by Lyndsay Faye
I know my role at such times and hastened to her bedside. She had once been a lovely woman, with very slender lips and a high, thoughtful brow—but her cheeks seemed flushed with fever and the edges of her mouth were cracked and peeling. When her eyes flicked open at my touch on her heated skin, I found them a startling shade of pale green. Her hand clutched at mine and I gently disengaged it, instead pressing my fingers to her wrist. Her pulse was as frantic and fluttering as the wing of a moth.
“It isn’t helping,” she moaned in a paper-thin voice. “Please don’t make me stay here. I can’t bear it any longer. I’ll swear upon a Bible it isn’t helping.”
“What isn’t helping, miss?”
“The treatment,” she gasped, shuddering. “The doctor won’t listen.”
“There, there. It’s all right now—my name is Dr. John Watson, and I vow that we won’t let anyone harm you further. Tell me what he has given you, if you are able.”
“I don’t know. Some sort of potion. It looked like drops of silver.”
Holmes’s piercing voice came from behind my shoulder. “Mercury poisoning, would you not agree, Doctor?”
“Almost certainly.”
“Will she be all right?”
“I can’t yet—”
“What the devil is going on here?” a masterful voice thundered.
The afflicted woman in the bed shied away in fright as I instinctually flung an arm between her body and the intruder. Filling the doorway was a stoop-shouldered gentleman of about fifty years, with a boldly rectangular face and a sneer of outrage on his lips. Though his tailored clothing and neatly brushed brown beard were the height of respectability, there was a look of almost reptilian cold-bloodedness in his flashing eyes.
“Dr. Henry Staunton, I presume.” Holmes confronted him. “Your churlishness is misplaced—we were summoned. This woman is a client of mine.”
“A client?” Dr. Staunton scoffed. “Impossible! You will both cease alarming my charge and remove yourself from my property or I shall summon the police forthwith.”
“By all means,” said I, carefully producing my revolver and turning so that the quivering lady should not see it. “Please summon the police.”
“God in heaven! What sort of housebreakers are you, to barrel in at gunpoint and bully my patients?”
“I am Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and he is not bullying her.” Holmes revealed a gun of his own. “I would venture to say he may in fact be saving her life. Now, Watson, I can think of no finer course of action than to follow Dr. Staunton’s admirable advice, and to send for some stout local constabulary.”
“Preposterous!” Dr. Staunton bellowed. “This is a private institution. I’ll set the dogs on you first!”
Our client screamed, shrinking farther against the wall in terror. I was on my feet by this time. “You’ll do no such thing. Holmes, where are we to put him?”
“Worry not, Watson. I’ve every intention of locking both him and his staff in their cellar,” Holmes said frigidly. “With tremendous pleasure.”
Little remains to tell of what I would recall as one of the most macabre cases Holmes and I were ever prevailed upon to solve—and the second of a grim pair taking place in the quiet town of Croydon. We lost no time in imprisoning the doctor and his four nurses, which would have been a daunting task save for the fact that bullets are very effective arguments. While I tended to the lady and looked into the state of the other inmates, Holmes himself ran for the stables, saddled a mount, and had soon fetched a set of burly policemen.
It was what happened next that I hate to think upon. Alongside the officers, we discovered overwhelming evidence of the most grotesque experimentation upon Dr. Henry Staunton’s subjects. Ice baths, electricity, starvation, isolation, various hysteria remedies too foul to name—apparently, no atrocity was considered too outlandish to attempt in the name of progress. Never shall I forget the sight of his “treatment room,” a chamber of horrors better resembling a feudal dungeon than a haven of healing, and one which the official force quit in revulsion after less than five minutes’ perusal. My friend and I remained, shaken beyond our worst expectations.
“The depths to which human depravity can sink will never cease to confound me.” Holmes’s face was rigid with disgust as we gazed at a wall of instruments I did not even attempt to identify. “What are we to make of the species in light of this room? Where is progress, where is logic, where is reason itself, when a savage smashing his comrade’s skull with a rock would be kinder treatment of the race? I ask you, what is the limit to our perversion?”
“It doesn’t bear thinking on,” I agreed, overwhelmed by the evil surrounding us.
“Hell is empty,” Holmes concluded under his breath, “and all the devils are here.”
Stricken, I pressed his still too-thin arm in reassurance. “Some of the angels are too, my dear fellow.”
He dropped a set of forceps back upon a tabletop, his jaw set stonily. “Not enough of them.”
“No, there I will not contradict you.”
“What is the solution, then?”
“I have no answer. I don’t know that anyone does, Holmes.”
When my friend’s eyes snagged upon the sort of sewing needle which ought to have been found at the nearby tannery and instead was set in a case alongside others like it, he froze with such a look of valiantly restrained anguish that I instantly steered him straight out of the room. My never having seen the expression before, it startled me deeply. The mere fact that he allowed me the liberty of propelling him away, when ordinarily I am ever the one who follows his lead, told me with what graphic colors his imagination was painting possibilities from the data at hand.
Planting his back against the wall in the corridor, I admonished him, “All right, that’s enough, don’t you agree?”
My friend’s shoulders could have been carved from granite, but his face was now slack and neutral enough to cause the gravest alarm. That his time abroad had been more nightmare than holiday I had already deduced from the obvious physical signs, but to see the ruthless mastery of his mind so adversely affected confirmed my worst fears. I wondered with a sharp ache in my chest—and always shall wonder, I believe—what terrors I missed when I could have been of service, even if only to the smallest degree.
“Holmes,” I insisted, giving him a shake, “you’re conducting a fruitless and damaging exercise, and I won’t have it. Are you listening to me? Holmes, stop.”
When I raised my voice, he came back to himself with a tiny shudder. I let him go, studying him carefully. Raising his hands to his brow and brushing his closed eyelids with his thumbs, he breathed several times before saying, “That was—for a moment, I . . .”
“No, take your time. Slowly. There, that’s right.”
“My sincerest apologies for that appalling display.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
He laughed silently, though I could detect no mirth in the expression. Patiently I waited as horror ebbed and calm settled into its void. Less than ten seconds later, he had pushed himself upright and was distantly ironical again.
“Well, if anyone is going to watch me being ridiculous, then thank God it’s you. I know I was vexing you earlier, but I appreciate your accompanying me this afternoon,” he added crisply. “I suspect that it should not have been very tolerable otherwise.”
“My dear chap, no matter how much pressure I am presently under, you must know that nothing better pleases me than watching you bring light where all is darkness.”
“Nonsense. I should never have found the place at all if not for you.”
“Well, you have said before that a trusty companion is sometimes of use.”
“Always,” he corrected me with an unreadable look. “You misquote me dreadfully. Always of use.”
“And I am doubly glad to have been so on this occasion. You
had better question Miss Rorden before the police monopolize her.”
“Dear me, is that my client’s name? I am clearly quite incapable without you,” he joked, quirking a somber smile.
“Yes, Miss Emilia Rorden. And you were preoccupied with herding a pack of villains into a root cellar.”
“I confess that even given the shameful treatment she has suffered, I am eager to speak with her. Despite her weakened condition, she is obviously a highly resourceful young lady. Come to that, is she strong enough?”
“Go gently with her, but I believe so. I’ve given her a mild sedative, and yarrow tea with a cold water bottle for the fever. None of the other women here are at all healthy, but they aren’t presently in any severe danger either, and we’ve summoned an ambulance. Lead the way, Holmes.”
When we had regained Miss Rorden’s sickroom, I saw that my immediate measures had taken some effect, though whether her constitution could ever fully recover from mercury poisoning was beyond my control. Holmes pulled a chair up to her bedside, saying, “You have been much tried already, Miss Rorden, but I beg leave to speak with you for a few minutes before we take you away from this terrible place.”
Miss Rorden’s hair gushed over the pillow in a tangled black cascade like a spill of creosote; her chiseled features were still both wan and fevered above the rubber bag I had filled with ice and placed beneath her pillow. But her green eyes were clear as tinted glass now and she nodded, weakly taking the hand my friend proffered her.
“Do you know how you came to be here?” he asked.
“I suffer from epilepsy, Mr. Holmes,” she whispered as strongly as she could. “The fits are not severe, but they are frequent. They were a burden to my family, not to mention a public disgrace on more than one occasion. Eventually my parents despaired of curing me by conventional means and sent me to the only specialist they could afford. In my feverish state when I wrote to you, I had forgotten his name, recalling only certain tokens by which you might know my whereabouts.”
“Henry Staunton. He will trouble you no further, I promise that, Miss Rorden. Go on.”
“I fear we have all been the victims of the vilest quackery imaginable. The lengths he went to, the torments he devised—”
“We know of them already and you need not burden yourself with that part of the account today,” Holmes interrupted gently.
“Thank God. I am one of the lucky ones, I know it, to be merely subjected to slow poisoning. Thinking about what some of the others went through . . . oh, it’s unbearable. In any case, I fear that our mortality rate here has reflected the care Dr. Staunton takes with his patients, which soon revealed a bizarre quirk of his nature to us.”
“And this was?”
“Whenever one of us seemed likely to expire from the ill-use, he would ask which of our loved ones we cared for the most and bring a memento mori to the deathbed, requesting a lock of hair. There was always a gleam in his eye when he did so—not of sympathy, or even apathy, but of pleasure. It was . . . monstrously cruel, Mr. Holmes, to treat the expiring as if they were some sort of prize. He must have collected a dozen such remembrances, always carefully addressing the package in his own hand and assuring whoever stood at death’s door that, though she was likely to have passed away by the time it arrived at its destination, nevertheless her kin would always treasure this final gift from her.”
“Trophies,” my friend mused in quiet revulsion. “Possibly he also kept locks for himself postmortem; possibly the ceremony was enough to satisfy him. You say that he would actually send these tokens to your parents? Your husbands?”
“Whomever we most urgently wished to bid farewell to, yes. But it was obvious that the true joy he derived was from the added mental torment of our realizing the end had come—of tearing us away from our last shred of hope. No one escaped this ritual. He would snip a lock, we would indicate a recipient, and we knew we were done for. After a very short interim, his latest victim would be in the ground.”
“Dear God, he’s entirely mad,” I breathed.
“Very probably madness, at the least virulent sadism, or a combination of the two.” Holmes spoke in a mellow tone so as not to further upset the lady, but I needed nothing more than his ramrod posture to know that Dr. Staunton’s days on earth were numbered.
“Three of the four nurses here are as vile as the doctor, but one is merely plodding and stupid,” Miss Rorden continued. “After I was subjected to the ceremony of consigning a lock of my hair to its case, and he had prepared it for posting, I remembered your name from The Strand, Mr. Holmes, and where you reside. I had a vague recollection of the impossible feats you were said to accomplish, had hazy visions of you finding and saving me. My only chance at survival seemed to be smuggling you a message, however slender the chance it would arrive safely. When next I saw the nurse who is more witless than cruel, I convinced her in great desperation that my remembrance to my family had been misaddressed, that I had made an error in telling the doctor where it ought to be delivered, and that she must bring me pen and paper. When I think of what Dr. Staunton would have done had he found out my ploy! We spirited all away under a staircase where I wrote to you by candlelight, Mr. Holmes—it must have been delirious, barely legible.”
“It was brilliantly thought of and courageously executed.”
“There was no way for me to know that it would go out with the morning post, but it must have, oh it must have, for you are here,” she concluded on a sob, and he tightened his grip on her hand. “He would have killed me within a day or two. Dear God, to think of it! He has killed so many of us.”
Seeing that the interview could go no further, we soothed her spirits and I administered another round of compresses, which further reduced her temperature and soon found her drifting in a troubled but genuine sleep. Thus were all Holmes’s deductions confirmed, and I am flattered to say that while my never very humble friend could have taken the credit, he ever afterward would admit only to having “helped to hang” the infamous Henry Staunton, as I myself had identified the crucial clock tower.
Sitting across from each other in the train returning to London upon the late evening in question, the women Staunton had abused so shamefully having been rushed to the nearest hospital, we both regained our energies and spirits somewhat. Holmes, however—though revived—seemed distinctly ill at ease. During one stretch of countryside, in fact, he appeared for some twenty minutes to be upon the verge of speech. My friend was never one to mince words, so I waited in baffled silence as he fidgeted.
When at last Holmes did give way to utterance, he announced imperiously, “You ought to sell it.”
Having never seen Holmes look so aloof and so apprehensive simultaneously, I took a long moment to study him. “And what am I selling?”
“Your practice, of course.”
At times, friendship with Sherlock Holmes is an easy matter of shared concerts, quiet suppers, and the ever-present chance of witnessing his remarkable intellect blazing to life over a conundrum worthy of his artistry. At others, such as the moment to which I refer, his assumed authority can be just a trifle vexing even to men who habitually charge themselves to keep their tempers.
“Indeed. How do you propose I live, then?”
“Howsoever you please, so long as it’s at Baker Street. It is most inconvenient for me to travel so far every time I am in need of your assistance.”
When my mouth opened upon a truly tart reply, he held up a hand in a far more placating manner. “No, please hear me out.”
“I really don’t see why I ought to, Holmes.”
“A profession is only as valuable as it makes a man feel, my dear fellow.”
“So you propose that I discard mine?”
“You’re a writer.”
Such a wealth of conflicting feeling assaulted me that I could only retort icily, “You mean biographer.”
S
ilence flooded the train car, a silence in which I took a certain harsh satisfaction.
“And what if I do?” he asked, looking for an instant almost frightened.
“A poor one, as you have said repeatedly.”
“As I regret. When I came back, and required aid in besting Colonel Moran, I could turn to no one else, nor did I desire to do so. I needed you, and you said, ‘where you like and when you like.’ ” Holmes paused, passing a knuckle over his lips briefly. “I had not expected that. Only hoped it. I owe you more than a set of rooms.”
My face turned to the window. The tree line blurred as I thought of my combined home and practice and all that had taken place within its walls. Of the laughter, and the shared silences, and of the memento mori of my late wife’s flaxen hair hidden in my bedside table, and of the note I yet retained that ended, “Believe me to be, my dear fellow, very sincerely yours, Sherlock Holmes.”
“You said in my consulting room dressed as the old bookseller that several times during the last three years, you have taken up your pen to write to me,” I remarked when I could speak normally.
“Yes.” Holmes’s voice was faintly strained, and though I have never once desired to hurt him, I was perversely glad of it.
“What did you wish to say?”
“I don’t follow you, Doctor.”
“When you took up your pen, what would you have written? Now I am here, you see, and you aren’t dead after all, so you can simply tell me. Would it have been merely terse notice that you continued breathing, or would you have included commentary upon the weather in Tibet? Updates regarding your success in researching coal-tar derivatives, perhaps? A colorful portrait of the Khalifa would have proved a most welcome diversion.”
“Watson, please don’t.”
“Fine, as you wish—I should never dream of forcing your confidence. How many times?”
“My dear fellow—”
“How many times is several, Holmes?”
“I was guilty of some slight prevarication on that subject. It was not several.”
