullpen with no idea what was going on.
I closed my eyes, wearily rubbing the bridge of my nose. When I opened them, it was to write a note to Brian asking him to bring the case file home with him to Baker Street. I left the note on his desk and dragged myself out of the deserted station.
Even my journey from the Yard to King’s College was
exasperating. I ran into Ruby, a homeless child who was one of my Baker Street Irregulars — the network of Londoners I sometimes paid to do my street-level reconnaissance. I found Ruby and her little band of children to be especially effective because they had access to the underbelly of the city and were the sadly anonymous class of citizens who were neither noticed nor remembered.
Unfortunately, the access Ruby and her peers had to London did not include access to the school system. She couldn’t read the piece of paper I handed her and she certainly couldn’t write whatever she was trying to convey to me down.
Finally, after five minutes of fruitless attempts at communication, I grabbed her dirty hands from waving around as she repeated her narrative for the third time. The two girls who were with her scampered out of my reach and Ruby jumped at my touch, her eyes narrowing suspiciously. I relaxed my grip (well aware of the abuses these children suffered on the streets) and moved her hands so that they were over my ears. She still looked confused, so I shook my head with her hands still in place, and then moved her hands over my mouth, shaking my head again.
A small “O” of surprise formed on the young girl’s mouth and she nodded slowly, starting to understand. I passed her a coin and a note, trying to communicate that she needed to find someone to read it to her. She looked down at the note and shrugged, calling for her peers before walking away from me, looking over her shoulder every ten yards or so until she was out of my sight.
I continued my walk to King’s College, trying not to make eye contact with anyone, but noticing a woman on her way to work who had left her front door open as evidenced by the way she was carrying her keys, with her house key still out and pointed in front of her. I waved her down, but she was in too much of a hurry to wait and said something incomprehensible to me before running off to her seamstress job.
By the time I had arrived at my destination, I was in no mood for dealing with the public. I had my hand on the door leading into the building where I had spent the last three years working towards my law degree when a herd of people rushed past me to get outside. I was buffeted about by all the moving bodies, but somehow managed to get inside, pressing myself against the hallway wall.
People continued their frenzied exit, some without their winter coats, gathering in a space off the school grounds across the street. I recognized a few of the women in my third-year class and even saw one call to me, her eyes meeting mine as she drew close. When I didn’t respond, she grasped my arm and tried to pull me out the door I had just come in. I shook off her hand and went in the opposite direction, looking for the source of the panic.
That was when my friend Beans came around the corner. The awkward son of Lord Beanstine and professor at King’s saw me, registered surprise on his handsome bespectacled face. The drum beats of his speech got louder as he approached my position. He ignored my attempts to communicate and grabbing my waist nearly lifted me off my feet to get me out of the building.
I gave up protesting as soon as we were outside, but he seemed not to notice, continuing his rapid departure until we were across the street from the college and well into the small park. Only there was I able to convince him to release me as he encouraged other students and faculty to join us where we stood, waving his arms. For all of Lord Beanstine’s very vocal contempt for his son’s chosen profession, Henry Beanstine demonstrated his leadership in ways his father would never appreciate. Suddenly, I felt a rumble under my feet and everyone in the crowd seemed to surge in a singular direction. A plume of smoke rose from a building to the east, far from where we were gathered, but close enough that all around me students cowered on the grass, helping each other up from prostrate positions. I thought I was the only one still standing tall, the sound of the explosion much less dramatic to my ears, and not having reacted instinctively by throwing myself out of harm’s way.
Except I wasn’t.
A young girl on crutches a hundred yards away stood staring at me, equally unique in the sea of humans frantically scurrying around us. She seemed unfazed by the panic around her and singular in her reaction. I cut through the crowd, pushing people out of my way, her eyes — one hazel, one green — standing out in her small white face, burned into my psyche.
“Hey!” I called out, not caring what I actually said, only hoping to slow her down, but she joined the natural currents of the throng, throwing aside her crutches, weaving out of my sight within moments.
CHAPTER 6
“THREE BOMB THREATS IN the same afternoon?” I wrote on my pad of paper, sitting next to Brian at dinner that same night.
I could feel a very faint vibration coming from the other end of the table we sat at and, glancing up, was unsurprised to see Mr. Dawes with his chin on his chest, his belly passing his snores into the table.
In the meantime, Brian put down his fork to hold up five fingers before writing, “Buckingham Palace — where I was deployed. That one was mailed to the Yard. Other four were called in. Only real bomb was at Grey Hall and no one was hurt.”
His bandaged left hand was now covered in a black glove and though he had taken four pills at the beginning of the meal, I could tell that the pain persisted an hour later. He was fidgeting with his pill bottle and glancing at the clock every quarter of the hour.
“Those are targets the IRA would find useful to threaten.”
We exchanged a look as I wrote those words before Brian pressed pencil to paper again to answer.
“Michaels believes it is more likely to be Russians. Holdovers from the war that have been reactivated by Moscow.”
“Was there a warning before the bomb at the railway station?” I wrote as Mrs. Dawes picked up our plates. The sting of Brian and his peers tearing off to Buckingham Palace was still very present … it was the ease with which I was dismissed as irrelevant at Scotland Yard that continued to smart. Even the fact that I had been present at the explosion on the college campus seemed irrelevant to the police. They didn’t even bother to interview me as a witness.
Brian snagged a final carrot off his plate before she could leave, earning an indulgent smile from his mother.
I tapped the pad a little impatiently as they spoke, drawing his attention back to me.
He flipped open the case file to point to the rail engineer’s statement.
He glanced suddenly away from me and held up a finger. Another second went by and he rose, leaving the table to exit his front door into our shared hallway. I surmised that someone had rung the bell to 221 Baker Street and my suspicion was confirmed when he strode back in with Dr. Heather Olsen a few moments later.
Dr. Olsen was a practicing psychiatrist and my half-cousin, her father and my mother were step-siblings, two of Dr. John Watson’s children by different mothers. Olsen’s father was the outcast of the Watson clan and he had removed himself and his small family from his father’s and his brothers’ lives. Olsen was her name by marriage of course. She had married someone too much like her own father and left him soon after.
She smiled at me before being introduced by Brian to his mother. I let their conversation continue for a few moments — time seemed to pass so much slower when silence enveloped it — before tapping on my pad to indicate to Olsen that she needed to use it to communicate with me.
She surprised me by handing me a note she had already written that said, “I came to check up on you and introduce you to a friend who might be able to help.”
I looked up at her questioningly, but followed her back out into the hallway where a woman a little younger than me stood waiting, her brown colouring a gorgeous contrast to her pale dress. Originally from France, if her footwear was any indication, she raised her hand in greeting when she saw me and made a few gestures. To my surprise, Olsen responded with more hand gestures.
I watched their hand conversation with curiosity until Olsen tapped on the note she had handed me, and I flipped it over, “This is Amélie from the
Institut National de Jeunes Sourds in Paris. She’s going to teach you to read lips.”
CHAPTER 7
I DIDN’T WANT TO like Amélie because I had zero interest in learning to read lips, but her unshakeable smile made it hard to follow through on my plans.
The small woman had twisted her long, black braids into a scarf that matched her dress and smelled incredible, like jasmine and honey. To my chagrin, I had to ask after her perfume. She laughed and wrote down the name of it under my question, “Shalimar.”
Heather explained to me over tea and my pad of paper that in consultation with the doctors Watson, they had contacted the French school for the deaf and were put into contact with one of their most accomplished graduates — Mademoiselle Amélie Blaise, who was living in London. She and Dr. Olsen had met and Amélie had offered to work with me.
I tried to be polite through these drawn-out explanations — they took forever because of the amount of reading and writing they required — but explicitly refused the offered aid.
* * *
“EVERYONE GOES THROUGH WHAT you are going though when they lose one of their abilities; soldiers who have lost a limb, an elderly person who loses their sight,” said the note written by Olsen.
I gritted my teeth and wrote back, “That information does nothing to help me, Doc. I resent being condescended to or pitied.”
What I didn’t write was that my abilities were what made me distinct. What was I without my inductive skills? Just another immigrant Londoner from the colonies? An orphan with famous relatives? I fought the urge to glare at Amélie as she and Olsen talked back and forth with their hands.
