Cry of the Innocents

by Cavan Scott

  Holmes whistled for his carriage and, after a word with his tramp-turned-driver, we were off.

  “Well?” I demanded, as the cab rocked to and fro.

  “Cole’s Blacking,” he replied.

  “The stuff from Lord Redshaw’s study? What about it?”

  “It’s the brand favoured by the Regent. Pots of the stuff were on display alongside the advertisement for Mr Powell’s services to the Regent’s patrons: ‘Shoes repaired and polished. A complete service.’ Surely you recognised the label?”

  “Why would I?” I exclaimed. “Besides, did you not say it was a popular brand?”

  “Indeed I did.”

  “So surely it must be favoured by boot-blacks on every street corner. Why make your way straight to the Regent?”

  “Because every investigation has to start somewhere. And besides, if we hadn’t visited the Regent we would not now be following Lady Marie Redshaw.”

  “We are?” I said, thrusting my head out of the window. Sure enough, another of Lord Redshaw’s carriages with its recognisable yellow trim was speeding ahead. Holmes’s driver kept a safe distance, so not to alert Marie’s man to the fact that we were in pursuit. “Where the devil is she heading?”

  “To the wrong side of town,” Holmes said, removing the heels from both shoes to balance his gait.

  The road narrowed as we descended into the dark heart of Bristol, crumbling tenement buildings clustered together as if crowding for warmth.

  “St Jude’s,” Holmes explained as I covered my nose with the back of my hand. As in all great cities, the physical boundaries between rich and poor in Bristol were wafer thin. We had travelled no more than two miles and already the cobbles had become uneven beneath the carriage’s wheels. Ragged children stood on every street corner, their eyes hollow with hunger, holding out bunches of wilting cress or matchboxes, desperate to earn a few pennies.

  We sped on, passing not only the destitute, but also Lady Marie’s carriage.

  “Holmes, she has stopped.”

  “And so shall we; although Rawnsey knows better than to come crashing to a halt behind a quarry, even if you do not. Really, Watson. You must learn to engage that brain of yours! How you survived a war I shall never know.”

  Trying hard not to take offence, I fumed as the driver brought us to a stop. Holmes was across the road before I had even exited the carriage. I did likewise and saw Holmes slip a shiny coin into the palm of a street urchin.

  “What was that?” I asked, as the girl scampered into a nearby porch.

  “That was a child,” Holmes replied. “Your powers of observation decline by the second.”

  “The money,” I growled.

  “A transaction. According to my grubby-faced informant, Lady Marie vanished into Parson’s Close.”

  “Are you sure?” I said, eyeing the cesspit of an alleyway with suspicion. “Why would she come here, of all places?”

  “Why indeed?” Holmes said, disappearing into the gloomy lane.

  My boots squelched in thick mud as I followed Holmes into Parson’s Close. At least I chose to believe it was mud. As we ventured deeper into the maze of passageways, tenements all but blocked out the sun on either side of us.

  “She came this way,” Holmes insisted, following a path through the muck that only he could see.

  “How do you know?” I asked, having long since lost my sense of direction.

  “Her dress has left a clear trail in the mud.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  But I could see for myself the tableau that greeted us as we turned a corner. Lady Marie was pinned against a wall, a blackened hand around her neck.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  BOYLE’S COURT

  The thug with his hand around Lady Marie’s throat glared at us as we froze in place. He was a big man, in a jacket and trousers that had more holes than one of my theories. His face was unshaven, a patch across one eye and a deep scar where a left ear should be.

  I have no doubt that Holmes would have sprinted to Marie’s aid, if not for the knife the villain held in his other hand, its point at her belly.

  “Let her go,” I demanded, but the man’s palm remained locked around Marie’s thin neck. The miscreant stared back at us like a cornered fox. He looked as though he were uncertain whether to run or stand his ground. We too hesitated. There was no way of knowing what the man would do to Lady Marie if we made the wrong choice.

  “Now listen,” Holmes said, one hand raised towards the fellow while the other clutched his cane. “No one wants any trouble…”

  “S’at right?” the brute growled in reply, showing a mouth largely untroubled by teeth. His one good eye flicked between Holmes and me. “Leave us be then. This ain’t got nuffink to do with you.”

  “You know we can’t do that,” Holmes said. “Besides, what would stop us going straight to the authorities?”

  The monster laughed, a thick ugly sound. “Authorities? You mean the police? Police don’t comes round here. No one comes round here; not fancy folk like thee, nor pretty things like this. And even if they does, they’ll never find I, not in a million years.”

  What the rascal said may well have been true, but they would certainly have heard his howl of pain and surprise as Lady Marie brought her knee up sharply into his unmentionables. He stumbled forward, but not far enough to send him sprawling into the mud as Marie tried to push him aside. Instead he turned, and for a moment I thought he was about to drive the knife into her side. He would have done so too, had Holmes not launched his cane at the degenerate with all the skill and strength of a Greek athlete. It soared through the air like a javelin, its rounded head hitting the scoundrel in the temple. He cried out, dropping his knife. Holmes sprang like a wildcat, barging the man away from Lady Marie. The two of them crashed to the ground in a mass of splayed limbs and clenched fists. The thug gained the upper hand and was on top of Holmes in an instant. He raised his block-like fist, ready to slam it into Holmes’s face, but he had forgotten about my presence. I hooked the crooked end of my own cane’s handle around the fiend’s elbow and pulled hard. He lost his balance and tumbled back, giving Holmes the opportunity to grab a fragment of brick from the mud, cracking it hard into the side of the man’s head. The blow toppled the brute to the side, but such was the thickness of the lout’s skull that still he made a grab for Holmes as he fell. Holmes delivered a well-aimed punch to the man’s jaw and the thug lay still.

  Breathing heavily, Holmes straddled his fallen foe, arm raised to deliver another blow, but when it was clear that the man was staying down, he turned to Lady Marie.

  “We need to get you out of here,” he said, wiping his hands together as if that could clear half the muck that smothered him from head to toe.

  “No,” she replied, taking a step back as if Holmes were her attacker rather than her saviour.

  “Lady Marie, I don’t think you understand the danger you are in,” I said, shooting a glance at the unconscious brute to make sure he was not already coming around.

  “What are you doing here?” she said, looking at us from one to the other.

  “A question we might also ask you,” Holmes said.

  “You must leave,” she insisted.

  “We shall do nothing of the sort,” I told her. “Unless you come with us.”

  “I cannot,” she said.

  “Then we have reached something of an impasse,” observed

  Holmes.

  Marie looked to us and then to the man who had assaulted her. It was clear she realised that she could neither persuade us to leave her nor escape our protection, so instead she chose the third option.

  “Can I trust you?” she said finally.

  “With your life,” I assured her.

  She opened her hand and we saw for the first time that there was a piece of paper crumpled in her palm. She handed it to me and I read the words written in the clear, neat handwriting of an educated woman.

  Mrs Prother
oe, 3 Boyle’s Court,

  off Parson’s Close, St Jude’s

  “This is whom you have come to see?” I asked, and the lady nodded. “But why?”

  “Will you come with me?” she asked.

  “Of course,” Holmes said, “but I suggest we hurry before our friend awakes.”

  We hurried away from the unconscious villain. The turn of a corner had us walking through a low-roofed passage. A couple of washerwomen approached from the other direction, regarding us with understandable suspicion.

  “Excuse my appearance, ladies,” Holmes said, as if the state of his coat were any worse than the threadbare clothes on their own hunched backs, “but I wondered if you could direct us towards Boyle’s Court.”

  The broader of the two women, her grubby face a cluster of hairy warts, sniffed. “Boyle’s Court? Just round the corner, sir.”

  “Thank you,” said Holmes, slipping her a coin.

  “Much obliged to you, sir,” she said, tugging at her scarf and hurrying on, no doubt to tell her entire brood that strangers were abroad. I gripped my cane all the more tightly, convinced that a pack of wolves were about to descend upon us, ready to relieve us of the contents of our wallets.

  The crone’s word had been good, however. Boyle’s Court was exactly where she had said, a square of abominable land between four imposing buildings. The few windows that pitted the rough walls were caked with grime, brown paper and rags stuffed roughly into cracks in the glass to keep as much warmth as possible within the tenements. If the stink of the alleyway had been bad, the fetid reek of the court was unbearable. A privy was situated beside a water pump, and my stomach lurched as I spotted that some industrious soul was using the foul space to smoke kippers. Across the way, a fellow looked up from where he was turning wooden handles on a lathe, masses of the things piled up in baskets by his side.

  “We’re looking for number three,” Holmes called out merrily, as if we belonged and were in no danger of being garrotted at every turn.

  The wood turner pointed to the nearest doorway and returned to his work without a word.

  “Much obliged,” Holmes said, leading us across the threshold and up creaking stairs. The stairwell echoed with the sound of every soul that lived and worked in the building. There were shouts and laughter and singing and the shrill cries of a new-born babe. So many voices crammed into one place. Eventually we found the correct door, a faded “3” stencilled into wood that had barely seen a lick of paint in its entire life.

  “Are you sure this is the place you wished to visit?” Holmes asked Marie, giving her the chance to change her mind, but the lady merely stepped up to the door and rapped loudly.

  It was yanked open by a large man with fierce whiskers whose surprise when he found us at his door equalled our own at seeing him.

  “Yeah?” he asked, looking us up and down. “You from the landlord? Rent’s not due ’til Monday.”

  “We are looking for Mrs Protheroe,” Marie told him.

  “Who?”

  “Mrs Protheroe,” Marie repeated, trying to look into the room beyond. There was little to see. The room contained two beds, a chair and a pile of rags, which its occupant was in the process of turning into garments for market. “Does she live here?”

  “Never heard of her,” the bewhiskered tailor replied.

  “Perhaps she recently moved out,” I suggested, remembering stories of the swift turnover of tenements such as these, families evicted if they missed only a single week’s rent.

  “Not from here she didn’t. Lived here three years, and never missed a payment. What is this?”

  “A mistake, it seems,” Holmes offered. “I apologise for disturbing your work.” His eyes fell upon a heap of shoes the man was patching up for sale and he added: “I don’t suppose any of those are a size twelve?”

  A quick exchange of coins later and Holmes was furnished with a pair of boots that, while of dubious quality, were still sturdier than the shoes he had vandalised himself. The door to 3 Boyle’s Court slammed shut.

  It was then that Lady Marie let out a heartfelt sob.

  She stumbled back and I went to grasp her, only for the lady to steady herself against the wall, raising a hand to ward off my offer of assistance.

  “I am fine, thank you, Doctor,” she said, curtly.

  “Then perhaps you will tell us what brought you to this den?” Holmes asked, cutting straight to the point. “Who is this Mrs Protheroe?”

  Lady Marie Redshaw looked him straight in the eye and said, “She is the woman who took my baby.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  MARIE’S STORY

  I had never been so glad to be away from anywhere as St Jude’s. Retracing our steps through the mud we were relieved to see that the blackguard who had attacked Lady Marie had crawled away to whatever hole he called home. Word had spread through the back-to-back buildings, however, and the narrow passages were lined with slum-dwellers curious to see the gentlefolk who had wandered haphazardly into their domain. I gripped my cane as I accompanied Marie Redshaw out of Parson’s Close, the lady’s arm slipped through my own and her head held high. She really was a remarkable woman. For all her obvious distress over the last few days, she had a seam of steel running through her soul. One would have thought we were strolling through the park as we passed a succession of filthy tykes and toothless hags. Still, as we stepped back out onto the main thoroughfare, I realised that I had been holding my breath, and not only because of the stink.

  “There you are, my dear,” I said, patting her gloved hand. “Out, safe and sound.”

  I turned to tell Holmes that I would take Lady Marie to her carriage, but he was not there. Fear gripped my heart. He had been walking behind us through that Stygian passageway, his newly purchased boots squelching in the mud. What had happened to him? Had the lowlife in the eye-patch returned to bury his knife in Holmes’s back?

  “Go to your carriage, and get away from here,” I told Marie, slipping my arm free. “I shall meet you at Ridgeside.”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t go there.”

  This was no time for an argument. “Then go somewhere safe, and I will find you after I’ve located Holmes. A coffeehouse or some such.”

  “A capital idea,” said a deep baritone from the gloom. Holmes appeared at the ingress, smiling broadly. He held his cane in his hand, although his mud-stained long coat and top hat were missing. “I for one would love a warm brew.”

  “Holmes!” I said. “What the devil happened to you?”

  Holmes’s eyebrows were raised in mock befuddlement. “What happened? Nothing happened, Doctor. I merely stopped off to chat to some of those delightful people. It always strikes me as curious that poverty and community go hand in hand.”

  “But your coat and hat?”

  “You saw the state of them. Besides, I found a couple of fellows whose need was greater than mine.”

  “You gave them away?”

  “I donated them, in exchange for information…” His sharp eyes turned to Lady Marie. “… about Mrs Protheroe.”

  Marie gave a little gasp. “And what did you learn?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” Holmes admitted. “No one has heard of her, which is a near impossibility in a warren such as St Jude’s. Life in the slums makes everyone’s business one’s own. I even talked to the shopkeeper, Mr Finch, he of the kippers. Again, Mrs Protheroe’s name drew only a blank stare, and shopkeepers are the eyes and ears of a tenement; they know exactly how much every family earns. How else can they know how much credit to offer when a poor soul asks to put a slice of bread on tick?”

  “Then I am quite lost,” Lady Marie said, fighting back tears.

  “Not if you tell us everything,” Holmes insisted. “Problems can never be solved if they are kept secret. You have trusted us once today. Will you not do so again?”

  I had become acutely aware of numerous sets of eyes staring at us, but knew that it would be rash to hurry the lady into giving a h
asty answer. Instead, we waited as Marie studied Holmes’s face with such intensity that I feared for a moment that she would see beyond his disguise. How could she trust a man whose very existence was a fiction?

  It appeared that I was worrying in vain. “Dr Watson mentioned coffee. I know a coffeehouse nearby which is discreet and serves an excellent macaroon. Would you gentlemen care to join me?”

  Beaming, Holmes held out his arm. “If the establishment will forgive my attire, it would be a pleasure.”

  * * *

  It was becoming abundantly clear that life with Lady Marie Redshaw held one revelation after another. I should hardly have been surprised. After all, this was a lady who thought nothing of walking into one of Bristol’s most notorious slums armed only with an address written on a scrap of paper.

  At her request, we followed her carriage through a quarter known as Old Market to a street called Laurence Hill. It was a bustling thoroughfare lined with shops and stalls. Bakers, butchers, confectioners and fruiterers rubbed shoulders, their wares perused by Bristolians of all classes and creeds. We alighted from our carriages next to the Packhorse public house and followed the lady up a narrow paved alleyway, this one a thousand times more sanitary than Parson’s Close. Marie stopped at an archway and pushed open a door to an iron staircase that curled down to what can be only described as a subterranean street. I could scarcely believe what I was seeing in the glow of gas lamps that burned bright. There stood a row of shopfronts, complete with windows and hoardings running into darkness at either end of the cobbled street, on which a number of arched cellars had been built.

  “This is incredible,” I said, which drew a smile from Marie.

  “The original Packhorse Lane,” she explained, leading us to a shop beside a near duplicate of the pub on the street above. “It was entombed when the road was raised to accommodate new railway lines a decade or more ago. Only certain folk know it still exists.”

  “But you do,” Holmes commented as he looked up at the arched ceiling that formed the new road, dust falling like snow with the passing of every carriage.