by A S Croyle
He closed his journal. “At twenty minutes past nine, there were over a hundred persons in the hall and perhaps another four hundred on the range. Now, it must be conceded that they were quite orderly, trying not to push, the women engaged in conversation, the men generally silent. But the staff,” he added proudly, “made short work of it. By eleven the room was nearly empty.”
I understood his gratification at this feat. Clearing the hall was accomplished by a junior assistant physician, three casualty physicians, of which this man likely was in concert, an assistant surgeon and four house surgeons and their dressers. Uncle said it was not unusual for over thirty thousand patients to be processed through the hall in a year, and he said all of it was done with a glitter of wit and the greatest dignity and virtue.
“But,” he said, “my fatigue is not due solely to my morning duties. I was cajoled into a race in the wee hours last night.”
“A race, sir?”
“Which I lost miserably,” he said laughing. “I had just finished treating a battery of votaries of Bacchus who were unable to reach their homes or even say where they lived. So, we let them stay to restore themselves to consciousness. And then there I was at two in the morning, running from Oxford Circus to Holburn Circus, though I had to be on duty before eight this morning. But I ran anyway, against Dr. Willoughby Furner and Dr. Ormerod, both alumni of the Rugby School.” He shook his head and added, “What was I thinking?” he laughed.
I did not know Dr. Furner, but I was acquainted with Dr. Joseph Ardene Ormerod. He and his family lived on Wimpole Street; Uncle and Aunt Susan knew him well. He’d recently written an article about diseases of the spinal cord, and Uncle was co-authoring an abstract regarding tumors of the cerebellum for a medical journal, Brain - A Journal of Neurology. Uncle and Dr. Ormerod shared a keen interest in the workings of the brain and neurological diseases, especially ataxia.
I laughed and asked, “Are you sure you were not in the company of these votaries of Bacchus yourself to so indulge in such a marathon?”
“No, I was not. I was coaxed from writing poetry.”
“Poetry?”
“Yes,” he said, his chest puffing. “I published my first book of poems just last year.”
“How on earth do you find the time?”
“We find the time to pursue those endeavours which interest us most.”
“And that is not medicine?”
He smiled again. “I believe the muse and St. Luke are a bit at odds with each other where I am concerned.”
I was about to ask him if I could read some of his poetry when Sherlock came dashing across the courtyard.
I glanced at the little silver watch pinned to my lapel.
“Yes, I know,” Sherlock said through heavy breaths. “I am a bit tardy. But Poppy, I’ve just discovered that Dr. Haviland keeps bees here! They obtain nectar from the sunflowers growing on the banks of the river. I must make a list of the equipment I need to start studying hives in earnest.”
“And why the sudden fascination with bees?” I asked.
“Not sudden. Bees have always intrigued me because they are logical and orderly,” Sherlock said.
“Pardon me?”
He sat down on the bench next to me. “Bees are highly evolved insects that engage in a variety of complex tasks not practiced by the multitude of solitary insects.”
“Ah,” I said, smiling. “So they are social creatures. They see the value of living in an organized family group.”
He all but rolled his eyes. “Even highly developed creatures generally have a flaw or two,” he quipped. “But, yes, their behaviours indicate they communicate, they have a complex manner of nest construction, monitor environmental controls and defences, and have an established division of the labour within their colonies. They might be the most fascinating creatures on earth. According to Dr. Haviland - you know Dr. Haviland, don’t you, Poppy?”
I shook my head and the young poet/physician piped up and said, “He is a house physician. We are all indebted for his work regarding a tedious case of empyema and evacuation of the pleural sac.”
“Why, yes!” Sherlock said. “It was written up in The Lancet. In January of 1873, I believe.”
“Quite,” said the young man.
“Now, a honey bee colony consists of three kinds of adult bees,” Sherlock continued. “Workers, drones, and a queen. Several thousand worker bees cooperate in nest building, food collection, and so on. Each bee has a definite task to perform, related to its adult age, although survival and reproduction take the combined efforts of the entire colony.”
“Generally, reproduction does take a combined effort, Sherlock,” I said with a smile.
He ignored my inference.
“In addition to thousands of worker adults, a colony normally has a single queen and several hundred drones during late spring and summer. The social structure of the colony is maintained by the presence of the queen.”
“Oh, I quite like that. A queen in charge.”
Ignoring my comment yet again, he said, “According to Dr. Haviland, the presence of bees is very important to the future of humanity.”
“How so?”
“They pollinate, Poppy. Harvests depend upon them. Almond orchards, for example. Oh!” he exclaimed, jumping up as he uttered the word almond. “Poppy, we must get going.”
Finally, the poet stood and extended his hand to Sherlock. “Sir, my name is Dr. Robert Bridges. You are-”
“Sherlock Holmes. A pleasure to make your acquaintance. What are you writing there?” he added, nodding toward Bridges’ journal.
“Oh, just a hospital report.”
“But he also writes poetry,” I interjected.
Sherlock gave his head a little shake.
When Dr. Bridges took his leave of us and wished us a good day, Sherlock stared after him and said, “Another poet,” he mumbled, referring obviously to Oscar Wilde. “You do attract them like-”
“Bees to honey?” I asked.
“Exactly.”
“A doctor who writes poetry. A waste of a scientific mind,” he added. “Nothing shall come of it.”
We did not know then, of course, that the young physician we had just met would be England’s Poet Laureate from 1913-1930.
“Come, Poppy,” Sherlock urged. “I have much to show you.”
A few minutes later, I was once again standing in the pathology lab of St. Bart’s, staring at the thin, lanky, mopey, impossible man who was well on his way to becoming the world’s most famous detective.
9
As I entered the lab, I stared at him, assessing him. He never changes, I thought. But then I realized that though he looked the same, he had matured tremendously in the four years since we met. No longer the odd Oxford fellow, his expression revealed a new confidence. He had set out to become the world’s first and only consulting detective... or if not the only one, then the best. If at the tender age of twenty-four he was not there yet, he was certainly getting close. His dark hair tousled and unkempt, Sherlock quickly tossed his morning frock over the counter, took his place behind the microscope, and focused on whatever was on the slide beneath it.
An English gentleman, rarely did he abandon his cat-like tidiness, but in the privacy of his room back at Oxford, while he was playing melancholy tunes on his violin, he often donned one of his many dressing gowns. These days, in the lab, he gave precious little thought to his appearance or anything but that upon which he was working... solving the problem, the case, was all that mattered at those times, and he forgot about the current standards of fashion, as well as about eating or sleeping.
“You look thin, Sherlock. Are you eating? Are you - ?”
His head shot up and he said, “Oh, Poppy, come in!” It was as if he had forgotten completely that I had just fol
lowed him into the lab.
“Do come in! I need your assistance.”
“My assistance?” I was incredulous. “What is it?”
“In a moment. But first, a gift for you,” he said, reaching down to the floor to pick up a package.
“A gift? What is the occasion?”
“Is this not the first anniversary of the Grand Opening of your medical practice?”
I nodded but the reminder almost made me cringe. My practice had not been much of a success.
“Congratulations,” Sherlock said.
“I am not at all sure congratulations are in order. This year has been neither profitable nor satisfying.”
“Times will change, Poppy,” he urged. “Just a few years ago, a medical school in England which allowed women to attend and obtain a medical degree was pure fantasy. Now, look at you. You have graduated. You are a medical doctor. You treat patients as a physician, not as a nurse or an apothecary.”
“A few patients, Sherlock,” I agreed, “but put emphasis on the word ‘few.’”
I untied the red ribbon and opened the box. I removed the trumpet-shaped wooden tube.
“A stethoscope?”
“When I visited your office last week, I noticed that yours was quite bent and worn.”
“It was second-hand.”
“Well, that,” he said, “is because you stubbornly refused to accept anything beyond the small loan you obtained from your uncle to commence your practice. However,” he added, pointing to the new one, “that should remedy one need. Will it suffice?”
“Yes, it’s perfect. Thank you so much.”
“Good. Did you know that a French physician invented the instrument so he could examine a very fat woman whose heart he could not hear when he pressed his ear to her chest? Necessity is the mother of invention. And I have just learned that a British scientist has used a galvanometer to measure electric impulses from the brains of animals.”
“Yes, Richard Caton,” I said.
“Quite right. Astounding. I think remarkable inventions are on the horizon, Poppy. I do wish I would live to see all the medical tools and scientific and forensic advancements that the next hundred years will bring.”
“Why, Mr. Holmes, don’t you plan to live forever?” I quipped.
“I do, of course. I should like to attain immortality. That would be quite the invention, wouldn’t it? At least my monographs will succeed me.”
He placed the stethoscope around my neck, took me by the arm, and without further conversation, he guided me to St. Bart’s mortuary.
As we walked, I stared at his gift, pondering how few times I had actually used any of the equipment in my medical office.
Female doctors were still not trusted or visited by most of the general public. Bart’s had a casualty ward, but I had not been able to convince anyone there to hire me to work in it nor had any of the other hospitals in London opened a triage department, a goal I had set for myself after Uncle Ormond and I had treated the injured at the site of the horrible train collision.
I was not the only female doctor who had been unsuccessful. Of the twenty-five young women who entered the freshman class at the London School of Medicine for Women, the first in Britain to open its door to women, only a handful graduated. It was not until the year I matriculated, in 1877, that an agreement was finally reached with the Royal Free Hospital to allow our students to complete their clinical studies there, so I thanked God every day for the experience I garnered under my uncle’s tutelage. Some of my classmates dropped out and became apothecaries. Some obtained a midwife’s degree from the Obstetrical Society. One woman, Alice Vickery, passed the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s examination. She became the first qualified female chemist and druggist. But there were only five women who were practicing medicine in the whole Kingdom, and we were not well received by the public.
Eventually things began to change, just as Sherlock said they would. Women in medicine and other professions earned respect. The roles of women began to move away from the stereotypes of the sad Lily Bart of The House of Mirth and most of the females portrayed in Little Women... we started to see as many ‘Jo’s as ‘Amy’s.’ The restlessness of even the most well-born of women was exposed by Nobel Prize winner Edith Wharton and other writers. But at the time, I was certain that Britain’s orthodoxy regarding gender was unyielding.
When we entered the morgue, Sherlock threw back the sheet that covered a man in his early forties. A dead man, of course.
“It’s a corpse.”
“Elementary, my dear Dr. Stamford.”
“You haven’t robbed any graves, have you?”
Knowing his propensity toward scientific methods and how studying the dead might impact solving crimes among the living, I put nothing past him.
“Fresh corpses are useful, to be sure, but I leave grave robbing to those still seeking profit as Resurrectionists.”
“I am glad to hear you have not resorted to that,” I said.
The so-called Resurrectionists - grave robbers with a fancy name - capitalized on the fact that dead bodies were much sought after by scientists and physicians for the study of human anatomy, so they commanded a premium price; seven to ten pounds each had once been the going rate. The best sources were mass graves or pits in which paupers were buried. Until the laws changed in 1820, it was an easy way to make money, almost as easy as the heinous baby-farming industry that still plagued the British Empire.
These most monstrous practices had endured, but fortunately, public outcry and new regulations had diminished both. Though bodies were certainly useful in the study of anatomy and physiology, particularly in medical schools, the law provided for cheap, legal cadavers by turning over to medical schools the bodies of those who died in caretaker institutions and prisons, thus discouraging grave robbers.
“This, Poppy,” Sherlock said, “is one of several men who have recently died under similar and suspicious circumstances. He died just twenty-four hours after the one who was reported in the newspaper today.”
“And... why have you called upon me, Sherlock?”
“Your uncle is out of town, lecturing in Scotland, is he not?”
Uncle Ormond was indeed in Edinburgh, lecturing to first-year medical students on the subject of toxicology and its usefulness in determining the cause of death and how that knowledge could be useful in criminal investigations. The faculty there had been courting him for some time, hoping to convince him to take a permanent position as a professor in pathology.
“Yes, he is, but there is a coroner here in London, and if there are suspicious circumstances surrounding this man’s death, he will summon a jury and investigate how the deceased died. He will interview members of the family and there will be an inquest and-”
“Oh, but you know how the people of this city are; they love a spectacle.”
I had to admit that was true. Coroner’s inquests were frequently held in public houses or in the open air; rumours quickly spread through the excited crowds who clamoured for a verdict, even if it was not substantiated by any evidence.
“Lestrade wants to keep this quiet. But soon it will be public knowledge. Did you read the article in the newspaper as I requested?”
“No, but Oscar told me about it when we had lunch today.”
“How is Oscar?” he asked, but his attention was fixed upon the corpse. He held a magnifying glass over the men’s fingernails and studied them.
“He seems well. He’s trying hard to rid himself of his Irish accent. He seems desperate to be a true Londoner.”
“Hmm,” he responded. Sherlock cared little for trivial facts that might clutter his brain.
“I’m a bit worried about him. He seems enamoured with Lillie Langtry.”
“The actress?”
“Yes, who als
o happens to be the mistress to our Prince.”
He murmured, “Hmm” again.
“It could do Oscar harm, Sherlock.”
“I agree Oscar should not interfere with the Prince’s affairs. Mr. Brown, the apothecary here, was saying the other day that Bertie is building a retreat for their trysts.”
“Yes, Oscar mentioned that.”
“Now where did I put my notes?” he asked himself. Picking up a notebook near the foot of the gurney, he said, “Here they are.” He clearly was disinterested in gossip and wished to proceed with his investigation. “It could be a serial killer, Poppy.”
“A what?”
“The person who killed this young man. This is not the first victim near the museum. It is the fifth such corpse in as many weeks. I think we have a serial killer on the loose.”
“A what?”
“A serial killer. A situation where several murders can be tied together.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing. Would you count the baby farmers as a series?”
“I would not. They were committed as separate events by many so-called Angel Makers with no specific time between them. Only the motivation to murder the children was the same - to make room for more out of greed. That is really the common denominator - the desire for profit.”
I looked down. “Yes, that’s true, of course. So these victims are not chosen at random?”
“No, Poppy, this was not some random spree. This is a series of murders and I believe they are linked, for several reasons, the first being that a small statue of Buddha and a dead bird were found next to each corpse, and the bodies were arranged in precisely the same manner. A murderer who chooses victims in a deliberate series or sequence, generally engaging in the same rituals or mode, is nothing new, of course. When I was investigating our prior case, I read about a French nobleman named Gilles de Rais in the fifteenth century who attacked children. He raped, tortured and killed them very methodically.”
“How many?”
“The estimate is over eight hundred.”
