“What of his person, was he clean and tidy?”
“Indeed, sir. He washed regular and told me he took a bath each week at the caravan. I believed him, and his clothes were always well washed and neatly mended. I have to admit, sir, when first the Colonel insisted we hire the boy, I was reluctant. But he stole nothing, and when a man attempted to bribe him to harm The Fury, he attacked the man with such anger I must pull him away lest he commit bloody murder. I gave him his wages each week, fifteen shillings and two half crowns, and I believe he gave it all to his grandmother. He did not smoke or drink, and he was always quiet-spoken and polite. If all stable lads were like him, sir, the lot of a trainer would be much easier.”
Holmes nodded slowly. “Colonel Ross said much the same. Now I would speak to your good wife.” The lady was summoned, but could add nothing to her man’s information—although I believed she knew something she was withholding. Yet, to my surprise, Holmes questioned her no further but allowed her to depart. After that her son appeared looking worried.
“I’m Matthew Hammond, sir, I understand you wish to question me?”
“I do,” Holmes said.
I was looking the lad over as Holmes asked his questions and the boy replied, still with a concerned look upon his face. He was a good-looking boy of some five feet, eight inches, dressed in the country style. He was lean and small-boned, but fresh-faced, hard-muscled, and with an air of competence about him. I judged his age to be around twenty or so, and he had an honest, decent look about him that I liked immediately.
“What do you know of the missing lad?”
“Little enough, sir. He was a little shy, for he seldom chattered, but he did his work very well, and all the horses would do more for him than for anyone else.”
“Which perhaps caused resentment?” Holmes said quietly. The lad nodded. “The lad with whom he was quarrelling, is he one who might have resented Joe’s abilities?” Again there came the wordless agreement. “Would you be pleased to see Joe back again?”
“I would that, sir. I miss him and so does The Fury. Joe and me always got on real well, and I gave Bob a beating after Dad told me about him quarrelling with Joe and trying to knock him about. Weren’t no use though, Joe was gone and he mayn’t come back.”
“If he does, would you be glad of it?”
Matthew Hammond’s face lit with hope. “You know where he is, sir? You’ll get him to come home? Tell him if you find him as Matt says he should come back to us and there’ll always be a place here.”
Holmes dismissed the young man with a smile and turned to me. “The last piece of the puzzle, my dear Watson. Now we have only to seek out Margaret Faa and convince her and Joe that they should return to King’s Pyland.”
The dogcart we had used to reach the stables was waiting. Holmes took the reins and we returned in haste. A train took us to Poole in Dorset, where we hired another vehicle and made our way to Morden heath. I was weary, but Holmes seemed tireless.
“Cheer up, Watson, we are almost there.”
“Almost where?” I asked.
“Almost to where some of the Boswells are camped, and Margaret Faa with them.” He flicked the pony lightly with the whip, and we rattled over the rough heath track towards a clump of caravans surrounded by a ring of suspicious dogs, bored horses, and swarthy people who awaited our coming without signs of welcome.
Holmes halted the pony and looked at them. “I wish to see Margaret Faa; tell her Kooshto Bok is here.” At that there was a burst of laughter and one of the men swaggered forward.
“Good luck is it? Who are you to call himself that for a Romi?”
“Perhaps the beng,” Holmes said. “Give her the word.”
The man nodded and vanished among the caravans to return in minutes. “She’ll speak to you. Jal palla.” We followed as ordered, winding through the vans until we walked down a long dip and around bracken clumps to emerge by a single caravan. Beside it grazed a skewbald pony, a plump and well-cared-for beast that looked us over and nickered hopefully. The man had left us here and I wondered what we should do now. Holmes produced a sugar lump from his pocket and fed the pony, then turned to the caravan and spoke quietly.
“Avel, joovel, dukker and roker.”
An old woman peered at him from the window and snorted. “Who are you to bid me come out to talk and tell your fortune, gaujo?”
“No foreigner to your people; the Boswells have known me before.”
“How do they call you then?”
“Jinomengro.”
She nodded, “I know of you. I will come out and talk—but your fortune is your own.”
“Maybe I’ll tell you yours instead.” She laughed an amazing laugh like that of a girl, and disappeared back into the caravan to emerge seconds later to sit on the steps and survey us.
“So, why are you here, man who knows, and what is it that you know?”
Holmes seated himself comfortably on the grass. I followed suit more awkwardly, and he lit his pipe, blew out a cloud of smoke and started.
“Once there was a woman who loved a man of sastera.” Here the old woman laughed appreciatively, and later Holmes explained that the word meant iron and was a pun on the man’s trade as a blacksmith, as well as a compliment on his physical abilities. “She wed him and it was not expressly forbidden since those who work as komlomeskro have magic. She bore him a child, but in time he died and his kinfolk drove her out, saying that she was not of their breed and should inherit nothing.”
“They were wrong.”
“They paid,” Holmes said quietly, “Did they not?”
“They paid,” the old woman agreed. “Our curse on them—and all they had was gone over the years. But it did my daughter little good. She died, so I took the child and came away to live apart.”
“Because you did not wish the child to be as the Romany, despised, apart, wed and bred too early and oft illused?”
“Aava,” she nodded once, a short powerful downward jerk of her chin.
“Then a man offered the child employment. He would be well-paid, well-treated, and valued, and he would be let do the work he wished to do, for he loves horses and can speak to them?”
“Aava.”
“Until one he worked with uncovered the secret and would have used him ill, so that the child fled back to you and you took him on the road again. But behind him lies one who will die without him, one who loves with all his heart. Will you keep them apart?”
The door flung open and a slender girl in an explosion of skirts hurtled down the steps. “The Fury, he is ill, pining for me, or is it Matthew, you mean? Tell me! Who is it you mean?”
I must admit that I sat on the grass almost too stunned to regain my feet. Holmes uncoiled his lean frame and stood to take her hand.
“It is The Fury firstly that I mean. He will neither eat nor work without you, but Matthew said if I found you that I should say this to you from him: ‘Tell him if you find him as Matt says he should come back to us and there’ll always be a place here.’ Those were his words and you yourself will know the truth to them.”
The girl nodded. “His truth, but what of Mr. Hammond and his wife? What will they say when they know? What will the Colonel say, who will not be so quick to take on a girl to groom The Fury?”
Holmes smiled at her. “I think the Colonel would take on the devil himself for a stable lad did the devil handle horses as you can. What is your name?”
“My father was Joseph, therefore I used that name at the stables. My own name now is Ruth, a name from the Bible, for my mother said I was Ruth to her Naomi. My father’s people would have allowed me to stay with them if she was gone, but I would not. Before that I was called Leah after my mother.”
“Ruth, then. Will you come back to London with us to meet Colonel Ross, and after that to King’s Pyland if he accepts you?”
Ruth Faa nodded slowly. “I will come. My grandmother will follow and meet me at the stables—if I do not rejoin her before she is t
here.”
So we went back to London, stared at by fellow passengers as we traveled, watched half-contemptuously, half-suspiciously by those who wondered why we traveled with a young gypsy girl at our heels. On our arrival Holmes delivered the girl to Mrs. Hudson’s hands, and she, good woman that she was, let the girl bathe and gave her the clothes to wear which Holmes had arranged.
Ruth rejoined us looking like the boy she had been at the stables. Holmes had provided breeches, a checked shirt, a neck scarf, and scissors for the girl to trim her hair again and that she had done. I could see how it was that she had been mistaken for a boy all that time. Her figure was very slender and her features aquiline, so that with a boy’s loose garb she looked to be no more than a young lad. I could see too how it was that Ross had mistaken her age, for she looked in her lad’s clothing to be around thirteen or fourteen.
Holmes must have sent a messenger to the Colonel immediately upon our return, for we had no sooner eaten than the man was on our doorstep. He strode in, seized the boy by the shoulders and shook him gently.
“Joe, Joe, why did you run away? The Fury is pining, he won’t eat, won’t be saddled, won’t be ridden, and he’s kicked young Jackson so that the boy is limping like a spavined horse.”
“Good,” Ruth snapped.
Colonel Ross stared down at her. “What? Good! Why?” His gaze on her sharpened, “What did he try on you, lad?”
Holmes drew him back from the girl. “I think before anything, Colonel, you should know who Joe really is.”
“I don’t care about any of that,” said Ross impatiently. “So the lad got into some small trouble and fled, I can make it right whatever it may be.”
“Possibly, Colonel, but you may find it more difficult to change the boy’s sex. This is Ruth Faa who met The Fury. They loved each other at first sight and yes, she is a whisperer as you surmised. She wanted to work with the horse, but knew no stables would give a girl work as a stable lad.”
Colonel Ross stared down, and gradually—I could see the transition in his face—he discerned the female beneath the boy’s disguise. Ruth stood motionless before him, waiting. At last his jaw clenched in decision.
“I do not care. Let her keep to her costume, let others believe what they will. She is The Fury’s groom so long as he races. If there is scandal over it I will face it out; so long as the horse keeps winning, I will know it for sour grapes when men sneer.”
Holmes nodded. “I expected no less from you, Colonel Ross. But I would venture to say that you might have any problem resolved shortly. Let us go down to your stables in the morning. One thing I will tell you which Ruth—or Joe—will not. Bob Jackson discovered her secret and attempted to blackmail her of all her wages. When she refused that demand, he said she could pay in another way and laid hands upon her. That time your trainer intervened, not knowing what the quarrel meant—but it was this which drove Ruth from the stables, since she feared what next Bob would do.”
Ross’s eyes burned with a cold rage. “He will be gone the moment I set foot on my land there. And he will go with a warning on what may happen to lads who talk too freely.”
“Just so,” said Holmes. “I knew Joe could rely on you.”
Still, I wondered, it was a makeshift solution at best. The boy would not keep silent forever, and how long would Ross hold up under the sneers of those who deem a young girl too fragile to handle a high-spirited colt? Holmes reassured me later on.
“Do not worry, my dear Watson.” His eyes had the ghost of a twinkle as we approached the stables. “I think all will be resolved very well.”
Matthew Hammond came out at the sound of our wheels and cried out as Ruth waved from the letdown window. I opened the door and they were in each other’s arms. For minutes he held her, before he turned to face his parents who were standing at the door, his father agape, but his mother smiling, and I saw she too had guessed Ruth’s secret.
“Mother, Father, this is the girl I’ll wed. This is—” He grinned down at her and she supplied her female name with a tiny, joyous smile.
“Ruth.”
“This is Ruth. She’ll be lad for The Fury, I’ll be his jockey, he’ll make a fortune for the Colonel, and nobody better say anything about her ever.”
The Colonel went off into a great shout of laughter, I found I was following suit, and even Holmes had something that could almost be described as a grin about his lips.
So that was the way of it. Ruth was stable lad for The Fury throughout the animal’s career and that was long and illustrious. But well before it ended, Ruth and Matthew had married and she bore him two sons and a daughter. The Fury bred fine foals and Colonel Ross became a rich man.
And Silver Blaze? He bred great fillies and many other fine colts, but there was never another one as brilliant or as dangerous as The Fury. Nor, I think, one who was so cared for and so greatly loved by his stable-lad—but then, I doubt that any other of his colts had a Ruth.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Acquaintances of mine in the United States who specialize in Sherlock Holmes, Caralyn and Joel Senter, queried the Romany words used by Sherlock Holmes when I was writing this story. I was able to assure them (and you) that the words are correct for the country (England) and the time period for my stories (1890-1910). I also own a brief—and very rare—Romany dictionary put out by the English Folklore Society of that period.
THE BUTTON-BOX
It was the year of ’96 in which the following case occurred. Like so many of Holmes’ cases it began with the trivial and ended with a more serious crime. And the trivial in this case was so bewilderingly trivial that initially I could see no rhyme or reason in it.
Holmes had been busy investigating the case of the Bermondsy abductions, and at the end of that depraved and vicious series of events, we were taking our leisure for a time while I attended to personal matters, and Holmes, despite his pipe and his violin, had already become bored. So that it was all to the good when it appeared that a new case was presenting itself hopefully for our inspection.
It started with the arrival in our rooms of Mr. Hilton Soames, tutor and lecturer at the College of St. Luke. We had aided him in an earlier mystery when one of his students had attempted to gain an unfair advantage in pursuing a scholarship, and now he was again on our doorstep begging for our assistance.
“For,” he said, as he accepted a cup of tea, “my grandmother is so enraged by this insolent theft that I fear for her health.”
I looked at him in surprise. I had believed Soames to be in his mid-forties, and I would have supposed his grandmother to be long since dead. He caught my look and understood it at once.
“No, I fear it is my appearance which deceives you, Doctor. I am but thirty-six, although I know I appear some years older, also the women of my family have always been healthy and long-lived. My grandmother is eighty-seven, and in her energy you would think her near a score of years the younger.”
Holmes intervened. “Tell us why the lady is so agitated and why it is that you require my aid?”
Soames shivered. “It is terrible that a lady of her age cannot walk abroad without being flung to the ground and having her property seized from her.”
“What property?” I questioned him. “Her handbag, I assume?”
“No, that is the foolish thing. It was her button-box that was stolen.”
I stared at him. “Her button-box? What is that, and why should your grandmother be carrying it about with her?”
Holmes broke in quietly. “A button-box is a box that contains buttons, Watson. Many women build up quite a collection; since buttons can cost quite large sums, it is not uncommon for the woman of the house to select a container and place in it any loose or spare buttons she obtains. Then, if a button is required, she may search within the box and use one from her store. Into the box go also complete sets of buttons from garments which are otherwise too worn out to continue to give service.”
I nodded. “Now that you mention it, I do recall my mother
had such a container.”
Soames sighed. “My grandmother’s button-box was old. It was, so far as any of us know, passed down to her from her grandmother, who had it from hers. The container is referred to as a box, but in reality it is more of a tiny chest. One apparently made in imitation of a sailor’s chest—and family legend has it that it was given to some long ago Soames as a gift from someone for whom he had done a favor.”
“Is there a curse?” I asked frivolously.
Soames groaned. “No, there is not, although I shall think there is if Holmes cannot retrieve the item. My grandmother is a woman of strong character, and we are not like to ever hear the last of it if her button-box is not returned to her.”
I eyed the lecturer as he paced in his agitation. Soames was a tall, spare man of a nervous and excitable temperament at the best of times—which these were not. I imagined his grandmother to be a tall lady, gaunt of features, nervous, excitable, and with a penetrating and shrill voice, which would drive Soames to distraction.
Besides, Holmes needed a trivial case to occupy his mind, and one of such pleasantly bewildering and minor importance should occupy him splendidly. I could see he was considering the proposition and I hastened to endorse the idea.
“Are you sure you wish to use your time in seeking out a lost button-box, Holmes?”
My friend eyed me with amusement, while Soames’ look as he stood up was one of reproach. Holmes turned to the lecturer. “No, no, Mr. Soames. Watson is merely using reverse psychology. He hopes that by stressing the unimportance of the case that I may be moved to investigate.”
He waved Soames to a seat again. “Tell me how your grandmother came to lose her button-box—and I foresee,” he added, “that we shall all become very tired of hearing those two words before this case is concluded. But to begin your tale, how is it that she was carrying the item about the town?”
“My family, Mr. Holmes, have lived near the University for some generations. My grandmother has a small house near the University, and is often about visiting friends and doing good works in connection either with the church or with the University. A week ago yesterday she was calling on an old friend who has a small granddaughter staying with her, and my grandmother took her button-box to amuse the child while her elders were in converse.
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