The woman gaped at us in astonishment. “You have been following me.” She put down her newspaper and seized a good-sized wooden box lying next to her as if to defend herself with it.
“Not at all,” Holmes said. “I have never laid eyes on you until this moment.”
“It is so,” I piped in. “Quite remarkable, isn’t he?” Sister Carolina was chuckling disdainfully.
“What you say is quite true, but I’m at a loss as to how you could possibly know these things. Perhaps you’ve been following my career?”
“I fear not, although I’m sure it will be a brilliant one. You are clutching to yourself an oaken box labeled Pastels Tendres, containing the prized pastels of an artist. Your general demeanor of independence and briskness of welcome indicate America, not to mention a certain national look which Americans are acquiring—what the French would call enfantin. But you have settled in France: you wear a well-used French gown and bonnet, which means you are no tourist, and you read Le Figaro easily. Your clothing indicates that you are in straitened circumstances—as are most artists trying to live from their art—but your pince-nez are solid gold, clearly a gift from well-to-do family connections. No gentleman would buy such a gift for a lady. It is too useful.”
The lady was impressed. “Extraordinary! My father is indeed prosperous, but I will not have him supporting me—although I do not begrudge a gift now and then. And I lack a wedding ring, obviously. All true, but how do you know of my unconventional style of painting, and my recent disappointment?”
“Your fingers are stained with unmixed oil paint, which no orthodox painter would use. Your approach must therefore be irregular. From this I surmise a recent rejection, as you are leaving Paris, the artist’s holy of holies, possibly forever. The volume of your luggage in the overhead bin reveals as much. Other than these small indications, you are a complete stranger to me.”
“Well, then, we are strangers no longer,” the woman replied. Smiling, she extended a hand to Holmes and me and shook ours vigorously. “Mary Cassatt, originally of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, most recently of Paris. And you are right, I have not lost confidence in my art.”
“Of course not, Miss Cassatt, your deportment, the set of your jaw, the way you grip your paint box—you are justifiably sure of yourself. My name is Captain Basil, and these are my cousins, Reverend Basil and his sister Mary.”
“Are you on a pilgrimage together?”
“A pilgrimage of sorts,” Holmes replied. “And now you will be getting off the train.”
Her eyes widened. “Do you think I should? I had thought to get away from Paris, to escape …”
“Miss Cassatt,” Holmes replied, “a century from now your work will be praised and studied and fawned over by the whole world. You have no time to lose. You must stay.”
“Captain Basil, with your powers of observation, you have confirmed for me that my approach is the right one. The power of the picture is in the small things, the things others don’t see, the light-catching things that go unobserved by our dull eyes.” She paused, gazed out the window for a moment, then arose. “I will be turning back my ticket now.” And she left the compartment in search of the agent.
“Holmes, you are a healer,” I remarked.
“Like you. Our professions are similar, Tuck—we are both engaged in the cure of souls.”
The train was just leaving the station when Miss Cassatt was replaced by a young man who popped through the door in a sweat. He nodded at us and sat down by the window, shedding his coat. “Almost missed the train,” he said. “You speak English?”
“Yes, we are English. I am Reverend Basil, my sister Mary, and my cousin Captain Basil.” I was playing the game quite smoothly now.
“Clement Yeobright,” he said. “On my way home at last. Do you mind?” he took out a cigarette.
“Not at all,” said Holmes, who lit it for him from his black clay pipe. “Where is your home?”
“Egdon Heath in Wessex.”
“Sounds desolate,” Holmes observed, blowing smoke in his direction.
“Oh, not at all,” the young man said, learning forward with some energy. “It is most exhilarating and strengthening and soothing. I would rather live on those hills than anywhere else in the world.”
“You, a young man, are leaving Paris, the most brilliant of cities, to bury yourself in the heath of the West Country?”
“I hate Paris,” Yeobright snapped. “It is false and flashy and … effeminate.”
“And yet those things hold a certain attraction for you,” Holmes replied.
“What do you mean, sir?” Yeobright sat back warily.
“I mean you have been working for some time as a jeweler in Paris. Diamonds are your business, and you have been quite successful at it. They are gaudy things, are they not?”
“I’m leaving all of that behind.” Then he stared at Holmes with that stunned expression I had become used to. “How in blazes did you know all of that?”
“Your sleeves are whiter to the elbows than the rest of your shirt. This comes from wearing sleeve stockings, which is typical of a jeweler. You have a faint white stripe on your forehead from a visor with a loupe attached, also typical of a jeweler. You wear a diamond stickpin of unusual purity. That and your natty clothes suggest that you are—or recently have been—a diamond dealer of substance.”
“You are a close observer. Yes, I have been doing well.”
“Pray, what is ‘doing well’?”
Yeobright made no answer at first. He looked out the window at the flat French countryside, then abruptly said, “That is precisely the question, sir. What is ‘doing well’? How does any man worthy of the name pass his time?”
“For my part, I collect vintage cameos,” Holmes said coolly.
“Indeed.” The young man showed no interest.
“Of course, I don’t carry them with me. Thieves infest these trains. In fact, just weeks ago a gang stole 700 thousand francs in Egyptian and Spanish bonds from this very train, the Paris-Calais Express.”
Yeobright continued staring at the landscape. “I had heard something of that,” he murmured, but he was no longer with us. His mind had drifted into some charmed atmosphere of his own making, and soon he was snoozing against the window.
Some hours later, Holmes and I sat outdoors on a bench astern the cross-channel ferry. We both preferred it to the main cabin, which was stale with the odor of seasickness—although Holmes fouled the fresh air with his old pipe.
“Young Yeobright is the man of the future,” shouted Holmes over the wind. “Immense potential, utterly aimless.”
“He seemed quite nice to me,” I shouted back.
“Nice men like Yeobright impose their will on others to no real purpose. He will create a wake of unhappiness as he searches for something to live for. All in vain.”
“That is the future you see for mankind?”
“It is.”
The wind weakened for a few moments.
“Is it the future you see for yourself?” I asked.
“Ah, there,” Holmes stood and set his face toward the channel spray, raising his black walking stick against it. “I have something to live for. To delve into the mystery of all things. It is the mystery that matters.”
“Then we are indeed in the same occupation. Mystery is my business as well.”
“So it is, as I said. We do the same job, you and I,” Holmes gave a wry laugh. “And I venture a guess that it is permanent employment.”
As we approached the port of Dover, we entered the main cabin where Sister Carolina sat working on her rosary kit. “Another,” she said, and held it up hesitantly, a small silver cross drooping from a circlet of parched red and black berries. “It is a gift for you, Mr. Holmes,” she sniffed. “I do not know how else to thank you for … the Holy Father … such a moment.”
“I accept it with pleasure,” said Holmes, taking it reverently from her hand. His cool voice warmed slightly. “Although my failures thus far outnumber my successes,” he muttered in my ear.
We soon debarked into the autumnal damp of Dover. During my years in the Carolinas, I had forgotten how the cold English air could stab like a knife in the spine. While we were collecting our belongings, I caught sight of the comely Mrs. Katherine Wells coming down the gangplank, now snug in a coat and hat of black woolen brocade and followed by men carrying trunks. She glanced at me and waved as she entered a waiting brougham, then was off.
“Holmes! Katherine Wells was on the Dover boat with us!”
“Yes.”
“Now she knows we were lying about Paris being our destination.”
“She never believed that it was,” he muttered. “And lower your voice. Have you any money for the porter?” I dug into my pockets for some coins.
From the Dover station we took the London train and at last arrived in the metropolis. Holmes’s demeanor changed as we approached the city. He pulled his collars up and his hat down, stayed furtively behind the porters when we left the train, and made quiet arrangements with two separate cabmen on Cannon Street.
“We part here, Tuck. In this cab I will take Sister Carolina to a religious house I know of. She will be safe there. You have a sister in the city, don’t you? Take the other cab, please, and stay with her until I call on you.”
He and Sister Carolina disappeared into their cab.
I didn’t expect them to disappear from the face of the earth. Yet that is what happened.
LONDON
Chapter 7
Four days later I was walking through Hyde Park with my four-year-old nephew. My adventure in Rome now felt like a dream. Had it really happened? I had heard nothing at all from Holmes or Sister Carolina since leaving them at the station. As I felt responsible for her safety, I was growing anxious.
What if something had happened to them? I would be totally ignorant of it, possibly forever. After all, I had no inkling of Holmes’s address, nor of the place he would have taken the Sister. I recalled how Holmes had been on his guard as we last parted and wondered if perhaps he had fallen foul of the ‘master criminal’ he spoke of so cryptically.
I had none of Holmes’s instincts, so couldn’t tell if I myself were in danger or not. It didn’t appear so. I had arrived to a squealing welcome at the house of my sister and her husband in Campden Hill and made the acquaintance of her son, a noteworthy boy of four (“four-and-a-half,” he reminded me soberly), big for his age, who engaged us in conversation with full, florid sentences. I had never known a child to speak so. His mother told me that the gift of language had fallen on Gibby like a tongue of flame. As soon as I met him, he tested me with a provocative and quite unanswerable question: “Uncle Simon, when I jump from a chair, do I fall to the earth, or does the earth fall towards me?”
While awaiting a message from Holmes, I paced my sister’s house like a bored cat, with Gibby continuously flinging questions at me, and she finally asked me to take Gibby on an outing to the park if only to be rid of us.
I had some qualms about leaving the house, especially with a child in tow, but I was overwhelmingly curious to see something in town. So I agreed to go. It was a brilliant, fresh fall day, and I couldn’t conceive that anything could happen to us in daylight in the heart of the world’s greatest city.
We bundled up Gibby against the cold and he and I set out. He became something of an attraction on the pavement. A young idler propped against a street lamp grinned at the little boy as we passed. Ladies stopped to admire him and the eager chaos of his red hair.
The child nattered on as we strode along just inside the gardens by the Kensington High Street. “Uncle Simon, why are you so burly?”
“Burly?” I laughed. An odd word for a four-year-old. “We come from a large family.”
“It is a large family in numbers … and it is also large in size,” the child giggled. He floored me with this one. It’s true, I was one of twenty-three children, and my brothers and I were all broad and muscular. At age four, Gibby was already distinguishing the significations of words as if he had the dictionary in his head.
“Uncle Simon, why are you a priest?”
I gave him a sort of childish answer. “Because the Lord loves little children, and he needs me to baptize them.”
“Yes, I know. I was baptized in the church by the water tower. Do you know why? Father says it took a great deal of water to make me a Christian.”
He laughed at his little joke, while I stared down incredulously at the wild mass of red hair that roofed over such a precocious brain.
“Someday I should like to be a priest,” he chirped.
“Why, Gibby?”
“To get rid of my sins. And help other people get rid of theirs.”
It was a stunning summary from the mouth of a babe—a little formula I have cherished ever since. “That is an excellent reason to be a priest, Gibby. Thank you for your wise words.”
He grinned up at me.
We soon found ourselves at the end of the park, toddling alongside the anarchy of Piccadilly among a crowd of rude boys. I could tell Gibby was beginning to tire—it had been a long walk already—but I had to go just a little further.
There it was—number 198 Piccadilly—according to Holmes, the address of the master criminal of London. Set in the stately façade was an immense barred gate, next to which a London policeman stood watching the passersby. I had anticipated something else—a moldering Gothic tower, or perhaps an archway leading to sinister caverns—but it was just a townhouse typical of Mayfair.
What had I expected? To glimpse an imprisoned Holmes gesturing to me from an upper-story window? To catch sight of Sister Carolina being carted off into the white-slave trade?
I couldn’t resist speaking to the policeman. “Is anything wrong, constable?”
“Nothing sir, er, Padre.”
“What brings you here to this particular gate?”
“Just standing my post, sir.”
I examined the pavement round the gate looking for traces of river mud, but found nothing but the usual London dust. I got down on all fours and sniffed about in vain for the odor of the Thames before I realized what I was doing.
“Are we playing a game?” Gibby asked.
I looked up to find that the constable and three or four pedestrians, a lady and gentleman and a couple of stray beggar boys, had stopped to stare at me. The constable was tapping himself with his stick, so I stood and brushed off my knees. “Er, thought I could smell gas. You know, these old underground gas pipes aren’t to be trusted.”
After I had loitered a while, hoping to catch someone, anyone, going in or out of the house, the constable suggested I move along. “The little fellow looks tired, Padre. Per’aps you should cab it home. ”
I agreed, and he signaled for a hansom cab that had been waiting across the street. “Where to, sir?”
“Campden Hill.”
The constable shut us into the cab, had a word with the driver, and we were off. Nothing out of the ordinary—until we moved beyond the park in Knightsbridge and missed the turning for Campden Hill. Then I knew something was going wrong.
All at once the carriage reeled forward at high speed, listing from one side to the other and going faster and faster, winding madly through the traffic for no reason I could see. I reached out for Gibby and held him tight as we spun off the street toward Hammersmith.
“Slow down! Stop!” I shouted, beating on the trap door in the roof of the cab, but it was locked. “Stop, I say. There is a child!” The driver gave no answer but lashed the great black horse even faster. We sped on, turning wildly almost backward into a lane spiky with barren trees. The child and I banged hard against the windows. Branches slapped at us as we hurtled over
ragged roads through the outlands of Shepherds Bush. The driver’s whip slapped again and again across the flanks of the laboring horse.
My hammering and shouting did no good. I managed to roll Gibby into a lap blanket and clasped him tight against myself to protect him, but he made no sound except an occasional “whee!” Flinging gravel from the wheels against the windows and even over the fender, the cab lurched and bounced so violently that several times I thought we would overturn. We could do nothing but endure it.
Then as quickly as it had begun, the mad ride was over. We had come nearly full circle and stopped at Campden Hill. The latch abruptly opened. Without pause I pulled Gibby, blanket and all, out of the doors and turned in anger to the cab driver. Buried in a scarf and low hat, he laid his whip over my face, just missing my eye, shouting “Get out of it and stay out!” Then he was off again at speed.
Gibby and I limped to my sister’s house. The idler still slumped against the street lamp looked sinister to me now, and I glared at him. My cheek stinging, my head reeling, I was outraged and my sister horrified when I told her the story. She breathed out threatenings and slaughter, but my brother-in-law, Ed, was more philosophical, eventually succeeding in calming her down. As for Gibby, he merely looked up at me and asked, “Can we do it again?”
“Why?” my sister asked. “What would cause a London cabbie to take leave of his senses like that?”
I had told my family nothing about my adventure with Holmes. They knew I had been to Rome, but they thought I had stopped at London on my way back to the States just to see them. Of course I suspected that the driver had been suborned by Holmes’s enemies and that this show of violence was intended to warn me off. Now it had touched my family, and I resolved to wait no longer to hear from Holmes.
After a short rest and a little refreshment, I started out again, this time taking the Metropolitan from Kensington Station to Westminster Bridge. As the train rattled along, I kept looking round at my fellow passengers. Which of them might be stalking me? Watching me? Hanging from a strap was a beefy fellow in a bowler hat, next to a short man who glanced at me occasionally through gemlike spectacles. Was he looking at me, or I at him? He shifted his weight. Which of us was the more nervous?
The Tarleton Murders Page 5