by Lyndsay Faye
“Good heavens!” he boomed. “Can it be?”
“I am nearly beyond doubt it is so. When you correctly identified her symptoms, you mistakenly feared for her virtue when really, her brain was at fault. The inefficiency over household management, the depression, the irrational aversion to your tokens of affection, the morbid hypotheses—all this and more can be laid at the door of impending insanity. We must take swift action to save your wife, Mr. Treadwell. There is not a moment to be lost. Dr. Watson here is in complete agreement with me that the affliction is so far advanced, she is suffering from delusions, paranoia, and generalized mental degeneration.”
I opened my mouth, but when the sole of Holmes’s boot pressed meaningfully into my shoe leather, I shut it again.
“No, no, it’s too terrible!” Mr. Treadwell exclaimed. “Oh, I can hardly credit the magnitude of my mistake. What a blunder I could have made! Dr. Watson, what a fortunate thing you were present to confirm Mr. Holmes’s diagnosis.”
“Yes, aren’t you grateful he’s here?” Holmes insisted. “The good doctor has more than earned his keep this morning, if you want my opinion. He has proved invaluable.”
“Quite so, and I’ll add ten pounds to your fee for it, gladly.”
“I hardly think—” My mouth closed a second time when a renewed assault was made upon my toe.
“But whatever can this fireplace scheme have to do with hysteria?” Mr. Treadwell questioned avidly.
In a sweeping motion, Holmes indicated the surrounding townhouse. “When a woman believes her residence is aflame, she always races to retrieve her most valuable possession; but it is my belief that Mrs. Treadwell’s raving and disordered mind will instruct her to save something entirely worthless. This will prove hysteria beyond the shadow of a doubt. But you will see the concrete proof of my conjecture only if you agree to this experiment.”
“By Jove, if you should confirm it before my very eyes!” Mr. Treadwell gasped. “Little Alice hysterical, and I never noticed. What a relief! You’ve restored me with hope, I don’t mind telling you. It’s a hundredfold better than being made a cuckold of, gentlemen—not that I wish her sick, you understand. I’ll hire the best of specialists.”
“No doubt,” I said frigidly.
“Shall we, then?” Holmes suggested, gesturing toward the door.
When we had hurried downstairs and Mr. Treadwell had vanished into the sunroom, I rounded on Holmes for the third time that day, determined to go no further.
“Mrs. Treadwell,” I pronounced softly but clearly, “is no more hysterical than I am. What on earth do you mean by all of this?”
“I mean possibly to save her life,” my friend hissed, wrapping his fingers about my wrist, and my breath caught when the fierce glow returned to his languid gaze. “If she imagines that her letter box is a safe hiding place, then she has made a grievous error—trust me, Dr. Watson, and do exactly as I say, I beg of you. I cannot state the matter urgently enough. If Mrs. Treadwell saves that letter box, I intend to devise an excuse to take it away from her.”
It was not an unconflicted decision, for following Holmes’s imperious orders in the midst of a tempest was not yet second nature to me; but nevertheless I did trust him, and so—with mind awhirl—I accompanied him back into the parlor, where Mrs. Alice Treadwell had exchanged her book for her sewing box. She swept her queerly blanched face up to ours, smiling timidly.
“We’ve nearly finished, but I wonder, madam, if you would be so good as to list any minor inconveniences about the house,” Holmes requested courteously. “Items such as leaks in the roof, a cracked kitchen flagstone—it would be an immense help to us.”
“Oh . . . I can do my best. There have been repairs made twice to the kitchen stove, and Cook still isn’t satisfied with it. The shed in the back area is in a terrible state. We’ve thought of building a new one, but it never seemed to be the right time.”
For several minutes, Mrs. Treadwell quietly listed household annoyances whilst Holmes and I listened attentively. Finally, when my already restless nerves were keyed to a positively tremulous pitch, I glanced behind me to see billows of smoke ballooning outward from the sunroom door. Mrs. Treadwell’s eyes followed mine.
“Sweet God in heaven!” she gasped, leaping to her feet and spilling all the needlework scraps from her lap. “Help, gentlemen! Oh, do call for help!”
Mrs. Treadwell flew like a loosed arrow up the stairs. At the same moment, her husband’s burly outline emerged from the ashen atmosphere; he was holding a kerchief over his face. His queer black eyes watched her go.
“That’s not the look of a hysterical woman,” he growled, muffling a cough. “She seems devilishly determined.”
“Determined to save something of no value whatever!” Holmes volleyed over his shoulder, bounding up the stairs as we rushed after him. “Mark my words!”
When we reached the landing, we were met with the sight of Mrs. Treadwell, her pale face white as cream and her hands clutching her skirts, wrapping a long hooded mantle of wine-colored velvet about herself as she dashed out of her bedroom. There was no letter box in her hands, I noted with a rush of relief, though why I should have been relieved I did not know.
“It’s a false alarm, madam,” Holmes reported, holding out his palms reassuringly. “A harmless mistake about the damper in the sunroom fireplace.”
“Thank God for that,” Mrs. Treadwell murmured, swaying upon her small feet.
Quick as thinking, Holmes had her as lightly by the elbow as if she were composed of glass and was directing her back into her bedroom. He was gone only ten or twenty seconds and then appeared again, pulling the door shut behind, his spare bones galvanized like lightning rods and his deep-set grey eyes glittering mirrors in his chiseled face.
“Can you imagine a better demonstration of a hysterical mind, Mr. Holmes?” cried Mr. Treadwell. “She runs to the very room where she might have saved her jewels, or even her confounded letter box, and she retrieves a cloak, of all things. A cloak, when her house is burning. I am in your debt, sirs. Here is your thirty pounds, and gladly too.”
Sherlock Holmes plucked the notes from his client’s hand. Without another word, leaving me to make a confused and hasty farewell, he walked directly down the stairs, out the front door, and into the road to stand in the brightening March light, waving down a passing hansom. I could do nothing, I had already learned in such predicaments, save follow him.
“Holmes,” I said, when we were clattering in a fresh cab along Prince of Wales Road, “whatever just happened, I feel I have done you a disservice. Will you accept my apology? Though all was dark to me, I ought not to have doubted your motives, and you would never force open a lady’s letter box.”
Holmes had his index finger over his thin lips, his elbow propped against the cab’s window ledge. “I might, actually,” he granted with a smile confined solely to the left edge of his mouth, “but I should need a thousand times better a reason.”
“What on earth did all that signify? I understand nothing.”
“But you sense the majority of it, I would wager. The main point was in the bottle of concealer hidden in the vanity drawer of a woman who wears no frivolous cosmetics. You may not have observed the very peculiar shadow at the edge of her jaw, but I am trained to see such things, even when I’ve no desire to. Her face was badly bruised, quite recently—and I do not imagine it will take you much consideration, Doctor, to pinpoint the man responsible, nor to marvel over the steps she takes to hide the foul liberties he visits upon her person.”
“The cowardly villain!” I cried, anger flooding my limbs. “When I think of that sweet, helpless young lady—why, I ought to horsewhip the scoundrel. Holmes, we cannot take his money and simply—”
“You have leapt to more than enough conclusions this morning, my dear fellow, though they were all of them justified,” Holmes interrupted me amiabl
y. “I took the thirty pounds because that execrable cad’s wife isn’t having an affair and he thinks I proved it to him. I earned the money, did I not? Here is your tenner—no, no, you did your part, and I insist; not another word out of you. As for Mrs. Treadwell, she will doubtless tell us all about it herself whenever she slips out of the house and arrives at Baker Street, for I palmed her my card when I escorted her back to her room. She is to waste not an instant in coming to see us.”
More relieved than I could say, I nodded. Folding the bank note, I continued to hesitate, staring at it, until Holmes fairly snorted and recrossed his legs in annoyance, pin-striped trousers flapping. It was a situation in which losing was preferable to winning, I concluded, and smiled reluctantly at him when I slipped it into my wallet.
“So it seems that you were right from the start. She truly is an honest woman,” I mused, settling back against the seat.
“Haven’t you been listening? There is no such thing,” Holmes retorted.
“But—”
“I wanted to know why she was lying because I strongly suspected that her husband—one of the less acute examples of the species yet produced, I think you’ll agree—was not apt enough to discern a very good paste copy of an item of jewelry from the genuine article. Of course she wouldn’t wear them in public any longer! The accusations of poison were simply an outrageous pretext, and a clever pretext at that, one she could supplement with careful applications of the concealer she already kept for use during her darkest domestic hours. Her husband had no idea what to make of any of it and wandered the halls of his own home frustrated and perplexed for half a year.”
“She has been pawning her collection?” I exclaimed.
“For these six months, yes. Do keep up, Watson! It was one thing to fool her spouse, but quite another to fool a room of eagle-eyed socialites. I can probably tell you ninety percent of the story, but let us instead await the arrival of Mrs. Treadwell herself, and the literal truth. Or as close as she’ll come to it, that is.”
My mind was in such turmoil by this time that I was more than happy to allow a silence to fall between myself and my impossibly contradictory fellow lodger. We reached Baker Street in due time and climbed the stairs in companionable quiet, stoking the white-skinned coals in our sitting room and calling for tea. It had just arrived when there came a strident ringing, a hurried exchange of female voices, and a tripping patter upon the stairs. When the door burst open without a knock, Mrs. Alice Treadwell appeared, her breath coming in rapid gusts and an unnatural flush along her cheekbones. She wore the identical hooded mantle she had fled to rescue earlier that morning.
“Mrs. Treadwell, please sit down,” my friend hastened to say, leaping up and taking her elbow. “Watson, pour her some brandy, there’s a good fellow.”
Mrs. Treadwell collapsed into the armchair which I had gradually been growing to think of as “mine” as I hurried to bring her a glass of spirits.
“Mr. Holmes,” she gasped. “So you are a detective. My husband has found me out, hasn’t he?”
“Mr. Treadwell has found out nothing, but I should be grateful to know the facts of the matter in order to satisfy my own curiosity.” My friend seated himself in his own chair while I took the settee. “Please do not feel as if you must speak of his foul treatment of you. We know your husband to be an unrepentant brute and hereby vow to do no further business with him save that which might serve to benefit yourself, madam—but what, if you will pardon my inquiring, took place six months ago?”
“Six months ago my parents, George and Mary Darlington, were taken from us,” Mrs. Treadwell replied weakly. “I mean to say, from my sister and me. I ought not to think of it as a blessing—it’s heathenish, altogether despicable. But my unmarried elder sister, Rose Darlington, who has always been my most kindred spirit, became a woman of independent means overnight. Lucien is so well off that naturally I myself inherited nothing despite my . . . unique situation.”
“A situation which I despise to witness, I assure you. The day this great nation grants women such as yourself the ready means to escape the clutches of monsters like Lucien Treadwell, I shall personally fund a parade through Piccadilly Circus.” Holmes’s voice was a light purr, but I could see that he meant every word.
Her blush deepened. “May we both live to see it, Mr. Holmes. In any case, despite my having nothing of my own to offer in return, Rose pressed me in ardent language to flee from Lucien and take refuge with her. At the time, I was too frightened, I am ashamed to say. I locked that letter away, though I ought to have burned it. When Lucien tried to open the box and found it fastened, he was too proud to force the latch, but he took other measures—no, I do not desire your pity.
“But neither did I desire my sister’s,” she continued, fiercely blinking away the tears, “and so I determined to have some money to present to her if we were to spend our lives together. I could not look myself in the glass otherwise. I . . . I stole out of the house and had my jewelry copied, selling each original as soon as the paste was finished, making up a ridiculous story about poison in the hopes my husband would think me too irrational to do battle with any longer. Every womanly means at my disposal I employed to avoid him in the meanwhile—headaches, fatigue, fainting spells, ennui. I meant to rebuild my life as Alice Darlington once more. No doubt you both think me contemptible.”
“Actually,” I interjected warmly, “I think myself a fool for having doubted your innate resourcefulness.”
“And I think you as formidable an opponent as ever I have faced, madam, though I confess that I harbor hopes we may instead form an alliance,” Holmes announced gallantly.
She attempted a smile which broke nearly as soon as it formed. “Dare I hope that you will not tell Lucien everything, then? What is it you want from me?”
“I only wish to know how much capital you’ve sewn into the lining of that cloak.”
The lady’s fingers darted to her lips as she gasped. “I cannot imagine how you know that I . . . In any case, a considerable windfall. Nearly fifteen hundred pounds in notes.”
“Mrs. Treadwell—Darlington, rather; forgive me—you must depart immediately.” Holmes pulled down our Bradshaw. “There is a train to Brighton at two fourteen from Charing Cross. Do not wait for your wardrobe or your books or to bid farewell to your friends. Take your very important cloak and go directly to the train station from Baker Street. Ask Peterson, the commissionaire below, to accompany you, and I shall make certain he is paid for the journey. Come, your protests are quite useless, for I will see that you are safely ensconced on that train. I wish you all the best of luck. And I do beg your pardon. Regarding the false fire, which was my doing, I was worried about the suspicions attached to your letter box and hoped there were no valuables within—but happily, you are still cannier than I had supposed.”
“I cannot claim to understand you completely, but I am very grateful. Please, I must reimburse you for your pains,” she whispered.
“Oh, no, I should not like to grow greedy,” said he, contentedly. “You see, I have already been paid twenty pounds.”
The Darlington Substitution Scandal, as it came to be known a fortnight later when the entire truth came out in the society papers, was the pet freak of the popular press for no less than a full month. Mr. Treadwell, to our surprise and considerable amusement, stuck firmly by Holmes’s claim that his wife was hysterical; he further argued that no sane man stood a chance against the workings of feminine guile. When my friend, who could barely suffer to hear Mr. Treadwell’s name without a disgusted curl of his lip, half-tilted his head judiciously at this quotation, I was left to ponder the inexplicable dualities of human nature, a topic with which I am not fully reconciled even to this day.
The Adventure of
the Beggar’s Feast
It was my habit when I lived with my friend Sherlock Holmes in our suite of rooms in Baker Street, during the seas
on of grey winds and charitable spirits, to volunteer a portion of my time working at hospital. Two afternoons in the week I would bundle myself warmly and take myself off to Barts, there to assist the surgeons and other medical personnel with whatever overflow of duties my training as a general practitioner and my brief military experience allowed. The staff grew accustomed to my presence as a locum there, and though my duties were difficult, they were never dull, for one session might find me setting all the broken limbs inflicted by a carriage accident, and the next tending to the victims of another unhappy bout of smallpox or influenza in one of the many slums cloistered in forgotten corners of our sprawling city.
On one such early evening late in December of the year 1887, I stood at the end of a ward devoted to accidental injuries hurriedly repacking my clean instruments in my leather medical bag, wondering just how put out Holmes would be if I arrived late for a string quartet recital at St. James’s Hall. To my considerable surprise, the man himself appeared strolling in my direction seconds later, swinging his stick, his tall, thin form seeming even taller and thinner in the faint, slanting light from beyond the distant door.
“I’m just finishing. However did you find me in this maze?” I asked him. Holmes knew his own way around Barts, for he had conducted extensive chemical researches there, but that did not explain his discovering my whereabouts.
“Simplicity itself, my dear fellow: know thy best resources.” He spun his cane against the polished floor and caught it up just as it began to topple. “It is a farcical blunder to act alone when assistance could halve the time required.”
Laughing, I asked, “And who assisted you, then?”
“I’d made up my mind to consult the likeliest expert regarding the comings and goings within this anthill, and the third nurse I passed in the front hall sent me straight to you. It’s an easy matter to tell which of the caretakers has her finger on the pulse of the establishment, so to speak—she is invariably both the weariest-seeming and paradoxically the neatest. This one obviously had not slept in over twenty hours, but there wasn’t so much as a speck marring her nail beds. Such women have a marked tendency to know absolutely everything.”
