“And the other reason?” Sarah asked, archly.
John smiled. “Because she’s always been a bohemian herself. And she has a bit of a past among the artistic set as well. She posed for quite a few painters in her reckless youth, and—though a gentleman never pays attention to rumors—there are rumors she had more than a few amorous adventures among them.”
“She may be a bit of a bohemian, but everything I heard out of her tells me she has enough good common sense to be able to keep a small herd of flighty artists out of trouble,” Mary replied with some affection. Nan smothered a smile; it was obvious that Mary had warmed up to Beatrice immediately.
“That she does,” John agreed. He regarded all of them soberly. “Do any of you feel that there is any urgency in taking care of Number 10? I’m not only asking about logic and reasoning; I am asking about instincts.”
Nan leaned back in her seat and clasped her hands on her knee. Sarah got a faraway look in her eyes. “I’d like to ask the birds before we come to a conclusion,” she said, finally. “But I’m not getting any sense that we need to move in the next—three or four days, at least. Sarah?”
Sarah shook her head. “No feelings of nameless dread here. And speaking logically—Doctor Watson, won’t the police be doing their best to keep anyone out of Number 10 for a while?”
“It’s been boarded up, and yes, whoever is patrolling Berkeley Square as his regular beat is going to be keeping an eye on the place to keep the curious out,” Watson said in a decided tone of voice.
“Then let’s do what we seldom get a chance to do,” Mary Watson chimed in. “Let’s do what Holmes does, survey the site, get the plans of the house, gather information on our foe.”
“Speaking of Holmes, I wonder how he’s coming with that missing girl case?” mused Watson. “Or if the raven was wrong, and it’s too ordinary for him to care about?”
“I just hope he doesn’t expect to dragoon you into it before we finish with Number 10,” Mary said darkly. “I’ll . . . I’ll organize his case files if he dares.”
“Mary!” John clutched at his chest in pretended shock. “You wouldn’t!”
She looked mock contrite. “No, I wouldn’t. But I will see to it that Mrs. Hudson burns all his toast.”
“That, he wouldn’t notice. He scarcely notices when his food is ice-cold.” Watson snorted. “Still, we should look in on him on the way up. And we should decide if you are dining with Mary and me, ladies.”
Nan answered for both of them. “I wouldn’t impose on Mrs. Hudson’s good nature without advance warning. Tomorrow night, however, we would be delighted.”
On arrival at 221, the quartet headed straight up the stairs to B, opening the door to the strains of, “Watson! Bring the young ladies in! I need the feminine perspective!”
Watson’s eyebrows rose, but he waved the women in ahead of them, and they all fitted themselves into the somewhat chaotic sitting room. Holmes was deep in perusal of what looked to be a thick packet of papers, his brows furrowed, as he waved them all to seats. “This case is . . . very interesting, Watson. On the face of it, it would be a simple elopement. However, there is nothing simple about it, once one gets past the surface. Take these letters, for instance. Here, take them indeed!” He divided the packet into three, and handed one third each to Nan, Sarah, and Mary. “These are not the originals, of course; these are translations. Read those over, and tell me what you think. You, in particular, Mary.”
“Translated by whom?” Mary asked, accepting her packet. “You know what they say about translations . . . they can range from incomplete to inaccurate.”
“By me, of course,” Holmes replied. “These are part of my case notes. I promise you, I have been careful to reproduce the least nuance.”
Nan read her letters . . . and at first, they seemed very commonplace. Addressed to the missing girl’s parents, there was nothing in them to excite any sort of suspicion. In fact, they were utterly dull recitations of where the girl had gone and what she had done.
. . . perhaps, a little too dull.
No, a great deal too dull.
“Had this young lady ever been anywhere away from home before?” Nan asked, more sharply than she intended.
“Ha!” exclaimed Holmes. “I believe you have seen what I have! No, despite her sister’s profession, Johanna had never been away from home for as much as a night. She had never traveled beyond the borders of her city.”
“It’s more what I haven’t seen, Mister Holmes,” Nan pointed. “There’s no excitement here. She’s never been outside of her home city you say, never been to a strange country at all, and yet, these . . . descriptions, if you could call them that, are like a particularly stodgy guidebook. She doesn’t exclaim about things that surely must seem odd to a German. She doesn’t go into raptures over a beautiful building, or a stained glass window, or even, for heaven’s sake, the interior of St. Paul’s. There’s nothing of the personal in any of the letters you have given me. Nothing about fashions, and the first thing most young women would talk about would be fashion, because there are always differences in things we women notice between countries. Surely she should have been on the lookout for the Professional Beauties, and yet . . . there is nothing. Nothing about the new food she has been trying. Nothing about the opera other than the description of the opera house! And absolutely no sense of excitement in any of it.” She frowned. “In fact, these are letters that are devoid of people as well. Didn’t she meet anyone besides her sister?”
Sarah nodded agreement. “Wasn’t she introduced to anyone? Surely, with her sister performing her London debut, there must have been all manner of nobility and notables swarming about, but you’d never know it from these letters. Nothing about the opera house dandies. Nothing about the artistic set. Nothing about musicians. She mentions no one, least of all this mysterious Canadian. He should have appeared somewhere in these letters at the beginning, even if she attempted to hide a growing infatuation by eliminating him from later missives.”
Mary was frowning even more deeply. “Sherlock,” she said sharply. “Even assuming that this girl was the dullest, shyest creature on the planet, there is nothing in here that shows me she was in love enough with a stranger to elope with him. A woman in love does tend to wax poetic and rapturous about even the smallest of trifles, if it can be related at all to the beloved. I would have expected poems of praise to any little thing that recalled him to her mind.”
“Wouldn’t she have been trying to conceal that?” Holmes asked, looking for all the world like a hound on the scent. “These are letters to her parents, after all. One might assume that the fiancé would see them, and she would not have wished him to learn of a rival.”
“Trust me, Sherlock, a young girl is absolutely incapable of completely hiding an infatuation from the knowing eye,” Mary replied. “It is a great deal like the analogy of ‘seeing’ a hole in a dark cave by lighting its edges. You might not be able to see the hole itself, but you can certainly intuit where it is. She does not avoid the existence of her fiancé; she refers to him several times in each letter, in the most commonplace way, and he would be the last thing in the world she would want to touch on, if she were in love with another. And there is a complete absence of anyone else, at all, other than her sister Magdalena. If I were to say anything about these letters, I would say for a certainty that they were not written by anyone madly enough in love with someone to fly with him.”
“Ah!” Holmes settled back in his chair with contentment. “That was precisely what I thought, but I wanted to see if you ladies would come to the same conclusions I did. I tend to find the ways of the feminine sex . . . obtuse. But never let it be said I ever hesitated to consult with someone more expert than I, when my knowledge is lacking.”
“I can’t say I’ve ever been in love, but I tend to agree with Mary,” Sarah told Holmes, handing over her share of the letters
. “These are the letters of a dulled soul, not an enlivened one. A girl in love sees the stars everywhere. Whoever wrote these letters was staring fixedly at the ground, and never looked up.”
Nan passed hers over with a shrug.
“Then there is the matter of the unheartbroken fiancé,” Holmes continued. “And the now-unconcerned parents. You will recall I got heart-rending missives from the parents as well as the fiancé from Germany. I also interviewed them as soon as they arrived; the fiancé came the day after the Von Dietersdorfs. They were quite upset, not to say distraught. Then, today, they all returned en masse to tell me there was no further need for me to investigate. They told me, calmly, serenely even, that the matter was settled and I was no longer to concern myself about it. That Johanna had indeed run off with a young man from Canada, and that she would be fine. Now . . . I could imagine the parents having been convinced that this was the case—but the fiancé? Unless he was covering his injured pride and emotions with feigned indifference . . . no.” Holmes’ eyes glittered. “I generally am not prey to emotions myself, but I am by no means blind to their effects in others, and the young man—Helmut Reicholt—was as calm as if the girl now meant nothing more to him than the waitress at a café, and this was a young man who had been pleading desperately with me, in tones of woe, to find her and persuade her to return not half a week ago.”
“I take it you are not giving up the case, then, Holmes?” Watson said sardonically.
“I can afford to indulge myself in an occasional case that is purely of my own interest,” Holmes replied, with a brisk nod. “And this one . . . is interesting.”
“I don’t suppose you want to make use of my Talent on the parents or the fiancé, do you?” Nan asked. She was a little concerned, since that was bordering on the unethical, especially when there was absolutely no proof that there was anything more going on than a girl who had run away and a fiancé who was experiencing relief at getting out of an engagement he might not, perhaps, have been wholeheartedly happy about.
“No, no,” Holmes replied, waving her offer away. “In a sense, that would be cheating. I prefer my own methods. But thank you for the offer.”
At that moment, Nan wished she had the originals of those letters in her hands, because she had another Talent that she had only touched on to Holmes—the ability to trace where an object had been, its history, and something of the emotions of the latest one to have held it.
“In that case, Holmes, I will see the young ladies to a cab, and would you care to come up to dine with us?” Watson asked genially.
“Thank you, but I’m dining out,” Holmes replied, standing up and reaching for his overcoat. “There are some musical friends I wish to speak to tonight, and the only way to capture them is to lure them with a feast. Good evening to you all, and I’ll go out with you.”
• • •
“Oi miss! Yer roight in time! Them birds been right good’s gold!” said Suki, meeting them at the door to their flat. “An’ Mrs. ’Orace on’y jest brought up dinner!”
“Excellent, my little imp,” said Sarah, stooping over to kiss the top of the little girl’s head. Or rather, the enormous bow that crowned it. Little Suki, having been dressed most of her short life in whatever her mistress picked up at stalls and rag-vendors, was inordinately proud of dressing well, in the neat little frocks Memsa’b had had made for her that looked as if they had come right out of the pages of a Kate Greenaway book. “We’ll all have dinner straightaway, then. Did you have a nice tea?”
Suki nodded; she was an attractive little mite. Her hair was a tumble of short black curls, she had a pair of enormous, beautiful brown eyes, and if her dusky complexion made some people suspect she owed her dark coloring not to Italian blood but to an African race, they were too polite—and too wise—to voice that suspicion around Nan and Sarah. When she opened her mouth, she was pure Cockney, though she was trying very hard to “speak roight,” so as not to shame the young ladies. “Oi ’ad a loverly tea,” she replied. “Mrs. ’Orace give us all a curry.” By “us all,” of course, she meant that the birds had shared it. “She do a bang-up curry.”
“Excellent!” Nan replied, hanging up her hat and shawl. “Now, what are we having for supper?”
“Lamp-chops,” Suki said, forthrightly. “Lamp-chops an’—fixin’s.”
Nan whistled, and a moment later the birds came flying in from their own room. They had a room all their very own, which they knew they were supposed to remain confined to when Nan and Sarah were not about. It had an ultra-safe iron stove in the fireplace, good, heavy perches that would not fall over short of an earthquake, a bath pan for each of the birds, water and food dishes, and a multitude of “toys” of various sorts. And of course, when the girls were gone, Suki spent most of her time in there with them, keeping them company.
Neville landed on Nan’s shoulder, Grey on Sarah’s arm, and everyone went in to dinner together.
The flat was a very spacious one, above a bookshop also owned by their landlady, who had a smaller flat behind the bookstore. It had four bedrooms, one of which was the bird’s playroom, a sitting room, a dining room with a pantry, and a real bathroom with piped-in water and a boiler for the bath. It didn’t require a kitchen, for like Holmes and the Watsons, the widowed landlady, Mrs. Horace, provided breakfast and supper, and if arranged, luncheon and tea as well. All they needed was the little stove in the sitting room to provide hot water for tea and a place to toast bread. Lord Alderscroft paid for this highly agreeable arrangement, and the landlady understood that they were, unlike most young ladies, apt to be coming and going at all hours. Nan more than once suspected that Mrs. Horace at least knew about the Hunting Lodge and the Elemental Masters, even if she was not a magician herself, and assumed that Nan and Sarah were part of that establishment. Nan was perfectly content to leave her with that impression. It was near enough to the truth after all.
“Memsa’b senna note,” the urchin continued, as they all took their places around the table. The birds joined them on perches, with their own food and water in cups fastened at either end. Grey got chopped fruit at this time of the evening, with a few shelled nuts. Neville got raw meat, the trimmings from whatever Mrs. Horace cooked for the girls. “She ast if I wanta come go t’ th’ Lunnon Zoo. She’s bringin’ th’ school an’ sez I could meet ’em there.”
“When would that be?” Nan asked, taking the cover off the new potatoes and peas and helping herself, then passing the plate to Sarah. Sarah had taken a lamb chop and served first Suki, then herself, and was spooning out mint jelly from a bowl.
“Day arter termorrer,” said Suki, her eyes on the spoon holding the sweet stuff.
“I’ll send a note saying you may,” Sarah told the girl, who looked up, grinning with glee. “Just remember that the birds in the aviary are not like Grey and Neville, so don’t go climbing past balustrades and fences so you can get closer to them.”
“Yes’m,” Suki promised, taking bread and buttering it.
Supper was followed by Suki reciting the lessons that the girls had set her to do during the day, and a bedtime story. After Suki had been put to bed, and the birds settled onto their perches beside the hearth, Sarah stared fixedly for a while at the center ornament on the mantelpiece, which happened to be an enormous, and unusually fine, whelk shell, a gift from the Selkie-folk.
“What are you thinking about?” Nan asked, after a while.
“Well,” Sarah said slowly. “I was wondering if there was any way we could ask that fearsome Celtic warrior you turn into now and again about the Fomorians. . . .”
“Huh.” Nan considered that. “That’s not exactly under my control, you know.”
“Hypnosis? Or perhaps Memsa’b and Sahib know a way?” Sarah continued to look hopeful.
Nan smiled wryly. “I am sure Holmes knows hypnosis, but I am equally sure he would not be in the least interested in attempting to
summon a Celtic warrior-woman out of my head. I’ll tell you what, though, we can ask Mary and John and see what they say.”
“I hope they know a way. Or that they know someone who knows a way.” Sarah tilted her head to the side. “Do you think that it is a past life of yours?”
Now Nan laughed. “How should I know that? When it happens, it’s as if a separate person comes and takes over my body, and we don’t have anything to say to one another. I don’t understand what she is saying, and I am fairly certain she doesn’t understand me.”
Sarah bit her lip. “You could try lucid dreaming. . . .”
Nan felt annoyed with herself. “Yes, I could, and I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself. Good work, Sarah! This is why we are better as a team!”
Sarah flushed with pleasure, and they both returned to their books.
Nan and Sarah had been taught the technique of lucid dreaming, or “dreaming-to-order,” when they were in their early teens. Memsa’b had said it was a useful technique when you were trying to remember something, or when you were working through a problem, but with proper precautions it was also useful when dealing with the occult. To be fair, Sarah used it more often than Nan; her mediumistic tendencies tended to attract spirits, and often they were too weak even to make themselves and their needs known to her when she was awake. So once every fortnight or so, she would deliberately set out to use lucid dreaming to see if there were any ghosts in need of her assistance. More often than not she didn’t even bother to tell Nan of the result, because more often than not, it was the spirit of a child or an adult who had died unexpectedly; they were confused and only needed help to realize what had happened and be sent on their way. Only when the case was exceptional would Sarah say, casually, usually over breakfast, “I had a special visitor last night. . . .”
A Study in Sable Page 6