by Lyndsay Faye
“Anything, Mr. Holmes!” he cried. “I should take heart, truly, if only I knew you believed me.”
“I believe you, but owing to the lack of hard data, I cannot promise immediate results. You must swear that in the interim, you will do nothing tragic with this pistol. I should be very put out indeed if you ruined my investigation by wrecking your health in a permanent fashion.”
Our guest’s already red face colored still more deeply. “Nothing of the sort will happen, Mr. Holmes, I vow it will not. I already owe you my life, seemingly. It would be the worst sort of disrespect to discard it now.”
“Then good night, Mr. Falconer, and I shall do all I can. I take it a note sent to The Fox’s Tooth would find you if I had need?”
“Yes, Mr. Holmes.” He took the gun my friend held out and hastily slipped it into his jacket pocket, going for his still-damp coat.
“Have you enough funds left over to find shelter tonight?” I could not help asking.
“Think nothing of my circumstances, sirs, or at least not those which I’ve brought on myself,” he objected with a hollow expression that could not fail to painfully remind me of my late brother’s. “Far more deserving men—aye, and women and children too—are out in the cold this evening. There’s a cranny behind a statue in Newcastle Street not many know of that’s mostly dry, and I’ll make my way there. Good night, and thank you again for your extreme generosity. I pray you can find some answers for me.”
When Mr. Falconer had gone, I rose and banked the fire, skirting the puddle left by his coat and attempting not to dwell upon the sibling I had lost untimely to his cups. “A highly disturbing account.”
“And an absolutely unique one. I’ve been searching my memory for a parallel case to no avail. What do you make of it?” Holmes asked, tamping out his pipe.
“It is certainly nightmarish, and there may be nothing more to make of it than that—a nightmare. But I should abhor the feeling that I was in mortal danger and my story was not believed by anyone. We seem to owe it to him to investigate.”
After a pause, Holmes swept his attention over me from top to toe. “You appear troubled, my dear Watson.”
“It has been a troubling evening.”
“Not generally troubled, specifically so.”
Replacing the poker, I admitted, “My own history makes the matter more personal than it should be, perhaps.”
“Of course,” he acknowledged, his severe brows thawing. “But we encounter such examples of self-ruination all too often without your taking them to heart so.”
“You may consider this a whimsical quirk of the softer emotions, then.”
“Watson, for heaven’s sake,” he protested, concerned. “Out with it, man.”
“If you insist, very well. Mr. Falconer is one of the last men on earth whom I should entrust with a gun.”
“What else could I have done?” he appealed, worrying at his high forehead in energetic circles. “Stolen it from him? When his life seems in danger?”
“Of course not.”
“My dear fellow, I thought you frowned upon my criminal tendencies.”
“You misunderstand me.”
“You imply I ought to have acted differently!”
“I am not suggesting that there was a better solution, Holmes. I am suggesting there was none.”
“Oh, what’s the use, I can’t think like this, not when my head feels full of needles.” My friend glided to his feet with a despairing huff. “Good night, Watson. If any other invaders with guns should happen to storm our gates, I beg that you will do me the favor of dispatching them without the necessity of consulting me.”
Holmes slammed his bedroom door considerably harder than any man with a headache ought to have done, and I retired upstairs. When I had readied myself for sleep, listening to the wind shriek like a banshee and the slush spatter against the window, I wondered whether Mr. Horatio Falconer was fit to remember his promise when staring out from the bottom of a gin bottle. More despondently, I wondered whether it was the case that, even supposing he spared his own life so far as weaponry was concerned, he might destroy himself all too quickly simply by means of patronizing The Fox’s Tooth, rendering my friend’s assistance equally pointless.
The morning dawned clear and cold and I woke early, plagued by dreams of a gun pressed hard against Holmes’s stark skull. As I washed and shaved, I thought again of Mr. Falconer and, in the broad light of day, could not give his tale nearly so much credence as I had granted it when sitting rapt before a midnight fireplace whilst the tempest without erased the rational world. By having been made his confidants, I could not help feeling, we might also have been made his dupes, even supposing his intentions blameless. A man of such unbridled passion, who admitted to extreme mental decay and who had invaded our home in such a shocking manner, could not be trusted, no matter Holmes’s love of the inexplicable and bizarre. I made up my mind to tell him so.
When I reached the sitting room, however, I found a note indicating that Holmes had already departed but would return before luncheon. This was surprising, given the trials of the previous night, but Holmes better than any other man I knew was capable of thumbing his nose at fatigue. I was at my desk writing in my journal when my fellow lodger breezed in at a quarter to eleven whistling an air from The Marriage of Figaro.
“Heavens, Holmes, you can’t have slept more than a few hours. I’m surprised to see you in such good spirits,” I remarked as he shed his outer garments.
“Watson, how terribly uncharitable.”
I laughed. “How is your head?”
“In perfect working order. And how are you faring?”
“I’ve been puzzling over the Falconer business.”
“As have I, I assure you. I just took definitive steps.”
“What if he is right to doubt himself so severely?” I argued, pressing my pen against my lip. “The room could be a fantasy associated with his childhood, the product of an imagination which has in some ways reverted to an infantile state.”
Holmes smoothed a palm over his black hair as he approached me, returning it to its usual neat sheen. “You’ve been reading Die Traumdeutung again.”
“Well, Dr. Freud makes some intriguing arguments.”
“Watson, Watson, after all this time, I had hoped you might do a bit better,” Holmes remarked, but his tone was jocular. “All right, let us suppose that everything we have heard was due to paranoid hallucinations brought on by hard living. Where does this leave us as far as the facts are concerned? Mr. Falconer dreams he has multiple times been assaulted, abducted, and freed by a hooded man. What do we make of the point that on every single occasion, he awakened with the sensation of having been drugged and not drunk? The gentleman has been drinking for a lengthy period, I think you’ll agree—he ought to have a grasp on the sensation by this time. I am more inclined to believe the chloroform rag is real.”
“Perhaps,” I conceded doubtfully.
“You suggest his mind has deteriorated, which is a fair argument, but let me counter it with this one: if our client experienced fantastical nightmares in which ghouls of every variety set upon him and there was no pattern to the horror, I should agree with your suspicion of delirium tremens, and we should not be assisting him. If conversely he suffered from trauma which somehow created a tragic idée fixe regarding this room, and were it always identical, this morning I should have had my feet up before a roaring fire. But what do you make of the visions as he has actually told them to us?”
“They seem unlikely in the extreme.”
“But not impossible! Mark that, Watson. None of it is impossible. Now, he claims to have been taken three times. The place to which he is spirited is very specific as he paints it: it is well furnished with a comfortable bed, a walnut desk, and dark green curtains. It is always night when he arrives, and the light is tinged with blu
e. He is locked within, and his cries are met with no reaction save when the hooded man arrives with the chloroform rag—and I think it apparent this same hooded man absconds with him in the first place. He always hears a woman pleading and weeping. Each time, she has grown more agitated, and the man’s answering voice more insistent.”
“All of this could be mere delusion. Why blue light of all things?”
“Does nothing suggest itself to you?”
“Apparently not.”
“Well, well, never mind, then. It is perfectly clear to me, however. In fact, I made it the starting point of my investigation, though my search has not yielded results as of yet.”
When he did not explain further, I understood that, as was most often the case, he had no intention of doing so. “You sound so definite. How are you sure of Mr. Falconer’s story?”
“Because when he awakens, he is in Covent Garden.”
“What bearing can that have?”
“If he were dreaming, would he not regain consciousness in Hyde Park, where he in his fashion resides?”
Pausing, I considered. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Granted, thinking is not your vocation, but you might have given it a touch more effort.”
I knew better than to rise to such desiccated bait. “All you are saying may be true, but it remains unlikely that we’ll ever get to the bottom of it unless we can comprehend what they want him for in the first place. Radical medical research? Some deranged idea of sport? Nothing can be answered before we understand why.”
Laughing, Holmes clapped me on the shoulder. “A more dignified and logical response could be expected of no man save you to the best of my knowledge, Watson, though I admit I haven’t met everyone. However, your perspective evinces a degree of pessimism I fail to share. We are not entirely helpless.”
“Really?” I brightened. “What can we do? You said the clue of the blue light has come to nothing thus far.”
“No, but it will come to something. And we can dog his steps. I’ve set an Irregular on the task with strictest orders to interfere in no way should he feel the smallest bit uneasy. I’ve dark misgivings regarding this case.”
“Because it seems to be based upon the ravings of a lunatic?”
“No,” he corrected me, slipping his hands into his pockets. “Because hooded men are dangerous when unmasked, and I aim to unmask one.”
I saw little of my friend during the next few days, but often watched as a bushy-bearded worker with the thick leather gloves of an ironsmith vanished from our lodgings only to appear again after nightfall and emerge from Holmes’s bedroom wearing his dressing gown and a guarded expression. Thus I heard nothing more of Mr. Falconer’s case until one night when Holmes and I sat in a corner of a shabby café in Bethnal Green Road, sipping coffee following a simple repast. As to what on earth we were doing so far from Westminster I had no notion, for Holmes after sending me a telegram advising me of the appointment had done nothing save comment upon the occupation of Peking and praise the establishment’s admittedly passable shepherd’s pie. Since over the many years of our acquaintance I have taken diminishing pleasure in asking questions that will go unanswered, I expressed only mild surprise at our environs, and waited for Holmes to perform his conjuring trick.
“Do you find the night too bitter for a brief walk?” my friend asked, an impish smile playing at the edges of his mouth.
“No indeed. Doubtless it will lead us to whatever you mean to show me.”
Holmes made a rueful noise as he settled the bill. “If you grow any more apt at observation and inference, I shall have no stock of surprises left. Come, we’ve only a few blocks to travel, and I admit I think this may interest you.”
The night was frigid indeed, with creeping tendrils of fog crawling through the alleys and sinister ice crystals painted in the cracked windowpanes. I ducked deeply into my collar and Holmes did likewise, with only the high arc of his nose betraying his identity. Though Bethnal Green Road was exceedingly populous—indeed, notoriously so—as it was drawing close to ten o’clock, we were the only pedestrians save for hard-seeming men with bitter, cast-down eyes. We had been walking for only about two minutes when we reached Ainsley Street, and as we turned onto this narrower thoroughfare, I came to a halt with a low groan.
“Oh, what an idiot you must think me!” I lamented.
“Not at all. I reached the conclusion that Mr. Falconer’s story seemed to you so outlandish and yet so distressingly familiar that a further stretch of the imagination was beyond your scope,” he returned easily.
We faced a simple red brick house trimmed in peeling white, matching those on the other side of the impoverished street, exactly as Mr. Falconer had described them—but interrupting the moldering residences was a police station, its familiar beacon of blue light shining upon the filthy pavement and the mottled trunks of the plane trees.
“This is J Division,” Holmes remarked. “Bethnal Green and environs, added by the Yard in eighteen eighty-six owing to the alarmingly rapid expansion of the city. I would have introduced you to it earlier, but I wanted to identify the exact house. It is this one, number forty-six Ainsley Street.”
“How do you know?”
“Doubtless you have wondered where I’ve been for the past few days. As soon as I identified which police station’s light Mr. Falconer observed, I made it my business to loiter here incognito. As Bethnal Green is an infamous slum, it wouldn’t have done for me to lurk in respectable tweeds, you understand. The house immediately to the left of the station possesses an exceedingly tall resident, with a physician’s sign in the front window. His name is Dr. Elijah Ashman.”
“The hooded man?” I exclaimed.
“Such is my working hypothesis.”
“But who would practice medicine in such a place?”
Holmes’s eyes gleamed beneath the brim of his hat. “Who would practice medicine in a house no one calls upon, to boot?”
We stood across from the house in question, conversing—but we fell instantly silent when its door opened and a woman appeared, quietly but respectably dressed, the cobalt illumination lending her appearance an otherworldly quality. Holmes gripped my arm.
“Hullo!” he exclaimed. “And here we could well have the distraught female in question.”
The strange woman’s face was indeed pinched with worry. She walked at a brisk pace toward the main road and Holmes followed at a short distance, I at his side. When she reached the wider thoroughfare and seemed to cast about for a cab, Holmes slid up next to her and said, “Madam, I wonder whether I might have a word with you?”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, whirling.
She was small and thin, with dark hair and a petite upturned nose, wearing a good-quality grey cloak lined with red. I should have thought her pretty in an unremarkable fashion save for her blinking brown eyes, which were somewhat vacant and altogether haunted.
“Do I know you?” Her voice was tremulous. “This is not a part of London where I feel easy in my mind speaking to strangers.”
“Nor indeed should you, but you are quite safe with us. I am Sherlock Holmes, and this is my friend Dr. Watson. We were, in fact, desirous to know whether we could assist you in any fashion. You appeared distressed when you exited that house, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”
“I see,” she said in relief. “Well, that is all right then. I am Mrs. Sarah Pattison, but my husband has been deceased these five years—one of his ships was lost at sea—and he never did like my answering strange men, as he always called me too trusting by half. But I can tell that you are gentlemen and mean me no harm.”
I glanced at Holmes during this rambling confession, but he did not appear the smallest bit impatient.
“You honor us, Mrs. Pattison,” he said smoothly. “Ah! Here is a cab. Might we share it with you en route to more salutary environs, and
might you tell us what a woman of your obvious good character is doing visiting a physician in Bethnal Green of all places? In your husband’s absence, it would ease my mind to know you arrived home safely.”
“An escort would be most welcome.” She fretted at one of her gloves, glancing from side to side. “It’s dreadful hereabouts, just dreadful. I’d not be here at all if my brother James were not friends with Dr. Ashman, who lives in poverty only because he practices such an obscure branch of medicine. He is a psychologist. He is trying to bring James back from the brink and—I’m sorry,” she murmured as she dissolved in tears. “My brother has fallen into a life of terrible dissolution and hardly knows himself. It’s too terrible to contemplate.”
Holmes handed her up into the waiting cab. “You must tell us about it, and we shall see you safe home.”
Mystified both at Mrs. Pattison’s words and at her absent, almost childlike way of enunciating them, I followed Holmes into the four-wheeler. Mrs. Pattison gave her address as Cockspur Street near to Trafalgar Square, and we pulled away from the grim suburb, Holmes polite but intent and I determined to say nothing lest his powers of persuasion be interrupted and her steady flow of chatter stopped. The gas lamps we passed flickered wanly against our faces through the shaded windows, illuminating us in unnerving glimpses.
“James was always wild, but I never thought he should come to this pass,” Mrs. Pattison lamented, drawing back her hood. “He fell in with a bad lot, Mr. Holmes, and entirely lost his self-respect—he has nearly ruined himself, and if Dr. Ashman cannot help him, I shall despair. Since my husband died, James was all I had in the world, and indeed he lived off an allowance I gave him inherited from the shipping concern. Now I write out the checks to Dr. Ashman instead, to settle my brother’s debts, for it really wouldn’t be appropriate for me to meet with such low types and James would only spend it all on drink. Oh, to think that he doesn’t recognize his own sister any longer! It’s heartbreaking. I shan’t be able to bear it if he dies alone, in the cold, not knowing himself. He fancies himself an opera singer, Mr. Holmes. Can you imagine? His voice has always been stirring, but he is a clerk at a maritime warehouse.”
