‘Mary’s stronger than you think,’ I told him.
He shook his head. ‘Mary’s more fragile than you think,’ he told me. ‘You’re the strong one.’
READING BETWEEN THE LINES
Three days. Three days I lay in bed! I am ashamed to think of it now, but John insisted, and his agreement that I be released from hospital early had come with certain conditions, including that I couldn’t get up until he told me so.
Besides, he wasn’t going to let me go anywhere until I told him what I had observed at the hospital.
‘I didn’t actually see much,’ I had to admit. ‘There were arguments and tension, and people enjoying and misusing whatever little power they had. I also saw kindness and gentleness, and some truly awful clothes.’
‘Do you think something is going wrong there?’ John asked, standing by the window, fiddling with his watch-chain.
‘I think Emma’s death wasn’t natural,’ I insisted.
‘The post-mortem showed nothing,’ he said unhappily.
‘Mary says suffocation doesn’t always present evidence.’
John smiled, and nodded, his pride in his clever wife overcoming his worry.
‘Can I get up now?’
He agreed, partly because I was so insistent, and partly to keep an eye on Mary. Restless Mary could become reckless Mary. I told him I felt much better than I did. I couldn’t bear to be up here any more. The solitude was acceptable, but there was someone in my kitchen, doing my job, looking after Mr Holmes, and I had to keep an eye on her.
Halfway down the stairs I regretted my decision. I was supported by Grace, but still felt very weak and shaky. I could hear Mr Holmes playing his violin as I descended, but when I stopped, he stopped. I reached out for support, and became aware I was leaning against his door. I stood there for a moment, listening to the silence within. He was waiting for me to go on or give up. I could never give up in front of him. I took a breath, drew upon my strength and carried on down the stairs, hearing the music start again behind me.
I went down to the kitchen, my kitchen, at last. I couldn’t quite believe it was all still there, the brand-new gas range, the windows out to the street and the back yard, the porcelain pastry board below the air vent, and that scarred and burnt kitchen table. It all felt oddly like something that I dreamed, but when I stepped through the door, there it all was. First I saw Mary, standing by the range. She looked so young and so strong. She didn’t even look tired any more. I decided John must be worrying unnecessarily, because he loved her and wanted to protect her.
Grace handed me over to Mary, who hugged me close, and sat me down in the armchair by the range very carefully, as if I was made of porcelain. Grace went to look in the pantry, I presume to check what I could eat. I looked around my kitchen, which seemed so familiar and yet so strange. I had been gone too long. I would need time to fit in again.
In the centre of the room stood another woman, the woman I’d been introduced to before as Mrs Turner, although I had been only vaguely aware of it then. She was of middling height, but very thin. Her face was drawn and grey, and her hair was mostly grey too, though you could see it had once been brown. Even her clothes were grey and brown, patched, and of cheap material, but carefully sewn. Either she or someone she knew was an expert seamstress. I nodded to her, but though she nodded back, she looked away again nervously.
‘Martha, this is Mrs Turner,’ Mary said, as she adjusted my cushion for me. I shifted uncomfortably – I was quite capable of adjusting my own cushion – and, getting the message, Mary went to stand by Mrs Turner. ‘I’ve brought her in to help you whilst you recover.’
‘How kind of you,’ I said, wondering if Mrs Turner was a blessing or curse. She was obviously one of Mary’s waifs and strays. Mary could never resist helping anyone in trouble, no matter what the cost, or the outcome.
‘She can clean and dust and do laundry,’ Mary continued, her eyes pleading with me to be kind to Mrs Turner.
‘There’s no need to do laundry here, it’s sent out,’ I said. I had always hated laundry day – the damp, the heat, the clothes drying for days, the repeated washing. ‘Can you cook?’
She cast one scared look up at Mary, and said to me, ‘Only basic things, ma’am.’
‘You don’t need to call me ma’am, Mrs Hudson will do,’ I told her. ‘That’s all right, I can cook.’
Grace turned round to argue, and I said quickly, ‘I’ll instruct you what to do. What other skills have you?’
‘I’m a good seamstress,’ she said softly. ‘I can take your dress in for you.’
My dress was hanging loose. I must have lost a considerable amount of weight whilst I was ill. It was not the reducing diet I would have chosen.
‘Thank you,’ I told her. ‘Well, cleaning, lighting the fires and so on will be your main duties. You’ll need to take food up to Mr Holmes, too, though you’ll only clean his rooms if he’s out. He hates having people fussing around him.’
‘Mr Holmes?’ she said, her voice low and scared. I’d never seen anyone quite so shy and nervous.
‘He’ll be nice to you,’ I reassured her. ‘He’s only rude to people he’s close to.’
‘He called me a damned interfering woman yesterday,’ Mary said happily. ‘We’re good friends.’
And that was that, Mrs Turner was hired. Grace took her out shopping as I would need special food for the next few days, and Mary and I sat down round the kitchen table.
It wasn’t silent in there. The noise of Baker Street filtered through the area door, all the cabs and carriages and calling. The air vent that led up to Mr Holmes’ room was half open, and we could hear the Chopin pieces he was playing. But in the kitchen, we didn’t speak. Mary smiled at me, and I smiled softly back. It was our way of saying we were glad I was back.
‘I’ve been doing some research,’ I told her. I had Billy and Mercer, the man who dug up the tedious background details for Mr Holmes, find all the mentions about Lord Howe in past newspapers they could manage. ‘It didn’t escape my notice that most of the gossip items came from Patrick West’s columns.’
‘He doesn’t like him,’ I told Mary. ‘Mr West is very scathing about Lord Howe.’
‘I’m surprised he dare,’ Mary said.
‘Oh, he never says anything definite,’ I told her. ‘You have to read between the lines. A certain Lord H goes to Spa, and then two columns later Emma is mentioned going to Spa to meet a lord. Separately it means nothing but together . . .’
‘All the secrets are told,’ Mary said, almost under her breath, as if we were being eavesdropped on. ‘And, well, what did you find out?’
‘Not much,’ I admitted. ‘It feels like there’s a story there, but no one’s ever quite grasped it. He comes across as a humourless man, very proud of his heritage, the sort of man who never believes anything he does is wrong because someone as important as him could never be wrong.’
‘Doesn’t sound like Emma’s type,’ Mary said dubiously.
‘Perhaps he had hidden depths,’ I said, though I doubted it. ‘Perhaps he paid well. But she was only one of many mistresses.’
‘I read Irene’s letter. Married three times and no son! Finally got his Jane Seymour in his last wife. What these men will do for a boy.’
I shook my head. Something felt wrong, but neither Patrick West nor I had managed to put a name to it.
‘Oh, she gave him the son all right,’ I said. ‘He even took her abroad to a special doctor to make sure she got the best treatment. She suffered a great deal, but a son was born, and survived. He’d be about forty now.’
‘And the mother?’ Mary asked.
‘Oh, she survived, too. But she never got over the trauma of the birth. She’d never look at her son, or touch him. She started to say he was evil. She went mad. She ended up locked in an asylum.’
Mary shuddered.
‘Was this when Emma was his mistress?’ she asked. I nodded. So there it was. Another story from Emma’s p
ast, another tale she wouldn’t tell, another man with a secret.
‘He’s very powerful,’ I murmured. ‘He could arrange a death.’
‘In a hospital? With everyone watching?’
‘Where else would be so perfect?’ I pointed out. ‘People die in hospital all the time. It’s expected.’
‘But there’s no proof,’ Mary said quickly. ‘Just speculation and maybes and perhapses, but nothing concrete. We need some evidence. We need some data! What about the first woman who died? That first night you were there?’
‘I’m not absolutely sure that happened,’ I told her, biting my lip. I had been in so much pain, and groggy from the drugs they’d given me, and scared and alone. ‘It could have been just a nightmare.’
‘Nothing that can be proved, then,’ Mary said. ‘We’ll leave that to one side, and concentrate on what we know actually occurred.’
I smiled. So like Mr Holmes! But both our cases were just as nebulous as each other. Just ideas and feelings and fancies from a sick woman, and an over-eager woman.
‘Mary,’ I asked, ‘who is Mrs Turner?’
‘Oh, one of John’s charity cases,’ she said, looking down.
‘You’re no better at lying then,’ I told her. She looked up.
‘All right,’ she admitted, ‘Mrs Turner is a woman I found whilst looking for the boys.’
‘A witness?’ I asked.
‘Sort of,’ Mary said slowly. ‘Ten years ago she was admitted to a workhouse with her five-year-old son. She was very ill. She recovered, and got the chance of a place in a country house, but she couldn’t take her boy. She decided to go, and save up and come back for him. She was there for five years, then came back to claim her son – only to find someone else had taken him.’
‘How awful,’ I said. To work and work for your boy, all that time, just waiting and hoping, then find him snatched away.
‘As far as the workhouse was concerned, he was claimed by his mother and that was that. Mrs Turner had a bit of a breakdown, but when she recovered, she started to look for him. That’s when I found her, hanging around the workhouse, watching every woman that came in and out of there.’
‘So is it a woman taking these boys?’
‘A woman could be the ringleader,’ she said. ‘Or maybe she’s just a dupe, or . . . Martha, I don’t know what to do next.’
‘Wiggins and the others are coming Tuesday,’ I said gently. She was getting quite distressed, and it tugged at me to see her like that. ‘I’m going to ask them about the Pale Boys.’
‘You think they’re the missing boys?’ Mary questioned. ‘But some of those boys went missing years ago. If they were alive they’d be grown men now.’
If they were alive. What a thing to say. It was obviously something Mary had thought, but I don’t think she had said it until then.
‘Mary,’ I said slowly. ‘You didn’t tell Mrs Turner we’d find her boy, did you?’
‘What else could I say?’ Mary said quickly, getting up and pacing round the kitchen. ‘You didn’t see her, Martha, standing outside that workhouse day after day, begging people to tell her where her boy was.’
‘But Mary . . .’
‘I know!’ she cried out. ‘We may not find him. He may not be alive! But someone has to look. No one else would. Everyone else just said good riddance, street boys, who cares, let them rot! No one else would do anything! I have to help, Martha, I have to!’
‘We will help,’ I said quietly, and she nodded in agreement. I watched her, clasping her hands, her cheeks red with passion, pacing round the kitchen, and I wondered if Mr Holmes had done the right thing giving this case to Mary Watson.
THE TALES OF THE IRREGULARS
Tuesday afternoon came, and with it, the Irregulars.
Wiggins arrived first, slipping through the area door. He didn’t hug me. He just stood and looked at me for a long while.
‘You all right?’ he asked eventually.
‘I will be,’ I replied. He nodded, just as Mrs Turner came in. She saw him and looked stricken.
I remembered what it was like after my boy died. For a while, I dared not go to the village near my home: every boy looked like my boy. I found myself following strange children down the street, half convinced they were my dead son. But at the same time I couldn’t bear to see children happy and alive and well, and with their parents. To spare her, I sent Mrs Turner upstairs to clean my room.
I had, with the help of Mrs Turner, Mary and even Grace (though it wasn’t part of her duties), made a batch of cakes for the boys, and they came tumbling in, eager to eat and talk, and reassure themselves I was well. I was touched by their concern for me, and found myself unexpectedly tearful once or twice.
‘It’s because you’re still weak,’ Grace told me, as I wiped my eyes in the scullery. Weak: how I despised that word. Weakness was for others, people I took care of. I wasn’t supposed to be weak.
I had thought I would have to introduce the subject myself, but when I walked back into the kitchen, the boys were crowded around Mary, telling her tales of the Pale Boys.
‘You only ever see them at night,’ Micky, the youngest, told her.
‘Pale face, just floating in mid-air, like a ghost!’ another boy, Mike, thin, with sandy hair, told her.
‘Just like ’eadless ghosts!’ Jim, who only had one eye, insisted.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ one of the older boys, Frank, said.
‘They only look like that ’cos they wear all black, innit?’
‘I saw them,’ Jim told him. ‘Just before dawn, it was, just floating down the street. They weren’t real, I tell you.’
‘They’re not a fairy tale,’ one of the other boys insisted. He was new, and I couldn’t remember his name. The number and members of Wiggins’ Irregulars changed all the time. This boy was very quiet, and still. ‘We’ve all seen them, ’aven’t we?’
There was a chorus of agreement, with only Wiggins remaining silent. The boys shouted out over each other, eager to tell their tales.
‘All in black.’
‘White face and black eyes!’
‘Just walking around, like they don’t care.’
‘Middle of the night, it were.’
‘Never seen them in daylight.’
‘Bet they can’t come out in daylight!’
‘They don’t eat, or drink neither.’
‘They don’t even breathe. I seen ’em! They’ve got no breath when it’s cold.’
‘They can get through locked doors. Nowhere’s safe from them.’
‘They leave corpses wherever they go. They just walk past you and you die. Don’t even have to touch you.’
‘Enough!’ Wiggins snapped. The boys immediately fell silent. ‘Look,’ he said, quieter. ‘Maybe there are boys in black. I ain’t never seen them.’
‘P’raps they’re scared of you, Wiggins,’ Micky said softly.
‘Lots of people are,’ the quiet boy said, staring up at his leader in awe, like knights would have looked at kings, once. Wiggins smiled, a dry smile with no humour in it.
‘Maybe,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe they just avoid me ’cos I’ll see right through all this ghost crap they’ve got you believing. Right, Jake, you said you saw them, tell Mrs ’Udson. Everyone else keep quiet.’
He sat down and Jake, who turned out to be the new, quiet boy, started to talk.
‘It was before I knew you,’ he said. ‘I was trying to find a place to sleep in the park.’
‘Park’s no good,’ Micky said authoritatively. ‘Colder than the streets and full of perverts.’
‘Well, I didn’t know that then, did I?’ Jake said, as Wiggins silenced Micky with a look. ‘I found a place in those bushes past the boating lake, just at twilight. That’s when I saw them. Just faces at first, coming towards me. Floating in mid-air, like. I nearly . . . well, I nearly peed my trousers, if you know what I mean. Anyway, then I saw they were just boys but in black, so I could only see their faces in the dark.
But they were silent, you know? Not just walking silent, but not talking or laughing or coughing either.’
‘How old were they?’ Wiggins asked.
‘Like us,’ Jake told him. His accent was northern, and I wondered how he had ended up in London. ‘Some young, some about fifteen or so. They didn’t see me. You know me, I know how to hide. Went into the bushes, didn’t dare breathe, case they heard me. They walked straight past me, down the path, and I thought they’d gone, but then I heard a scuffle, and a gasp, and I waited a while and went and looked. Couldn’t sleep ’less I knew. There was a woman down there, just an old woman, she was all hunched over, and when I touched her, well, she was dead.’
‘She could have died of cold,’ Wiggins objected. Jake shook his head.
‘She were still warm. Life had just gone out of her.’
Wiggins sighed, his shoulders stooped for a moment. I thought he would look at me, just a second’s support, but he didn’t. He did this alone.
‘No one goes near the park alone after dark,’ he said eventually.
‘Never do,’ Micky said. ‘Those trees are strange.’
‘They’re not ghosts,’ Mary said suddenly. ‘They can’t walk through locked doors and they can’t steal your breath and they have to eat.’
‘You can prove that, can you?’ Wiggins asked. She looked at him, and nodded.
‘Where have you all seen them?’ I asked. ‘If I got a map, could you show me?’
‘Course we could,’ Wiggins said. ‘Least we could do.’
Billy went to get the map.
‘What are you doing?’ Mary whispered.
‘Every dog has a kennel,’ I said softly. ‘Even painted ones.’
‘What?’ she asked, then got my point. ‘You know, you can carry a metaphor too far,’ she told me with a smile.
When Billy unrolled the map, I had a shock. It was covered in red crosses. It was the map I had used to track down the blackmailer, back in April. I must have gone white, because Grace quickly poured me a glass of water.
‘I thought you threw this away,’ Mary said to Billy, under her breath. The boys had crowded round her and didn’t hear him.
The Women of Baker Street Page 10