by A S Croyle
“Sherlock, who at my friend Mycroft’s request is still investigating the swan case, and who is, to Mycroft’s consternation, in full pursuit of facts surrounding that poor fellow who young Wiggins disinterred.”
“Why does Mycroft wish him to stay out of the case, Uncle?”
“Because it could be quite dangerous. It’s for the Yard to sort out.”
“I also ran into Mycroft today. He said the man was a member of the Privy Council.”
“Yes, his identity is now known,” Uncle said. “I’m sure it will be in all the papers tomorrow. He has something to do with the Board of Trade at Whitehall Gardens. In the Railway Department, I believe. His name was Cecil Gray.”
“And what else is known about him?”
“Very little. He is - was - married. Had a daughter who died very recently. In fact, it was in her grave that Wiggins found the body.”
“His daughter’s grave? My God.”
“Yes, terrible circumstances.”
“Has he anything to do with Oxford? Was he interested in phrenology?”
Uncle cocked his head. “What makes you ask?”
“If you spoke to Sherlock, then you must know that we suspect that someone was funding an Oxford professor’s research in that regard. Wiggins was sending bodies by rail to Oxford. So I must wonder-”
“Stop wondering, Poppy,” Uncle said in a stern voice. “You - and Sherlock - must let the Yard handle this.”
“Sometimes they are out of their depth.”
“You parrot Sherlock.”
“Perhaps he is right. You should know that first hand.”
He knew I was referring to the British Museum murders Sherlock had solved the previous year, the false accusations against Uncle which were part of a ruse concocted by Mycroft to flush out the true criminal. It had nearly ended very badly.
“The second young man I spoke with today was Jonathan Younger,” he said to change the subject.
“Yes, I ran into him today also.”
“He wanted to know if he could take you to dinner tomorrow night.”
“Dinner? No, I told him perhaps lunch. Actually I have plans with Sherlock tomorrow evening.”
“You are not still pining for Sherlock, are you, Poppy?”
I felt my face flush and momentarily turned away. Then I faced him squarely. “Pining,” I sneered. “I do not pine.”
“Hanging on to a scrap of hope then?”
I looked down, into my glass, and swirled the crimson liquid myself this time. I looked back at Uncle and asked, “Do you remember the young man I told you about, the poet I met at the British Museum? The one from India?”
He nodded.
“He told me once that a mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it. I have come to agree with him.”
“I see,” he said, but his eyes betrayed his skepticism. “So then... Jonathan Younger.”
“What about him?”
He smiled. “I told him that I place no restrictions on my very intelligent, educated, logical, independent, willful niece.”
I laughed. “I take after my uncle.”
“And so he would like to take you to lunch tomorrow at noon at The Criterion. I suggested the Holburn. Aunt Susan and I were there the other night for dinner. We had fish, sweets, ices and cheese - wonderful bread, as well. All for three shillings and six pence. Quite good.”
“Did you tell Jonathan that I would meet him there?”
“I advised him to send a page to confirm all this. And I told him that if you had not arrived by half twelve, he’d best have something to eat by himself or go back to Bart’s hungry.”
“All right then,” I said with a smile.
He finished his port and said, “I’m going to get some sleep. You should, too.”
He started to rise but I reached out to touch his elbow. “Uncle.”
“Yes?”
“I heard something... I heard something quite despicable about St. Bart’s today.”
He settled back into the chair. “What was that?”
“Sherlock said that they used to... well, he told me that at a public house there was a room in the back with benches with the grave robbers’ names who waited there with specimens for the surgeons at St. Bart’s to appraise and purchase.”
His face fell. “The Fortune of War public house on Pie Corner. Yes, Sherlock is correct.”
“It’s true then,” I said, heaving a loud breath. “And so, despite acts of Parliament and the Poor Laws, grave robbing still occurs.”
“Yes, it does, because there has been such an influx of medical students that there are not enough bodies for dissection. This has to do with this Wiggins thing, doesn’t it, Poppy?”
“Yes.”
“Poppy, I urge you not to-”
I interrupted him mid-sentence. “Uncle, in a very twisted way, I do see why the purchase of cadavers, this black market is on-going.”
“Oxford is still a somewhat marginalized medical school, Poppy. A lot of the metropolitan medical schools at the hospitals are booming. And we don’t get enough bodies to meet the needs of the medical students. So we still resort to finding beggars, and homeless and prostitutes and poor people who are willing to contract away their dying relatives. Brokers, undertakers, and others still pay the poor to give up their dead or simply help themselves and lie to relatives who want to at least give the deceased a pauper’s funeral. Still, to this day, body-dealers and those who specialize in body parts pick up corpses and sell them for profit... for a sixpence or a few shillings. The price of a meal at the Holburn,” he choked.
“And they are transported to various places on the railway?”
“On what they call dead trains.”
“My God. Uncle, this is-”
“Despicable. Nothing of which the medical profession can be proud. There are those who fight for the poor and unsuspecting. People like Hussey in Oxford.”
“Hussey? I thought he was something of a dolt.”
“Do not believe everything you hear, Poppy. He trained at St. Bart’s. He is the coroner in Oxford now, elected by the town council a couple of years ago. He has refused to provide any unclaimed bodies to Radcliffe Infirmary and he has lobbied against guardians selling the bodies of the poor for dissection. He constantly wages a war against people selling their loved ones.
“Poppy, there are dealers who employ go-betweens, like porters at hospitals and workhouse masters and undertakers. Of course, young medical students must learn all they can about the human body, but this trafficking of bodies and body parts...”
His voice trailed off. I simply nodded. It was exactly what Sherlock had been telling me earlier.
“Poppy, I don’t know what kind of scheme young Wiggins involved himself in. I don’t know if this Cecil Gray he dug up has anything to do with this at all. But stay out of it, will you? Promise me?”
Uncle had asked me this before. His concern for me was always at odds with what Sherlock asked this of me. He had frequently cautioned me to check my feelings for Sherlock and to disentangle myself from Sherlock’s detective pursuits. But it was a tug-of-war - complying with Uncle’s caring requests or submitting to Sherlock’s urgent entreaties.
Uncle always lost.
Chapter 15
I lay in bed for a long time, unable to sleep, thinking about the sordid business of body snatching. Obviously, the Anatomy Act had done nothing to better or cheapen medical training. There was a shortage of bodies and teaching hospitals with a focus on dissection needs must equal corpses being provided somehow... by mortuaries or workhouses or gaols. And if that wasn’t enough... and if coroners like the wrongly reputed Hussey, however well-intentioned he might be, stepped in to thwart relatives from selling bodies and refu
sed to let every corpse that came through the Radcliffe Infirmary be carted off prematurely, then this illegal trade would continue.
Oxford had remained a limited provincial medical school, particularly in development of clinical medicine. So bodies were even more sorely needed. And so, this Professor, this Danford Hopgood would have all the more difficult time obtaining corpses for his ‘research.’ I needed to talk to Wiggins. I needed to ask him to accompany me to meet Sherlock and I wanted to find out everything he knew about this degenerate, repugnant trade.
The following morning, a page called upon us during breakfast with a message from Jonathan that he would send a carriage for me to take me to The Criterion for our luncheon. I asked the page to relate to Jonathan that I needed no carriage; I would walk.
After he left, I set out for St. Paul’s where I so often went to contemplate things. If I desired a chaperone on my trek to the Four Swans and if I wanted to speak with Wiggins, first I had to find him. How did Sherlock contact him? Logical as I thought myself to be, it was worth trying to dissect Sherlock’s methods.
I arrived at the cathedral around ten. How often I had come here to pray for guidance or to ask that the burden of my affection for Sherlock Holmes be lifted.
As always, I marvelled at St. Paul’s exterior, taking in her extreme beauty... a mighty temple of colossal proportions, especially the front view at Ludgate Bill. The façade, a pediment, was sustained by a double colonnade and flanked by two towers. Once there had been Paul’s Cross where people preached sermons and politics mixed with religion in a way that had mostly passed. Now a statue of Queen Anne stood where the cross once was.
I entered the door to the left of the northern portico. Only once had I ascended to the top of the dome so I could look down on the nave and the transept, the fresco with depictions of the life of the patron saint. Looking down from the grandeur of the dome, I had often wondered how these works could be accomplished from that dizzying height. A light gallery encircles the top of the dome some five hundred steps upward, and from there one could see all of London, its great avenues, its patches of green, the river winding its way and the bridges spanning it with steamers and wherries and sailing vessels making their way to where I always wondered. My feelings were always strangely mingled. Sometimes I longed to leave England, to immerse myself in other cultures, to venture, as Victor had, to a far off place like India. But if I did, would I miss my relatives? Would I miss my parents, Uncle Ormond and Aunt Susan? This church? Would I long to still be wandering the streets with Sherlock - Farrington and Holburn, Oxford? And Fleet, the bustling lane of the offices of Punch and The Standard and The Daily Telegraph?
I sat down in a pew and closed my eyes. I forced myself to retrace the many moments when I sat quietly spellbound, listening to Sherlock. He knew he was special and was immodest about the fact. He’d once said that no one would ever bring to a case the amount of study and talent that he would. I believed it was in part due to the fact that he played the game for the game’s sake, rather than out of any deep concern for society. He was not totally deficient in human sympathy but oh, there were times when he seemed to be. He loved to push beyond the mundane, to put himself in peril if need be to pursue his goal - defeating criminals, solving the crimes. The thrill of the chase was as important, perhaps more exciting, than ultimately solving it. He could be like a racehorse, driven round the track, nostrils flaring, heart thumping, hooves thundering, absolutely and single-mindedly focused on the matter at hand. For him that was solving the unsolvable, to the point of deafness and blindness to everything else. If anything disturbed Sherlock, it was the possibility that a clue might have slipped by him or been dismissed as unimportant. He had told me repeatedly to discard distraction from my life, including romantic notions as he had worked so hard to do, and yet he kept his mind open to extraordinary possibilities, to look at a problem from many different angles.
He had asked me once, when we were sitting by the river during his holiday at Victor Trevor’s home, “Mary’s father has three daughters. The oldest is named April. The next oldest is May. The youngest is named what?”
I had been reading and occasionally watching the white clouds slowly snake their way across the bluest of skies. I mumbled ‘June.”
He had laughed. “You are not paying attention. Though you are trying to think in a logical way, you are not really listening. Mary is one of three daughters. Her sisters are April and May. The third must be, therefore, named Mary.”
I believe I’d thrown my book at him.
Though he was arrogant enough that he rarely admitted a mistake, he counselled that we must all learn from our mistakes and those of others. He would forgive one mistake but certainly no more than that.
He never guessed. He accumulated evidence and data. He asked the right questions. He evaluated and formed a hypothesis and then reached a conclusion. He constantly worked on improving his inductive skills.
After a time, resolved that dissecting Sherlock’s brain - what little I knew of it - would not lead me to Wiggins or Rattle or Ollie or Scratch or any of Sherlock’s other young cohorts, I sighed, stood up and muttered to myself, “This is getting me nowhere.” None of the things I’d learned from Sherlock were going to help me find one homeless boy in a city of thousands.
As I emerged, I saw a young girl, perhaps twelve or thirteen years of age, with loose, dirty brown curls and eyes like an owl’s. She wore a long, grey tattered skirt and a short gown, something one would expect to see on a washerwoman decades ago. It was T-shaped with a flared hem, the kind of garment that might be suitable for physical labor. It was made of corded linen, and was long ago off-white but now discolored with age that was more obvious against her pasty skin. It had been patched many times, especially along the sleeves and beneath the arms, with the tiny stitches of a skilled and frugal hand. Her battered boots were dusty. She walked up to me and said, “I’m ‘ere t’say Wiggins’ll fetch yer ‘round six to take yer to Sherlock.”
“What? Who are you?”
“Ivy. Ivy Green.”
“Well, Ivy, how did you find me?”
“Wiggins says that Mr. ‘olmes says you come ‘ere sometimes to think. So’s I followed and waited fer yer t’ be done prayin’.”
“Wiggins said that, did he?”
She nodded.
“And you’ll go back to Master Wiggins to confirm that you found me then.”
She nodded again.
“And what will you get for your trouble?”
Now she shrugged and said, “Maybe a shilling. Mr. ‘olmes will see to it.”
Laughing, I gave her a shilling from my pocket and said, “You deserve this and more. Do tell Archie - I mean, Wiggins, I look forward to seeing him then. At my home?”
Again, Ivy nodded.
“All right then. Thank you, Ivy.”
Wide-eyed, she said, “That’s a fine scarf, Miss. And your cape...”
“Ivy, why don’t you come with Wiggins tonight and we’ll give you a decent supper?”
I wanted to take her straightaway to a shop to buy her clothing as well, but she fidgeted as if she could not wait to get on with her day. “No, Miss. I’ll be off then.”
Before I could object, she turned and ran up Fleet Street.
Well, so much for comprehending Sherlock Holmes or any of his little friends, I thought.
Chapter 16
I walked down Regent Street toward Piccadilly Circus where I was to meet Jonathan at The Criterion Theater and Restaurant. Built on what had once been the site of a coaching inn called the White Bear, it had thrived for over a century but was demolished in 1870 and rebuilt. I was just fourteen and my uncle and I watched from a distance. He had squeezed my hand and said, “We must never forget the past, Poppy, what’s gone before. It is alive in the present if we keep it so.”
Ground for the new buil
ding was broken in 1871; a restaurant and a bar opened in 1873 and the theater presented its first performance, An American Lady, in 1874, the year I met Sherlock. I stood at the entrance for a moment. Many, many years later, I would revisit that site where a statue, Eros, was erected a few years after that luncheon, which I came to regard as the real turning point in my life. Ultimately the decision to meet Jonathan that day set into motion a series of events that altered the course of my existence.
I spotted Jonathan and when he saw me enter the restaurant, he gallantly rushed to escort me to our table, took my cape and handed it to a waiter as he held my chair out for me to be seated.
It was a lovely setting with clean linen tablecloths, neatly pressed napkins, plated silverware, pewter pots and finger glasses. We were immediately offered a choice of cheeses and pulled bread. A waiter handed me a bill-of-fare but Jonathan quickly suggested flounder and potatoes and I simply nodded.
“We can order something else, if you prefer, Poppy.”
“No Jonathan. Flounder is fine.”
“My father,” he said, “often likes to tell me about all the restaurants he and my mother frequented when he was a young solicitor before he became an MP in Suffolk. I believe his favorite place was George Reeves on Cornhill and Lombard. He used to rave about the roast beef and mutton cutlets and hashed duck and new potatoes.”
We sat there, me rather stiff and uncomfortable as Jonathan rapidly recounted his days at Harrow with my brother Michael and his struggle to decide whether to follow his father’s footsteps into the law or to pursue medicine.
On this subject, medicine, we found common ground and conversation eased through the rest of lunch... until he asked me this: “What is the nature of your relationship with Sherlock Holmes? Why do you keep company with him?”
I dabbed my lips with my napkin, took a sip of water and said, “Pardon me?”
“I asked what your relationship to him is.”
My mind flitted from one memory to another, from the day I met Sherlock on the grounds of Oxford to our long afternoons by the river in the Broads when he visited Victor Trevor, to his disappearance to sort out a blackmail scheme against Victor’s father. He’d summoned me to Holme-Next-the-Sea to seek my counsel as to how to tell Victor about his father’s sordid past from which Mrs. Hudson’s estranged husband’s blackmail scheme was hatched. It was at that seaside cottage that we had finally displayed our affection toward one another. I thought of the criminal cases we had worked together. I often placed myself in danger to do so. I thought of our meetings at the British Museum where he researched certain Buddhist practices as they related to our last case. I saw in my mind his lodgings on Montague, which I had seen only once. The roaring fireplace, the mantel where he kept notes and pipes. And the tavern at which he often stopped, the one across the street from the museum. There were many public houses but this was his favorite and I pictured him sitting in there, nursing a beer and thinking through a problem.