Sherlock Holmes: The American Years

by Michael Kurland

  As Holmes was paying the cab driver, a man in a tweed suit appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, on the sidewalk beside us. He nodded a curt greeting and spoke to Holmes in a low voice. “Nothing new since you left, sir. Shall I stay out here?”

  “No,” Holmes said. “Come inside. Mrs. Stevenson is here, and I think it’s time to speak to Miss Rostov.”

  “Holmes!” I whispered, caught up in the general trend toward sotto-voce speech. “What do you mean, Miss Rostov? Where is the robber?”

  Holmes looked at me almost pityingly. “Miss Rostov is Miss Greenwood. Mrs. Stevenson is in no danger, I assure you.”

  Fanny placed her hand on my arm. “Louis, calm down. Don’t you think I can take care of myself?”

  “With an armed road-agent?”

  “I’d say you’ve got him pretty well outnumbered,” she answered, with a glance that took in the three of us.

  Not at all comforted, I collected myself and followed Holmes and the rest up the steps.

  A servant girl answered the door. “May we come in, Mary,” Holmes said, “and would you please fetch Mrs. Paxton for us?”

  Mary stepped aside, and we walked into the entrance hall, on the left side of which a carpeted staircase rose to the upper floors. Holmes directed us, with the exception of Fanny, to a parlor to the right of the hall. The tweed-suited man took up a position where he could not be seen from the staircase and left me to sit on a chair near the parlor door from which I had a view of the hall and stairs. “By the way,” he said, “I’m Alva Weston, with the Pinkerton Agency.” I introduced myself, and we settled back to waiting.

  Mary went silently to the back of the house and returned a minute later, followed by Mrs. Paxton.

  Mrs. Paxton was a stout woman, plainly dressed, with her brown hair pulled back into a bun. She was clearly in on the story, and as she introduced herself to Fanny and spoke quietly with Holmes, she seemed entirely self-possessed despite the knowledge that the mistress of a stagecoach bandit was hiding out in her upstairs rooms. At a word from her, Mary climbed the carpeted stairs and disappeared, descending soundlessly a few minutes later. “She says she’ll be right down, ma’am,” she said to Mrs. Paxton, and backed away into the rear of the hallway, to watch, wide-eyed, what might happen next.

  No one spoke, and the little noises of the day seemed to fall like raindrops into a lake of silence. I could hear my own breathing, and I stifled a cough. I thought I heard a door close upstairs, and a moment later, without the sound of a footstep, a young woman appeared on the stairs. It was the girl in the photograph, with the same long, dark eyes. She was tall, straight, and slender, and her face had a slightly foreign look, with wide, high cheekbones and pale skin that seemed luminous in the half light of the stairway. Her auburn hair was gathered in a coil at her neck, and the plain dark dress she wore hung loosely on her. She descended slowly and stopped, halfway down, on seeing Holmes with Fanny and Mrs. Paxton.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Sherlock Holmes, from the Bank of Calistoga.”

  “Oh.” She didn’t seem particularly surprised, but her eyes closed for a moment, and she seemed to grasp the banister more tightly with her left hand.

  Weston had moved from his place of concealment to a spot between the stairway and the front door. He and Holmes held pistols concealed at their sides.

  Holmes spoke again, in a calm voice. “Miss Rostov, please hand your gun to Mr. Weston, there.”

  She walked a few steps farther down the stairs toward Weston, removed her right hand from the folds of her skirt, and handed him a revolver. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” she said softly.

  She turned back to face Holmes, steadying herself this time with both hands. “My friend is upstairs. Someone needs to take care of her; she’s real sick. You can go see for yourself. It’s no trick, I promise.” Her words, though weighted by a slight foreign inflection, flew with the headlong earnestness of youth. For all her experience of men and their vices, I thought, she’s still just a girl.

  “I know,” Holmes said. “I’ve brought someone to care for her,” he said, with a nod to Fanny. The young woman paused for a second, looking at them, then turned toward the top of the stairs.

  From the landing we followed her down a hallway to the right, where she unlocked a door, opened it wide, and stepped into a room. Holmes and Weston followed, and after a moment, Fanny and I joined them.

  The room was, in fact, a pair of rooms, a sitting room with chairs, a table, a small sofa under a bay window, and a bedroom behind it. Miss Rostov had gone directly into the bedroom and was leaning over the bed. Fanny followed her there, and I followed Fanny as far as the door.

  A young woman lay in the bed, tucked in like a child under a patchwork quilt and propped up a little with pillows. So thin was she that the coverlet scarcely showed where her small body lay beneath it. Her face was colorless, wasted and haunting, delicate in its outline, with a small, pale mouth and shadowed eyes. Her dark hair was loosely braided, but a few tendrils, damp with perspiration, curled on her forehead. As I watched, her eyes opened and she looked up at Miss Rostov as if trying to see who she was. “Annie?” she asked in a voice hardly more than a sigh.

  “Yes, petite,” Miss Rostov said, putting a gentle hand on the invalid’s brow and smoothing the damp hair from her forehead. The girl’s lips moved in the hint of a smile, and she closed her eyes as if exhausted by the effort.

  Miss Rostov returned to us closing the bedroom door behind her. “Are you going to arrest me now?”

  Fanny looked at her and then at Holmes. “I hope not,” she said. “I need to speak with you.” Fanny pulled two chairs together at the table in the sitting room, sat in one, and motioned Miss Rostov into the other.

  With Holmes’s permission, Weston left the room to wait downstairs. Holmes established himself in the window seat somewhat apart from the rest of us. Unwilling to leave, I took a seat on a straight-backed chair from which I could see the door to the hallway.

  Fanny spoke to Miss Rostov. “I don’t even know your names,” she began apologetically. “No one has gotten round to telling me.”

  The girl gave her a look as if she was trying to decide how far to trust her. “I am Annie—Antonia Davidovna Rostov. My friend,” she continued, with a slight hesitation before the word, “is Josette—Josephine—LaFreniere.”

  “I’m Fanny Stevenson, and these two men are my husband, Louis, and Mr. Sherlock Holmes—whom you’ve met. Now, Antonia,” she went on, gently, “I understand that a doctor has seen Josette.”

  Antonia answered in a low voice, “Yes.”

  “And has he told you what’s wrong with her?”

  “I knew that already—consumption.”

  Fanny leaned toward her. “And has he told you how serious her condition is?”

  Antonia nodded. “Yes,” she said. She hunched forward in her chair, her hands covering her face, and drew in a long, sobbing breath. “Damn—oh, damn!” she whispered. “I don’t want to cry so loud, she might hear me.” She looked at Fanny, suddenly contrite. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  “It’s all right,” Fanny said. “Nothing I haven’t heard before.”

  “I tried so hard, you see,” Antonia said. “I did all of it to save her—just to end up here.” She gave another shuddering sigh. Her eyes welled with tears, and her hands, now in her lap, grasped each other, their knuckles white. “I killed her, didn’t I? Bringing her here. I made her worse.”

  Fanny laid her hand on Antonia’s arm. “No, you didn’t.” she said, firmly. “You tried to help, but there wasn’t anything left to do.”

  The girl seemed to relax a little. “That’s what the doctor said, too,” she answered, almost reassured, it seemed, to hear Fanny confirm his verdict.

  A hollow cough from the bedroom made both their heads turn toward it. “Come,” Fanny said, and Antonia followed her to the room. The door closed behind them.

  I moved near Holmes and asked him, in a low voice, �
��So where is the stage robber?”

  Holmes gave a nod toward the bedroom door. “In there.”

  It took a second for the meaning of what he had said to reach me. “You don’t mean Miss Rostov?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “That girl? Are you sure?”

  He turned back to face me. “Yes. You’ve heard her; she has all but confessed.”

  I was still skeptical. “Holmes,” I said, “I’m prepared to believe you that she and her friend are here alone. But how do you know the robber hasn’t just deserted them?”

  “By the accumulation of evidence.”

  “What evidence?”

  “There were clues practically from the beginning,” he said, “at the scene of the robbery itself. A tangle of long hairs on a bush. The prints of a small-sized boot in the mud where she had led her horse to drink in the stream. Evidence—broken twigs, tufts of wool from the blanket, a ribbon bow clearly torn from a dress—that she changed her clothing in the clearing.”

  “How did you know she wasn’t just there with the robber?’

  “The signs indicated that only one person, with one horse, was waiting in that spot,” Holmes answered. “I saw nothing that suggested the presence of a second person, and neither did the other stage passengers. What Mrs. Bannerman told us also suggested that Miss Rostov wasn’t passing information to a man. And there were the clothes under the bed—on which, on examination, I found another couple of long reddish hairs. And finally, there was her accent—which I noticed at the time, though no one else did.

  “Once I was convinced that Miss Rostov was the robber, I was equally sure that she had no male confederate. What man would send a woman out alone to commit a highway robbery?”

  “What you’re saying makes sense—but it seems so unlikely.”

  “Perhaps, but it’s true. We’ve been watching Miss Rostov for several days. She didn’t know she was being pursued, so it was easy to find her here. She had, as Dr. Jenkins thought, consulted with Dr. Silbermann, who has been coming to look in on Miss Duverger—or, rather, LaFreniere—and told us where they were staying. With the help of the Pinkertons—hired by the bank—and Mrs. Paxton, we have watched them at all hours, and no man has visited Miss Rostov except the doctor.

  “I also had Mr. Ingram send a man to St. Helena to make some inquiries. He learned that a young woman resembling Miss Rostov bought a quantity of cayenne pepper from a grocer there and that a similar woman, heavily veiled, hired a horse from a livery stable on the morning of the robbery. Does that put you more at ease?”

  I acknowledged that it did, and Holmes fell silent, leaving me to consider what he had revealed and to wonder at the desperate, hopeless courage of the girl in the next room.

  It was some time before Fanny came from the bedroom, alone. The gray daylight outside the windows was starting to fade, and a chill draft, borne by the fog, seeped through the window and played shiveringly, like the touch of a ghost, through the shadowed room. “She had a hemorrhage,” she said to Holmes and me, “but the crisis is past, for now. Annie is asleep, too. She’s exhausted; I don’t think she’s slept in days.”

  Holmes, who had been reading a book, looked up. “What is Miss LaFreniere’s condition otherwise?”

  Fanny lowered her voice. “It won’t be much longer, I suspect. I’ll be surprised if she lasts the night. Can’t you let Annie stay with her until the end? It seems so cruel to leave that poor child to die among strangers.”

  Holmes said nothing, but signaled his assent with a nod and went back to his reading.

  Time seemed to settle in the room like the fog itself. I read absentmindedly in a lady’s novel that had been sitting on the table. A maid brought coffee and sandwiches and wine, lit the lamps, and laid a fire in the sitting room, and soon after that, Dr. Silberman arrived to examine Miss LaFreniere. He emerged from the bedroom, trailed by Fanny and Antonia and looking sober. “It’s the end,” he told them. “With luck, she won’t wake up, but if she does and is in pain, give her some laudanum. God bless you both,” he said, and was gone—home to wife and children, perhaps, or to dinner and good wine with his friends.

  At Fanny’s urging, Antonia sipped at some coffee and picked apart, rather than ate, a sandwich, and then returned to her chair in the bedroom. Fanny remained in the sitting room, but near enough to the bedroom door that she would hear any change in Jo’s breathing. Revived by meat and drink and the warmth of the fire, I decided to escape the oppressive atmosphere of the sickroom and, with a whispered word to Fanny, left to wait downstairs.

  Almost imperceptibly, the evening turned into night. Mrs. Paxton came into the parlor and said good night, trimmed the lamp, and retired to her apartment in the back of the house. The coal fire in the grate burned low. I grew tired, but could not sleep for coughing and thoughts of the scene upstairs. I felt that if I walked out into the street I would see Death beneath the low clouds, brooding over the house and enfolding it, and all of us, in its dark, sheltering wings.

  Every hour or so, restless, I lit a candle and climbed the stairs, to look in on Fanny and Holmes. I could hear poor Josette’s harsh breathing and see Antonia seated next to the bed, her bent head silhouetted in the light of the bedside lamp. Fanny looked steadfast and tired, and Holmes looked inscrutable.

  The twilight of morning was starting to fill the rooms of the house with a dim underwater light when Fanny came quietly downstairs and whispered that the ordeal was over at last. We waked Weston, who had fallen asleep on the parlor sofa, and Fanny said to him, “Mr. Holmes said to send for the police van.”

  I followed Fanny back upstairs to the rooms. Through the bedroom door I could see Josette’s body, as still as a sculpture on a tomb. She was laid out in a fresh dress of some light color, her hair carefully arranged. Antonia, pale and red-eyed, was in the outer room, sitting at the table with Holmes. “There was no one else,” I heard her say to him, “just me. Even Jo didn’t know where I got the money.”

  “Where is the money?”

  “In the valise in the bedroom.” Her face was without expression, her voice lifeless. “Everything’s there except what I spent. None of it matters now.” She looked around at Fanny and me, and then again at Holmes, and asked, “Is it time to go?”

  “When the van comes, yes,” Holmes said.

  “We’ll call the undertaker,” Fanny said. “Everything will be taken care of.”

  Antonia nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “May I sit with her until we have to leave?”

  Holmes nodded, and Antonia walked into the bedroom, bent down and kissed Jo’s forehead, and took her seat in the chair next to the bed.

  In a half hour or so, Mary knocked on the door and told Holmes that the van was waiting. Antonia appeared at the bedroom door, in a hat and shawl. She stood a little straighter and squared her shoulders. “All right, I’m ready.”

  She left the room with Holmes, and a minute later Weston came in and took the valise. Fanny and I went downstairs and asked Mrs. Paxton to send for the undertakers and a cab, and retreated to the parlor to wait. The morning sun, though it shone bright outside, had not yet taken the chill from the room. Fanny curled against me and shivered slightly. “Are you all right?” I asked her.

  “Yes, just tired.”

  I put my arm around her and held her close and, as I did, remembered again the long, cold weeks, so far from home, when Fanny had held me as I coughed blood, or hurried to my bedside as I wakened from a fevered sleep, her anxious eyes looking into mine. I thought how tired and despairing she must have felt then, when it seemed more than I could do to keep on with life at all.

  The newspapers quickly caught wind of the case, and for the next few days, the Call and the Bulletin carried front-page stories of “Russian Annie, The Fair Desperado” and the “Parlor House Road Agent,” with lurid engravings depicting the robbery of the stage and Antonia’s arrest. Holmes was mentioned as a private detective whose fortuitous presence on the stagecoach had brought him into t
he case and led to the apprehension of the “beautiful bandita.”

  With Mrs. Paxton’s help, Fanny made arrangements for Jo to be buried in one of the cemeteries at the edge of town. On the day of her funeral, I was too ill to go out, but Fanny and Mrs. Paxton rode behind the hearse and paid their last respects, with a small crowd of onlookers, as the girl was laid to rest.

  When I was recovered enough to see visitors again, Mr. Holmes came by to wish us farewell. Fanny had been fretful and peevish that morning, worrying about my health, the journey, and the fateful meeting with my parents. I had dismissed her fears. She had called me heartless; we had quarreled; and when Holmes arrived, we were sorting books in wounded silence. With an effort, we put on company faces, offered him the sofa, and seated ourselves on a couple of chairs.

  He told us Antonia had pled guilty to the robberies and would probably be sentenced to several years in the women’s prison. “Most of the stolen money was accounted for,” he said, “though I understand that Miss LaFreniere had quite an elegant funeral.” He turned to Fanny, who met his look unflinchingly.

  After he had left, I asked Fanny what Holmes had meant by his remark. “Did she give you money?”

  She paused over the box of books she was packing. “Yes. She paid for the funeral, and for a plot in the cemetery and a headstone, so Jo wouldn’t have to be buried in the potter’s field.”

  “With money from the robberies?” I asked, knowing what the answer was.

  She turned on me a look like the sighting of a pistol. “Do you care?” she asked. Her anger receded as quickly as it had risen, and a shadow of sadness darkened her face. She looked at the book in her hand, as if retrieving a memory, and then said quietly, “They were all alone, so far away from home—somebody had to do something.”