Sherlock Holmes

by Martin Rosenstock

  “Just a moment.” We’d skipped a key point. “You actually said yes?”

  “Naturally I did,” he snapped. “Watson’s nerves when first he arrived here disinclined him to forge many new acquaintances. Why, I myself only met him through a common acquaintance at Bart’s. He’d never have taken digs with me if not for the merest whim of fair fortune. Since that time, whether thanks to disinterest or laziness, he has managed to pass eight years living in the greatest city on this remarkable planet, and the one most fully stocked with upstanding folk to boot, with no better options for a best man than the humble fellow you see before you.”

  If you are humble, then I am the King of Zululand.

  “You’ve attended weddings, yes?” he urged.

  I nodded. I’d worn tails to Hannah Lestrade’s wedding to Verle Crowley, a handsome and ambitious gentleman who’d wanted to make his mark on the tea securities market. When that didn’t work out, he made other marks. Mainly on my sister’s person.

  “Then you simply must assist me, because this book – I imagined one penned by an American would surely be franker – is rubbish.”

  Mr. Holmes looked so tragic that, had it not been for yesterday’s significant anniversary, I would have smiled.

  “I’ve conducted extensive researches ever since the British Library opened its doors this morning,” he fretted. “Are you aware that the origins of this charming tradition lie with the Germanic Goths, and that it was the best man’s happy task to help kidnap a presumably unwilling maiden? The Vandals took this honoured role rather further, by arming the best man lest the groom be attacked by the bride’s vengeful family. As I’ve no intention of clubbing Miss Morstan – who is very quick and clever, and might well prevent me – nor of fending off her male relations, as they are deceased, I am mystified.”

  “Have you even been to bed yet?”

  “No, why do you ask?”

  “Never mind.” Rolling my eyes, I enquired, “But just where do I come into it?”

  “What am I to do? I already served as matchmaker and lost half the rent by it, not to mention a constant sounding board and a man who can always see his way safe to the end of a fracas.” His rail-thin arms spread like bats’ wings, an expression of genuine helplessness on his drawn face, mixed with something deeper I couldn’t begin to parse. “What role, if any, do I play now?”

  “You actually want to make a good job of this,” I realised, gaping.

  “Of course, I do!” he cried. “You’re talking of a soldier, a sturdy comrade, a chap who doesn’t shirk or slink or shy away – not from Ghazis, nor poisonous snakes, nor even the Ku Klux Klan, for God’s sake.”

  “The good doctor deserves all you say he does, but it’s not very like you to care about such a thing, is it?”

  “Naturally I care. Personal self-respect likewise enters the picture.” His thin upper lip curled in disgust. “After my visit to the library proved sterile, I went to my usual bookseller just now; the man has never once failed me previously, until he gave me that steaming pile of printed tripe.”

  “Really all that bad, is it?”

  With an actual snarl, and the weird quickness so odd for a man of his height, he sprang forward and snatched it from me. Mr. Holmes quickly found a page.

  “‘The consideration of whom to take for your wife is of utmost import,’” he sneered in an uncanny American drawl. “‘Imagine that she hides within her bosom the empty soul of a heartless termagant? Picture yourself sitting meekly listening to her prattle; or caring for your progeny with your own hands, while she goes to the women’s rights convention; or arriving home from a long day of toil with no promise of a kiss, or a caress; or seating yourself for the sacred tradition of familial supper, choking down dry, sour bread and burnt coffee?’”

  He made three long strides to my little stove and threw the book onto the coals.

  “It’s the most invidious fiddle-faddle I’ve ever read.” Mr. Holmes loomed over me with that hungry cat’s expression he gets. Poised to bite, or scratch, or hiss at the very least. “Since when does the woman pose to the man any risk whatsoever in the state of holy wedlock? She loses her property, her holdings, her freedoms, sometimes her very life, and for what? When a man marries, his last rational thought leaves his head; when a woman marries, she never had any in the first place.”

  “Excuse me?” said I, coldly.

  He didn’t notice. He’s like that sometimes, a cannonade, and all you can do is duck. Pacing, he made a few sweeping turns.

  “I grant that women can be powerfully conniving creatures – Miss Morstan is quite unimpeachable, by the by. Believe me, I made certain of that. But a woman can be scorned, railed at, imprisoned, abused, ignored, even horsewhipped, and so long as it’s done by her beloved helpmeet, it’s all perfectly legal. Any woman would have to be insane to enter into such an arrangement, or else pitiably slow.”

  “That’s not the case,” I growled, feeling my shoulders pushing themselves backwards. “Some do it for money or title, I suppose, but others do it for love.”

  “Love,” he snorted. “An outmoded evolutionary drive homologised by the Church, or simply a crude commercial transaction cloaked in a fairy tale? Oh, never mind.” He sighed, taking a resigned puff at his cigar. “I can’t imagine why I came to you in the first place. The very idea that a bachelor Peeler could know the first thing about the matrimonial state must be evidence I’m still intoxicated.”

  “Get out.”

  “Hmm?”

  He’d pursed his mouth into a question. I hadn’t realised I’d been whispering.

  “I said get out.”

  Mr. Holmes huffed a breath, surprised for once. God knows, he had it coming to him. I stood there, fair shaking with rage, while he peered down from on high.

  He cocked his head like a bird. Not regretful, just puzzled.

  “By the Lord Harry, get out!” I must have looked like a bantam fixing to fight a jaguar. I didn’t care. “If you’re not gone in under ten seconds, I’ll tell Gregson who really hid the Countess of Bessborough’s body in those catacombs. Because we both know full well that it wasn’t her son. I agreed with you – the real guilty party had been punished more than enough, and I didn’t say a word. But make yourself scarce double quick or I’ll tell the man probably next in line for chief inspector that Sherlock Holmes regularly lies to the Yard.”

  The cigar hung limp in the detective’s hand. His mouth was actually open.

  It was the only remotely satisfying thing about his visit.

  “Not another word,” I hissed, pointing at the door. “Get out.”

  When he’d swanned off, I sat down at my desk. Just shaking. Not really thinking, not any more. Not even about Hannah.

  If Sherlock Holmes so much as comes within ten feet of me at a crime scene again, he’ll have to watch out for a fist in his face. I tried to breathe slowly, focus on the case I’d been approached with.

  Of course I couldn’t, though. So I threw on my bowler and ulster and walked home. Past the corner where the Italian beggar sets up the tightropes for his trained mice in better weather. Past the chestnut vendors blowing on their fingers and the acrid, velvety fumes from the ironworks and the pale feet of the gutter children glowing like grub worms. Not really feeling the cold myself. Not feeling anything but an emptiness where an ache should have been.

  Because I’d thought back on what Mr. Holmes had really been saying. If you take away the insults, he wasn’t far wrong. And it wasn’t until I’d knocked the sludge from my boots that I realised I’d been limping horribly all the way here.

  Entry in the diary of Inspector Geoffrey Lestrade

  Monday, 7 January 1889 (cont.)

  Too much excitement today. Not a bit tired, so I’ll set down Millie Sparks’s tale in writing while it’s still reasonably fresh. Two hours before Mr. Holmes arrived, Miss Millie Sparks walked into my office bright as a new penny, sat herself down, gave her name, and listed her occupation and address: under-hou
semaid, 17 Somerleyton Road, Brixton.

  I stopped writing then. She wasn’t an under-housemaid. Some folk have it hard, and women have it harder, and some women even harder than others. And I’d never be so churlish as to assume a woman was no better than she should be simply because she was poor. But under-housemaids have more muscle than draft horses. Downcast eyes, for the most part. And hands cracked like cobblestones from all the lye and the vinegar and the lead-black and whatnot it takes to keep their “betters” feeling like they’ve the cleanest house in the row.

  This woman’s serge dress was cheap but not sombre, forest green, cheered by scraps of mismatched ribbon and lace. It was also cut low enough to bar her from entering public museums, let’s say. Her arms were thin, not strong. Her honey-coloured hair was frizzled with cheap curls, her wide froggy mouth turned down with worry and smeared with lip rouge. Blue eyes active as a sparrow’s, and bold as a tomcat’s. And her hands were perfectly normal.

  So she wasn’t an under-housemaid. I’ll put it that way.

  “It’s on account o’ me sister. That would be Miss Willie Sparks, spinster.” She scooted forward in her chair. “Ain’t ye going to make a note to keep us straight? Mam done birthed her first, christened her Wilhemina Sparks, and then I come after, and Mam already takin’ such a shine to the sound of it, named me Milhemina Sparks, but them bein’ our Sunday names if ye like, and fer the rest o’ the week just plain Willie and Millie.”

  Trying not to smile, I dutifully wrote it down. “So, the elder Miss Wilhemina Sparks, spinster, and the younger Miss Milhemina Sparks…”

  “Under-housemaid,” she affirmed.

  “What’s happened, Miss Sparks?”

  She inched so close I feared she’d fall off the chair. “Only that me dear, sweet sister Wilhemina done been snuffed, Inspector.”

  I blinked.

  “Croaked,” she obliged.

  “No, I know what it—”

  “Though she mightn’t ha’ laid down the old knife and fork just yet, pray God.” Tears stood in Miss Sparks’s eyes. “I only know as she done been spirited away, like. By snatchers. They’re everywhereabouts, and me sister Willie was napped, and I beg ye to find her afore it’s too late. Though it may be already, by now. Who knows?”

  “If you suspect your sister was kidnapped, Miss Sparks, who do you imagine would do such a thing?”

  “I done told ye, snatchers. But ye never wrote it down, so ye fergot. Better write it now, to be safe.”

  “I mean to say, do you suspect she might have been taken to a particular location?”

  “Who could know any such thing?” Miss Millie Sparks tilted her eyes at the ceiling. “But lemme give it a think, like. Folk what done get napped could end up in all sorts o’ dreadful scrapes… Maybe Bethnal Green? Shoreditch, as far off as Newcastle? If they done made it to the Thames and took a boat, though, could be any foul place. Africa? Canada, maybe. I hear tell what there’s the dreadfullest scallywags there, who’d skin ye as soon as look at ye, sell yer ’ide fer a pelt, and then roast the guts fer supper. I hope to Christ ’tisn’t Canada, Inspector, I most devoutly pray so.”

  My head was spinning. Dropping my pen, I rubbed my eyes.

  “When did your sister—”

  “Miss Wilhemina Sparks, spinster.”

  “When did she go missing?”

  “Who could say, sir? Coulda been six in the morn. Coulda been just as the church bells tolled noon. But when I done went to her crib, and up the stairs to her bedroom, she weren’t there.”

  I’ll admit, I was ready to throw her out on her ear. But when I tried, she gripped the arms of her chair as she delivered her story. And I’ll be hanged if it wasn’t just odd enough to be true.

  Miss Millie Sparks had been estranged from her sister Miss Willie Sparks for some ten years (she being twenty-five years of age now, and her elder sibling twenty-nine). She claimed this was thanks to a difference in temperament, and a squabble over inheritance when their mother died, and a beau, and a mysterious betrayal (I suspected it had rather more to do with Miss Millie Sparks’s choice of vocation). One day though, as my visitor was out “taking a constitutional like what I does every afternoon,” she chanced upon an old friend of the family and begged to know how her sister was faring, as their parents were both long departed.

  The family friend told Miss Millie Sparks that her sister was very unwell indeed. A recluse, in fact. Shut in, renting a single furnished room. Relying on the widowed proprietress to cook and clean and go to the shops. Apparently, after their mother and father passed, Willie Sparks fell in love. She met a man at a pub and they courted. Exchanged gifts and tokens and letters. He vanished six months later along with a goodly percentage of her inheritance, having known the whereabouts of certain valuable securities. Willie Sparks had been the sole keeper of this sum, her sister “not needin’ handouts, thank ye” (having spent hers, I took it). Understandably, following these tragedies and betrayals, Willie Sparks got in the dumps.

  Miss Millie Sparks did not allow grass to grow under her feet upon hearing this news. After discovering her sister’s address in South Lambeth, she marched there, banged on the door, and barged in.

  “And weren’t she a sight fer sore eyes!” Millie Sparks gushed, dabbing away tears. “Me own dearest Willie, brought low and without a chum in the world and ready to let bygones be bygones. ’Twere something to see, Inspector. Fergiveness. There could have been a sermon done writ about us, though it beats me which of us were the prodigal!”

  Afterwards, Millie Sparks took to visiting her sister every day; and Willie always received her, since, after all, she never went out, and by this time was far enough gone to be stubborn over staying that way. Until the previous afternoon, that is – the landlady opened the door, reported that “Miss Willie had gone away to be married”, and then shooed Millie away like she was chasing a rat out of the larder.

  “It fair broke me heart it did, sir.” By now my visitor was sobbing. “To have me sister back, and then, then live to see her snatched, that’s what, by fiends, and who could tell in this great world the names o’ the culprits? John? Sam? Jim? I can’t. So I done run up to a bluebottle trudging his circle, and he laughed at me and said be off, and threatened to have me shut up in a cell if I wouldn’t scarper. Please get me sister back, Inspector! She’s the only kin left to me in the world, she is.”

  Knowing something about sisters, I asked a few more questions. Her sister’s landlady’s name and address. How I could reach her (she primly gave the name of a pub owned by a “chum what can track me down right quick”). When I sent her on her way, she was calmer, but bereft. I know the look.

  There’s nothing else I know about the matter, though. How does a body find a friendless woman who went off with a strange man? There are needles in haystacks that would be easier to trace.

  But two things I’m convinced of. Women deserve someone to fight for them, no matter their lot or their station. And every word Miss Millie Sparks told me, however ridiculous, was true.

  Entry in the diary of Inspector Geoffrey Lestrade

  Tuesday, 8 January 1889

  Every so often, the higher-ups at Great Scotland Yard decide to shake the trees; I’ve been through department secretarial supply audits, demands to know how much in fines we garnered as constables, even the barmy request that we “add together all the days spent in incarceration by those whom you have assisted in apprehending”. I’d forgotten all about it, I suppose. But this morning I was charged with making a brief account of every unsolved case I’d ever had.

  In other words, a guided tour of personal shortcomings.

  So when Dr. Watson arrived, preceded by a cheery knock, he found me thus: papers scattered on my desk like October leaves, my tie off and collar undone, my hair like a hedgehog’s from scraping my nails through it, an empty coffee jug beside me, and my brow slumped on my fist.

  “Good heavens!” he exclaimed.

  “Don’t worry, Doctor,” said I, sul
lenly. “It’s much worse than it looks.”

  Dr. Watson made as if to put his hat and coat on the rack but hesitated. Then he turned back towards the door.

  “Where are you going?” I exclaimed.

  “Please don’t bother over me, Inspector – your mind appears to be all too fully occupied. Forget I was here!”

  “No, come in, do come in, and then have a drink with me,” I groaned. “If I keep at this one second longer, the lot of it is going out that window. Just a moment, though. Is, er, does Mr. Holmes—?”

  “I’m here entirely on my own recognisance, Inspector.”

  “Then by all means sit down and I’ll pour some much-needed fortifications.”

  He approached with rueful caution. “I do believe I recognise that look. I wore it every day in eighteen seventy-eight.”

  “Which was?”

  “My final year of medical school at the University of London.”

  “Ah, well then it can’t have been this look, because I happen to know you didn’t fail medical school.”

  “Exacting work, is it?”

  “No, demoralising.”

  “Oh, well I certainly won’t ask you another word about it then. To your good health, Inspector!”

  We toasted. When Dr. Watson finished, he set the glass neatly on my desk, his bowler on his left knee and his gloves in his right hand, smiling at me in commiseration.

  For all I’m still fit to be tied over Mr. Holmes and his remarks, I shouldn’t have supposed he’d be as callous over the doctor’s feelings as he would, say, over mine. No gentleman would go so far against his conscience as to abuse Dr. Watson, because Dr. Watson is just about the warmest, steadiest fellow you could hope to meet. And whatever else Mr. Holmes is, I’ll admit that he’s a gentleman. The doctor looked worn – but in a happy, comfortable vein. Worn like a woodland path or worn like a favourite shirt. Afghanistan had almost ruined him when first we met. Little shivers, sharp glances, dark skin creased and sagging like discarded packing paper. In a morose humour, I’d given him a year in London before fleeing for some coastal village. And a month before Mr. Holmes lost interest in the poor devil. Neither, happily, came true.