A Study in Sable

by Mercedes Lackey

  “First of all, I beg you will allow me to introduce myself,” John said. “I am Doctor John Watson.”

  “We don’t need a—” Neddy began, but his mother interrupted him, her eyes wide and her cheeks flushed, one hand upraised.

  “Not the Doctor John Watson!” she exclaimed. “The one in the stories! The—” She stopped, overcome.

  “Yes, madam. The associate of Sherlock Holmes.” He smiled as her eyes went even wider. “And it is in that capacity that I am here. You bring us to the end of a somewhat more pedestrian tale than Mister Doyle generally writes up for me. Miss Nan Killian was the secretary to the Honorable Henry Smith, a solicitor of London. And she has a story to tell you.”

  Now that she had their attention, Nan quickly and efficiently told out her false tale. “I was empowered to contract the services of Sherlock Holmes to locate the lady—you—named in these documents,” she finished. “Needless to say, Mister Holmes made short work of the task, and arranged for the good Doctor to accompany me so that you would hear me out. Here are the instructions intended for you, as they were dictated to my employer in the Langham Hotel and transcribed by me.”

  She handed over the notes to the widow and her son, who examined them with a great deal of bewilderment. “None of these are dear Nigel’s bank—” she said, faltering. “Nor his usual solicitor—”

  “We apprehend that he may have had a mistrust of banks, and did not wish to leave too much of his savings in any one place,” Watson replied. “I understand he had business over much of this part of England; another explanation is that perhaps he felt uncomfortable carrying about cheques that were too large, or large amounts of cash money, and so he used banks local to the places he was doing business with.”

  “Well—what should I do?” she replied, now clearly overwhelmed.

  “We have laid out a simple plan,” Watson assured her. “We would like to accompany you—and your son as well, if he cares to come—to the nearest bank on the list. If you see here”—he pointed at a listing halfway down the first page—“we will first need to visit this solicitor and obtain a safety deposit box key. Then we will visit the bank itself. I am uncertain what will be in that box, or if Mister Hopkins also had an account there, but it is not that far, and I have the cab waiting. You will see from the notes, you will need to bring your marriage lines and the—other document. Shall we?”

  It took a little more persuasion, and then some hunting for the documents, but eventually they were on their way, stopping at a small solicitor’s office in the business center of Slough. There, John simply took over, forcefully getting past the clerk to the solicitor himself.

  “This is most irregular,” the gentleman said with some irritation. “You should have made an appointment—” But he let them into his private office and shut the door, going to sit behind the desk, waiting for an explanation.

  “I believe you had—briefly—a very unusual client,” John said to the stone-faced gentleman, once they were all safely in his office. “His name was Nigel Hopkins, and he left you in charge of a key. This is his wife, now his heir. Here are her marriage lines, here is the certificate of his death. And the password for the key is muttonchop.”

  As soon as the password left John’s lips, the solicitor’s demeanor changed. Suddenly he was all sympathy, solicitously patting Mrs. Hopkins’ hand, making sure she had a comfortable chair, and then retrieving an envelope from a file cabinet. “I have been wondering if someone would come for that key every day for the last twenty years,” he said, putting it into her hand. “It’s preyed on my mind, it has, the fear that he forgot it, and someone who deserved it would never know of it.”

  “That came nearer to the truth than we care to think,” John said, as the good man showed them out. “Thank you for your faithful service.”

  Mrs. Hopkins was practically speechless at this point, and her son was clearly dazed. Not a word passed from either of them during the short cab ride to the bank, where once again, John moved them smoothly past clerks and tellers and secretaries to the bank manager’s office, where once again the documents were presented, and Mrs. Hopkins handed over the key with a hand that trembled.

  “My dear lady!” the manager exclaimed, “Please, sit down. Yes, I remember Nigel very well. He made regular deposits here, and I am saddened to hear of his sudden demise! Franklin—get the lady’s box. I’ll get the accounts—” He hurried off himself, leaving an astonished Mrs. Hopkins sitting in the chair across from his desk, her son, just as dumbstruck, at her side.

  It was not more than a few moments before Franklin and the manager returned—the clerk with a safety deposit box, the manager with a ledger. Rather than actually say anything, the manager simply opened the ledger to the relevant page, and pointed to a total on the bottom. “There is the total of his account in the bank to—” he began, when Mrs. Hopkins went white, then pink, and uttered a cry, as her son clutched the back of her chair, clearly stunned.

  “Neddy! Neddy!” she cried out, and broke into tears. “Neddy, we are saved!”

  The bank manager managed to hold on to his dignity, although it was clear that a weeping woman in his office caused him some distress. He sent Franklin for water, fetched his own handkerchief, and did his best to comfort her, as her son was too thunderstruck to undertake the job himself.

  It was Nan who came to the rescue of all those poor bewildered men, going to the old woman, embracing her, and patting her back. “There, you see, your Nigel always meant for you to be taken care of,” she murmured. “I’m only sorry it took so long.”

  After a few more moments, the lady murmured her thanks into Nan’s ear; Nan took the hint and stood up, returning to her chair. Mrs. Hopkins dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose and regained some of her composure. After a sip of the water, and another dab at her eyes, she looked up at them all. “Things have been . . . difficult,” she managed, clearly embarrassed to have to admit that her husband’s death had left her in what must have been, by her reaction, very straitened circumstances. “All I had was what was in the household account. There were so many bills to pay . . . we had to dismiss the servants . . . we were trying to find lodgers, but no one answered the advertisements . . . I thought we would have to sell the house. . . .”

  She broke down again, but this time it was to bury her face in the handkerchief. The bank manager took the key from Neddy’s nerveless fingers and opened the safety deposit box.

  It was full of papers.

  Since Neddy didn’t seem capable of reaching for them himself, the bank manager took them out and began opening unsealed envelopes to see what was inside. “I do not think you will need to worry, Mrs. Hopkins,” he said slowly. “These are shares of stock in some very prosperous companies.”

  Now Mrs. Hopkins looked up, bewildered. “Shares? What does that mean?”

  The bank manager slowly, and carefully, explained to her what shares of stock were, and how she could expect regular payments from them quarterly. “I can see what Nigel had been doing,” he continued. “He put his stock dividends back in his account in this bank as deposits.”

  At that moment, John nudged Nan with his elbow, and raised his eyebrows at the manager. Taking the hint, Nan closed her eyes and opened her mind.

  Neddy’s surface thoughts were still . . . mostly blank. He was completely gobsmacked and hadn’t recovered from the sudden reversal of the family fortunes. Beneath that was a vast well of love and concern for his mother, and still-raw grief over his father. Nan shied away from Mrs. Hopkins—Agatha. The open wound of her loss was enough to have brought tears to the eyes of a statue, and even finding herself possessed of enough money to live comfortably again was not enough to take even the edge off that grief. Nigel had truly been the love of her life and the center of her universe.

  No wonder Hopkins was so insistent on dictating all this to Sarah.

  Nan quickly turned her attenti
on to the man John wanted her to examine: the bank manager, Trevor Howard. What she found there made her open her eyes quickly and nod to John Watson with a tiny smile. This was a fundamentally kind and painfully honest man. He might be next to helpless when it came to emotional situations, and more than a bit stodgy, but he could be absolutely trusted.

  Which made her accede to his request when he asked to see the notes. He looked through them, carefully, then said to Franklin, “Send in my son, would you? And bring another glass of water for Mrs. Hopkins.”

  When Franklin appeared with a man who could have been the younger version of Trevor Howard, and to Nan’s reading was the near twin of his father when it came to integrity, Howard sent Franklin out and reached over the desk to take Mrs. Hopkins’ hand.

  “I would like to propose something, dear lady,” he said, speaking quietly, as if to calm a small child or a dog—which actually was the right tactic to take with the poor woman at this moment in time. “There are many banks and solicitors on this list of yours, a dozen at least. Doctor Watson and Miss Killian here cannot be expected to go with you to all of them, and you will need a trustworthy and steady fellow to accompany you. Now, I will not try to conceal the fact that I hope you will keep this account with my bank, and that indeed, I hope you will consolidate everything else you retrieve here as well. But whether you do that or not, I feel I must offer you the services of my son to accompany you. He is the assistant manager here. He can speak with authority, and if need be, some force, on your behalf. He will see to it that you are not cheated or put off in any way, and will make sure you and whatever you bring back come home safely. Would that suit you?”

  Neddy finally shook off his shock and patted his mother’s hand, still being held by the bank manager. “I think that’s a capital idea, mother. They might try funny business with you and me, but they’ll never dare do so with Mister Howard along.”

  The son smiled, and murmured, “Alan. I’d be pleased if you’d call me by my Christian name.”

  Neddy held out his hand to Alan, who shook it. “Thank you, Alan. I’m Ned. And I cannot thank you enough for your kindness.” He looked over to the father while still shaking the hand of the son, “And I see every reason why consolidating everything here would be another capital idea.”

  “I cannot say that I think you’ll find equal sums in those distant accounts,” Trevor Howard warned, “But I believe, given what I know of your late father’s business from his dealings here, that your mother will be able to live in comfort and ease from now on.”

  There was more business talk—between the men, of course. Mrs. Hopkins had clearly been brought up in an age and a household where women were not expected to concern themselves with business. It was arranged that the bank’s own stockbroker would take charge of the shares and any more such items that surfaced in the course of retrieving what was in deposit boxes. Nan would have been more than a trifle irritated by the men’s easy dismissal of the two women in the room as inconsequential to this discussion, but she was just too relieved that her job had been so easily discharged to really care.

  But it was when she was looking in the box to see if there were any more papers in it, that she moved an empty envelope in the bottom and discovered a small, black, velvet-covered box. “There seems to be something else here,” she said, handing it to Agatha Hopkins.

  The widow opened it, hesitantly. “It’s a gold locket!” Nan exclaimed, recognizing the shape instantly as being nearly identical to one she herself owned. “Open it—”

  Inside was a small picture of what must have been Nigel Hopkins—probably taken not long before his death. And inscribed on the other half of the locket were two simple words that made Agatha burst into tears again.

  Love, always.

  Interlude: Danse Macabre

  THE room was shrouded in darkness, with only a single candle providing a faint illumination. The musician was playing from memory; he didn’t need to consult with sheet music, as his ivory-colored bow swept back and forth across the strings of his instrument. The music was melancholy, gentle, yet insistent. He repeated the tune over and over, tirelessly, for at least an hour before he was answered.

  A shimmering, transparent, slender white figure, seemingly made of mist, coalesced out of the darkness, just out of the reach of the candlelight.

  The musician ceased to play, and rested his violin and bow in his lap. For a long time, he sat there, motionless, head cocked slightly to one side, brows furrowed in concentration. At length, he sighed.

  “This is not what I intended,” he said to the white shape that hovered in the darkness. “I did not anticipate such interference. I shall have to make other plans.”

  Again, he took on an attitude of listening.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I believe that you should. No, I believe that you must. Perhaps you will stir into life something too formidable for this meddling girl. As for me . . .” He smiled. “I believe I have an idea. My quarry will find this revenant much more difficult . . . and much less sympathetic.”

  He stood up, and put the bow and violin back in the case. “You may go,” he told the misty figure, which promptly faded away.

  He stood looking into the darkness after it had gone. Finally he let out a long breath. Not a sigh, but as if he had made up his mind.

  “She shall not escape,” he said, as if making a pledge. “I swear, she shall not escape.”

  7

  NAN sat quietly with a book she was having trouble concentrating on. The window was closed against the dust and noise from the street, but the sun outside showed it was a pleasant, if cool, day. Three days had passed since the excursion to take Agatha Hopkins her “legacy,” and Nan was beginning to get bored. Normally, if she and Sarah were not on some errand of Lord Alderscroft’s, they were sitting right here at the table where she and Suki were now, transcribing old grimoires or histories that Lord A had borrowed from other Elemental Masters. When Suki needed help with her lessons, they’d take turns giving her a hand.

  But Sarah was fast asleep right now in her bedroom, Nan didn’t have any arcane volumes to transcribe, and she was in the position of being Suki’s sole teacher.

  It is a very, very good thing that Suki sees learning as a privilege and for the most part not a chore, or I should likely be screaming at her at this moment. From somewhat unfortunate experience, gathered when she had tried to fit herself into the position of “teacher” at the Harton School, Nan knew she did not have the patience or the temper to try to drive knowledge and information into the skull of a child who wasn’t interested in learning. Suki, however, was the opposite, which at least made teaching her a task that was merely tedious, rather than maddening.

  “Miz Nan? What’s this word?” Suki said, interrupting her slightly sullen thoughts. She craned her neck around to see the word Suki’s thin little forefinger was pointing at. This was a history lesson on Henry VIII, which would be followed by one on his son Edward, several more on his daughter Mary, and a great many on Queen Elizabeth.

  “Elephantine,” Nan replied. “What do you think it means?” She generally made Suki try a couple of guesses on her own before supplying an answer.

  Suki grinned. “Tha’s easy!” she scoffed. “Big’s a nelephant!”

  “It can also mean fat, or bulky,” Nan reminded her. “Now, read me the sentence and tell me which meaning you think it has.”

  “By this time, King ’Enry’s body ’ad bloated t’ el-e-phan-tine pro-por-tions,” Suki read, and furrowed her eyebrows. “Must mean fat, cuz I saw a pitchur of King ’Enry, an’ ’e weren’t big’s a nelephant.” She scratched her nose thoughtfully, “’E were purdy big, though.”

  “Very true; by the time he married his fifth wife he was very, very fat,” replied Nan. “So fat it took six men to move him to the bed where he died.” Suki’s eyes went very round at that idea, and small wonder. In her world, or rather,
the world from which Nan and Sarah had plucked her, people did not have enough money to get fat, much less grossly obese.

  “There ain’t ’nuff food in the worl’ t’git that fat!” she declared, which led Nan to bring out an historical novel, where one of Henry’s typical feasts was described.

  “The first course consisted of a civet of hare, a quarter of stag which had been a night in salt, a stuffed chicken, and a loin of veal. The two last dishes were covered with a German sauce. There were two enormous pies, surmounted with smaller pies, which formed a crown. The crust of the large ones was silvered all round and gilt at the top; each contained a whole roe deer, a gosling, three capons, six chickens, ten pigeons, and one young rabbit. With the course came a stuffing, a minced loin of veal, two pounds of fat, and twenty-six hard-boiled eggs, covered with saffron and flavored with cloves.”

  Suki’s eyes went round, trying to imagine all that food. Nan continued. “The second course was a roe deer, a pig, a sturgeon, a kid, two goslings, twelve chickens, as many pigeons, six young rabbits, two herons, a leveret, a fat capon stuffed, four chickens covered with yolks of eggs, and a wild boar.” She looked up and smiled. “The third, fourth, and fifth courses are not quite that much. The third course is biscuits and an enormous jelly, the fourth course is spiced cream, sweetened cream, and fruit, and the last course is wines, nuts, fruits, and pastries. But King Henry loved to eat more than anything, and you can see how easily he could get fat, if all he did was have a mouthful or two of everything that was served.”