The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part II

by David Marcum

  I shook my head. “What silly names; she (we must assume a she) is loquacious, even when paying by the word.”

  I was talking to thin air; Holmes was on the move. “Come,” he called back. “It’s ten minutes to seven.”

  I scurried after him. “We’ll not get across London to the Tower in time, Holmes, it must be several miles. It is a physical impossibility, unless you have engaged a private balloon!”

  Holmes skirted an ornamental fountain and came to a stop at a magnificent floral display. He plucked a red carnation bloom and slipped its stalk through my button hole.

  “I say, old chap,” I remonstrated.

  He handed me his Evening News and propelled me into a large grassy enclosure, the principal feature of which was an artificial lake crossed by a bridge illuminated with coloured electric globes.

  I recalled that some years previously, the promoters of the hideous Tower Bridge across the Thames had built a wood and plaster, quarter-scale model of the structure in the gardens of the Crystal Palace, no doubt hoping that the public would get used to a Gothic monstrosity almost as uncouth as the ridiculous iron tower that defiled the centre of Paris. The model had proved a popular attraction, especially when illuminated on spring and summer evenings. Young couples perambulated the lake and crossed the bridge, no doubt focussed on each other and oblivious to their less than scenic surroundings.

  I followed Holmes to the arch that marked the start of the bridge walkway. Close to, the model was sadly dilapidated. Bare wood showed through the paintwork, and the suspension wires hanging from the twin towers were visibly bent and frayed, and it was with trepidation that I followed Holmes onto the creaking deck and we joined the crowd crossing and re-crossing the structure. A police constable stood by one of the towers, but he seemed content to chat with a flower seller rather than enforce any rule of the road. Holmes and I took the leftmost tack as having fewer people walking against our direction.

  “Keep an eye out,” he enjoined me in a murmur.

  “What for?”

  My question was immediately answered. Coming towards me against the flow and at a stately pace was an oddly-dressed figure, a lady, who, despite the mildness of the evening, was wrapped in a voluminous grey cape. On her head she wore a grey, flowery hat and her face was hidden, veiled in net. She stopped before me and slipped a hand into her reticule.

  I blinked at her, started at a huge bang, and looked up as a firework bloomed high above me in the shape of a bright red carnation.

  Holmes stepped between the lady and me and took her arm. “Madame,” he said softly. “I urge you not to take such a foolhardy step.”

  More fireworks thundered over us as Holmes drew the lady to the side of the bridge. He made no move to bid me join them, and I stood uncertainly and in a state of utmost confusion as the crowd swirled past me staring up, mouths agape. An instinct of delicacy drew me away from my friend and the lady, and I took a position on the opposite side of the bridge against the balustrade and out of the flow of pedestrians. I could only glimpse Holmes and his companion through gaps in the passing throng and in the bursts of light from the fireworks as if in a jerky, slow-motion Kinematograph. Holmes bent towards the veiled lady and spoke most earnestly, emphasising his words with sharp gestures.

  A thickening of the crowd hid them from me for a few seconds, and Holmes was beside me and the lady gone.

  “Holmes,” I exclaimed. “You arranged a rendezvous for me with that lady!”

  The newspaper boy reappeared, handed Holmes a rolled up newspaper, and disappeared into the crowd.

  “In a manner of speaking.” Holmes unrolled the newspaper and disclosed a pocket pistol. “She intended to assassinate you.” He smiled. “Come, let’s take the train home and smoke a pipe or two in the safety of our comfortable den in Baker Street.” He took me by the arm and steered me towards the station.

  “Miss Berthoud said that she was sorry to have bothered you, but she cannot see very well without her spectacles, especially through her veil and in the glare of the electric lamps and pyrotechnics, and your luxurious moustache is very like that of her oppressor. I advised her to go home and lay the matter before us in the morning.”

  I dropped both newspaper and boutonniere into a bin. “Bothered, Holmes?” I said, somewhat sharply. “Yes, I dare say a bullet through the breastbone might have been bothersome.”

  Holmes kept his counsel during our ride home, over late supper, and for the rest of the evening, and I went to bed with no more idea of why I had been targeted by the veiled lady than I had on the bridge.

  I came down to breakfast the next morning and found Holmes in his dressing gown, reclining on the sofa, puffing on his morning pipe, and sipping coffee. A newspaper-wrapped parcel lay on the floor beside him.

  “I feel that I am owed an explanation, Holmes,” I said as I poured my coffee.

  “I am sure you do, old man,” he answered amicably. He leaned towards me and held out his cup for a refill.

  “I think it only right that I should know what the devil is going on,” I said stiffly. “Oh, good morning, Mrs. Hudson.”

  “Language, Doctor,” our landlady said as she placed fresh dishes of scrambled eggs, bacon, and kidneys before me on the table. “Naming calls. Billy will bring your toast, hot-and-hot.”

  “I expect Murchison did what I should have done in his circumstances,” Holmes said as the door closed behind her. “He bribed the boot boy (or boot girl as Miss Berthoud resides in an exclusive ladies’ hotel in Bayswater) to slip a note under her bedroom door. The note referred her to the Evening News Personals and gave the gentleman’s nom de plume, Ajax.”

  The bell rang in the hall downstairs.

  “Who is this Murchison,” I asked. “And how did you become involved in the matter?”

  Billy appeared at the door as I was about to tuck into my bacon and eggs.

  “Where’s the toast?” I asked.

  “Which, I didn’t bring it, Doctor, on account of the lady in the waiting room come to see Mr. Holmes.”

  “But, what about breakfast?” I exclaimed.

  Holmes jumped up. “Clear the table, Billy, then show her up.”

  “I am a wronged woman,” Miss Berthoud said in a charmingly French-lilted English. “I was harried from my home, driven from my position as a nanny with a titled family, and hounded and threatened by a fiend who will stop at nothing to ruin me.”

  Our visitor was a fresh-faced young lady of twenty or so, again in grey, but she had exchanged her cape and veil for a well-fitting, tailored ensemble in the latest fashion, and on her head was a tiny grey and pale yellow hat that clung to her tightly coiled hair like a budgerigar to its perch. She refused refreshment and took Holmes’s place on the sofa while he and I sat in our usual chairs before the empty grate.

  She folded her hands in her lap. “There are moments, gentlemen, when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely - or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. I grasped that moment yesterday when I saw you on the bridge, Doctor. I was determined to destroy he who stands between my dear Alfie and me.”

  Holmes sniffed. “But, you must consider, Miss Berthoud, that you would undoubtedly have been apprehended. Your costume, although admirably conceived for hiding your identity, was too voluminous for speedy escape, and a constable was at hand. You must have been caught and inevitably hanged for murder.”

  Miss Berthoud seemed about to contradict Holmes, but he overrode her. “I see you frown. Although your English is excellent, I deduce from your accent (and your name) that you are French by birth, and you may not be aware that on this side of the Channel the courts do not have the option of excusing a murder as a crime passionel. Our Judiciary is not known for its Romantic conceptions; no, no, it would have meant the
rope.”

  “I say, Holmes-” I interjected.

  “If I might accept your offer of refreshment, Doctor?” Miss Berthoud asked softly.

  “Of course, tea or coffee?” I asked.

  “A reviving brandy and soda for our guest, Watson,” Holmes said firmly. “And a whisky for me while you’re at the Tantalus.”

  I poured the drinks, handed them and helped myself to a whisky.

  “Tell me more of the target of your assassination attempt,” Holmes requested. “This Reverend Murchison.”

  “Your oppressor is a clergyman?” I asked. “Not of the established church, I trust.”

  “Of the Church of Scotland,” Miss Berthoud answered. “He retired to Boulogne, as do many of his countrymen, particularly professional gentlemen.”

  She took a dainty sip of brandy. “Although my family was of aristocratic status, we lost everything in the turmoil at the end of the last century. My great-grandfather opposed the tyrant Napoleon, and our family was proscribed. After the death of my father, my mother was obliged to sell what remained of our property and set up a lodging house in Boulogne. A very genteel establishment, you understand, catering to elderly ladies and retired gentlemen, several of them from Britain, as the town has a reputation as a welcoming place for such people: we have an English bookshop, several tea rooms, and a subscription library with the latest newspapers and periodicals from London. I left school in order to assist my mother in the business.”

  “Your English is most remarkable, Miss Berthoud,” I said.

  She bowed. “In France I received a typical education for a girl of my class and background, but I had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of an English lady who boarded with us. She took me under her wing and tutored me in your language.”

  Her voice took on a more severe quality as she continued. “My life changed forever when an elderly man in clerical hat and clothes appeared at our door enquiring whether we had rooms. He rented the second floor front bedroom, with the use of the necessary facilities on that floor and freedom of the downstairs sitting room where my mother and I spent our quiet evenings, sewing or reading improving literature.”

  She sighed a most affecting sigh. “From the moment Reverend Murchison entered our household, I had not a moment’s peace. At first, he dined with the other lodgers, but soon he was invited to share our supper en famille, and he ate with my mother and me every night, without fail. During meals, he did not take his eyes from me.”

  Miss Berthoud leaned across and grasped my hand. “I was a caged bird, Doctor!”

  I squeezed her hand in a reassuring gesture as she continued. “I must explain that in Boulogne, the English men who reside or holiday there are considered prime matches for young girls of the town; the gentlemen are usually elderly and are thought to be wealthy (at least in comparison the local ouvriers). My mother forced the man upon me. I had nowhere to go, and no funds of my own, but I knew that I could not endure being Reverend Murchison’s wife.”

  “Ouvriers,” said Holmes, “labourers.”

  I frowned at him.

  “I represented to my mother that the reverend gentleman was of a certain age and an ungenerous disposition, and that I was but nineteen,” Miss Berthoud continued with a long sigh. “But she would hear nothing against him. She even sought occasions when she might leave us alone together, and I was obliged to endure his vile advances.”

  I stood and stroked my moustache. “He did not, ah - “

  Miss Berthoud pursed her lips. “Reverend Murchison did not force himself upon me, no. But in every other way he bound me to him with chains of iron. He visited our sitting room morning and afternoon, visibly annoyed if other persons, such as our neighbours, Monsieur Sublier and his wife, or other lodgers were present.”

  “You made your escape,” Holmes suggested.

  “With the help of that kind English lady, since Passed Over, who knew of my travails and offered her wise counsel. I replied to an advertisement in an English newspaper, offering the position of nanny to a young lady of good character who could teach French. As you were kind enough to remark, my English was good (it has improved in the two years I have worked here). My benefactor provided a letter of introduction to Lord and Lady Muntley (for that is the name of my erstwhile employers) that served in lieu of an employment reference, and I happily accepted the position on adequate terms and conditions. I fled Boulogne for my safe haven in the town of Frome, in Wiltshire.”

  Miss Berthoud blinked sadly at me, and I offered her another glass of medicinal brandy, which she reluctantly accepted.

  “I will not say that my life was idyllic,” she continued, “although Frome is a pleasant location, and my employers were kind, but-” She sighed. “I hope that you will not judge me too harshly, gentlemen, when I admit that I am not one of those women who dote on children; in fact, I found no charming traits whatsoever in the baby boy in my care, or in the twin girls, his older sisters.”

  “Reverend Murchison sought you?” Holmes asked.

  “He somehow found me out and settled at an inn in the town. He followed me whenever I left the house, even to church on Sunday. He plagued me with bouquets of meadow flowers and boxes of inferior chocolates.”

  “The hound,” I said.

  “Frome is a small town, gentlemen, a village really, and Reverend’s Millward’s activities were noticed.” Miss Berthoud frowned down at the clenched hands in her lap. “He wrote to me, often daily.”

  “The fiend!” I cried.

  “I think we might accept Reverend Murchison’s villainy as a given, Watson,” Holmes said, turning to me, “requiring no further expostulation.”

  I sniffed and sipped my whisky in a decided manner.

  “One day,” Miss Berthoud continued, “earlier in the summer, the youngest child of the family was out of sorts, and our physician in Frome recommended the waters of Bath. We took lodgings there.”

  Miss Berthoud seemed lost in thought for a long moment.

  “And?” Holmes asked sharply.

  She looked up. “I met Lieutenant Lord Alfred Bartholomew by chance in a small park where he played at quoits with some of his brother officers from HMS Atropos, his armoured cruiser. She is in the second rate of that class, but Alfie and I are convinced that she is the most effectively armed of her sisters, as she has no less than five six-inch quick firers, all Armstrong guns. He is Third Officer.”

  Miss Berthoud smiled at me, and Holmes tut-tutted for her to continue.

  “Alfie proposed, but I hesitated. I did not care to exchange one kind of domestic slavery for another; to become an officer’s wife living at the admiral’s manor house while my husband was in China or the Cape, with my contentment dependent on the goodwill of my mother-in-law. No, no, that would never do. But my beloved convinced me that the Navy is quite different from the Army, in that wives may follow their husbands to foreign stations and set up a home, if they have sufficient means.”

  She took a sip of brandy and smiled again. “Admiral Lord Charles Bartholomew is very well situated, and Alfie has high expectations.”

  “Reverend Murchison discovered your attachment to Lieutenant Bartholomew?” Holmes asked.

  “He did. My tormentor followed me as I wheeled Baby to the park in his perambulator. I refused to enter into communication with him, but he sent me messages through the Personal Columns in which he avers in veiled terms that he will do everything in his power to sever relations between Alfie and me. If I will not be his, he is determined that I shall have no future with another, that I shall die an old maid.”

  “The brute!” I exclaimed, and Holmes gave me a reproving look.

  “He is determined to ruin my happiness,” Miss Berthoud said, sobbing into her hands. “The wedding is on Saturday at ten in the morning at the church in Rowland’s Castle, a village in Hamp
shire close to Admiral Bartholomew’s estates. Reverend Murchison requires me to submit to him within forty-eight hours or he will write to the admiral and acquaint him with his prior claim to my hand.”

  “Very well,” said Holmes, rubbing his palms together in what I thought a rather callous gesture. “I must now ask if there is anything known to Murchison that might cause unease if it were relayed to the admiral.”

  “Nothing! He will make something up. He is the Devil incarnate. Alfie’s father would instantly forbid the match if he detected any taint of impropriety. Lady Bartholomew is of a frail disposition of mind. I fear for her sanity if any shadow of scandal adhered to the family name.”

  “I must press you, Miss Berthoud,” Holmes said coldly. “If I am to help you in this matter, I must know everything.”

  Miss Berthoud looked down and wrung her hands. “You must understand that I was very young, Reverend Murchison was very persistent, my mother entreated me, and I could conceive of no alternative to accepting his proposal.”

  “You did so?” Holmes asked.

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “There is written proof of your acceptance of Reverend Murchison’s offer?”

  “There were certain allusions in one short note I wrote to Reverend Murchison,” she answered. “Nothing untoward, you understand, but they might be taken as a statement of assent.”

  “To marriage with him?”

  Miss Berthoud nodded unhappily.

  Holmes stood. “We have but two days before the deadline and four before the nuptials. We must act. Watson?”

  I stood.

  “Perhaps you might see Miss Berthoud to her conveyance.”

  I offered Miss Berthoud my arm and accompanied her downstairs and to the omnibus stop.

  I returned to our sitting room, and found Holmes leaning against the mantel smoking a cigar from my packet and undoing the string on the parcel I’d seen earlier.

  “An interesting lady,” I suggested, “who mixes the delicacy of her sex with an admirable streak of determination; think on the pistol.”