The House at Baker Street

by Michelle Birkby

  ‘Your case? You setting yourselves up as ’tecs, same as Mr ’Olmes?’ he said, with a mixture of incredulity and amusement.

  ‘Yes we are,’ I said calmly, sitting opposite him. ‘Why ever not?’

  His smile faded as he realized I was deadly serious.

  ‘Your case,’ he said, looking at the two of us.

  ‘Our case,’ Mary replied. ‘Our client to protect. Our obligation to fulfil.’

  He watched her earnest face for a moment, and saw how seriously she took this. He nodded, and ate an enormous bite of the seed cake.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Mind, on one condition.’

  ‘What condition?’ I asked.

  ‘If either of you get into trouble, or get hurt, I go straight to Mr ’Olmes,’ he insisted.

  ‘Agreed,’ Mary said quickly. We were daring, but not fools.

  ‘Right then, what’s the job?’ Wiggins asked, as businesslike as ever.

  ‘To follow two people,’ Mary told him, handing over a piece of paper. Wiggins, unusually for a street boy, could read and write. I do not know where he learnt these skills. I suspect the price for them was high. But they were skills he was determined to use and expand.

  ‘Mrs Laura Shirley and her husband. This is their address, details of where he works, and so on. We need to know the names and descriptions of everyone who calls at their house, everyone they have any contact with, everyone they see or meet, no matter how insignificant.’

  ‘Blimey, you don’t half ask a lot!’ Wiggins said, amused, peering down the list.

  ‘Can you manage all that?’ I asked, watching this boy.

  ‘No more than I done for Mr ’Olmes a dozen times,’ he told me with a touch of scorn as he folded the paper and put it into his pocket. ‘Servants, too?’ he asked. I hadn’t thought of that.

  ‘Not yet,’ I mused. This was more complicated than I first thought. There must be so many people Laura Shirley had contact with, day in and day out, and those people had contacts, and then there were her husband’s friends and colleagues . . . how would we track down all those connections?

  ‘Unless you spot something significant in the servants’ interaction,’ I added.

  ‘How will he know what is significant?’ Mary asked.

  ‘Wiggins will know,’ I said confidently. ‘Mr Holmes has great faith in his abilities.’ This was true. I had often heard Mr Holmes say that Wiggins was destined to rule Scotland Yard one day – or set it by its heels and outwit it completely. Wiggins’ back straightened unconsciously.

  ‘Send Billy to me twice a day for reports,’ Wiggins said. ‘He’ll know where to find us.’

  Have I mentioned Billy? He was our page-boy. More on him later. He has quite a story of his own.

  No one knew where the Irregulars slept, not even Mr Holmes. They guarded their lair fiercely, for who knew who would come for them in their sleep – the law, the beadles, the criminals. ‘I’ll come myself if anything happens.’

  He nodded once at Mary and me, and turned to go.

  ‘Remarkable boy,’ Mary said, watching the door as Wiggins left.

  ‘They all are, all the Irregulars,’ I said, clearing up the tea things. I was suddenly angry that all that intelligence and kindness should go to waste. ‘What kind of world is it where Wiggins and Billy and the like scrape a living on the streets whilst worse boys than them get an education and a home and parents?’

  ‘A world where you take Billy in and Mr Holmes employs Wiggins and Wiggins cares for the lost boys,’ Mary told me gently, handing me her tea cup. She patted me on the shoulder, and I sighed. She was right, of course. Others failed them. We would not. ‘Now what happens?’ Mary asked.

  ‘Now we wait,’ I sighed, and sat down. ‘Mr Holmes hates this part.’

  ‘I can’t say I blame him.’

  Mary left soon afterwards, to take care of her own home and husband. I made cakes all afternoon – it was the most restful occupation I knew. And all day, even until the nighttime, I heard Mr Holmes pace back and forth above me. I didn’t know what he was working on, but his restlessness matched my own.

  I have to admit the next two days were exciting. Dr Watson was spending a lot of time with Mr Holmes, so Mary was free to visit me. We sat round the kitchen table, the sun pouring through the window, tea always in front of us, and the two of us planning and deducing. The plight of Laura Shirley had touched us, but I must say it was the thrill of the chase that was driving us onwards. We came up with a dozen different scenarios to catch the blackmailer, each more ridiculous than the last. We pored over the letter, searching it for clues, making terribly far-fetched deductions from the colour of the ink or the smudge in the corner. We talked and planned and, most important and thrilling of all, we thought.

  I did love my job as housekeeper, more than I had enjoyed being merely a landlady. Mary did love being married to John. Yet neither role offered much in the way of mental stimulation when the men were out, chasing about the streets of London. But now we had something to do, not just a way to while away the hours, like embroidery or baking, but a problem to solve and a puzzle to piece together. For the first time in years I felt my thoughts racing and my mind turning and my imagination creating and I felt alive: intensely, gloriously alive.

  The kitchen vent stayed shut for two days. We could hear John and Mr Holmes moving about upstairs, the occasional slammed door, once in a while an excited shout. Mr Holmes would not eat the meals I brought him, and his light burnt all night, always the way when he had a case. Mysterious telegrams arrived for him (using various aliases of his) at all hours of the day and night. And yet, for once, I had no curiosity about his case. I was utterly absorbed in my own.

  Reports from Wiggins and the Irregulars arrived twice a day, via Billy. We examined every word for something, someone out of place. Laura visited her dressmaker, her father’s solicitor, paid her bill at the milliner’s. Mr Shirley went to work and went home. He ate lunch in a local chop house with three other men of equal probity and averageness. The servants seemed ordinary; one of the maids had a follower, the boot boy was recognized as one who had run away from his previous post. Just tiny wrinkles in their perfect life, but enough to start a whole range of speculation in our minds.

  Of course there came the moment when the door to Mr Holmes’ rooms slammed open with extraordinary force, and Mr Holmes ran down the stairs shouting, ‘Come, Watson, there’s not a moment to lose!’

  Mary and I happened to be in the hall as John ran past and out of the door, glancing apologetically at Mary.

  ‘Go, go!’ Mary shouted happily after her husband. ‘Save the day, solve the riddle. Be sure to tell me every detail later!’ She never begrudged John a moment with Mr Holmes, as long as he told her the entire story afterwards.

  Mr Holmes called out as he passed us, ‘The game, Mrs Watson, is afoot!’

  Then they were gone. Mary closed the door behind them, turning to me, smiling sweetly, and said, ‘And our game, Mrs Hudson, is also afoot!’

  And we laughed for the sheer joy of it.

  But we had been dreaming our hours away, imagining ourselves detectives but merely playing the game. The reality hit us that evening, hard.

  John and Mr Holmes returned after sunset, well satisfied. Their case was solved, judging by Mr Holmes’ suddenly prodigious appetite. Night fell, and it was bitterly cold, the last gasp of winter. Mary and I were in the kitchen when suddenly the area door banged open. There stood Billy, barely a shadow against the darkness, and he was supporting someone slumped against him. Someone, a boy – Wiggins! As Billy dragged him into the kitchen, I could see that Wiggins’ arm hung loose, and blood, oh my God, the blood, dripped from his head, from his arm, from all over him. I grabbed him from Billy – who no longer had the strength to hold him after carrying him for miles through the streets like this – and propped Wiggins on a chair. His eyes did not open, his breathing was shallow and rasping, and his clothes were damp and stiff with blood.

 
; ‘Mary,’ I forced myself to say. My boy, what had they done to my boy? What had I done to him? ‘Mary.’ I sounded so calm. ‘Get John. Now!’

  It was Wiggins who had brought Billy to me nearly a year ago. Wiggins turned up one cold, wet night with a bedraggled child in tow. This boy, who couldn’t have been more than ten, slightly built, with dark brown hair, took off his hat when he saw me, and said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in a refined accent. I sat him at the table and gave him a huge helping of cold meat, cheese and a chunk of bread. I recognized the pallid tone to his skin, the hollows in his cheeks. It’s the way the children look when they’ve been in the workhouse too long, and haven’t had enough to eat. He ate the food quickly as Wiggins and I talked in the pantry.

  ‘He’s from an orphanage,’ Wiggins told me, glancing over to Billy every now and again. ‘Both ’is parents up and died of the typhoid, and there ain’t no other family, so he got sent to a Church orphanage. Nasty places, those, specially for them that’s used to a family and food and love. And he’s posh and clever, and they don’t like that sort of thing.’

  ‘The other children bullied him?’

  ‘Not them. The bastards – ’scuse language, missus, but they are – the ones who run the place. They like their children small and quiet and obedient and knowing their place. They don’t like children who know it ought to be different, and damned well say so.’ Wiggins’ voice, though low, shook with anger.

  ‘So that’s what he did,’ I said softly, glancing over to the boy at the table. He’d finished the meal and was now looking around him, curious and bright. ‘They treated him badly. Beat him, punished him.’

  ‘They did,’ Wiggins confirmed grimly. ‘So I took ’im. That was right, weren’t it?’ he asked, a touch anxiously.

  ‘That was right,’ I assured him. I know I should have imposed authority, insisted Wiggins take him back to the orphanage, but I’ve seen those places. I wouldn’t even send a dog I hated there. ‘Will he stay with you?’

  ‘He could,’ Wiggins said, slowly. ‘He could learn to be one of us, but he shouldn’t. He could make something of himself.’

  ‘You could make something of yourself, Wiggins.’ ‘Yeah, and I will, but not the kind of something he’ll make of himself. He could be a doctor or a lawyer or suchlike. Me – I’m going to end up something a bit different, if you know what I mean,’ Wiggins told me, his eyes for a moment full of a burning intensity. He was right. Given how Wiggins was growing up, on the street, no care, no guidance, precious little education and not always of the right sort, he could end up dangling at the end of a rope, or the richest man in London, but he could never be a well-respected member of society. He’d always be on the outside, looking in. Knowing that must have hurt, sometimes, but he never said anything.

  I looked across at Billy, who had got up from the table and was walking around the kitchen.

  ‘He notices things,’ Wiggins said. ‘Things I miss. And he works out what they mean.’

  ‘Like a detective,’ I said softly.

  ‘Like a detective,’ Wiggins agreed. ‘Maybe Mr ’Olmes could teach ’im. Like an apprentice.’

  ‘I’m not sure . . .’ I didn’t know if I could impose a boy on Mr Holmes – but Wiggins knew how to play me.

  ‘Course, you’d be doing me a great favour, Mrs ’Udson. I can’t keep an eye on him on the street, he’d be getting into all sort of mischief in no time flat, and I’d have to get him out of it. It would be a great relief to me to know he was safely here. In a proper home, learning a proper trade, where he belongs.’

  ‘Wiggins,’ I said warningly, knowing I was being manipulated.

  ‘And ’cos I worry about you,’ Wiggins interrupted.

  ‘Me?’ I asked, surprised and touched.

  ‘Mr ’Olmes has all sorts in here, day and night. Thieves, murderers, politicians, brutes of all kinds. I don’t like to think of you here all alone, having to show people of that sort up to his rooms. And Mr ’Olmes could do with a boy he could trust hanging round the place.’

  ‘Could he,’ I said dryly.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Wiggins replied earnestly. ‘Very useful things, boys.’

  He had talked me into it, though truth to tell I hadn’t needed much persuading. A woman who’d lost her son, a boy who’d lost his mother – the entire thing was just like a story.

  I took Billy on as page-boy. First I had a conversation with Mr Holmes and John. If Billy was going to do all the showing clients in and so on for Mr Holmes, they’d have to contribute to his wages.

  Mr Holmes was reluctant at first. He didn’t like change, and what ways he had, he was settled in, but John had sprung gallantly to my rescue, pointing out that at my age it wasn’t good for me to keep running up and down the stairs at all hours, especially not with the kind of people who came to see Holmes. I’d had to show a drunken sailor in at 2 a.m. only that morning, for heaven’s sake, and if this went on I’d have a heart attack and it would be Holmes’ fault. What’s more, I needed help to do all the errands to map shops and telegraph offices and cab stands – at which point Mr Holmes interrupted him, accused him of as pretty a piece of emotional manipulation as he had ever seen, and gave in.

  Billy got a uniform with two rows of brass buttons and a home and an education.

  Once Mr Holmes realized how clever he was, he did start to give the boy an apprenticeship, of a sort. Mr Holmes taught Billy something of what he knew. John, too, gave Billy lessons in all the knowledge Mr Holmes had forgotten (such as the solar system), though John’s lessons always seemed to segue into thrilling stories that couldn’t possibly have all been true. I do believe John honed his story-telling skills on Billy. I sent him to a succession of different tutors every Tuesday afternoon, and Billy played his part, too, reading voraciously. Within a few weeks Billy became an integral part of the household, and after a month even Mr Holmes called him ‘useful’.

  But Billy never forgot who had rescued him. Every hour that he had free – usually on Wednesday afternoons and Sundays – he ran onto the streets to spend with Wiggins. The two of them became close, as close as Mr Holmes and John. It touched me to see the care they took of one another, the concealing of their tight friendship with a joking manner, as boys do.

  Now it was Billy guiding the injured Wiggins, with infinite care, to a kitchen chair. Wiggins was white and shaking. Thankfully John had come straight down as soon as Mary had called him, and gently knelt before him, examining the blood all over him.

  ‘Where are you hurt?’ he asked. Wiggins shook his head. He didn’t have the strength to answer. I felt sick, watching him bleed, but Mary held me up.

  ‘His head’s bleeding,’ Billy answered for him. ‘A big cut, right here. Some other cuts and bruises, and his arm twisted under him when the man pushed him down the stairs. I think it might be broken.’

  ‘Let me see,’ John said, taking my scissors from the table and cutting Wiggins’ shirt away. ‘Tea, Mrs Hudson, strong and sweet and lots of it. Billy, hold him up, support him, he’s going to be in a lot of pain and may pass out. Mary, boil some water, this wound needs cleaning.’

  I’d never seen John in his role as the doctor before. It was a new side to him for me – this gentle, firm, knowledgeable, authoritative man. No wonder he was on call at all hours – it must have been comforting to have John Watson treat you. As soon as he touched Wiggins, the boy calmed, and let John take care of him. I wasn’t surprised Mr Holmes deferred to John in all medical matters – he had a talent no mere learning could replicate.

  ‘He’s losing so much blood,’ Mary whispered to him, as she placed the bowl of hot water and cloths on the table by John’s side. She glanced up at me, and I saw she was stricken with guilt. How could we have put a boy, this boy, in so much danger?

  ‘It’s a scalp wound,’ John said, taking one of the cloths and dabbing at the cut on Wiggins’ head. It went across his forehead into his hair, a sharp straight line. He must have hit it on the edge of something. ‘They alwa
ys bleed heavily,’ he continued. ‘You’ll have a scar, Wiggins, which will make you very popular with ladies. Tell them you got it duelling.’ John winked, and Wiggins, thank God, laughed, just once, a queer, choking laugh.

  John unpeeled the last scraps of Wiggins’ shirt just as I put the tea on the table. I gasped – I could not help it; Wiggins’ torso was covered in bruises. Wiggins saw the horror in my eyes, and in John and Mary’s too. Even Billy winced.

  ‘I fell down some steps. Stone ones,’Wiggins said hoarsely.

  ‘Fell?’ John said, disbelieving. ‘Billy said you were pushed, and I’d say you were pushed with some force.’

  ‘I fell,’ Wiggins repeated stubbornly.

  I could have told then, I would have. I would have told John all about the letters, and Mrs Shirley, there and then, and he would have told Mr Holmes, and it would all have been taken out of our hands. But then Wiggins glanced at me, he stared at me, and his message was clear. He was in on our secret now, had suffered worse for it than we had, and he didn’t want it told. I gave in and sat down silently. If that was what Wiggins wished, that was how it would be. I owed him that.

  I swear that is the only reason I kept silent.

  ‘Some of these bruises are old,’ John said, examining the mass of yellowing, purple and black patches on Wiggins’ torso.

  ‘Lots of fights on the street,’ Wiggins told him, clenching his teeth. John’s touch, no matter how gentle, must have hurt, but he would not react to it, not even a gasp of pain. It was I who gasped, and winced and wept.

  ‘He always wins,’ Billy said, half proudly, half anxiously. I saw his glance at Wiggins and wondered how many fights Billy had pulled Wiggins out of, how many bruises he had. Did he worry that, one day, Wiggins would not win? There was so much that went on in the lives around me that I only knew through glances, and glimpses, and half-overheard conversations. I did not have the authority to demand the truth, but I had the skill to watch and listen and understand what they would never say.