The Women of Baker Street

by Michelle Birkby

  ‘No!’

  To my surprise, I had said it out loud. I looked around. No one had noticed. I wasn’t crying in fear, but in anger, at myself. I had forgotten Mr Holmes’ precept – do not see: observe.

  The atmosphere in the ward, the night, my own pain, the drugs – they had all combined together to create a moment of terror. But what had I actually seen? What was the dog beneath the Hound?

  I had seen something stand beside Emma’s bed. Not a shadow, a shape, a human shape. Slim and short – so a woman, or a child or even a short man. But something real, nonetheless. Emma had scratched them!

  The women in the beds – but had I seen them? I had merely seen shapes under covers, just white lumps in the dark. I had no way of knowing if what was under the sheets was a woman or a mound of pillows. Someone could have crept out of her bed as we slept.

  Let me see now – no, none of the women had a scratch on them next morning. But that only meant the creature by the bed was not one of the women. It didn’t mean he didn’t have help from one of them. One of those women could have got out of bed, let him in. Perhaps he had been hiding in the stock cupboard, or the bathrooms, having climbed in through a window. Perhaps she had let him in from the corridor to the rest of the hospital. One of those women could have caused the disturbance in the other wards that had distracted the night nurses and Sister. By all accounts the patient that had the violent fits was prone to them if he was scared. And who exactly had called for help from our ward anyway?

  I opened my eyes. Well, I thought, I could be proud of myself. I had shaken off the wild imaginings of that night and actually deduced some possible facts. I didn’t know names, or how, but I knew it was possible for someone to have killed Emma, and perhaps even the woman who died the first night I was there, without any supernatural intervention.

  I was smiling widely when Mary, exhausted and mussed from playing with the boys, came to join me.

  ‘What are you grinning at?’ she asked. ‘No, tell me later – me first.’

  ‘You talked to the boys?’ I asked.

  ‘And the nurse, too,’ she agreed, panting a little.

  ‘I hope she didn’t see you,’ I said, gesturing towards Eleanor’s house, where she sat with her telescope trained on the park.

  ‘We stayed in the trees,’ Mary said. ‘They hide from her, too. That nurse is very talkative! I get the feeling she’s not allowed to talk at home.’

  ‘Or laugh,’ I said, remembering the hastily hushed laughter as we entered the home.

  ‘No, the Langhams don’t keep staff long,’ Mary said. She was building up to something, I could tell. ‘Eleanor watches everything they do, and finds fault with it all. Luckily Mr Langham is very understanding, and always gives them a good reference, but barely a month passes without someone leaving and someone new coming in.’

  ‘So what you’re saying is it would be easy to slip someone into that household?’ I asked, amused.

  ‘I swear there are secrets in that house. I’m not sure how it can tie into Emma’s death, but we have to start somewhere.’

  ‘I agree,’ I said to her. ‘So, has their governess just left? Are you planning to replace her?’

  She turned to look at me, her face very serious.

  ‘No, not the governess. The boot boy,’ she said to me. ‘I said I had a replacement. I suggested Billy.’

  NOT A BOY ANY MORE

  ‘No!’ I said again, as I marched into the kitchen. Mrs Turner stood up hurriedly to take my coat, and Grace frowned at me.

  I hadn’t spoken to Mary all the way back from the park, although she had begged me to discuss her idea. She had tried to persuade me that Billy would be safe, Billy knew what he was doing; he had probably done more dangerous things than this when he was with Wiggins. Finally she started apologizing to me and begging me to speak to her. I hadn’t dared until I was safely in 221b. I was too angry. Didn’t she understand how much this boy meant to me? Ever since we had taken him in when Wiggins brought him to me, ever since I had agreed to make him Sherlock’s apprentice, he had been like a son to me. His parents had died, my son had died, but we had found consolation in each other. How important it was to keep him safe. I couldn’t shove him into a stranger’s house, a possibly murderous stranger, and leave him alone there!

  Grace and Mrs Turner had tactfully withdrawn. I paced around the kitchen, as Mary stood by the table, trying to calm me down.

  ‘I didn’t mean he should go in there alone,’ she said to me. ‘I was going to suggest that Wiggins station a couple of his boys outside the house, day and night, to keep an eye on things. He can run to them for help, or they can get help if he calls out.’

  ‘It’s not enough,’ I insisted.

  ‘It’s not as if we even know anything or anyone in that house is dangerous,’ Mary pleaded. ‘It’s just an atmosphere, a few secrets.’

  ‘It’s still dangerous!’

  ‘He’ll only be a boot boy! No one pays attention to the boot boy.’

  ‘No, Mary!’ I shouted. She looked at my face, and perhaps finally saw clearly the fear I had in the bottom of my heart of losing this boy. She sighed, and sat down on the chair.

  ‘You’re right, it’s too dangerous,’ she said softly. ‘I’m sorry I suggested it.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  That was Billy, standing at the top of the stair to the kitchen. I hadn’t seen him. He must have heard the whole thing.

  ‘You don’t know what she’s asking,’ I said wearily.

  ‘She wants me to go into a house in disguise as a boot boy,’ he said. ‘Like the sort of thing Mr Holmes does.’

  ‘It’s not the same,’ I snapped.

  ‘Why? Because he’s a man and I’m a boy?’ Billy asked, coming into the kitchen and standing next to me. How he had grown! He was as tall as me now, his face losing the last of his childish softness. I wanted to take him in my arms and hold him, and knew he would submit gracefully, but hate doing it.

  ‘Yes, I suppose,’ I said softly.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ he told me, not whining, but making a statement. ‘Boys younger than me work all the time, doing far worse jobs. Dangerous jobs, too, down the mines and up chimneys.’

  ‘You’re going to talk me into it, aren’t you?’ I said to him. He was determined, his jaw set, his gaze strong.

  ‘Mr Holmes has taught me lots,’ he continued, ‘and so has Wiggins. And Mrs Watson is right: no one notices the boot boy. And we can rely on Wiggins to have someone watching all the time.’

  ‘It’s not safe,’ I said in a last-ditch attempt.

  ‘If you don’t think that’s safe, you should know what I do when I’m out with Wiggins,’ he said darkly.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ I said. I preferred to think of them as two boys running round town having fun. I didn’t want to know of the battles they fought, the dangers they faced.

  ‘I live in this house,’ Billy said gently. ‘I see Mr Holmes and Dr Watson risking their lives all the time. And I see you and Mrs Watson doing it too now and I know why you do. I know you want to help people. I want to help them too. I want to be part of this too. I don’t want to be sat in the corner, waiting for you all to come home, maybe hurt, and not be able to do anything.’

  ‘Billy,’ Mary said softly. ‘Martha said no . . .’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I said quickly, before I could change it back again. ‘You’re right, God help you, you’re right.’

  He sighed happily, as if he weren’t expecting this outcome.

  ‘Right,’ he said, squaring his shoulders. ‘Where am I going?’

  Wiggins was found quickly, and agreed to have two boys waiting outside the Langham home day and night. They’d hang around, like ordinary street boys, and could hide in the park if necessary. If there was any sign of trouble, they’d get help, quickly. Wiggins would join them every day to personally get a report from Billy.

  ‘One of my boys could do this,’ Wiggins objected.

  ‘No
, they couldn’t,’ Billy told him. ‘For a start, they don’t know the duties. And besides, they look like street boys. Two days there and someone would be stealing the silver and blaming it on them. Whereas me,’ he grinned then, ‘I look innocent as the day is long.’

  He did. In some clean but shabby old clothes he looked like a good honest boy down on his luck seeking a good household. Wiggins gave him advice all the way there.

  ‘Knock the edge off your accent,’ he told him. ‘You sound too posh. Once you’re in, don’t ask questions, it makes people suspicious. Just listen. Stay quiet, keep your head down, and listen. People think servants and children are just part of the furniture, they say anything in front of them, but the minute you speak, they shut up. You ready? See you tomorrow, if you get in, or in ten minutes if you don’t.’

  We left Billy at the kitchen door, clutching a reference from Mary, and a letter saying she’d heard from the nurse a boot boy was wanted. Wiggins and I sat in the park. I could smell something burning. Something is always burning somewhere in a park in autumn.

  ‘Why don’t you believe in the Pale Boys?’ I asked Wiggins.

  ‘Ain’t got no time for ghost stories,’ he said. ‘My boys have got enough to be frightened of without being scared of made-up stuff, too. They gotta learn to like the dark. I ain’t going to have them be scared of it, ’cos they gotta live in it.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said softly. Wiggins painted a grim picture. I had always rather liked scary stories, but I had nothing in my childhood to frighten me.

  ‘’Ow long’s it been?’ he asked. His feet banged back and forth on the ground beneath the bench. I pulled out my tiny gold pocket watch.

  ‘Half an hour,’ I said. Wiggins stood up.

  ‘That’s it then, he’s done it,’ he said, staring away over the park. He sniffed once. ‘Fair play to him.’

  ‘Yes, he’s done it,’ I replied. ‘He’s a brave boy.’

  ‘Nah, he’s just a boy,’ Wiggins replied. ‘Looking for a bit of adventure.’ Wiggins gingerly placed his hand on my shoulder. He rarely touched me, rarely showed affection to anyone outside his gang, but he was trying now. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  Wiggins offered to see me home, but I pointed out acerbically that not only was I the grown-up, I also only lived around the corner. He left me, and I sat alone, thinking, allowing the stillness of solitude to melt into me. By the time it was dark, I was at peace again.

  I did feel a little nervous as I went home, thinking about the Pale Boys, but they didn’t come.

  Not that night, anyway.

  HALF-SICK OF SHADOWS

  Mary was still in the kitchen, reading a book by candlelight, when I got home. She looked up eagerly as I entered and took off my coat, putting the kettle on to boil.

  ‘Where’s Mrs Turner?’ I asked.

  ‘I let her go home for the evening. Grace is upstairs waiting for you.’

  I nodded.

  ‘It went well,’ I told her. ‘He’s in the house now.’

  She nodded, then burst out with, ‘Are you still angry with me? Please don’t be, I can’t bear it.’

  Was I angry? No, not any more. It had been a good idea, and it had worked, and Billy had wanted to do it. It was only my own fear that had driven me beyond logic into anger.

  ‘No, of course not,’ I told her. ‘Not now, anyway.’

  She sat down, appeased, but there was still a tension between us. I reached out for the book she was reading.

  ‘Improving your French grammar?’ I teased, as I read the title: ‘Étude médico-légale et clinique sur l’empoisonnement.’

  ‘That book is a bit of a struggle,’ she admitted. ‘But John says it’s the best, and if I want to learn, I should read it.’

  ‘Learn what?’

  ‘Do you remember before, when I looked at that man and knew he’d been murdered, and hadn’t committed suicide?’ I nodded. He had been one of the suspects in the blackmail case, until he had died himself. ‘Well, I wanted to learn more about what you can tell from bodies after they’re dead, how they died and so on. Not as an expert, just an intelligent layman. John’s teaching me.’

  ‘That sounds . . .’

  ‘Morbid?’ she said, laughing.

  ‘Fascinating,’ I corrected her, ‘but yes, also morbid.’

  I looked through the book. It was certainly gruesome.

  ‘John thinks you’re fragile,’ I said suddenly. She looked puzzled.

  ‘Well, I’m not,’ she said, turning back to the book. ‘It is fascinating,’ she said, leafing through the pages. ‘How can anyone be bored when there is so much to learn in the world?’

  Lucky Mary. Blessed with a good education, then an employer who allowed her to use her imagination and creativity, and now a husband who firmly encouraged her to use her mind, how could she know what it was like for the rest of us? Stuck in the same cycle of work, or home life, day after day, always doing the same jobs, that whether hard or easy rarely taxed our intellect, reading the same books, seeing the same people, having the same conversations over and over again, year after year after stultifying year. Never allowed to break out of the cycle, because that would be unladylike, not a woman’s place, not the correct or modest thing to do. Always living in the shadow of men.

  ‘ “I am half-sick of shadows”,’ I murmured.

  Mary, reading her book and not recognizing the quote, replied, ‘Turn the light up, then.’

  Well, she was right.

  ‘Be here tomorrow,’ I said briskly. ‘First we’re going to pay a visit, then we’re going to Sarah Malone’s house. I want to find out what she was confessing to Miranda Logan when she died screaming.’

  Grace was waiting for me up in my room. She undressed me and took off the bandage, not speaking a word. At first I thought she was angry with me for staying out late, but in the light of the gas lamp I could see she was distracted.

  ‘You’re healing well,’ she told me, as she smoothed cream over my scar. ‘You don’t need me here at night any more; I’ll just be here in the morning and evening, and at lunchtime, if that’s acceptable?’

  ‘Perfectly,’ I said to her, as she measured out my nighttime dose of medicine. ‘Grace, is everything all right?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, standing up straight, and bridling a little. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘Nothing, it’s just you seem a little distracted.’

  She stared out of the window a moment, as if making up her mind.

  ‘Nora said to tell you,’ she said, half to herself. ‘But what kind of nurse would I be if I burdened my patient?’

  ‘If Nora said to tell me, you’d better tell me.’

  So she did. Nora had been worried about the deaths on the ward, as she had revealed to me before. She had checked the official logbooks – no one could get hold of Sister Bey’s personal one – and found that the deaths, at least five of them, often happened when the staff were called out of the room to help with a particular patient.

  ‘A man in one of the main wards,’ Grace said, as she helped me on with my nightdress. ‘He ought to be in an asylum really. Most of the time he is perfectly quiet, but two or three times a month, he suddenly gets a fit on him, and starts screaming and shouting and smashing up the ward.’

  ‘The nurses on his own ward can’t deal with him?’

  ‘He’s very strong. And besides, he upsets the other patients, and they need soothing too. Here, drink this.’ She handed me my medication.

  ‘So everyone in earshot runs to help,’ I said. She nodded.

  ‘It’s understood that they all help each other, especially at night, when there’s so few of them. And, as it turns out, Sister Bey is the only one who can calm him. She just whispers in his ear and he quietens, eventually. They have to beg her to come though. She never comes running like the others.’

  I got into bed. Sister Bey, with her two logbooks, never going near a patient, always sitting and writing. Now here she wa
s, at the centre of the distraction.

  ‘What causes this man’s fits?’

  ‘No one knows,’ she said, as she tucked me in. ‘He claims to hear a woman’s voice whispering in his ear telling him he’s going to die, but no one ever sees anything. Mind you, it’s easy to hide on those pavilion wards. There are so many people around, and it’s so dark.’

  Nora too had had her suspicions, and vowed next time the man started to scream, and Sister Bey came to help, she would quietly go back to the private ward before Sister Bey returned. Last night, that was what had happened.

  ‘The ward was full,’ Grace said, sitting on my bed. ‘Flo Bryson is still there, from your time, Betty Soland had gone, but is back after a relapse, oh, and Eleanor Langham is back.’

  ‘Really? Already?’

  ‘Just for a day or two, for tests. She’ll be home again tomorrow. And Miranda Logan came to visit Flo, but of course Miss Logan would’ve been long gone by then. Are you warm enough?’

  ‘Yes, yes, go on,’ I said impatiently. ‘All the beds were full? Including the one opposite the one nearest the door?’ The Death Bed, I called it, but I couldn’t say that to Grace.

  ‘Yes, all of them,’ Grace repeated. ‘Well, the man started to scream, and a woman screamed too, because he’d become violent and was hitting the other patients. It was Bedlam, quite literally. Well, Nora ran to help, and then ran back to get Sister Bey, who came after a few moments.’

  ‘Then Nora came back to the ward?’

  ‘She waited to make sure Sister Bey was fully occupied before she left. She slipped away as the Sister was bent over the patient’s bed. She is certain that Sister didn’t follow her.’

  ‘What happened when she got to the ward?’

  ‘Well, that’s the awful thing,’ Grace said. ‘She’d barely got in when someone smashed that lamp on the desk over her head. She was knocked unconscious. She’s lucky she isn’t dead.’

  IN THE GRAVEYARD

  Early the next morning, very early, so early the gas lamps still flared in the cavernous station, Mary and I caught the train to Teddington. There, as a pale and sickly sun struggled up, we walked for twenty minutes, with a rest every so often so I could catch my breath, until we found a low stone church. It had a graveyard surrounding it, the heavy mist swirling around the crooked ancient gravestones. Only one stone was new. This was Emma’s.