by A S Croyle
Finally, I thought of the way my feelings waxed and waned toward Sherlock.
“Poppy?” Jonathan asked, snapping me back to the present. “I do not mean to offend but I have wondered...”
“Sherlock is my very dear friend, Jonathan. We have known each other a long time and worked together on many cases.”
“Cases? You? But you are not a detective.”
“I lend my medical expertise occasionally. And I assist in other ways.”
“So it is a business relationship.”
“No, we are friends,” I said again. “Why does this matter to you?”
“Michael has told me a great deal about Sherlock Holmes. I think he is... well, he is not suitable for you.”
I smiled to myself. Then I laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“That is almost precisely what Sherlock said to me about you.”
“He doesn’t even know me,” he protested. “What makes him think that I am unsuitable for you?”
“Jonathan, it really does not matter to me what either one of you think. I go my own way and I shall make my own decisions. Men - even ones for whom I have affection - do not make them for me.”
Now Jonathan laughed. “I knew you were different, Poppy. Independent. As I told you, I find it exciting. I should like to see you again.”
I glanced at the watch pinned to my bodice. “I must be going, Jonathan,” I said as I stood and waved to a waiter to retrieve my cape.
Jonathan stood and said, “Poppy, let me hail you a cab or-”
“No, thank you, Jonathan. As I told your page earlier, I prefer to walk.”
As soon as I had my cape, I drew it around me, tied it, thanked him for lunch and headed back to my office.
Men, I thought. Men! Is there not a single man in the world who would allow a woman to be - well, whatever she wishes?
Chapter 17
The day passed slowly, despite another flurry of patients. I counted the hours until Wiggins would escort me to The Four Swans to consult with Sherlock about the two cases - the dead swans and the dead Privy Council member.
Despite Uncle’s protest, I sat near the front door to wait with cape, scarf and bonnet on. As the grandfather clock struck six, I jumped. Just moments later, Wiggins knocked on the door and I raced to open it.
“There’s a hansom waiting t’ take us on t’ th’ Four Swans, Miss,” he said.
“Let us go then, Archie. I mean, Wiggins,” I said, grabbing my gloves and hooking my arm through his.
It seemed to take forever to get to the East End and all the longer because each time I tried to query Wiggins about his grave robbing enterprise, he either refused to answer or simply looked away. The Four Swans was in sight when Wiggins signaled the cabbie to stop. As we exited the hansom, I felt the squalor. All around me - the stench of sewers and drains, the foul odour of sweaty people molded to one another in the cheap lodgings, the pall of hopelessness washed down by pale ale. There was no hint that anyone in this desolate area would reap the harvest of their labors or aspirations. They had stopped dreaming long ago.
Before I took two steps, Sherlock emerged from the shadows. “Follow me,” he said gruffly. So began a sojourn down Commercial Street between Flower and Dean and Aldgate, near Whitechapel. “What are we doing, Sherlock? Where are we going?”
“Quiet, Poppy,” he said, gently taking me by the elbow to prod me along. “We will return to the Four Swans soon to have a meal and I will give you an account of our case.”
“Which case? The mutilated swans or the dismembered corpse?”
“Both. But first, do come along and observe.”
“But where are we going, Sherlock?”
“Just follow me.”
We finally stopped in an alley near Court Street directly across from London Hospital. Sherlock pointed to a woman standing beneath a gas lamp near a doorway several yards away. She was small in stature, with long brown hair and wore a crimson dress and a black bonnet trimmed with a wine-colored ribbon.
Many other women paraded along Commercial, most dressed neatly, hawking trinkets and menthol cones or in search of clients. I knew their lives likely alternated from lodging houses to workhouses to the pavement.
“Sherlock,” I whispered, but he put finger to lips and said, “Quiet. Observe.”
The woman looked back and forth as if she were waiting for someone.
“Sherlock, you must tell me at once what we are doing here or-”
“Ssshh,” he cautioned.
A few moments later, a man came from Thomas Street to her left. She turned and raised her skirts above her ankles. He spoke to her, then cupped her face with his hands. They turned to cross Court Street and he paused to fondle her beneath another gas lamp. It was then that I was able to focus on his face.
I realized it was Jonathan Younger.
Chapter 18
Soon they were laughing and groping each other like fecund feral cats. The woman emitted a series of unrelenting groans as Jonathan explored her, right there on the street. Then they stepped into a rowhouse and shut the door behind them.
It is difficult to describe the feelings I experienced in that moment. I had no deep affection for Jonathan. We were not in a significant relationship. Yet I felt a sense of betrayal. He was my brother’s dear friend. I’d agreed to be with him in a social setting and I had hoped that perhaps a new relationship would help me push away any romantic feelings I still nurtured for Sherlock. Whether I acquiesced to Jonathan’s pursuit was immaterial. It would have meant I was reasserting my emotional independence, that I was willing to discard Sherlock from my life entirely.
I closed my eyes for a moment, willing my surroundings to disappear, willing the clattering of horses and hansoms that heaped this reality upon me to vanish into the fog. My mind went to the Broads, to the river where some beautiful creature is always going about its business. I was sitting on the grass, watching birds float above, flailing their wings... teal and wigeon, reed and sedge warblers. I watched a marsh harrier careen at full tilt, clapping its wings, stalling above a rock and then banking off across the river. And then the butterflies floated by, mute, graceful, leading a short life of pure innocence. Swallowtails or a rare Norfolk hawker dragonfly, turning at this angle and that on the wind, shadowing the sunlight, nesting on a fen orchid or a crested buckler fern, then taking flight once more and waving goodbye as it disappears into a chink.
Come, a voice said to me. Come home and be greeted by your friends back home. Walk along the river, navigate the patchwork of waterways, watch for the harvest mice and water shrews and listen, listen to the swans gliding along the water.
But no. Reality is fixed, demanding. I could feel the roar of it, rough and grating inside my head like the rumble of a mile-high wave seething and heaving and crashing against the rocks. Even if you leave momentarily, it always follows, it always calls you back.
“Poppy,” Sherlock said and I turned to look at him. “You see who it is.”
The color draining from my face, I nodded. I felt water drip on the back of my neck as snow heaved off the muzzle of fog and broke through.
Go back to the Broads, my mind told me. Skip along the water’s edge. Let it roll down and slide along the top of your foot. Dip your toes in and cast a long glance back to London and laugh at her. You are not supposed to be there, you are supposed to be here with us, the creatures called.
“Poppy, I spoke with Womack yesterday. I inquired as to Jonathan. He is the one who told me of his almost nightly visits to avail himself of... of this. A friend of Jonathan’s who works at London Hospital has introduced him to many of these... women. I spoke to Womack about the house where Dr. Younger meets his... his-”
I spit out, “Stop!” and Wiggins walked a few paces away as if to hide from this unusual
spat between two people he admired. I longed for Sherlock’s face to slip away as well, out of the glare of the light. I longed for darkness to surround me, soft and restful, for the light to desert me for as long as I willed it.
I tried to think of something clever. Instead I blurted, “You are cruel, Sherlock. You... you do not want me yourself but you don’t want anyone else to want me either.”
“It would be a pity if you truly believed that, Poppy. You may not like the message but I am simply the messenger,” he said softly. “Sometimes the very thing you wish least to hear is that which you need most to hear. And, in this case, to see, because I do not think you would have listened to me if you did not see it for yourself.”
In the deepest levels of my soul, I knew he was right. Still, I was angry. And there awakened in me an anguish that would later emigrate to resolve and become forever inseparable from it. That resolve would be indissolubly united with all the pain that loving Sherlock had caused me. I determined that I would never give into my emotions so completely again.
“I should like to leave now, Sherlock.”
“We have things to discuss. I have a lead on the killer. And possibly a connection to the person who is destroying the swans.”
“I do not care.” I walked away briskly and Wiggins raced up to me.
“But, Miss, yer was wantin’ me t’ talk about the grave diggin’.”
I saw a hansom coming toward me, stepped into the roadway and waved to it. It stopped. “Not now. I will talk to you... another time.”
“But, Poppy,” Sherlock said.
As I stepped up into the cab, Sherlock took my wrist and borrowed a little fragment from the truth. “Forgive me,” he said. “I was trying to be helpful.”
I knew he wanted to show me he was right about Jonathan after all. In fact, he probably wanted to show me how senseless and illogical it was to be in a romantic relationship. But he may also have been sorry to hurt me.
“And you have been. Very helpful indeed.”
I had chosen. My fate was settled. I would fend off lofty romantic notions that might pull at my soul; I would allow them no longer to get in my way. In separating from Sherlock, I needed to be like him. Cold, disentangled from love and emotion, oblivious to the incessant stream of images from our night together.
As the cab pulled away, I heard him call out my name. I did not look back.
Chapter 19
The cab bumped along and my mind sputtered and spun, but as I, too, tended toward the science of deduction, the logical course of things, I summarily dismissed Jonathan as a non-entity. I quickly decided that he did not matter. His sordid night life did not matter. I would at the proper time relate this evening’s revelations to my dear brother who thought of Jonathan as a friend - he needed to know the sort of man he was befriending. But right now, Jonathan’s lifestyle, his existence was insignificant.
In my mind, just as in Sherlock’s, what mattered at this instance was the case. I did not have all the facts and that is what I needed. I knew that Kate had had a loving father but after he died, her life went to hell. I knew that she’d ended up a prostitute to support the child her married lover had fathered. I sensed her affinity to swans and from her comments, I sensed that she detested the fact that she was a woman in a man’s world, that she respected me for having forged my way through the barriers. I knew that she had seen something that resulted in a terrible beating. A warning to keep her silent. If all this was connected to the boy who had disappeared from the Queen’s employ and the rumours about the member of the Privy Council, if it was related to the dead Cecil Gray, I certainly could not prove that yet.
But as we trotted along, as London’s filth spewed around us, as loquacious beggars ran beside the cab and pawnbrokers and dealers hawked their wares, as the rambling residents of London’s underworld and the shrill sounds of her desperate characters propelled like shooting stars through the night, I realized that this was exactly where I needed to be and Sherlock was exactly who I needed to speak to.
To him and to Kate Dew. Wiggins would know exactly where to find her. Rattle had given me the addresses after he followed her and Wiggins knew the area.
I shouted to the cabbie to turn around. He made a turn so sharp that I thought I would cascade from the cab as we headed back from whence we came. Along the way, more ladies of the evening appeared, some lady-like in appearance who had obviously used taste in selecting their clothing. A few were dressed in bright colors, their dresses meretricious and tawdry. A stout woman on the corner of Thomas with a round face and thick, muscular arms was talking to a man of equal girth, quite obviously negotiating a price. I signaled the cabbie to stop and tossed him several coins as I emerged from the cab. I ran to where I’d left Sherlock and Wiggins and nearly collided with them as they rounded the corner.
“Poppy!” Sherlock cried. “You... what on earth are you... ?”
“Be quiet,” I said. “We need to talk.”
“Poppy, I am sorry, truly but-”
“Still your tongue, will you? I have need of a glass of wine and you must listen to me.”
We went to the Four Swans and Sherlock ordered beverages, some cold meats and cheese. I proceeded to tell Sherlock about Kate Dew. I related what she had said about her father and his demotion to cleaning urinals at St. James, about being unable to follow his footsteps in his unnamed profession, about her relationship with a married man which resulted in the illicit birth of her daughter, and her preoccupation with swans and her disdain for the queen. He sat, wide-eyed, taking it all in, his mind like a Babbage calculating machine tying all the loose ends together. Then he leaned forward. “Dew? You said her surname was Dew?”
I nodded.
“Poppy, you remember I told you that I could not speak to the Keeper of the Swans as he was ill? He finally recovered from his bronchial infection and he was able to speak to me.”
“And?”
“And he told me more about swans than I have an interest in but also gave me some useful information. A man named Charles Dew was a Deputy Keeper of the Swans for many, many years. He had a son who would be in his twenties now. At least it was thought it was a son.”
I felt my eyebrows rise. “Thought?”
“The assistant keeper was injured and could not complete his daily duties. He was demoted to maintaining urinals at St. James. Just as your patient described about her father. The Keeper went into great detail about those as well. How glazed stoneware basins and marble divisions replaced the iron and slate and that now metal perforated with geometric patterns-”
“Sherlock,” I interrupted, impatient to hear the real story.
“The son stayed on for awhile, helping with the swans, but apparently rumours started to fly about some unusual relationship with a member of the Privy Council. At first, so the Keeper thought, the gentleman of high birth had simply taken an interest in the boy who apparently was quite bright. But then people started to talk about it being something more. And the Keeper has come to believe that those rumours were wrong, too.
“He went to great length to explain how many young women in America’s Civil War dressed as men to join the war effort. He said that he and Mr. Dew had discussed this on many occasions.”
“The Civil War ended over a decade ago.”
“Indeed, round about the time the man started to work with the swans and started bringing his son with him. The Keeper has come to the conclusion that the man’s son was not a boy at all but a female and that the Privy Council member eventually became involved with the girl. That is why she left.”
“And the Privy Council member... who was it?”
“Our dismembered corpse, Dr. Stamford. Cecil Gray.”
“So now,” I said, leaning toward him, “if we pull all of this together... Kate’s account of her life, what she told me about her father, her illeg
itimate child, the fact that Cecil Gray was involved with Mr. Dew’s alleged son...”I sat back, took a sip of wine, left that string of facts hanging for a moment and then looked straight at Wiggins.
“Wha’?” he asked.
“Do you think prior your commission came from Mr. Gray?”
He shook his head. “I don’ know. No idea.”
I told him the address to Kate’s lodgings and asked, “Can you show us the way?”
He nodded.
“Take us there, Wiggins.”
He shrugged and stood. “Awright, Miss.”
Chapter 20
“Sherlock,” I said, “You told me that you had a lead on Sir Gray’s case.”
“Hopkins told me that Hopgood, the professor at Oxford, disappeared around the same time as Cecil Gray. I went to Oxford. No one knows where he went.”
“I see,” I whispered.
When we arrived at the lodgings of Kate Dew, another young woman greeted us at the door with a toddler in her arms. We asked for Kate and the woman directed us to a lodging house around the corner. She said Kate was an excellent cook and that she was fixing a meal for a sick friend.