A Study In Scarlet Women

by Sherry Thomas

I spoke to Dr. Birch and his sister, Miss Birch. They both identified Lady Sheridan as Mrs. Broadbent, the elderly patient staying at the inn in Barton Cross. Since Dr. Birch had to rush out to Curry House, Miss Birch was the one who took the morphine to the inn and administered it to Lady Sheridan.

  When Dr. Birch came back from Curry House and called on Lady Sheridan, she was better, thanks to the morphine, though still in a state of great suffering. As he recounted what had kept him from seeing her sooner, she became more animated and asked a number of questions.

  Dr. Birch doesn’t recall whether he used Mr. Sackville’s name in his exchange with Lady Sheridan—he thinks he might have. Miss Birch had this to add: After she administered the morphine, Lady Sheridan asked her to retrieve a framed photograph of her daughter from her reticule. And when Miss Birch reached in, the first thing she felt was not a photograph, but a pistol.

  Yours truly,

  MacDonald

  When Inspector Treadles arrived at the Sheridan town house, Mr. Addison conducted him not to the drawing room, but Lady Sheridan’s bedroom.

  “The doctor has just been. She doesn’t have long to live,” said the butler, looking much less spry than Treadles remembered from mere days ago. “Please be brief, Inspector.”

  Lady Sheridan lay in a half recline, a hillock of pillows behind her back. Her grey hair was loose, her cheeks waxy, her eyes deeply sunken. At Treadles’s entrance, she signaled a white-capped nurse, who had been feeding her spoonfuls of broth, to leave.

  “I’m afraid I won’t be able to answer many questions, Inspector,” she said slowly. “I’ve had quite a bit of laudanum.”

  “I’ll be quick then, ma’am. How do you explain your presence in the next nearest village to Curry House at the same time Mr. Sackville died?”

  “Coincidence. I might die any minute. For old times’ sake, I wished to see my brother-in-law one last time.”

  “Why did you choose to do so alone? Why not bring along Lord Sheridan?”

  She snorted, a sound of bitterness. “He isn’t about to die.”

  “If a social call had indeed been your only purpose, why lie about something so simple and understandable?”

  “If I didn’t, Lord Sheridan would know, wouldn’t he?” Her eyelids drooped. When she looked at Treadles again, the simple action seemed to require superhuman effort. “He’d have asked me why I must undermine his proud estrangement from his brother and I hadn’t enough time left to bother with that sort of nonsense.”

  “And the pistol you carried with you on the trip?”

  This time she closed her eyes, a strange little smile about her lips. “A lady must take care when she travels by herself.”

  Shortly after Treadles had been promoted to sergeant, he returned to Barrow-in-Furness to visit his mother. She had been in robust health, but as he said good-bye to her, he’d had a sense of foreboding. That it would be the last time he saw her. She’d died mere weeks later from a sudden and fierce fever. In the hours before his father-in-law drew his last breath, everyone had been convinced that he would fully recover, especially Alice. But Treadles had the same premonition. Mr. Cousin had died that night.

  There would be no further questions for Lady Sheridan; their final meeting was at an end.

  He bowed. “Thank you, ma’am. Good-bye.”

  Upon Inspector Treadles’s return to Scotland Yard, he found Hodges’s written statement at his desk. Treadles filliped the piece of paper. Something about the handwriting snagged his attention, the oddly crooked g’s, the squashed o’s, and the majuscule a’s that were more ambitious than necessary.

  Where had he seen this handwriting before?

  Then he looked at what Hodges had actually written. He’d been staying at an inn in Camberwell, which was in London, very far from Isle of Wight, the supposed destination for his holidays.

  But very close to Lambeth, where Mr. Sackville had visited twice a month for at least seven years running.

  Treadles leaped up and pulled open the file case where he kept his official correspondence. Yes, there were those two letters he’d received about the house of ill repute in Lambeth. The exact same handwriting. The first letter was rather vague. The second, which he’d received two months ago, was full of anger and anguish, all but screaming into the void, warning of pure depravity, the exploitation of the most innocent and helpless, etc.

  He rushed out to Lambeth, to the lane named in the letter, and stood before the skeletal remains of what must have been a structure big enough for a family of twelve. He’d been there no more than a few minutes before he realized that the house next door had an unusually large number of men hurrying in and out.

  Not that news from home is much better, Alice had said on the night of Holmes’s “misfortune,” sitting at the edge of Treadles’s desk and flipping through the evening papers. Recriminations over the failure of the Irish Home Rule bill. Police still looking for suspects in the fire in Lambeth that destroyed a building and killed two.

  And what had he said to her? I know about that building in Lambeth. Every last inspector in Scotland Yard got letters about it—and it isn’t even a copper hell, but a bookmaker’s. You close one down and it opens right back up two streets over.

  The neighboring house was the bookmaker’s place, and the men who barged in and out the runners who collected bets and settled winnings.

  What then had been the depravities committed in the house that had been burned to the ground? What kind of depravities would turn a man like Hodges, who must have seen a fair bit of the seedier side of life, into a rabid crusader?

  Treadles ordered Hodges arrested and brought to London. Sergeant MacDonald delivered the valet into Treadles’s keeping late that evening.

  This time Hodges didn’t look so natty. There was something about being arrested and put under the power of the Crown that stripped jauntiness from a man. A state of vulnerability that was not helped by the blank, sterile walls of an interrogation room.

  “Mr. Hodges, you were the one who poisoned Mr. Sackville. You were outraged at what went on in that house in Lambeth he visited. You gave him arsenic, coinciding with the timing of his trips to London, so that he would suffer and not be able to achieve what he set out to do.”

  “You can’t prove anything.”

  The absence of jauntiness did not imply the absence of defiance.

  “No, but I have here a sample of your writing, and every inspector at Scotland Yard has received letters from you, screaming about the intolerable deeds that went on inside the house. And then the house mysteriously went up in smoke, resulting in two deaths. That is enough ground to charge you with arson and murder, Mr. Hodges.”

  Scotland Yard certainly didn’t have any other suspects. The investigation had been ongoing for weeks and the officer in charge still couldn’t be sure how many people had lived inside or what it had been used for before it was reduced to ashes and rubble.

  “I didn’t burn down the house,” Hodges answered through clenched teeth.

  “You will have a difficult time proving that.”

  “I was in Devon.”

  “You could have had accomplices in London.”

  “I would never do such a thing. There were children inside. Little children!”

  Hodges’s outburst ricocheted in the room. His hands balled into fists. And he panted, as if he’d run all the way from Curry House.

  Treadles felt as if he’d been picked up, turned upside down, and shaken violently. “Tell me about those children,” he said, his voice sounding curiously disembodied.

  “The little girl they brought me wasn’t even nine. She said she’d been in that house for a whole year, at least. And she told me that there were boys and girls at least three years younger than her.” Hodges’s throat worked. “Yes, I gave him arsenic before his next trip. But I didn’t want to kill him—I am not a murderer
. I wanted to buy some time for the police to do something. Anything.”

  “You had the wrong house number in your letters.”

  Hodges dropped his head into his hands.

  It had been an easy enough mistake. Of the two houses, only one had its number on the exterior, and though it seemed to be right in the middle, between the two entrances, the number had belonged to the bookmaker.

  “When did you decide to change to chloral?” Treadles still sounded dispassionate.

  Times like this, it was as if some mechanism deep inside him roared to life and insulated him in a thick layer of numbness.

  “I never had anything to do with the chloral. I was gone that week. In London. I went to see if there was anything I could do to close the place down, but when I got there, it had already burned to the ground.” Hodges wiped the heel of his hand across his eyes. “And no one knew what happened to the children. No one.”

  The next morning, Treadles returned to 18 Upper Baker Street. He noticed that the manservant who conducted him to the flat was the same one who had opened the door for him the other day at the lurid house where he last met with Lord Ingram and Miss Holmes—on loan from Lord Ingram to keep an eye on Miss Holmes’s safety, no doubt.

  Miss Holmes greeted him solemnly. It had been excruciating to come before her at their previous meeting, knowing that her wide-set, innocent-seeming eyes would have remarked every last ounce of his inner distress. But now he barely cared.

  Now the numbness reigned.

  He stated what Hodges had revealed at Scotland Yard, something his normal self would have tried his best to shield from the hearing of a lady. She listened without moving, not even to pour tea, and remained still for long minutes afterward.

  Vaguely he wondered whether it had been too much for her—whether her woman’s mind could not handle iniquities of this magnitude without going to pieces.

  “What Becky Birtle said,” she murmured. “It’s so obvious in hindsight. Mr. Sackville was only interested in her because she was small and underdeveloped and he thought her still prepubescent. When it turned out she already had menses, he lost all in—”

  She sprang out of her chair. “The Sheridans’ daughter. How did she die?”

  He rose hastily. “Sergeant MacDonald looked it up and copied down what had been written on her death certificate. I have it with me.” He opened the document case he carried. “Congestive heart failure, signed by—Dr. Bernard Motley. But he is Mrs. Treadles’s family physician.”

  Miss Holmes all but ripped the piece of paper from him. She stared down at it, a fierce frown on her face. “Do you remember the case you had sent me via Lord Ingram, the curious death of a young girl related by none other than this Dr. Motley?”

  “The one you believe to have killed herself by smuggling frozen carbon dioxide to her room?” What did that have to do with anything?

  “Did the Sheridan household have a ready supply of carbon dioxide?”

  “I spoke to the Sheridans’ butler. He mentioned they used to have canisters of gas for carbonating water.”

  “It was her. Clara Sackville killed herself.” Her voice was firm, implacable.

  The implication of her words at last penetrated past the shield of numbness. “Are you saying that Mr. Sackville did something to his niece? His own niece, when she was a little girl?”

  Miss Holmes returned to her seat, lifted the teapot, and poured, her hands perfectly steady while Treadles scrambled to reassemble his protective cocoon. “And Sophia Lonsdale was one of her best friends.”

  Treadles was still reeling. “She killed Mr. Sackville for Clara?”

  “It would explain the pistol in Lady Sheridan’s reticule, wouldn’t it? She would have done it herself, but he already died before she had the chance to confront him.”

  A knock came at the door. “Miss Holmes,” said the manservant, “something came in the post. You said to bring everything to you right away.”

  “Yes, thank you, Barkley.” She scanned the envelope. “Mrs. Marbleton—my name and address have been typed on the same typewriter she used to produce her first cipher for me to solve. Let’s see what she wants to tell me.”

  Dear Miss Holmes,

  Two months ago, I returned to Britain for the first time in many years, to see an old friend on her deathbed. Before she passed away, she gave me a diary from another old friend who departed many years ago. My dying friend had never read Clara Sackville’s diary, as Clara had asked her not to open it until her parents had both passed on. No other person of my acquaintance holds to her word as firmly as my friend did—I know because she had long kept my secrets.

  But I have never been as resistant to curiosity. After my friend’s funeral, I read Clara’s diary. As I did so, I wept, screamed, threw an inkwell across the room in anger, and shook at the cruelty and injustice in this world.

  And despised myself for having never guessed anything remotely near the incestuous truth.

  Clara loved and trusted her uncle. He exploited that trust and love and twisted her innate desire to please. I cannot bear to think of how lonely and frightened she must have been. When he used her to satisfy some warped part of himself, he forever isolated her from everyone and everything else she held dear.

  The more she descended into her private hell, the more she tried to love him. Love was her defense against the judgment that was to come. Love was the only excuse.

  But as soon as she entered puberty, he had no more use for her. It annihilated her: the betrayal of trust, the belief that she had done the abominable in the eyes of God, the knowledge that she would have carried on doing the same if he hadn’t abandoned her. Not to mention the fact that he was family, and that everyone, especially her parents, still expected her to be terribly fond of this uncle.

  That she did not destroy the diary tells me that she wished for the truth to be known someday. So I proceeded accordingly. The choice was left to Mr. Sackville. He could choose to face exposure, or he could choose to not face it.

  As for the women whose deaths you’ve connected to his, yes, indeed there was a connection. Lady Amelia and Lady Shrewsbury came upon Clara and Mr. Sackville. Clara recorded that she was terrified they would inform her parents, but her uncle assured her that it would not come to pass. Lady Amelia’s husband owed Mr. Sackville a ruinous amount of money. Lady Shrewsbury was not in financial distress, but she was a social-climbing toady who didn’t have enough character to gainsay Lady Amelia.

  The incident took place when Clara was a few months short of eleven. These women failed her utterly. They did nothing to protect her from Mr. Sackville’s predation, then or ever.

  I offered them the same choice as I did Mr. Sackville.

  They all chose chloral. Cowards, one and all.

  Lady Sheridan died in the night. Expect the matter to be made public soon.

  Yours truly,

  An admirer

  P.S. Best of luck with life as Sherlock Holmes.

  P.P.S. I have taken temporary custody of the children from the house Mr. Sackville frequented in London. I hope they—or some of them at least—will grow up and be well.

  P.P.P.S. Lady Sheridan and I ran into each other quite by chance. I have the habit of investigating establishments that purport to help women. She had long been a patroness to the YWCA. We met each other outside the association’s institute in Bethnal Green, not a place I expected to encounter Society ladies.

  Recognition shocked us both. But almost immediately we began to speak. I had always regretted the injury I must have caused her. Unbeknownst to me, she had devoted herself to the welfare of vulnerable young women because of the harsh fate I had met with—which she felt was far more punishment than I deserved.

  At some point in the conversation we began reminiscing about Clara. She told me that she had never believed in the explanation the physician had offered, b
ut only pretended to do so for her husband’s sake. Clara had been far from well. Lady Sheridan had tried everything in her power to uplift the girl’s spirit and blamed herself for failing.

  I debated with myself, but in the end decided to tell her the truth—and assured her that I would not let the guilty parties go free.

  But Lady Sheridan had decided to take matters into her own hands anyway. And it was only the full execution of Sophia Lonsdale’s plan that had prevented her from committing murder at the end of her life.

  “So all three of them took the chloral themselves,” Treadles heard himself murmur.

  “Sophia Lonsdale must have been in the hansom cab Lady Shrewsbury got into the night before her death,” said Miss Holmes. “I wonder that she didn’t also confront Lady Amelia in person.”

  “But there is no evidence of her having been in the vicinity of Curry House.”

  “I believe when the young Marbletons reported on how difficult it is for a stranger to go unnoticed in the area, she opted for the postal service instead—it can’t be difficult to have her package resemble, from the outside, a wrapped magazine or some such, so that the servants would pay it no mind. The worst that could happen would be that someone finds a typed, unsigned letter detailing Mr. Sackville’s perversions. But of course Mr. Sackville would have destroyed everything.”

  Treadles nodded. “Do you think Sophia Lonsdale was in a hurry at the end? Almost a fortnight passed between Lady Amelia’s death and Mr. Sackville’s, but only a day elapsed between Mr. Sackville’s and Lady Shrewsbury’s.”

  “It’s possible she became impatient. It’s also possible she wished to take advantage of my scandal.” Miss Holmes smiled slightly. “Seems more plausible to have a healthy woman die in her sleep when she’d been greatly angered by her son than for no reason at all.”

  Treadles had no idea what he could say in response. He did not understand Miss Holmes’s scandal. It made no sense how such a diamond-bright mind could have made such foolish, downright immoral decisions.