by Lyndsay Faye
“Now you mention it, I could have told you as much myself.”
“Yes, that’s all well and good, Watson, but I mentioned it first,” he admonished me severely, and I could not help chuckling again.
“All right, all right.” I snapped my bag shut. “What’s the time?”
“Four forty-seven by my watch. I’ve a cab outside, always provided you are through with philanthropy for the day and are ready for Haydn.”
We were making for the door when a pair of orderlies with a nurse entered, wheeling another unfortunate victim of misadventure lying upon a stretcher. The slim, fashionably dressed young man had clearly suffered a severe head injury, for his brow was cocooned in considerable bandaging. While he seemed careworn—from excess of leisure or excess of woes I could not say—he was certainly under five and twenty years of age. My reaction upon glimpsing him was typical of both the seasoned medico and the veteran of the battlefield; while I wished him every chance at a swift recovery, a colleague of mine had clearly already done all he could, and so since the patient was resting quietly, by instinct I paid him no more mind than I would a hale soldier on patrol. I had already stepped around the gurney when Holmes stopped in his tracks.
“What’s happened to this poor fellow?” he asked in his blandest, most ingratiating tone.
When the nurse—a charming and capable young woman by the name of Caric—saw that Holmes was with me, her stern face relaxed into her natural expression. “We hardly know, sir. Poor soul. He’s been robbed, that much is certain, for there’s nothing on his person to identify who he might be, and no money or valuables either. An ostler found him down by the river in Blackfriars, and called for a constable.”
“And did the ostler arrive too late to see what had happened? Or had he glimpsed signs of a struggle and interfered in a more timely fashion?”
“It’s all right, Nurse Caric,” I assured her when her glinting brown eyes narrowed again, although I confess I was equally mystified by Holmes’s keen interest. “This is my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, whose area of expertise is the detection of crime.”
She seemed marginally mollified, but her hand remained protectively upon the sheet covering her charge. “I suppose it’s all right, then, Doctor. The physician who treated him spoke with both the ostler and the constable when he was brought in, and I was with them. No fight was interrupted—the damage had already been done when he was discovered.”
“Excuse me, but where was this precisely?” Holmes asked.
“In a narrow corridor off Pageantmaster Court, sir.”
“Excellent. Do go on.”
“I was saying that the fight was already finished,” she continued with more visible impatience. “But it seems that when the ostler found him lying on the ground, he spied another man peering from the other end of the alleyway. That man was most revolting in appearance, he said—he’d long, matted hair of yellowish grey, his back was hunched, his face was coarse with a terribly crooked broken nose, and he was dressed in the foulest rags the ostler had ever seen. But when the ostler cried out to him, the man disappeared, and the ostler thought it best to stay with the injured gentleman and call for help rather than chase after a beggar who may have had nothing to do with the assault. The ostler was a most reliable, steady sort, if you want my opinion, and if you don’t, the constable who left not half an hour ago shared it.”
“Oh, I should a thousand times rather solicit your opinion than a constable’s, Nurse Caric. The large number of hair follicles escaping your cap indicates that you have been on shift for over twelve hours, as is supported by the demarcations beneath your eyes, and yet despite the fact you have been hard at work—your hands, you see, are quite pink from repeated scrubbings—your apron is spotless, which indicates you must have changed it. Twice, I think, though I cannot be certain. Your opinion is invaluable, I assure you.”
“Yes, I’ve changed my apron twice. But . . .” When Nurse Caric frowned, she wisely directed the expression at me rather than my companion.
“It was a compliment,” I explained. “He . . . Never mind him. Can you tell us anything further?”
Smoothing down her fresh apron, she shook her head. “It’s a common enough occurrence, Doctor. A man walks into an alley and doesn’t walk out again. . . . If there truly were good angels watching over us, the least they could do would be to warn of such dangers. Leastaways, that’s what I think, and I don’t care who knows it. Pray God he awakens soon and knows himself when he does, for otherwise we’ve no chance of tracing anyone he loves to comfort him.”
I nodded soberly. As Nurse Caric spoke, the orderlies wheeled the white-faced unconscious gentleman into a bare, curtained alcove. When the nurse departed in search of a clean hospital gown to replace his soiled finery, I followed after her for two paces before I realized that Holmes remained firmly in place, staring with eyes like his fencing foils at the anonymous assault victim.
“Holmes,” I ventured, “the cab downstairs—”
“I wonder, Watson,” my friend declared, putting his index finger over his lips and rocking back on his heels in thought.
“I can see that. What do you wonder about, I wonder?”
“I wonder why this person is not wearing his own clothing.”
Stepping back to the gurney, I looked him over, thoroughly bemused; I could see no indications whatsoever pointing to borrowed attire, though I noted many signs he had suffered a thorough trouncing and been left in the filth of a dank passage. The young man wore the finest-quality woolen trousers. His waistcoat was done in rich, dark green velvet with polished mother-of-pearl buttons, his disheveled black silk cravat was of the most expensive cloth, and his superbly cut frock coat proved to be lined with navy satin when I pulled back the lapel.
“Why on earth do you say it isn’t his clothing?”
“The cuffs of his shirtsleeve.”
I peered down at them; they were greatly muddied, but they fitted the unlucky boy perfectly well.
“No, not the fit. The second hole. They’ve been threaded with cuff links more widely apart in the past, and now someone has pierced straight through the celluloid again. You don’t mean to tell me that a man who can afford such togs has somehow lost two inches in circumference from his wrist and then not bothered to purchase himself new cuffs?”
Rubbing his slender hands together, Holmes rounded the makeshift bed, his eyes never leaving the hospital’s latest unfortunate admission. I had seldom seen him so enamored of a puzzle. “I might add that the trousers fit, but the knee break is in the wrong place by a full two inches—always study the knees, my dear fellow; if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a score of times. And a costly waistcoat with that strange pucker near the lowest rib would certainly have caused an argument between me and my tailor, were I in this lad’s shoes—or rather, whoever’s shoes these are. But in any case, he could never have afforded any of it, begging for a living on the streets as he does.”
At my expression of frank shock, Holmes leaned down to loosen the patient’s collar and gently finished removing his unpinned cravat. As he did so, I began to suspect that I too could glean conclusions from the evidence at hand, for something before me was not right—but just as was the case regarding the efficacy of nurses, it ultimately required Sherlock Holmes to articulate what I could only sense.
“You see what I see, but what do you conclude from it?”
“I cannot think.”
“No, no, of course you can, you are simply unpracticed at taking mental leaps into the void. Shall I state the hypothesis as I view it, then?”
“Please do.”
“The lad is a beggar, I said. I know it because these marks of grime are not the results of a street brawl—they continue underneath his clothing. He was this filthy before the tussle, not just afterward. And witness his hands.”
My friend lifted one of them for my closer insp
ection. The appendage was callused in several places, but the most peculiar thing about it was its fingertips. They bore evidence of having been moderately frostbitten, the phalanges revealing several small healed-over vesicles and also older marks which seemed to me evidence of still worse hemorrhagic blistering. As a doctor, I knew well enough what I was looking at—and yet, I had never seen such queer successive evidence of having habitually frozen one’s flesh before.
“This is a common affliction, but solely among a particular set. The only men and women I have ever encountered with hands like these are those who work the shallow,” Holmes explained clinically, returning the unknown man’s limb to the bedsheets.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Apologies, but the street language of thieves’ cant invents appellations for practices that civilized English would prefer to ignore altogether, so on occasion my terminology cannot help but devolve into slang. ‘Working the shallow’ is a form of begging, not unlike a scaldrum dodge.”
“Defining a term by means of another term I equally cannot parse seems an inefficient way of explaining it to me.”
“What a logical remonstrance, my dear Watson!”
“Yes, it was.”
My friend’s lips quivered, settling into a self-depreciating smile. “In a scaldrum dodge, the mendicants self-administer injuries in order to appear more pitiful to potential benefactors. Cuts, bruises, abrasions, worse—when pleading for the odd charitable coin, a missing hand could mean the difference between starvation and sympathy.”
“Holmes, do you mean to tell me that there are those who would prefer to lose a limb than—”
“Than a life?” He raised expressive brows, momentarily looking up from the supine figure.
Sighing, I pulled at a taut muscle in my shoulder. “Go on.”
“Working the shallow, on the other hand, means begging in the dead of winter without proper clothing—as a deliberate strategy, mind—and the fewer garments they can get away with, the more money they are apt to take in. The amateurs attempt going without coats, while the most extreme practitioners bare themselves to the elements, pretending to have seconds previous pawned their last shirt and the like. So long as public decency is at least partially maintained, they will stop at nothing to appear penniless. We don’t see such desperation in the vicinity of Baker Street, but I’ve witnessed it plentiful times in Whitechapel and St. Giles, to name but two neighborhoods, and likewise in far too many others to list.”
“And I, in India. The poor wretches risk their health to do such a thing.”
“The most daring of them risk everything.” My friend had commenced searching extensively through the young man’s garments, tucking his fingers into pockets and unbuttoning the extravagant waistcoat to search for hidden pouches. “If I’m right, and that is his trade, he wasn’t robbed of his identification at all—he simply had nothing of value on his person to steal, apart from the tiepin. The clothes would have garnered a tidy profit in a pawn shop, but ripping a man’s vestments from his body is not a crime to be enacted on a public street. Our hapless passersby are generally lured indoors if they’re to be stripped entirely. No, our thief was impulsive, in the market for small treasures easily carried off. A watch, a wallet, a coin purse, a ring—save for the tiepin, our man was destined for disappointment, however.”
“Holmes, what tiepin?”
“This cravat has a recent pinprick in it but no actual jewelry.”
“The missing tiepin, then,” I conceded, smiling even as I shook my head.
“Quite so. Ah, here we are.”
Holmes pulled a thin scrap of paper from an inner waistcoat pocket and unfolded it, passing it to me after he had made a comprehensive inspection. It was a receipt from a furniture warehouse.
“The true owner of the waistcoat just bought himself a large curio case, whoever he is,” I said, returning the small document to Holmes. “There is no name, though, and no delivery address—only information regarding the vendor. Small wonder the policeman overlooked it.”
“Small wonder, and also every reason why he will fail to identify either the victim or the culprit,” my friend snorted, replacing the evidence with due care.
“Holmes,” I remarked, “we aren’t going to a Haydn concert, are we?”
He gave me an innocent glance, an expression which on Sherlock Holmes looks like two parts surprise and one part mild injury. It was not an expression which, by the year 1887, fooled me in the smallest degree.
“The tickets are in my coat pocket, my dear fellow, and if music is your pleasure, we’ll be rattling down the Strand toward Piccadilly within mere moments. Of course, this furniture warehouse does happen to be located in Blackfriars, on Gardner’s Lane and High Timber Street, not far from where this unfortunate chap was attacked and left for dead.”
I placed my hat on my head and picked up my bag. “Then we had better pay it a call, had we not?”
Holmes fairly grinned at me in agreement, tossed his stick and caught it again, and strode back in the direction of the Great Hall. We hastened down the staircase and out into the central courtyard, the garden a wash of sere winter tones, the grasses robbed of all moisture, and the fountain frosted over with ice. By some miracle, my friend’s cab was still waiting for him, the driver muffled under a wealth of blankets and mist emerging from the impatient horse’s nose.
When we alighted some ten minutes later in Blackfriars, the sun was swiftly quickening its descent into the great dun-colored river, plunging like a fallen phoenix. The apothecaries were pulling down the shades behind their polished glass windows, and the pubs, with their lambent yellow fires, were beginning to glow all the brighter for the gloom, like scattered lighthouses in a sea of bluish-grey. It was that almost mystical time that is neither day nor night, the earth tipping into dusk, and I confess that I thrilled at the chance to be pursuing an unexpected case rather than whiling away our evening being passively entertained. Holmes had walked half a block farther toward the river with his silk hat pulled low over his brow when his hand suddenly caught my elbow.
“Keep walking,” he murmured. “But pull out your watch and glance discreetly across the street as if you’re ascertaining how long it will take to arrive at your destination. Then look immediately back down at the time.”
Settling my features into a blank, I did as he said and cast my gaze across the thoroughfare. One of the oddest creatures I have ever seen in all my travels approached us on the other side of the road, and my spine tingled when I recognized him by description. His stature was slight, his shoulders were rounded, his back was humped, and his gait was halfway between a lurch and a shuffle. He wore clothing of the filthiest repugnance, the sort of rotting and fetid garments draped over the skeletal limbs of the scavengers who drag the Thames for salable garbage or descend into the sewer system to dredge for lost coins—full of holes, hanging like so much tangled moss from his frame.
All of these foul characteristics were as nothing, however, compared with the unhappy man’s face; his dirty grey hair hung in unevenly tangled knots around a visage which must initially have been loathsome, lumpen and coarse as it looked, but which was not assisted by a nose that had been badly broken many years previous, giving his vulture’s countenance a smashed effect.
My friend’s pace never varied, and it was not until we had rounded the corner that Holmes abruptly stopped and whirled about again, resting his fingers lightly against the brick edge of the building as he watched.
“This is the furniture warehouse in question,” he informed me over his shoulder.
“But Holmes, surely we can postpone that visit—if Nurse Caric is to be believed, doubtless here is the very man who may have seen the well-dressed beggar attacked.”
“She is absolutely to be believed.” My friend paused. “Is that what you plan to call it when all is over and you convert fact to melodrama? ‘The Adventur
e of the Well-Dressed Beggar’ or some similar rubbish?”
“You need not presume to have already solved it,” I returned, perhaps with rather more pique than was necessary.
Holmes only regarded me with an eyebrow cocked and his mouth quirked into an aloof smile. “Touché, Watson. Take off your coat and your scarf,” he instructed me imperiously, unwrapping his muffler and pulling his arms out of his own greatcoat as he did so.
Reluctantly, I complied. When Holmes handed me his coat, I understood better what he intended and offered him my own. My tall friend’s cape-backed topcoat of black wool hung far below my knees, giving me a disreputable air; Holmes, conversely, on the instant he had donned my brown tweed, I found to be inexplicably six inches shorter than he had been before, and I laughed in spite of myself.
“No longer John Watson and Sherlock Holmes, then,” I surmised.
“No, I’m afraid those chaps wouldn’t suit just now, as admirable as they are. Now, follow me and do exactly as I do.”
When Holmes gained the opposite curb and joined the small stream of pedestrians, our subject had progressed a full block ahead of us. My friend selected a man who traveled at a brisk speed and fell into place directly behind him, his grey eyes locked blankly on our quarry over the stranger’s shoulder, as if unseeing and lost in thought. Before long, I had fallen into step behind my own shield, copying as best I could Holmes’s air of weary impatience to arrive at his destination.
Doubtless my excitement was more visible than his, however, for Holmes had somehow retreated entirely within himself, and the man who under normal circumstances garnered furtive stares from strangers thanks to his remarkable appearance was now no more noticed than a crack in the cobblestones. His disguise was not properly a disguise at all—merely my own coat and a bowed gait which rendered him the same size as mere mortals—and yet his alteration was entire, and I could only reflect, as indeed did many of our friends from the Yard, that had Holmes wished to travel the world with the hot metal aroma of footlights ever in his nostrils, he would have been loudly applauded across the continents. It is a peculiarity inherent to my friend’s reserved nature, however, that while honest admiration from his sole companion and few esteemed colleagues can actually cause the man to blush, acclaim from the public falls upon wholly deaf ears, so perhaps after all Sherlock Holmes had chosen the profession which suited him best.
