The Women of Baker Street

by Michelle Birkby

  The gas was on low, so I could barely see, but I wasn’t afraid of these shadows. I ran my hand over the table, knowing each cut and burn as well as I knew the scars on my own hand. I listened to the noises in the street outside, and the wonderful silence in my home, and for the first time in two weeks, I felt like I could breathe.

  A figure appeared in the doorway, tall and thin, almost saturnine in the dark. In silence he moved around the kitchen, moving a cup here, a pot there, preparing his potion. He put the cup before me and I took a sip.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘this tea is acceptable.’

  Sherlock Holmes tasted his own tea and grimaced.

  ‘I followed your steps exactly. Logically, it should taste like your tea,’ he complained.

  ‘Tea-making is an art, not a science.’

  We drank in silence for a while.

  ‘How did you know I was coming home?’ I ventured.

  ‘I heard Mrs Watson insisting that Watson sign the discharge notice,’ he explained. ‘I knew then you would be home immediately. She generally gets her own way with him.’

  As do you, I thought.

  ‘I hope you are quite well,’ he said, after a while, as if he had just remembered he ought to say something.

  ‘I am recovering,’ I told him, equally politely. ‘Mrs Watson tells me she has arranged some help for me whilst I am convalescing, so you won’t be inconvenienced.’

  ‘That wasn’t—’ he said quickly.

  ‘I know,’ I interrupted. ‘Sorry.’

  That may have been as close as we could get to an expression of concern and reassurance between us. We had both been brought up to hide our feelings and present a stoic face to the world, and we were both very good at it.

  ‘I did not notice you were ill,’ he said, after a while.

  ‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘I took good care that you should not.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ he said, getting up and pacing up and down. ‘There are seventeen steps up to my room. I counted them once, and I have never needed to count them again, for they do not change. When I meet people, I meet them once, and that is enough to observe. However, I rarely have prolonged contact with them. I do not need to update my observations. Those people I see day to day have become like . . .’

  ‘Wallpaper?’ I said, quite gently.

  ‘Quite,’ he agreed ruefully. ‘However, wallpaper may decay and peel away, but as the daily changes are infinitesimal, we do not notice until the wallpaper falls on our head.’

  ‘Not in this house it won’t,’ I said firmly, but he ignored me.

  ‘I must take care to notice the changes in the few people I do see day to day,’ he continued, walking up and down, his hands behind his back, thinking aloud, as I had heard him do in his rooms. ‘Yourself, Billy, Watson. Your illness has taught me a valuable lesson.’

  ‘I’m so glad I could help,’ I said dryly. I was feeling a little tired now.

  ‘You were of help,’ he said seriously, sitting down again. ‘I must never forget there is always more to learn. I am sorry that you were the cause of that lesson, though.’

  ‘I deliberately hid it from you,’ I told him again. ‘I would not have you know of my illness.’

  ‘Why not?’ he countered. ‘You know of mine.’

  There seemed nothing more to say to that, so we merely drank in companionable silence, each lost in our own thoughts.

  ‘I have to know,’ I said after a while, putting the cup down on the saucer. ‘Did you send Billy and Wiggins to Mary about those missing boys?’

  He looked up, surprised.

  ‘Logically,’ I said, ‘they would have gone to you first. You’re their mentor. You’re the detective.’

  He smiled ruefully.

  ‘They did,’ he admitted. ‘But what they had was mostly rumour and conjecture. I thought perhaps it would be better dealt with by Mrs Watson and yourself. I thought it would be good training for you both, to sift fact from fairy tale, and find out what truth lies at the bottom of these stories.’

  ‘Training?’ I asked, amused.

  ‘I admit,’ he said, carefully replacing his cup on its own saucer, ‘I had thought you and Mrs Watson were like the rest of your sex, incapable of logical thought or action. Although Mrs Watson had shown some genius for the work when she came to me to track down her father, I had thought marriage and a home of her own would rid her of her talent, as it does all women.’

  ‘Did you?’ I asked softly. He leaned forward and clasped his hands on the table.

  ‘However,’ he continued as if I hadn’t spoken, ‘certain events earlier this year led me to believe that perhaps the two of you had not entirely lost all capacity for logical thought. Or I should say, she had not lost it; I was unaware of your own talents. Perhaps you were not quite as illogical as the rest of your sex. Perhaps you could even, in time, be taught to observe and deduce and think properly. I am all in favour of as many people as possible learning to use their minds. Hence, I decided the best course of action was to give you a case of your own, and see how far you could get with it. I shall, of course, take over if you find you cannot get any further – but I shall wait until you ask me.’

  ‘First,’ I said to him, ‘thank you for at least waiting until we ask. Second, what do you know about what happened earlier this year?’ It was this phrase that had caused my stomach to tighten. I felt the breath catch in my throat. We had kept our secret so well, I was certain! I had not let anything slip – unless I had called out whilst under the drug-induced sleep of the operation.

  He looked at me very steadily, his eyes black in the darkness of the room.

  ‘Lestrade has a bugbear about the death in Richmond,’ he said softly. ‘He will not let it go.’

  My hand gripped the delicate china of my cup.

  ‘I investigated, out of mere curiosity at first,’ Mr Holmes continued. ‘This man had thoroughly covered his tracks. But I found scraps of papers, and several people suddenly either disappeared or came out of hiding, and names familiar to me were spoken in reference to this man. That’s all I have, so far. But I have suspicions.’

  I pressed my lips together. I would not talk. I would not condemn myself out of my own mouth, not to this man.

  ‘He deserved his end,’ Mr Holmes said harshly.

  ‘Did he?’ I asked, angry. ‘How could you say that?’

  ‘I have an idea of what he did.’

  ‘You don’t know how it’s haunted me!’ I cried out.

  ‘Yes, I do!’ he snapped back. ‘Do you think I have always behaved exactly according to the law? Do you not think that I, too, might have crossed the line? Or gone further than I expected, or wanted?’ He reached forward and clasped my hands, his thin fingers wrapping around mine. ‘Believe me, I know.’

  I sat there for a moment, in silence. I never thought of him like that. I had once or twice referred to him as an angel of vengeance, as a joke. I laughed at it. Now perhaps I saw something new in him, something John and Mary and Billy had never seen and never would.

  ‘Inspector Lestrade . . .’ I said slowly.

  ‘Will never know,’ he reassured me.

  ‘He might. If you found out, he might.’

  Mr Holmes snorted and released my hands.

  ‘Not him,’ he insisted. ‘He lacks the imagination. I’ve already half-convinced him the whole thing was a terrible accident.’

  ‘Why is he so tenacious about this?’ I asked, not as reassured as I should be. Mr Holmes shrugged and sat back.

  ‘Some instinct,’ he speculated. ‘But you will be safe, I promise you.’

  I nodded. I believed him. And now, back in the kitchen of 221b, I felt safe. I sipped my tea again. It was cold, and I poured out some more from the pot for both of us.

  ‘When you were on Dartmoor,’ I asked, ‘did you have nightmares?’

  ‘Why would I have nightmares?’ he said, irritated, as he added more sugar to his cup.

  ‘It’s a lonely place,’ I said, sippin
g my tea. ‘You slept in burial mounds, I understand? The moor is full of strange noises at night, Dr Watson said, and there was an escaped prisoner, too. And the Hound itself.’

  ‘Yes, the Hound,’ he said softly. He looked at me, and even there, in the half-dark of the kitchen, he could see I was not asking out of idle curiosity.

  ‘There were dreams,’ he admitted. ‘It has always annoyed me that a man’s mind, no matter how logical and ordered, should become prey to fantasies and fairy tales as soon as he sleeps.’

  ‘Bad dreams?’ I asked. He flared up for a moment, as if he would not answer, then nodded.

  ‘But of course, in the daylight, there was an adequate explanation for all of them. Animals made the noises, people were responsible for the lights, the Hound, for all its horror, was not supernatural. And yet . . .’

  ‘And yet for a moment you believed?’ I whispered. ‘For a moment the nightmares were real?’

  ‘Only a brief moment,’ he said to me. ‘The Hound leapt at me, huge and glowing, and for a moment I believed in Hell and its devil and a great curse.’ He sipped his tea. ‘But I learnt the truth, the devil fell, and proved to be nothing more than a painted dog.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Behind the nightmare was a kernel of truth. You had to seek out and confront that truth to stop the nightmare.’

  ‘I suppose that was the case,’ he said, almost grudging. I do not think he liked to talk to me about this. He drained his cup and put it down. ‘Good night, Mrs Hudson.’

  ‘Good night, Mr Holmes.’

  He left, and went up to bed. It would always be like this in 221b Baker Street, him and me in this house. Other people would visit, and stay and sleep in here, some for years, but in the end, it was always Mrs Hudson and Sherlock Holmes in 221b Baker Street.

  I sat back and tried to think about the hospital case logically, stripping away all the supernatural elements. What did I know? What was fact, and not fancy?

  Emma died after she changed beds. Coincidence? Would she have died no matter what bed she was in? And how had she died? My mind had been screaming about supernatural monsters, but I knew that not to be the case. Then what? I had seen a dark shadow rise up beside her bed – and I still thought the dark shadow had killed a woman in the same bed in the same way on my first night. But I had been heavily drugged then, of course . . .

  Wait a minute. I’d been a fool! That night’s reaction wasn’t a nightmare, it was drugs, again. And the reason no one else had woken up – not even watchful Miranda – was that we had all been drugged.

  It was a moment of revelation. Drugging me might have been accidental – slightly too much of the pain medication I was still taking, or even an unexpected reaction – but drugging everyone was completely different.

  For a moment I suspected the nurses. They gave us the evening medication. But of course the easiest way to drug us all would be to slip it into the evening tea. We had our own tea, but the water was boiled in the storeroom, right through the door at the end of the ward, the door we all went through on our way to the conveniences. The nurses didn’t share our tea, so they would not have been affected. Any one of us could have done it – nurses, patients, a complete stranger; we didn’t recognize all the doctors and cleaners and other visitors to the ward.

  My mind was racing again. I remembered this feeling. This was how it felt before, when Mary and I were working on the blackmail case. This was good. This was intoxicating. This was addictive.

  This was what it was to be alive.

  AND SO TO WORK

  Mary arrived soon after with two women, one of them drooped and depressed, in a shapeless shabby dress. She was introduced as Mrs Turner, and would do my housework whilst I was recovering. She nodded at me, not meeting my eyes, and silently went into the scullery.

  The other woman was dressed as a nurse, and as she stepped forward into the light for a moment I thought she had brought me Nora.

  ‘I’ve hired a nurse on your behalf to take care of you whilst you are convalescing at home. You are nowhere near strong enough to look after yourself. This is Nurse Grace Taylor,’ Mary announced. ‘She is Nora’s sister. Now you’ll be able to hear about everything that happens on your old ward. Isn’t that nice?’

  Clever, devious Mary.

  I woke early. I had got used to that at the hospital. But thankfully I woke up in my own bed, in the small room above that of Mr Holmes. My own warm, comfortable bed, the fire still burning low in the fireplace, the door firmly shut on the rest of the house, the window showing me Baker Street, and silence, blessed silence everywhere. With a sigh of contentment, I settled back to think.

  I was interrupted by Mr Holmes, who came into the room not in his normal manner, which was to stride in as if he were the most important person there, or anywhere, which was usually justified. He held out a letter to me, the paper large and thick and lavender. The letter was opened.

  ‘I didn’t open it, or read it,’ he said quickly. ‘Mrs Watson did that. No doubt she knew who it was from, and knew the news was for both of you.’

  I took the letter and looked at the postmark. Vienna?

  ‘No doubt she is taking classes there,’ Mr Holmes said. ‘Perhaps she is contemplating a return to the stage.’ He left quickly. So the letter was from Irene Adler.

  My dearest Martha,

  Holmes’ telegram telling me of your illness was sent to New York, and sent round a few friends, and finally sent to me here in Vienna. I was preparing to come back when I received Mary’s telegram, by the same route, telling me you were recovering, and asking for information about Emma Fordyce. I presume, then, you are well enough to be curious? To be investigating a little? Very well, I shall stay in Vienna for now, but here is some information for you.

  I met Emma when I was a girl becoming a woman, in 1870. She was in her sixties then, but still playing the game, and still very good at it. She knew attraction was as much a matter of charm and thought and conversation as anything that happened in the bedroom, and men still loved her. As for me, I knew by then I could sing, and that was all I wanted to do in life. Well, that, and have adventures. Emma took me under her wing and guided me, kept me safe, introduced me to composers and conductors, and taught me to be clever. She also taught me about the fun to be had in the world. I would sing for her and her lovers (I was blindfolded, of course) and afterwards Emma would tell me who they were and what they had done and how they could be useful.

  Emma was sweet and kind and clever, and I am persuaded many of her lovers truly loved her, and would have married her. But she would never marry. She loved her freedom, and I don’t believe she ever fell in love. But this is background, and you want detail. Mary asked if there were any men who might have wanted to keep their liaison with Emma a secret. Well, there were many men, but times were different then, and most were proud of their friendship with Emma. I know of only two men who were difficult.

  One was Lord Ernest Howe. He never wanted his association with Emma to be known; it was to be kept a strict secret. He had many lovers. He had three wives too (not all at the same time, they had an annoying habit of dying). He was obsessed with getting a son and heir. Both his first and second wives had died childless, and he was on his third by the time he met Emma: none of his mistresses had produced a son either, though there were a few girls.

  Emma wasn’t that impressed with him, I do remember that. He lacked a sense of humour, or any kindness. His third wife finally ended up in a lunatic asylum, I know. But Emma would never talk about him like she would about the other men. However, she did get letters from him, letters she would never let me read. She would lock herself away with these letters for hours on end, and when she had finished, she would burn them.

  The other was Richard Pembury. Sir Richard now. Yes, that Sir Richard! The politician who speaks so beautifully in the House, and supports Reform bills and help for fallen women and so on. He and Emma had a beautiful time in Venice about thirty-five years ago. Her maid thought Emma would
fall in love this time. Glowing with it, she said. But then, one day, it all just stopped. I asked her once what had happened, but she refused to tell me, saying that secrets had power. But she did warn me to stay away from him. I remember he was to be married once, but she wrote to him, and he called the wedding off. She didn’t seem triumphant about it.

  There, does that help your mystery? I wish I could come to help, but I am taking lessons with a great maestro. I think I shall sing again – through choice, not necessity. My husband is kind, and understands the lure of the stage, though I’m not sure he knows how great the lure is. Then I shall come to London, and send you tickets – but I won’t send one to Mr Holmes. If he wants to hear me sing, he can pay for it.

  Love to Mary, and of course to you.

  Yours, Irene.

  Like Irene herself, the letter left me excited, but exhausted. I put it to one side.

  At first I thought about the incidents at the hospital, but my mind just kept going round and round in circles, and nothing new sprang out at me. I decided to put that case on the back burner and think about Mary’s case. Therefore, a couple of hours later, when she came in, before she spoke, I said to her:

  ‘Boys may get lost, but they don’t just disappear.’

  ‘Well, good morning to you too,’ she replied, taking off her coat. ‘Did you sleep well?’

  ‘Moderately well,’ I replied. ‘I’ve been watching Baker Street.’

  She moved over to the window and peered out.

  ‘It’s very busy this morning,’ she said. The street was full of street sellers, important men in suits, less important men lounging about, hansom cabs, carriages, horses, carts, boys running messages, boys delivering goods, boys just running about and getting in everyone’s way.’

  ‘Boys, street boys, just move on,’ I said to her. ‘I’ve been thinking about it since I woke up.’