“No sir. They came around very late last night and knocked on my door and gave me the news about Tom, and I was too upset to think, and they were decent enough not to be putting me through a whole lot of questions. They said they would be back this morning, and I thought maybe that if they did not ask I would just let it go, seeing as what Tom had agreed to do wasn’t strictly legal and all, and I did not want to send my Tom off with a final record of the police saying that he was a criminal. You can understand that can you not, Mr. Holmes?”
“Indeed, I can. It is entirely understandable. I would have felt exactly the same way. But there is someone or some people out there who have done murder, both to Lord St. Simon and to your Tom, and they could go on to do it again to someone else. I can assure you that telling your story about Tom will help the police to do their job and capture them. So, Tom’s final act from beyond will be as an agent of justice, and that will be how he is remembered, as well, of course, as a good father and a loving husband to his Gooey.”
The woman looked at Holmes and smiled for the first time since we had arrived. We bid her good-day and began to walk to the nearest telegraph office so Holmes could send a note off to Lestrade.
I had a question burning in my head that I could not hold back. “Did Harriot St. Simon really offer to cover the costs of the funeral and a pension to that poor widow?”
“Of course not. But she will when she is told to.”
“Goodness, Holmes. Are you going to tell her she has to do that?”
“Of course not. Late last night I sent a wire off to her Pa and told him what had happened. He agreed to make sure that she did what he told her, and if she refused he would cover the costs. Our Lady said that her Pa lived by the Code and she was right. He does.”
Lestrade came post haste to talk to Mrs. Rugglesworth and, having done so, made his way to the office of the Crown prosecutor. He, in turn, went immediately to the judge and it was agreed that all charges related to the murder of Lord St. Simon would be dismissed. The Crown, however, was a competitive young chap and must have seen himself as on his way up the ladder, for he turned around and demanded that the judge allow the charge to be placed against Lady St. Simon of gross indecency and that evidence heard so far be considered for that case, and that the jury be kept on. The Lady’s barrister howled in protest, but the judge had clearly taken a strong dislike to our client and had no intention of letting her walk away scot free.
Her barrister set out to make the case that his client had done no more wrong than had her husband and was prepared to call Lady Flora Miller to testify to that effect. The judge would have none of that, and lectured the Lady’s advocate that His Lordship, being as he was dead, was not on trial, and that regardless of what faults he may have had, it was an inviolable rule for a gentleman that de mortuis nihil nisi bonum.
The Lady’s barrister protested that none of her “victims” had been under legal age; even Lord Eustace was old enough (barely) to be legally responsible for himself. None had brought suit against her. Her husband, being as he was dead, was not bringing suit against her. Nevertheless, the jury, taking their cue from the judge, found our client guilty, and the judge, noting the need for an effective deterrent not only against self-centered married English women, but especially against our fair but predatory cousins from across the Atlantic, imposed a harsh sentence of three years in prison. She could be released after two years if her deportment gave indication that she was prepared to mend her ways.
Several of the newspapers exulted in the triumph of the English way of life. The Evening Star postured as the champion protector of the English family, this in spite of its standard daily fare of every titillating detail of every report of every conceivable questionable act that could be engaged in between two human beings, regardless of their age, race, sex, or status. The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian and the others members of the serious and responsible press went to great lengths to stress that they were not in any way supportive of Lady St. Simon, but they bemoaned the blatantly inappropriate conviction and sentence and predicted that she would be released upon appeal.
The wheels of justice, as always, grind slowly, and so it was that our client was led off to Holloway Prison for Women, where she was destined to remain for at least a year. Custody of her children was given to her brother-in-law and, having become yesterday’s news, her story faded from the press, and the public mostly forgot about her.
Chapter Nine
A Scene at Brown’s
SHERLOCK HOLMES DID NOT FORGET about his client.
Over the years of sharing digs with him on Baker Street, I had observed that he was, at bottom, a bit of a stickler for decency and the preservation of the moral order. He was a firm believer in the equality of the sexes even if he left any crusading for that cause to those he regarded as infinitely more qualified to do so than he. There were, however, certain issues that moved him to take umbrage and concentrated action. I also had to admit that he was not the best of sport when it came to losing.
“That woman, Mrs. St. Simon,” he said whilst pacing back and forth in our sitting room, “may be irresponsible, selfish, impetuous, volcanic, wanton, and unfit to be a mother, but that does not excuse an idiotic miscarriage of justice that was no more than pandering to the hypocritical ravings of the press and the public. Two men were murdered and their killer walks the streets. Such a travesty cannot be allowed to continue.”
But continue it did. First for weeks, and then over a month. During that time Holmes accepted the case of the Grosvenor furniture van, gave it his singular concentration until it was resolved, and immediately returned to the growing volumes of correspondence, court and police records, press reports, and every other scrap of material he could lay his hands on that was even remotely related to the case of our most notable lady.
All to no avail. After two months he seemed to be no closer to a solution. Then came a small break in the case. It arrived in the form of a printed note on fine linen paper, embossed with the coat of arms of a recently appointed member of the House of Lords.
“What do you make of this, Watson?” he asked, handing me the note.
It ran:
Mr. Sherlock Holmes, Esquire:
Your client is indubitably a sockdologizing young man-trap, and although a mille passum from impeccancy, she is nonetheless innocent and the victim of an infamous farrago of lies. Having been the quarry in the maw of justice myself, I am compelled to approbation for her, although in that point at issue only.
I have chanced to come across documents that may be material to your case and emancipate it from its current torpor. If you could be so kind as to meet me tomorrow morning for early coffee, I shall be pleased to impart them to you. I regret that I cannot invite you to my club as it does not permit visitors. Therefore, please meet me in the sitting room of Brown’s Hotel on Albermarle Street at eight o’clock. It is an unobtrusive place, free of large loutish honeymooning men, their perky brides, and bibulous managers. Kindly have your amanuensis accompany you.
Yours faithfully,
Lord Backwater of Crosshaltwhistle
I looked at Holmes and shrugged. “If nothing else we shall be treated to some excellent coffee and pastries in the most elegant front room in London. I will not need my service revolver, although a dictionary might prove useful.”
The following morning, we hailed a cab and drove south on Baker Street and then directly into the heart of Mayfair. We rounded both Grosvenor and Berkley Squares and pulled up to Brown’s Hotel, where we were to meet Lord Backwater.
Lord Backwater of Crosshaltwhistle had been a controversial figure in the public life of London for several decades. He moved in a wide circle of society wherein some found him to be unfailingly convivial, erudite, generous, and gracious, while others had deemed him arrogant, pompous, intellectually detached, and bullying. The same could be said, and had been, about my friend, Sherlock Holmes.
The Lord’s personal life was beyond reproach, an
d his dedication to his brilliant wife and his family universally respected. At one time he had been the publisher and part-owner of The Daily Telegraph, as well as several score of other newspapers in Britain, Europe, the United States, and Canada. He had sold off his papers and had included in the bill of sale a requirement that the new owners pay him a personal fee guaranteeing that he would never subsequently open a competing newspaper. The new owners were happy to do so, and in Great Britain, his transactions were generally regarded as sharp and clever dealings of the sort that were necessary when conducting business with Yankees. Unfortunately, there were some exceptionally zealous district attorneys in America who thought otherwise. They had been egged on by a few American newspapers, particularly one in Chicago, that had printed every vile personal slander they could dredge up, no doubt enhancing their sales but diminishing even the fig-leaf of integrity they still clutched.
The prosecutors brought charges against him, almost all except the most trivial of which were thrown out of court, and they succeeded in forcing him to spend a couple of years as the guest of the American government in a prison in Florida. He had returned to public life and assumed a new role as a respected historian and essayist. He was a member of White’s Club on St. James, the club to which his distant cousin Lord St. Simon also belonged, and it was he, you will recall, who had recommended Sherlock Holmes.
The doorman ushered us into the parlor of the hotel, where an impeccably dressed gentleman was seated and reading what, given the pile of papers beside him on the floor, I gathered was his fifth newspaper of the morning. He rose and greeted us with a warm smile.
Lord Backwater was a fairly large and powerfully built man who nevertheless would have benefited by losing, at least, two stone in weight. His face, no doubt finely featured and handsome in his youth, was still attractive but had acquired generous bags under the eyes and an overall look of having been slept on. He welcomed us and gestured toward chairs facing him.
“Welcome gentleman,” he said. “Please, be seated. Some coffee? What is served here is woefully pusillanimous for my palate but condign for the purpose intended.”
One of the attentive butlers looking after the room brought a silver coffee service and poured cups for each of us. We engaged in some idle conversation during which Lord Backwater generously complimented me on my stories and passed on the names of two publishers in America that he recommended for distribution to readers across the pond. He thanked me for providing him with reliable late-night reading since my first account, A Study in Scarlet, had appeared in Beeton’s some years ago now. He was quite up on all of the subsequent stories and confessed to having become a fan of London’s only consulting detective.
He then turned to Sherlock Holmes and addressed the reason for our meeting.
“Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson. Robert St. Simon may have been a chinless twit, and the apotheosis of a lucky man transmorgified into a snob. But nevertheless, he was an acquaintance and distant relative of mine. We knew each other from White’s, where we saw each other regularly and, on two voyages across the Atlantic, we chanced to be on the same liner. I would not say that we were never friends as our falling short of that mark was the result of my not approving of those aspects of his personal life which had a fissiparous effect on the extended family. He was born on to the vertiginous heights of nobility but plummeted into an orgy of toadyism and vulgar exhibitionism. Nevertheless, I have a duty, combined with my deep commitment to the integrity of journalism, which unlike many cynics today I do not consider to be an oxymoron, to galvanize myself and assist in bringing to justice whoever was responsible for his untimely demise.”
Here he stopped and reached down and opened his valise.
“I followed closely the events of his egregious trial, and there kept coming to my mind a remembrance of things past, of a vaguely similar set of tenebrous circumstances that I read about some years before. As I was reading and writing in the early hours of last Thursday morning, it came to me. I keep my own very extensive library of books and newspapers and I searched through it until I came across the articles I remembered. I will not provide any commentary on them, lest Schadenfreude become my wry amusement, but permit me simply to give them over to you for your consideration, bereft of my adjudication. Then please govern yourself accordingly.”
He extracted from his case four folded newspapers and handed them to Holmes.
“And now I must ask you to forgive my shortness of time but I am due in Westminster, and so I must take my leave. Good-day, gentlemen.”
“Well now, my dear Watson,” said Homes once we had the room to ourselves, “as there remains a decent amount of non-pusillanimous coffee in the carafe and some delectable pastries on the tray, I suggest that we enjoy them whilst I begin to read these papers and bring your notebook up to date.”
“An excellent suggestion, Holmes,” I said. I extracted my pocket dictionary from my suit jacket and started expanding my vocabulary. I must say that for a few minutes, what with the excellent refreshments, I was as happy as a clam.
It did not last.
I had only just finished my first cup of excellent coffee and was eagerly looking forward to my second when I heard an audible gasp from Holmes. I looked up to see him glaring at the newspaper he was reading. He then quickly gathered up all of the papers Lord Backwater had given us and leapt to his feet.
“Come, Watson, the game is afoot. I am furious with myself for not having seen this earlier. There is no time to lose. Please, quickly my friend.”
I gave a last longing look at the carafe and the still laden tray of pastries and sighed. I was tempted to stuff them into my pockets but restrained the impulse. “Yes, yes, of course. Coming Holmes.”
Once in a cab and on our way back, I asked, “What in heaven’s name came over you, Holmes? What was it that gave you such a start?”
His muttered response was, “Forgive me if I ignore you,” and he continued to focus his eye and mind on what he was reading. Upon arriving back at Baker Street, he turned to me and said, “I will continue on my own. Do have a good day my friend.”
“And where might you be off to?”
“First stop is the Metropole Hotel.”
“And your reason?”
“Gathering data. I shall see you anon.”
I returned to our rooms and waited for Sherlock Holmes … and waited. With growing impatience and annoyed curiosity, I waited for three weeks.
I saw little of him, and when I did, we passed like ships in the night. Two other minor cases came, were resolved, and went. When I asked him concerning the St. Simon case, he dismissed my questions with, “Nothing to report. Still gathering data.”
I read and re-read the old newspapers that Lord Backwater had given to us. The earliest, now seven years old, was from Kansas City and carried the story, so hated by Lady St. Simon, that falsely accused her of an illicit affair and of plotting the death of her first husband. In a copy of the Liverpool Mercury, dated a year later and under the byline of a reporter named A. K. Blanc, was one of the many stories of the trial of Mrs. Francis Maybrick. She was another young American woman who had married a much older, wealthy Englishman. He had died, it was claimed by the paper, of arsenic poisoning. His wife had been carrying on an affair at the time with a much younger lover and, on the flimsiest evidence, she was convicted of murdering her husband and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. She was still incarcerated and still protesting her innocence.
In the North London Journal of two years ago was the explosive story of the Cleveland Road Scandal. A young telegraph boy had been stopped by a constable and had in his possession far more money than he could ever have earned from his delivery services. When the police accused him of robbery he disclosed that he had been recruited to work in a brothel on Cleveland Road, just a few blocks from the British Museum. The next day a confidential invitation was delivered to four men, all members of noble families, including one who was employed by the Prince of Wales, to attend a privat
e presentation of a promising investment opportunity. The meeting was to be held at 21, Cleveland Road, a respectable address in Fitzrovia. Minutes after the four of them had entered the building the police, accompanied by a reporter named Alex Wiebe, raided it and all four men were arrested, being found–in at a place of immoral homosexual prostitution involving lads in their early teens. The men were immediately vilified and could not show their faces in public for fear of being attacked. They proved their innocence and sued the paper for libel and slander. The court found in their favor and the publisher was sentenced to a year in jail. Tragically, one of the men, Lord Somerset, was so broken and humiliated by the events and the shame to which he was subjected, that he took his own life.
These stories all had a common thread and were in some manner similar to events that were to be found in the lives of our clients, both the now dead Lord, and his wife, still living. However, there had been scores of similar stories of scandal, extortion, blackmail, assault, and murder over the same period in England, and I could not, for the life of me, discern what was peculiar about these four accounts.
If Holmes saw something in them, he was not letting on. I did, however, notice a change in his disposition. After the trial, he had been despondent and I was dreadfully worried that he might resort to his seven percent solution to ease his spirits. Those moods were now gone. His features were still gravely set, but I discerned a light in his eye, a spring in his step, and at times even a wisp of a smile at the corner of his mouth. Clearly, something was up.
Chapter Ten
The Play’s the Thing
LATE ONE AFTERNOON I RETURNED to Baker Street from my medical practice, somewhat discouraged by the paucity of patients, and I slowly ascended the seventeen steps up to our rooms. I entered and stopped still in the doorway. Standing by the fireplace was Sherlock Holmes, smiling and holding a snifter of brandy. Seated on his left was the Reverend Mister Ezekiel Black, the US Marshall who had assisted us in past cases and who had recently sent us the information concerning Miss Hattie Doran. He immediately pulled his very long legs back underneath his very long body and stood up, smiling warmly at me.
Sherlock Holmes Never Dies - Collection Three: New Sherlock Holmes Mysteries - Second Edition (Boxed Sets Book 3) Page 15
