Echoes of Sherlock Holmes

by Laurie R. King

  “When this is all over, I’ll still expect to see you in my office on Thursday,” I said, then added with a gentle and genuine smile, “my dear Sherlock.”

  THE FIRST MRS. COULTER

  by Catriona McPherson

  Miss Cordelia Grant did not mourn the world of damp dressing rooms, damper lodgings, and Sunday travel in a third-class railway carriage. True, her current role—lady’s maid to Mrs. Gilver—was performed on a smaller stage than that of even the lowliest provincial theater and her cast of one worked hard at thwarting most of her best ideas when it came to costume but still she thought herself lucky. There were men marching for work, women queuing for bread and soup, and her parents’ little acting company was reduced to church halls and social clubs. Miss Grant was accordingly grateful for her settled home, steady wage, and security.

  Sometimes, however, the quiet comforts of rural Perthshire in wintertime failed to satisfy appetites formed during a theatrical childhood and Miss Grant’s efforts to supplement those comforts only made her chafe the more.

  Today was typical. Moriarty, wheeled out during the matinee at La Scala, had riled up all her lusts like a stiff wind in a pile of leaves, and reading “The Adventure of The Veiled Lodger” in a back issue of the Strand on the way home had worsened matters—for, where the picture was silly and melodramatic, the story was clever and thrilling and left Miss Grant longing for clients to visit her, to pour their agonies into her willing ear, to gasp in astonishment when she deduced all.

  She would, she decided, put in some practice right here on the Perth to Pitlochry omnibus, just in case. Reading was making her feel rather sick anyway.

  There was precious little to see out of the window now the town was behind them, so she scrutinized her fellow passengers and, being a lady’s maid, it was their clothes that drew her eye: the nap of a felt hat that knew careful brushing though of average quality; the tiny holes along a hem hinting that a skirt had been taken up to get more wear from it after the fashion changed; the crisp fit across the shoulders on the bespoke coat of a Dunkeld solicitor, and the stretched seams and bunched gussets on the ready-made coat of the butcher who sat beside him.

  Rolled brims, covered buttons, invisible darns; all were of note to Miss Grant. She was so intent on a beautiful lace handkerchief—needle-made, corners turned without a pucker, rosettes point-ironed so their petals were cupped, not flattened by pressing—that she had been looking at it for several minutes before she realized it was held to a weeping face. She withdrew her gaze.

  That was Mrs. Coulter, she thought, and looked back again out of the corner of her eye. Yes indeed, that was Mrs. Edward Coulter.

  Edward Ernest Coulter was an architect, but he married well, took up residence at Benachally Castle, and lived there quietly. It was the talk of the county when all of a sudden FOR SALE signs went up at the gate lodge and the Coulters removed themselves to a semi-detached sandstone villa where Mrs. Coulter gave piano lessons by the hour. Mr. Coulter was only fifty at the move but if he had done any more architecting, Miss Grant had not seen him at it.

  Now there she was, erstwhile chatelaine of Benachally, sitting on a bus in a gabardine mackintosh that was green with age and thin with washing, her woollen stockings drooping at her ankles, her shoes scuffed pale and snub-nosed from wear. She was poor-looking even for a piano teacher and she was still weeping when Miss Grant pulled the cord and climbed down.

  Drysdale the chauffeur had the dog cart waiting at Gilverton’s gates and had brought a hot bottle for Miss Grant to hug while he trundled her up the drive. As she tucked the blanket more cozily about her knees, she thought what a long cold walk it would be from the bus stop to the sandstone villa in that thin mackintosh, and how the chill of the road would seep through those worn-down shoes. How shameful then that, although her heart sank as the cart slowed by the back door, it did not sink for poor Mrs. Coulter but for poor Miss Grant, who could ape the great detective with her skills of observation but would surely never get the chance to try the rest of it: investigation, revelation, and glory.

  Her sinking heart would have soared had she known how soon that chance would come.

  Young Lorna was at Gilverton for tea, installed in the kitchen, sighing fit to blow out the fire and complaining. Miss Grant tutted. Lorna was a head housemaid at the age of twenty, in a household with no butler, no housekeeper, no children, and not even a mistress yet. In other words, Liberty Hall.

  “It’s as dull as church,” she was saying. “There’s nothing to do.”

  “You said he had you clearing the attics,” said Miss Grant. He was Donald Gilver, elder son of her own mistress, Benachally’s third owner in ten years, lately set up there to grow barley and kill pheasants and generally stay out of trouble until it was time to marry.

  “The attics are clear!” said Lorna. “All except some filthy dirty trunks from ages back that I’m not touching.”

  “Send them on to the Wilsons,” said Miss Grant. She was beginning to drowse, what with the fire, the tea, and the two warm scones she had eaten.

  “They’re from long before the Wilsons!” said Lorna. “Ancient old things. E. E. C. are the initials on them.”

  Miss Grant snapped awake. “They must be the Coulters’,” she said. “Trunks? Clothes, you mean? Any jewel cases? Strongboxes? Anything of that kind?”

  “Why would you care?” said Lorna, in her pert way. Ordinarily Miss Grant would have drawn herself up at such cheek but right at that moment she barely heard the girl. She was plotting.

  Friday found her first in the library, looking up COULTER in the Post Office Directory, and then in Pitlochry on a trim enough street of nice enough houses—unless you had been used to a castle, anyway—lifting a glistening brass knocker and rehearsing her spiel.

  The maid who answered was neat and smart in a blue serge day-dress with shoes mystifyingly better-heeled and polished than Mrs. Coulter’s own. The explanation was not long in coming.

  “Bonnethill,” said the maid. “Behind the wee barber.”

  “Ah,” said Miss Grant. “I see.”

  For while Pitlochry is too small a town to have an unsavory district, at a push Bonnethill would do. Certainly coats would grow thin there and soles wear through. Miss Grant rang the bell at a faded blue door up a narrow stairway and it opened to reveal Mrs. Coulter, the Hon. Miss Elizabeth Larbert as was, standing there.

  “Can I help you?” the woman said, with no spark of recognition in her tired eyes, either from the bus or from the Benachally years. She was wiping reddened hands on the front of her apron.

  “I’m hoping I can help you, Mrs. Coulter.”

  “I’m not interested.” She began to close the door.

  “I’m not selling things,” said Miss Grant quickly. “I’m from Gilverton. I think I’ve found something that belongs to you. Or to your husband anyway.”

  “Something?” said Mrs. Coulter.

  “At Benachally,” said Miss Grant.

  “Not someone?” said Mrs. Coulter. She slumped a little against the jamb, saying: “No of course not. That would be far too good to be true.”

  “Possessions of your husband’s, in the attics,” Miss Grant went on, puzzling away all the while at the other woman’s curious words. “Trunks they are. I wondered if I might have them delivered to you. There could be something in them of some . . . interest to the family.”

  Mrs. Coulter saw through the nicety and gave a single huff of unhappy laughter.

  “They are nothing to do with the family,” she said. She gave a look over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “Just burn them or do what you will.”

  “And if what I decide to do is sort through them and sell what I can? Can I bring you the money?”

  Mrs. Coulter gazed at her for the time it took to breathe in and out twice without hurrying. Then she blinked.

  “From Gilverton?” she said. “Are you one of the servants?” There was a little tremor in her voice as the ghost of her old self looked at
her current self and wondered whether to laugh or cry.

  “What happened?” said Miss Grant. “What on earth happened to you?”

  Mrs. Coulter’s shoulders dropped so completely that the straps of her apron might have slipped off them.

  “You can’t come in,” she said. “My—” Again she lowered her voice. “My husband is resting and my children will be back from school soon. But there’s a tea-counter at the back of the bakers.”

  “Let me buy you a cup,” said Miss Grant. “And you tell me all about it.”

  It was excellent tea: blistering hot, the color of teak when the milk went in, and fragrant too. Proper leaves, Miss Grant concluded, not those sweepings in little sacks that were enjoying such a vogue. Mrs. Coulter got a bit of color in her thin cheeks as she sipped. By the time she was halfway down the first cup she was ready to begin.

  “My husband,” she said, “was married once before. Briefly. I didn’t tell my parents. It was hard enough . . .” Miss Grant nodded. It certainly would have been, trying to sell an architect of all things to Sir Stephen and Lady Larbert. Better than a doctor, at least, since he would not hand Lady Larbert into a carriage with hands that had just left off examining a rash, but an architect was not a gentleman and their daughter was a lady.

  “He was young,” Mrs. Coulter went on. “And he had his head turned. It was in New York. She was very glamorous by all accounts.” Mrs. Coulter’s voice dropped a little. “She was a soubrette.”

  Miss Grant leaned forward to hear better. “A socialite?”

  “Good Lord! Hardly,” said Mrs. Coulter. She laughed again as she had before—but this time, perhaps there was a little amusement in it. “She was quite outside society. Quite outside. What I mean is, she was theatrical.” Miss Grant would hardly tremble at that and, emboldened by such a calm reception, Mrs. Coulter went on. “Burlesque, actually.” Miss Grant did have to work just a little to keep her eyebrows straight then, but she managed, and so Mrs. Coulter, after swallowing a strengthening mouthful of tea, finished with: “A hoochie-coochie girl by the name of Za-Za-Zita.”

  “Heavens.”

  “He was a stage-door Johnnie and no bones about it. He saved her.”

  “Good for him,” said Miss Grant. “From what?”

  “Oh, she was in with a very rough crowd. Down in a part of New York called the Bowery or the Battery or some such outlandish place. She was mixed up with a jewel thief and if Edward—my husband—if my husband had not swept her away she might have ended up in some rather hot water. I sometimes think, uncharitably perhaps, that she used him.”

  “I wouldn’t wonder.”

  “His family cut him off.”

  “I wouldn’t wonder about that either,” said Miss Grant, trying to imagine a hoochie-coochie-dancing daughter-in-law being introduced to whatever blameless merchant or banker had been Mr. Coulter’s father. “And am I right in thinking that the marriage was not a success? She left him?”

  “The marriage wasn’t even a marriage!” said Mrs. Coulter. “Yes, she left him. As soon as he’d got her out of New York, out of America, she abandoned him.”

  “And divorced him?” said Miss Grant. For surely not even Sir Stephen and Lady Larbert would care about an indiscretion that left a man a widower.

  “She had no grounds!” cried Mrs. Coulter. “My husband is as loyal as the day is long.”

  “Too loyal to divorce her?” asked Miss Grant.

  “He could have,” Mrs. Coulter said. “He had photographs of her in her costumes; he had the costumes themselves. Any judge in the land could see a woman like that would never be faithful.”

  “They can be sticklers for hard evidence,” said Miss Grant, thinking of Brighton boarding houses and what good livings there are for indiscreet chambermaids.

  “And besides, he didn’t need to,” Mrs. Coulter said.

  “She died?”

  The woman had the strangest look on her face, Miss Grant thought to herself. She dabbed her lips and folded her little napkin before she spoke again.

  “She may have died for all we know. But what I meant was that he had no need to divorce her. He applied for annulment.” Miss Grant waited a moment or two but Mrs. Coulter said nothing, so she prompted her.

  “On the grounds that . . .”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Coulter did not blush and did not hang her head. On the contrary, she put her chin in the air and stared down her nose at Miss Grant, daring her to speak.

  Miss Grant was always one for a dare. “And the same judge who’d never believe she was faithful refused to believe she was chaste?” she said. “Dear me.”

  “We had both been so sure it was a mere technicality!” Mrs. Coulter said. “We had already told my parents we were engaged. We couldn’t find the words to describe our difficulty. So we went ahead with the wedding.”

  “Dear me,” said Miss Grant again. Then, as all the ramifications arrived in her brain together, she said in quick succession: “But that—So you’re—The children—” before she managed to press her lips closed again.

  “We are married in the eyes of God and in our own two hearts,” Mrs. Coulter said.

  “Well good then,” said Miss Grant, thinking that two hearts and the eyes of God were all very well but did not explain weeping on an omnibus or living behind a barber’s.

  “Money, however, has become a problem,” Mrs. Coulter conceded. “As I said, my husband was cut off when he married . . .”

  “Za-Za-Zita,” Miss Grant supplied.

  “But I had a settlement, a very generous portion, from my father. All was well until my sister, whom I turned to for help and comfort, to still my troubled thoughts, betrayed me. My own sister. And do you know why?”

  “Because your portion was a wedge cut from the same pie as hers?” Miss Grant guessed, making the other woman blink. The Hon. Miss Elizabeth had gone from castle to villa to rooms without becoming inured, it seemed, to plain speaking.

  “My mother, while she lived, gave me a little income from her own,” said Mrs. Coulter. “But when she died, even that money stopped. My father warned my husband not to try to get work: “worming his way in to the homes of respectable men by passing himself off as one of them.” I shall never forget those ugly words! And every penny that was meant for my children is gone.”

  “Gone?” said Miss Grant.

  “Gone to my sister. My father could reverse it if he cared to. I went to him just days ago and begged him again. My older son is finishing school. He should be going to Oxford. I begged him. But he just sat there glaring at me, telling me that when his father set the terms the words were mere formalities.”

  “What words?” asked Miss Grant gently.

  “Legitimate issue,” whispered Mrs. Coulter. “I begged. I told him we were desperate. That my husband was very foolish, but nothing more. He was bedazzled by her. She was a temptress and a trickster and she has ruined all our lives.”

  With that she stood, put her chair neatly under the table, said good-bye and walked away, leaving Miss Grant a-quiver.

  She had not met many Americans in her life and none of them burlesque dancers, but those she had come across were dazzling. There had been that one, years ago now, not long after she had arrived here. He was walking along the road, just walking along the road, swinging a carpet bag and singing a music-hall song at the top of his lungs, his voice as rich as treacle. His hair had been like raven’s feathers, his skin like milk, and his teeth when he smiled at her had glittered in the sunshine.

  “Are you lost?” she had asked him.

  “Nope,” he had replied and kept walking.

  If a single American man in ordinary clothes in a country lane could set the heart of Delia Grant fluttering and stay in her dreams for weeks afterwards, she could not imagine what a soubrette from the Bowery might do when seen across the footlights by a Perthshire architect far from home.

  Neither could she easily imagine what a soubrette from the Bowery might wear. The thought of her clothes,
just sitting there in the attics at Benachally, called to Miss Grant with a siren song. Clothes to make a judge grant a divorce, she thought. Clothes in which to dance a hoochie-coochie.

  “I’ve come to sort those trunks in your attics, Lorna,” she said casually, sweeping into the Benachally kitchen the next afternoon. Lorna exchanged a glance with the cook, who shrugged. “There might be some very interesting . . .” Thankfully, the door to the passageway closed behind her before she was forced to finish this sentence, and she went on her way.

  They were easily found. Most of the attics were still empty, only a year or so after Master Donald had moved in; swept and bare, they echoed her footsteps back to her, but in one corner, under the eaves, at the farthest point from the stairs, the humped shapes of two steamer trunks lay waiting.

  “She was no pixie,” Miss Grant said to herself, presently. The first trunk held hatboxes, shoe bags, and glove cases and, when she tried one of the hats on, what was supposed to be a flirty little concoction in the pillbox style fell down around her ears and looked like nothing so much as Bo-Peep’s bonnet. The gloves—red satin, black lace, kid dyed a shade of pink unknown to both nature and fashion—were as large as pruning gauntlets. And when it came to the shoes, Miss Grant began to pity poor Zita and wonder if perhaps she was a comedy act and not a glamour girl after all.

  For the shoes were quite simply enormous. They were beautifully made, hand-stitched, with fine leather soles, and even the silver tips of the high heels glittered with lacquer, but all the hand-stitching in the world could not change the fact that Zita had feet like loaves.

  Hard upon that thought, though, came another. If she was as large as it seemed and if her dresses were the same quality as her incidentals then there would be plenty of cloth to make it worth unpicking them.

  Feeling the thrill of the chase—for she loved a bargain—and relishing the prospect of having a frock admired and saying very airily, “It’s American, of course—New York,” Miss Grant turned to the second trunk and began rummaging.