“She was too weak to walk; the porter had to carry her to the carriage.” She was puzzled when Holmes said we were trying to find the women and asked to look in Miss Duverger’s room. “I haven’t cleaned it yet,” she apologized.
“Better yet,” Holmes said.
The room was small and plain. Nothing of Miss Duverger’s was left in it except a couple of dog-eared novels, a jar of flowers, and an empty medicine bottle on a table next to the bed. Holmes looked through the room, and from under the bed pulled a small pasteboard trunk. In it, wrapped in an Army blanket, were a pair of men’s pants, a blue shirt, a hat, and a blue bandanna.
“She must have forgotten that,” the landlady said. “But I can’t imagine why she’d have those clothes. No man ever came to see her except Dr Jenkins.”
Holmes closed the trunk and asked her to keep it until he could send a man from the sheriff’s office for it. Her eyes widened in alarm. “The sheriff? What have they done? They seemed like such quiet girls.” Shaking her head, she said, “I should have listened to my sister. She told me not to let to women like that.”
As we walked from the house to the street, I asked Holmes whether those were the clothes the robber had worn. He nodded.
“So she did give someone the information about the payroll. Is he still here, do you think, or is he meeting them in San Francisco?”
“Neither, I suspect,” Holmes said, but when I asked him to explain what he meant, he shook his head. “I don’t know enough yet.”
I wasn’t surprised when Holmes told me he intended to start for San Francisco on the next day’s train. “I would go sooner, if it were possible. The trail is already getting cold,” he said. “If Miss Duverger dies, it will be that much harder to find Miss Greenwood; she’ll be free to move almost anywhere and far less conspicuous without her invalid companion.”
I gave him the address where we’d be staying in San Francisco, and my parents’ home in Edinburgh. “Please,” I asked him, “write and tell me whether you find the robber. I feel like a reader forced to lay down a book just as the story becomes exciting.”
* * * *
But the days that followed were so filled with breaking up our camp, moving our possessions to San Francisco, and setting up our temporary household there, that I thought of the stagecoach robbery only in passing, to wonder idly whether I would ever learn the end of the tale.
We had been in San Francisco only a day or two, when Sam answered a knock on the door, and I heard a familiar voice ask for me. Fanny was in the kitchen, but the damp air had played havoc with my lungs, and I was coughing the afternoon away before the fire in the sitting room. Sam, all excitement, brought Holmes into the room.
When Holmes saw me, he stopped, and apologized. “Mr Stevenson—you’re ill, I see. I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you.”
I stood up to greet him. “I’m not all that sick,” I said with more valour than I felt. “It’s good to see you again. Come, sit down.”
“Not now, I’m afraid,” he said, “I’ve come on urgent business.”
“Really!” I replied, welcoming a distraction from my personal ills. “What is it?”
He looked around. “Is Mrs Stevenson here?”
A little surprised, I answered, “Yes, she’s—.” A movement caught my eye, and looking toward it, I saw Fanny in the doorway, smoothing her apron. “Fanny,” I called to her, “It’s Mr Holmes.”
Fanny hurried in. “Mr Holmes, how good to see you,” she said warmly, and turned to me with a stern look. “Louis, you should be resting.”
“I know. It’s you Mr Holmes has come to see,” I told her.
A little flustered, Fanny turned back to Holmes, who seemed unsure how to begin. “It’s about the stagecoach robbery,” he said.
We both stared at him, Fanny as curious as I was to find out where she fit into the case.
“We’ve tracked down the robber, and we’re at the point of making an arrest.”
“Really! That’s good news,” I said. “How did you find him?”
“I’ll tell you. But at the moment, the situation is rather difficult. You remember that one of the women was gravely ill.”
“Yes—Miss Duverger.”
“You have a good memory. She is still alive, though at death’s door, from what I understand. But we are about to arrest her companion, Miss Greenwood.”
Fanny’s eyes widened, and her hand went to her lips.
I started to speak, to ask further about the robber, but Holmes continued before I could get a word out.
“Miss Greenwood is quite desperate on her friend’s account. I think it will go more easily if we have someone with us—a woman—who can care for Miss Duverger.” He turned to Fanny. “I remembered that Mr Stevenson praised your skill as a nurse, though I fear there will be little even you can do for her. The purpose of having you there is to reassure Miss Greenwood that her friend will be cared for in her last hours. It’s a lot to ask, but do you think you could help?”
Fanny didn’t hesitate. “Why not? Where is she?”
“Wait,” I said, with an upwelling of husbandly protectiveness. “Is my wife going to be in danger?”
Holmes didn’t hesitate. “No. There are only the two women.”
“So where is the robber?”
“Quite safe.”
“You’ve arrested him, then?”
“Not yet, but we will shortly.”
I didn’t feel much mollified, but Fanny had already left to gather her things. I pulled my jacket and hat off the coat rack and put them on. In a moment, Fanny was back, in shawl and bonnet, and carrying a small satchel. She looked at me in alarm and frank disapproval, and I answered her before she could speak. “I’m not letting you go there by yourself.”
Had we been alone, she would have quite overpowered me, but with Mr Holmes present she felt constrained from quarrelling.
“Louis, you’re crazy,” she sighed, with a dark look and a shake of her head. She turned to Holmes. “I’m ready,” she said.
A four-wheeler was waiting outside for us, and Holmes directed it to an address I didn’t recognize. On the journey there, he was his usual uncommunicative self. His silence was catching, and Fanny and I said hardly a word, though I kept her little hand wrapped tightly in mine.
As the cab climbed hills and turned down one street after another, I lost track of its route, and when it finally stopped we were in a part of the city unknown to me, on a block of tall, funereal houses set close together like black cypress trees in a windbreak. The hills and the sea fog cut off any long view, and the street and houses seemed confined in a small space, like a stone castle in a fishbowl.
As Holmes was paying the cab driver, a man in a tweed suit appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, on the sidewalk beside us. He nodded a curt greeting and spoke to Holmes in a low voice. “Nothing new since you left, sir. Shall I stay out here?”
“No,” Holmes said. “Come inside. Mrs Stevenson is here, and I think it’s time to speak to Miss Rostov.”
“Holmes!” I whispered, caught up in the general trend toward sotto voce speech. “What do you mean, Miss Rostov? Where is the robber?”
Holmes looked at me almost pityingly. “Miss Rostov is Miss Greenwood. Mrs Stevenson is in no danger, I assure you.”
Fanny placed her hand on my arm. “Louis, calm down. Don’t you think I can take care of myself?”
“With an armed road-agent?”
“I’d say you’ve got him pretty well outnumbered,” she answered, with a glance that took in the three of us.
Not at all comforted, I collected myself and followed Holmes and the rest up the steps.
A servant girl answered the door. “May we come in, Mary,” Holmes said, “and would you please fetch Mrs Paxton for us?”
Mary stepped aside, and we walked into the entrance hall, on the left side of which a carpeted staircase rose to the upper floors. Holmes directed us, with the exception of Fanny, to a parlour to the right of the hall. The
tweed-suited man took up a position where he could not be seen from the staircase and left me to sit on a chair near the parlour door from which I had a view of the hall and stairs.
“By the way,” he said, “I’m Alva Weston, with the Pinkerton Agency.” I introduced myself, and we settled back to waiting.
Mary went silently to the back of the house and returned a minute later, followed by Mrs Paxton.
Mrs Paxton was a stout woman, plainly dressed, with her brown hair pulled back into a bun. She was clearly in on the story, and as she introduced herself to Fanny and spoke quietly with Holmes, she seemed entirely self-possessed despite the knowledge that the mistress of a stagecoach bandit was hiding out in her upstairs rooms.
At a word from her, Mary climbed the carpeted stairs and disappeared, descending soundlessly a moment later. “She says she’ll be right down, ma’am,” she said to Mrs Paxton and backed away into the rear of the hallway to watch, wide-eyed, what might happen next.
No one spoke, and the little noises of the day seemed to fall like raindrops into a lake of silence. I could hear my own breathing, and I stifled a cough. I thought I heard a door close upstairs, and a moment later, without the sound of a footstep, a young woman appeared on the stairs. It was the girl in the photograph, with the same dark eyes. She was tall, straight, and slender, and her face had a slightly foreign look, with wide, high cheekbones, and pale skin that seemed luminous in the half-light of the stairway. Her auburn hair was gathered in a coil at her neck, and the plain, dark dress she wore hung loosely on her. She descended slowly and stopped halfway down on seeing Holmes with Fanny and Mrs Paxton.
“Who are you?” She asked.
“Sherlock Holmes, from the Bank of Calistoga.”
“Oh.” She didn’t seem particularly surprised, but her eyes closed for a moment, and she seemed to grasp the banister more tightly with her left hand.
Weston had moved from his place of concealment to a spot between the stairway and the front door. He and Holmes held pistols concealed at their sides.
Holmes spoke again, in a calm voice. “Miss Rostov, please hand your gun to Mr Weston, there.”
She walked a few steps farther down the stairs toward Weston, removed her right hand from the folds of her skirt and handed him a revolver. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” she said softly.
She turned back to face Holmes, steadying herself this time with both hands. “My friend is upstairs. Someone needs to take care of her; she’s real sick. You can go see for yourself. It’s no trick, I promise.” Her words, though weighted by a slight foreign inflection, flew with the headlong earnestness of youth.
For all her experience of the baser aspects of life, I thought, she’s still just a girl.
“I know,” Holmes said. “I’ve brought someone to care for her,” he said, with a nod to Fanny. The young woman paused for a second, looking at them, then turned toward the top of the stairs.
From the landing we followed her down a hallway to the right, where she unlocked a door, opened it wide, and stepped into a room. Holmes and Weston followed, and after a moment, Fanny and I joined them.
The room was, in fact, a pair of rooms, a sitting room with chairs, a table, and a small sofa under a bay window, and a bedroom behind it. Miss Rostov had gone directly into the bedroom and was leaning over the bed. Fanny followed her there, and I followed Fanny as far as the door.
A young woman lay in the bed, tucked in like a child under a patchwork quilt and propped up a little with pillows. So thin was she that the coverlet scarcely showed where her small body lay beneath it. Her face was colourless, wasted and haunting, delicate in its outline, with a small, pale mouth and shadowed eyes. Her dark hair was loosely braided, but a few tendrils, damp with perspiration, curled on her forehead. As I watched, her eyes opened and she looked up at Miss Rostov as if trying to see who she was. “Annie?” she asked in a voice hardly more than a sigh.
“Yes, petite,” Miss Rostov said, putting a gentle hand on the invalid’s brow and smoothing the damp hair from her forehead. The girl’s lips moved in the hint of a smile, and she closed her eyes as if exhausted by the effort.
Miss Rostov closed the bedroom door and turned to us. “Are you going to arrest me now?”
Fanny looked at her and then at Holmes. “I hope not,” she said. “I need to speak with you.” Fanny pulled two chairs together at the table in the sitting room, sat in one and motioned Miss Rostov into the other.
At Holmes’s direction, Weston left the room to wait downstairs, and Holmes established himself in the window seat somewhat apart from the rest of us.
Unwilling to leave, I took a seat on a straight-backed chair from which I could see the door to the hallway.
Fanny spoke to Miss Rostov. “I don’t even know your names,” she began apologetically. “No one has gotten round to telling me.”
The girl gave her a look as if she was trying to decide how far to trust her. “I am Annie—Antonia Davidovna Rostov. My friend,” she continued, with a slight hesitation before the word, “is Josette—Josephine—LaFreniere.”
“I’m Fanny Stevenson, and these two men are my husband Louis and Mr Sherlock Holmes—whom you’ve met. Now, Antonia,” she went on, gently, “I understand that a doctor has seen Josette.”
Antonia answered in a low voice, “Yes.”
“And has he told you what’s wrong with her?”
“I knew that already—consumption.”
Fanny leaned toward her. “And has he told you how serious her condition is?”
Antonia nodded. “Yes,” she said. She hunched forward in her chair, her hands covering her face, and drew in a long sobbing breath. “Damn—oh, damn!,” she whispered. “I don’t want to cry so loud, she might hear me.” She looked at Fanny, suddenly contrite. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“It’s all right,” Fanny said. “Nothing I haven’t heard before.”
“I tried so hard, you see,” Antonia said. “I did all of it to save her—just to end up here.” She gave another shuddering sigh. Her eyes welled with tears, and her hands, now in her lap, grasped each other, their knuckles white. “I killed her, didn’t I? Bringing her here. I made her worse.”
Fanny laid her hand on Antonia’s arm. “No, you didn’t.” she said, firmly. “You tried to help, but there wasn’t anything left to do.”
The girl seemed to relax a little. “That’s what the doctor said, too,” she answered, almost reassured, it seemed, to hear Fanny confirm his verdict.
A hollow cough from the bedroom made both their heads turn toward it.
“Come,” Fanny said, and Antonia followed her to the room. The door closed behind them.
I moved near Holmes and asked him, in a low voice, “So where is the stage robber?”
Holmes gave a nod toward the bedroom door. “In there.”
It took a second for the meaning of what he had said to reach me. “You don’t mean Miss Rostov?”
“Yes,” he said.
“That girl? Are you sure?”
He turned back to face me. “Yes. You’ve heard her; she has all but confessed.”
I was still sceptical. “Holmes,” I said, “I’m prepared to believe you that she and her friend are here alone. But how do you know the robber hasn’t just deserted them?”
“By the accumulation of evidence.”
“What evidence?”
“There were clues practically from the beginning,” he said, “at the scene of the robbery itself. A tangle of long hairs on a bush. The prints of a small-sized boot in the mud where she had led her horse to drink in the stream. Evidence—broken twigs, tufts of wool from the blanket, a ribbon bow clearly torn from a dress—that she changed her clothing in the clearing.”
“How did you know she wasn’t just there with the robber?’
“The signs indicated that only one person, with one horse, was waiting in that spot,” Holmes answered. “I saw nothing that suggested the presence of a second person, and neither did the other sta
ge passengers. What Mrs Bannerman told us also suggested that Miss Rostov wasn’t passing information to a man. And there were the clothes under the bed—on which, on examination, I found another couple of long reddish hairs. And finally, there was her accent—which I noticed at the time, though no one else did.
“Once I was convinced that Miss Rostov was the robber, I was equally sure that she had no male confederate. What man would send a woman out alone to commit a highway robbery?”
“What you’re saying makes sense—but it seems so unlikely.”
“Perhaps, but it’s true. We’ve been watching Miss Rostov for several days. I don’t think she knew she was being pursued, so it was easy to find her here. She had, as Dr Jenkins thought, consulted with Dr Silbermann, who has been coming to look in on Miss Duverger—or, rather, LaFreniere—and told us where they were staying. With the help of the Pinkertons—hired by the bank—and Mrs Paxton, we have watched them at all hours, and no man has visited Miss Rostov except the doctor.
“I also had Mr Ingram send a man to St Helena to make some inquiries. He learned that a young woman resembling Miss Rostov bought a quantity of cayenne pepper from a grocer there and that a similar woman, heavily veiled, hired a horse from a livery stable on the morning of the robbery. Does that put you more at ease?”
I acknowledged that it did, and Holmes fell silent, leaving me to consider what he had revealed and to wonder at the desperate, hopeless courage of the girl in the next room.
It was some time before Fanny came from the bedroom, alone. The grey daylight outside the windows was starting to fade, and a chill draft, borne by the fog, seeped through the window and played shiveringly, like the touch of a ghost, through the shadowed room.
“She had a haemorrhage,” she said to Holmes and me, “but the crisis is past, for now. Annie is asleep, too. She’s exhausted; I don’t think she’s slept in days.”
Holmes, who had been reading a book, looked up. “What is Miss LaFreniere’s condition otherwise?”
Fanny lowered her voice. “It won’t be much longer, I suspect. I’ll be surprised if she lasts the night. Can’t you let Annie stay with her until the end? It seems so cruel to leave that poor child to die among strangers.”
The Sherlock Holmes Megapack: 25 Modern Tales by Masters: 25 Modern Tales by Masters Page 44
