A Study in Lavender: Queering Sherlock Holmes

by Raynes, Katie

  I wandered England and Europe, killing whenever I saw a man whose death would improve the world. When I saw how good I was at it, I realized I had found my calling.

  That’s the secret to success. Choose your career, whether it be doctor, lawyer, merchant chief, or murderer. Then study accordingly. I intended to murder men, so it behooved me to learn how a man is put together below the surface – veins, arteries, organs, and so forth. I delved into medical journals and books when I could find them. I apprenticed to a butcher for a while and made the amazing discovery that swine and human beings are very similar in their physical arrangement. I apprenticed in another place to an apothecary. I haunted courthouses whenever there was a murder trial, to learn what kinds of mistakes got a murderer caught. Preparation, all is preparation!

  I studied texts of sensational trials when I could get my hands on them. No longer a boy forced to read boring, dead old classics written by boring, dead old men, I began to devour detective novels. I spent every available shilling on them. After I discovered Sherlock, I read nothing else. I admit that, like thousands of my countrymen, in the beginning I believed the great detective was real.

  While under that delusion, I read “A Study in Scarlet,” and “Sign of the Four,” and the serialized stories in old copies of the Strand until the pages were stained and creased from handling. I kept copious notes. As time passed, my notes, which had begun in the spirit of admiration, gradually shifted to those things that displeased me or seemed inconsistent. I often said to myself, “That was foolish of so-and-so. To avoid detection all he had to do was…” This was good for me. The books caused me to analyse and re-analyse the reasons Sherlock found the villain out.

  Within a few years I knew I could commit whatever crime I wished and get away with it. That was when I decided to commit the same kinds of crime as Jack, to prove myself more clever, better, and with a worthier prey. Unlike Jack, that gormless coward, my victims would not be weak, helpless women who had harmed no one. My prey would deserve to die.

  As well as building my knowledge during those years of invisibility, I also built my health and strength. At twenty-five I am much stronger than I look. Four dead men in the past four months could attest to that were they able to attest to anything.

  A year ago, there was an unexpected and amazing turn. Sherlock was fictional; that I had finally learned, though by then it no longer mattered. No flesh-and-blood detective was as clever as the imaginary one. Once I learned he was a figment of his creator’s imagination, I longed for a way to delve into that imagination. As luck would have it, the old walrus-moustachioed author advertised in the newspaper for a secretary, stipulating that it must be someone with a very fine hand.

  When Doyle saw my beautiful penmanship he hired me on the spot. He was a physically impressive man, tall and broad, the kind who exudes vigour and strength. I suspect in hiring me he may have been partly motivated by the pity brawny men often feel for one like myself, slight and delicately built. He did not know that though I was no more than shoulder-high to him, I could kill him in a matter of moments if the notion seized me. My palms almost itched to find out how much effort it would take to push a blade through the skin, muscles, tendons, and finally through the fragile, pulsing arterial wall of such a thick, bull-like neck.

  He was a man who liked to talk. I think he liked to talk more than he liked to write. He was also a man of varied interests, some of them a little peculiar. He was a doctor for several years, but not a successful one. Eventually he laid down his stethoscope and picked up a pen and gave Sherlock to the world. When the war in Africa began he had volunteered money, his person, and his training to go there and briefly be a doctor again. Somewhere along the way, he became keenly interested in spiritualism and wrote endlessly on the subject. While I worked for him, I heard him grumble constantly that he wanted to kill Sherlock and let him stay dead but the public wouldn’t let him.

  His home, where I worked, was an admirable large brick house, three storeys tall, called Undershaw, in Hindhead, Surrey. It was surrounded by tall trees and grasses, with a lake nearby. It had more windows than I have ever seen in a house. When we became well acquainted as employer and secretary, he told me how he had designed it for his wife, a fragile consumptive with a warm heart. He had the grand staircase constructed with shallow stairs for her ease in walking. His initials are carved into the doors, and stained glass windows bear the family crest. There are at least thirty-six rooms, perhaps more, ten of them bedrooms. Doyle grandly insisted that I live there as their guest. It was all very flash, as the lower class says.

  My primary work was copying over a manuscript he was working upon, called “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” which may prove to be of interest to readers. I modestly admit to giving him suggestions whenever the plot stuck. At times he would stop writing, lean back, and set off on an excursion of nostalgia and tell of his days as a military doctor. The worst he had to face, he said, was not hacking off shattered limbs from wounded men, but watching them die horribly from enteric fevers. His military experience lasted only about three months, but he still kept in touch with “the lads” who had served with him. He offered to let me read some of their letters. I politely refused because I wasn’t interested. That was a mistake. Reading them would have been much to my advantage.

  His wife, Louise (he called her Touie), was a wisp of a lady who looked as if a strong breeze would blow her away, and whose head with its thick hair looked too heavy for her slender neck. It embarrasses me now to put the words down, but sometimes, in the dark of night, I lay awake and pretended she was my mother. Perhaps if my mother had lived, I might have been… It doesn’t matter, does it. What is, is.

  At this time I hit upon the genius of my plan, a stroke of brilliance that would capitalize upon the very things over which I had been bullied and tormented. Louise Doyle was unwittingly the inspiration. I surreptitiously studied the way she used her hands when she cut flowers or touched her two horrid children, brats no one but a mother could love. I studied the way she demurely lowered her gaze or shyly cocked her head to one side; the way she walked; the way she spoke. At night, before my mirror, I practised what I had observed.

  Days I spend my time as the humble amanuensis of Arthur Conan Doyle, who, I hear, is to be knighted by King Edward this year.

  Nights I worked in front of my mirror perfecting my feminine character, whom I named Angelique. I also prowled the large house after everyone had retired. I learned how to enter and leave any room undetected, often exiting with a piece of Louise’s clothing or that of a maidservant, in which to practice moving. I discovered that women’s clothing is not made for either comfort or convenience! They walk differently than a man because they are hampered by long skirts. Insult added to injury, women’s shoes are the epitome of torture. But I persevered. If they could do it, I could do it.

  As I had no expenses and went nowhere, I was able to save all my wages. Six months ago, when I had as much money as I expected to need, I gave Sir Arthur a fortnight’s notice. I told him a pitiful story of my sainted mother’s ill health; I was forced to resign my position and see to her welfare in Scotland.

  He was aggrieved at losing the best secretary he had ever had. My last day, he gave me a large gold watch, an excessively vulgar thing; the man has no taste. On the back was engraved:

  To S. MacKay

  from

  Arthur Conan Doyle.

  His name was engraved in slightly larger letters than mine!

  After leaving Undershaw, I went only forty miles away, to London, where I lived for nearly a month in a disgusting, tiny room with piles of dirt in the corners and vermin playing beneath and sometimes on my bed. I visited a seamstress my first day in London. I told her that my dear wife, Angelique, needed several garments made but was too ill for actual fittings. The seamstress was most sympathetic, took the dimensions I wrote for her, and made me a coat and several inexpensive frocks of plain, unremarkable material, as well as one charming gown
which Angelique would need when she had recovered. The dressmaker expressed sincere wishes that my wife would come to visit when she was quite well so that the dressmaker could see the dresses on her. I told the same story to a milliner and then a shoemaker. The shoemaker choked, “I trust your dear lady will soon be strong enough for dancing, sir.” If he thought that my bride had rather large feet, he was too much of a gentleman to comment. Not one to argue with success, I repeated it to a wig maker, adding that her illness had robbed her of her beautiful hair. The ringleted auburn wig was near the colour of my own hair.

  The English will believe nearly anything. How did such gullible people create an empire?

  My last purchases were not at all ladylike: a weathered Gladstone bag and two shiny blades, one a needle-pointed, double edged narrow stiletto and the other a wider knife with one razor-sharp edge. They fit quite nicely into the bag.

  At last I could leave the vile little room. I found the perfect place for my new home: a lodging house for young spinsters, with a small room at the rear with its own entrance opening out onto the garden, which was surrounded by a brick wall. I rented it in my guise as Angelique Fortaine, a descendant of French émigrés during the Terror. Poor Angelique had been a companion to the invalid wife of a wealthy man until the man – the cad! – forced himself upon her and then cast her out without references. Told with the appropriate quiver in the voice, it was most affecting. The other lodgers took Angelique to their collective bosom, loving her for her dainty ways and chin-up bravery.

  Everything was in place. It was time to launch my official career.

  I decided, first of all, to think of them as “projects” rather than victims. “Victim” denotes innocence. Since all men are guilty of something, innocence would not apply. I knew what kind of man I wanted to dispatch: big men, a physical combination of my father, Doyle, and the bullies who had tormented me.

  London is such a wonderfully designed city in which to commit murder, that it took no time at all to find an excellent location for my first project.

  It was a doss house which should have been torn down years before, and looked as if it were in imminent danger of collapsing. London is full of these abandoned places. Most of them, like this one, are not far from the river; immensely convenient for disposing of bodies. I packed the Gladstone with bread and cheese, the two blades, and a change of clothing in the event I became blood-spattered. And then I, as Angelique, took my place in the abandoned doss house and waited patiently. One of my virtues is patience, though I could not help but also be nervous and excited.

  Hours passed; I was becoming a little discouraged. Functioning gaslights were sparse and what little illumination came from them consisted of fuzzy yellow balls that dissipated in the thickening fog. The occasional sounds – horse hooves clopping, cab wheels squeaking, sharp or muted voices, barking dogs, the squall of cats – had the hollow, eerie quality that fog lends.

  Then he came. Easily as big as Doyle. A sailor, judging from his gait, which was one-part sea legs and two parts rum. He sang hoarsely, “‘Well it’s all for me grog, me jolly jolly grog, It’s all for me beer and tobacco –’”

  I pulled the bodice down a little, though not far enough to give away the padding that rounded it out and then I – rather, Angelique – suddenly stepped out of the shadows, facing him with a smile. He halted, his eyes narrowing in the dim glow of one of the scarce gaslights. “Hey, up,” he said, his accent betraying a Yorkshire birth. “What’s tha want, lass?”

  Angelique said, “Nothing. But I know what you want.” Angelique’s hand delivered a no-nonsense grope and a tent rose immediately in the man’s trousers. An unanticipated shock deep in my gut sent me out of character for the space of a second. I uttered a little involuntary gasp. and gripped him hard, as a wave of light-headedness passed over me. I had never even thought of – I ruthlessly put away the shadowy imaginings I dared not remember; Angelique took control again. It could not have lasted more than an instant, but it was a warning.

  The sailor looked down at Angelique’s firm hand clutching his hard rod. He chortled. “Tha does knows what I want, lass!”

  His coarse voice and the way he dug his dirty fingers so painfully into Angelique’s shoulder banished the last of her brief, unwelcome jolt of pleasure. There was business to be done. “Come along,” Angelique said. “I won’t do the deed in doorways.”

  “I ain’t got but a shillin’ left,” he mumbled. “That’s all tha can get.” Angelique assured him it was more than enough. His fingers dug more painfully into her shoulder. “Just see that ye mind the teeth, lass. If tha don’t, tha won’t have any teeth left.”

  Inside the doss-house, as he fumbled with his trouser buttons Angelique removed the stiletto from the bag. She had one more brief moment of panic when he grabbed her with one paw before she was ready, roughly hoisted her skirt and shoved his hand upward. He yelled in shock, “What the – ?” The last sound he made was a wheezing gurgle as the silver blade of the stiletto plunged into the front of his throat, through flesh, muscle and cartilage. There was little blood; the stiletto acted as a cork as he clawed at it, staggering. In the darkness I could not see the details, but I imagined his eyes popping open. He toppled like a tree beneath a woodsman’s axe. He lay on his back, his limbs working convulsively. Then he stopped. Just…stopped.

  Angelique put one foot on his chest for leverage, pulled out the stiletto, and wiped it on his coat. Last, to make certain he was dead, she carved a grinning mouth beneath his chin. She had forgot to ask the great donkey his name, but then, it didn’t matter. A rose by any other name is still…a corpse.

  My God, the exultation! Unless one has killed a man one can’t possibly conceive what it is like. The euphoria doesn’t last, of course. There is rather a…a letdown, a deflation of emotion minutes later.

  The rest of the night in the lodging house, I wrote it all down. I didn’t want to forget a second of it. I realized I had to make some improvements. After all, no true craftsman is ever satisfied, and one learns as one gains experience.

  To my disappointment, the body was not found for three days, and even when it was no one cared. After all, murder is an industry in the East End of London. My future excursions would have to be more daring, more dangerous, more open, if I wanted them to be noticed. There was nothing especially memorable about the two projects which followed, except that the bodies were discovered much sooner because they were left where they would be found, much like the whores killed by old Jack nearly fifteen years ago.

  Sometimes I thought about Sir Arthur’s ruminations on spiritualism and felt uneasy. Would any of my projects return to point an accusing finger? Absurd. None of Jack’s fair ladies had returned to do him in.

  When the fourth body was found, the whole huge city became gripped by a panic of my making! Exhilarating! The ladies in the lodging house talked of nothing else. The newspapers wrote of little else. In an effort to contain the panic, the police pointed out time and again that there was no known connection between the victims, except for the manner of their death and the fact that they had all had been men in their prime. No one believed them. Everybody knew they were searching for a man large enough and strong enough to overpower the victims and cut a grinning mouth beneath their chins.

  Even women were frightened though the “New Ripper” had thus far targeted only men. Decent women seldom left the house and working class women went only in pairs or small groups. Men, fools that they are, apparently considered such precautions to be unmanly and continued to make easy targets of themselves.

  Letters to the newspapers demanded that the police enlist the aid of Arthur Conan Doyle. It was common knowledge that letters poured in to the non-existent Baker Street address of “Mr Sherlock Holmes, Det.” More and more eyewitnesses came forward to describe a hairy creature seen in the vicinity of every one of the murders, a beast more ape than man. Utterly delightful! Dressed as Angelique I could have walked about in plain sight, carrying a severed he
ad in one hand and a knife dripping blood in the other, and no one would have suspected me.

  All these years, Michael Browne and David Neesom have never been far from my thoughts, though I lost track of both of them when the school was closed. I finally picked up David’s trail by reading a small story in an old newspaper. David had gone to South Africa in ’01 as a lieutenant, had saved the life of a colonel, during which action he had been wounded by some wretched Boer, and had been awarded the Victoria Cross. The article gave the place of his employment. My biggest fear was that he and Michael had ceased to be friends. I wanted, needed, them to be together in one way or another.

  Angelique, delicately dabbing at tears, hired a private detective to find her runaway fiancée, Michael Browne. I learned that Michael, though opposed to the war, had served as a hospital volunteer under the direction of Dr Conan Doyle before falling very ill in Africa. After returning home they had remained in touch; his letters had been there, under my very nose. If only I had read the letters Doyle offered to share with me, I would have found him sooner and saved a good deal of money. One of the few mistakes I have ever made.

  To Angelique’s delight, the detective reported (with a bit of a sneer on his pug face) that the bond between David and Michael had not been broken in the intervening years. Heroic David, whose handsome visage now bore a vivid scar, and the volunteer doctor, now studying to be a real doctor, were not so bold as to live together. But they frequently met at a music hall called the Fast Goose and from there often spent a night under assumed names at a declining hotel with the grand name of The Lord Byron. The detective made it plain that, since Angelique’s fiancé had turned out to be less than a man, he would be willing to take the sod’s place. With a brave smile, Angelique gently refused his solace.

  All of this detecting was expensive and used up the last of the money I had saved working for Doyle. Now that I had the information I needed, I had to decide how best to use it. I made and discarded a dozen scenarios before deciding that simplicity was best. It all hinged on their being, as they had been at school, Good Predictable Englishmen who never change an established habit. I decided that this would be my last project, and the first one involving two men at once. I examined my plan for flaws and found none. Therefore, it was set in motion.