All Roads Lead to Whitechapel

by Michelle Birkby

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said to Mary.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she replied softly.

  Once they had gone, I made some sandwiches and took them up to Mr Holmes. I recognized the signs—the increased tobacco smoking, the peevishness with company of any sort, the restlessness and silence. It was his time. He had a case to solve, something I knew nothing about, as I had been caught up in my own puzzle lately. Tonight he would solve it, he had that air about him.

  He was sat on a great pile of cushions culled from the sofa and armchairs, in front of the blazing fire. The room was in darkness, lit by only the flames and the fast-fading twilight outside, lending the room a disturbing, almost sinister air. It is in atmospheres like this that ghost stories are told, and believed. Thick huge shadows flickered in the corners, lending the books and pictures a life of their own, heavy and mysterious in the half-light. All the precarious piles of manuscripts and notes and papers seemed to writhe and twist in the flickering firelight, as if they would be free. The room was full of smoke and fog, from the fire and from the street and from Mr Holmes’ pipe, blurring the edges of the furniture, dimming my eyes, making the whole place seem almost hellish. It was more a cave than a room. In the dim, murky light, Mr Holmes sat perfectly still, his face saturnine, set in stone, a pagan statue of a god to be worshipped and feared and placated.

  For a moment, in that room, I shivered, despite the heat—but my mother’s sensible Scotch blood prevailed. I strode in, placed the sandwiches on the table, opened the windows wide to clear the smoke and stir the air, and poked the fire so it cast a kindlier light. Mr Holmes did not move during all these tasks. It was only when I was about to leave that he spoke.

  ‘I’m not hungry, Mrs Hudson.’

  ‘Not now, perhaps,’ I told him. ‘But you will be when you have solved your case at three o’clock in the morning, and I don’t wish you to be ringing for me then.’

  ‘At three o’clock?’ he asked, curious, and turning to me. ‘How do you know I will solve the case then?’

  ‘It’s always three in the morning, or thereabouts,’ I said, with a touch of asperity. ‘I am woken by a great shout, and the sound of you charging about your rooms, throwing things around, yelling out incomprehensible facts, and calling for Dr Watson or Billy.’

  He grimaced. I do not think he liked to be known so well. Or perhaps it gave him a pleasure he was uncomfortable in acknowledging. Perhaps he did not actually know how often he set the household into an uproar in the early hours of the morning. However, when he was not in the throes of a case, or boredom, he was unfailingly polite to me, and so he said, ‘I apologize. I shall endeavour to express triumph silently tonight.’ He turned back to the fire, casting his face half in shadow again.

  ‘No, don’t,’ I said impulsively, walking back into the room, towards him. ‘I like to hear it. I like to hear you crow in victory, and know that another case is solved. The world seems such a dark and soulless place sometimes, especially at three o’clock in the morning. I lie awake in bed, and think of all I have seen and read, and it can be hard to believe that there really are good men and women, and if there are, that they can hold back the dark and the terror and the evil. Then I hear you, and I know that someone is out there, trying to bring light into someone’s life. I hear you shout, and I know another problem has been solved, perhaps a life saved, or a danger averted, and I feel safe again. I feel there is hope again.’

  I don’t think I had ever spoken to him like that before. I had certainly never said so much. John had once told me that Holmes was the worst tenant in London, and I only put up with him because of the rent he paid. I put it up every time he destroyed another part of his rooms. He was paying—uncomplainingly—a very high rent by now. But it wasn’t that. It was because I knew of the miracles he wrought, the pain he healed, the comfort he gave, under my roof.

  Mr Holmes turned to look at me, curious and unsettled, as if I were a cat that had sprouted a pair of wings and proposed to fly about the room.

  ‘You have such faith in me, you and Watson,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Well-deserved faith,’ I told him firmly, my hands clasped in front of my black bombazine dress, the very picture of a respectable housekeeper, oh-so-successfully concealing the raging emotions within.

  ‘And if I should fail?’ Mr Holmes asked, his voice even, his face unreadable in the firelight. ‘I have failed before, Mrs Hudson. I will fail again.’

  ‘But you tried,’ I said, wanting so much to tell him what he, and what he did, meant to me, and yet shaking with nerves that what I was saying was inappropriate to speak to a tenant. Maybe this was not my place. My place was to incline my head silently and leave until called for. Yet now I had started, I could not stop. ‘And you will keep trying. It matters that you try, when so many walk away.’

  ‘It matters that I win,’ he said, and a log fell in the fire and the flames shot up, and for that moment, that one moment, I saw his face so clearly. His eyes looked bleak, and I caught a glimpse of the desperate battle always raging in his mind. Sherlock Holmes against the world. Sherlock Holmes, one man, against all the evil and corruption and hate in London. Then the log settled and the fire died down and his face was in darkness again. I looked around. On the table I saw a small scrap of grey paper. I saw my name—Hudson—and a message about game and flypaper.

  ‘Is this meant for me?’ I asked.

  ‘Not unless you sailed on the Gloria Scott,’ Mr Holmes said dryly. ‘It’s a souvenir. That is where it all began, really. My first case.’ He was silent for a moment.

  ‘Wiggins will recover?’ he asked, abruptly changing the subject, as he was prone to do.

  ‘He will. I will look after him.’

  ‘As he, apparently, looks after you, I hear,’ Mr Holmes said. I glanced up at the vent. Sound could drift through it both ways…

  ‘Good night, Mrs Hudson. Thank you for the sandwiches,’ Mr Holmes said politely.

  ‘Good night, Mr Holmes,’ I replied, closing the door softly as I left.

  Perhaps that would have been the moment to tell him about Laura Shirley, and all that had happened since then. He would have taken the case. I could have so easily lifted the burden from my shoulders and placed it on his, already so weighed down. But I could not. I remembered his bleak eyes, and I would not add one single grain to his problems. As he had his responsibilities, his promises, our faith to live up to, I also had. Mary and I had started this. Mary and I had taken on this burden. We would carry it until, one morning at 3 a.m., we finished it.

  CHAPTER

  7

  The Adventure of the Whitechapel Lady

  Seven months ago almost to the day, John had come down to my kitchen, sat down at the table, and told me he loved Mary Morstan but could never marry her. He sat right there, at the end by the stove where it was warmest, and drank tea and ate scones—or rather, sipped aimlessly at the tea, and crumbled the scones between his fingers. He talked of the fabulous Agra treasure, and a tale of mystery and betrayal in India and the Sign of Four and he talked most of all of brave, beautiful Mary Morstan at the centre of it all.

  ‘She’s clever,’ John said, his eyes shining as he stared out of the window and thought of her. ‘Even Holmes admires her intelligence. And she’s kind; kind to everyone and so calm. Even in the most dangerous moments, faced by murderers and villains and death, she didn’t shrink, though she must have been frightened. She just threw her shoulders back, as if she were a soldier like her father. And when she smiles…’ He looked down at the tea cup in front of him.

  ‘Your heart feels as if it has missed a beat,’ I finished for him. He looked at me, suddenly seeing I understood. ‘I remember mine used to feel like that when Hector—Mr Hudson—smiled at me. He didn’t smile often, except when he was with me, and, each time, I felt something inside me give a queer little flutter. That was when I knew I loved him.’

  John smiled, and blushed slightly. It was so touching, that blush, as if something of the schoolboy
remained in the battered old soldier.

  ‘I do,’ he admitted. ‘I do love her. I must love her, how can I not? If you knew her…’

  ‘I will know her,’ I said, picking up the cups, ‘when she becomes Mrs John Watson.’

  He didn’t answer, and I turned to look at him. The blush had gone from his face and he stared ahead of him, bleakly.

  ‘You are going to ask her to marry you?’ I asked.

  ‘She will be rich, when we solve the case,’ John told me, and his eyes were so, so sad. ‘She will finally have the fabulous Agra treasure that her father left her, and wealth beyond her dreams, and I am so poor. I barely scrape by on my army pension.’

  ‘How do you know what her dreams are?’ I said angrily. On the other hand, how did I know what her dreams were? Given the choice between treasure and the love of a man like John, I’d have chosen John, but what did I know of her? But still, I defended her. If he loved her, she must be worth his loving. ‘Besides,’ I told him, ‘if it were the other way round, you rich and her poor, it would not matter.’

  ‘A man is supposed to take care of a woman,’ he said gently. ‘He should support her, not the other way round. A poor man marrying a rich woman sounds—feels—contemptible, somehow.’

  ‘She won’t care!’ I told him. ‘If she loves you, the money won’t matter.’

  ‘I don’t even know if she loves me,’ he said, walking across the room to me. He looked so forlorn and lost.

  ‘If she knows you, she loves you,’ I said firmly. ‘How can she not?’

  I turned away, so he could not see my face. It was so unlike me to reveal how fond of him I was, how highly I regarded him. My emotions were mine alone, and I had not shared them since my Hector died. Besides, I could not bear to see the sadness in his eyes.

  ‘She’s so far above me, Mrs Hudson,’ he said. ‘And when I place the treasure in her hands, she will be unreachable.’

  Of course, she was not unreachable.

  Wiggins stayed on in the little room by the kitchen in 221b. He had wanted to leave, to recover with his gang around him, but Billy had given him a stern telling off about how hurt I would be if he left, and how rude that would be, so Wiggins stayed, temporarily.

  Two days after he had arrived, he gave me my next step as I brought him soup. Billy was sitting on the bed, and the two of them were having an urgent whispered conversation. It was getting quite heated before they saw me and stopped talking.

  I settled the tray on Wiggins’ lap and exhorted him not to spill the soup, but to eat it all at once. John had said that Wiggins was healing quickly, and I knew that once the pain had gone, the boy would be away, back to the streets. Until he was, I was determined to feed him up as much as possible. The sight of his thin chest when John had undressed him had disturbed me.

  As Wiggins ate his soup, I glanced round the room. I could see the pile of books, and the fresh flowers Mary had left. Wiggins occasionally glanced at the bright flowers as if he’d never seen anything so lovely in his life—which he probably hadn’t. I don’t know where Wiggins had learnt to read—I know it was a skill he had acquired before he met Mr Holmes—but he devoured any books he could find. I knew Billy spent every spare second in here with his friend, intensely chatting about whatever case Mr Holmes was working on, and cases he had worked on in the past. And, judging by the cigarette ash on the floor, Mr Holmes himself had visited a few times. Billy saw me glancing at the ash.

  ‘Wiggins didn’t tell Mr Holmes anything about the case,’ Billy said anxiously. Wiggins glanced up at him, and I saw Billy nod at the ash and mouth ‘She knows’.

  ‘Not a thing,’ Wiggins confirmed. ‘I meant what I said.’

  ‘No matter what anyone else says,’ Billy murmured, and I saw Wiggins glance mutinously at him. I guessed the two of them had been discussing rather fervently, as boys (and men) do, the relative merits of keeping me safe or keeping promises. It looked like Wiggins had won. I glanced over at Billy and smiled at him, to reassure him. He nodded at me, this boy so near to becoming a man.

  ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’ I said, looking at them. ‘Something you’re not sure whether to tell me about.’

  ‘It may be nothing,’ Billy said.

  ‘Or everything!’ Wiggins disagreed hotly.

  ‘She’ll end up going to Whitechapel! Do you want her in Whitechapel?’ Billy shouted back.

  ‘I’m not going to lie and, before you argue, not telling something is as bad as lying!’

  I sat down on the bed, straightened the sheets, and said, ‘Tell me.’

  ‘There’s a lady down in Whitechapel,’ Wiggins said quietly.

  ‘There’s a lot of ladies down in Whitechapel,’ I replied dryly. Even a musty old housekeeper like me knew a thing or two, especially one that regularly borrowed Mr Holmes’ copy of Illustrated Police News and read the advertisements as well as the stories.

  ‘No, this one’s a proper lady,’ Wiggins continued. ‘And not like them other proper ladies what visits Whitechapel, always praying and wittering and moaning, like we don’t have anything better to do than listen to them trying to save our souls, as if we had any souls to save in the first place.’

  ‘Since the Ripper, ma’am,’ Billy said shyly, as if he was embarrassed to even mention that name to me, ‘lots of ladies—fine ladies—have taken to doing missionary work in Whitechapel. Setting up churches and trying to save the…the fallen women.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ I asked, curious as to what Billy actually did with his time off.

  ‘I read about it, ma’am,’ he told me, which I knew was a half-truth. Wiggins had been known to run around Whitechapel, and Billy ran with him occasionally. Still, I knew better than to keep them apart, and knew Billy was probably quite safe with Wiggins. I didn’t have the heart to split them up and keep Billy at home. I decided to swallow the lie.

  ‘But this lady, the one I’m talking about,’ Wiggins continued, ‘she ’elps people. Proper ’elp, I mean. She has a sort of free clinic anyone can go to, and she gives out medicines and food and stuff and never mentions God or prayers or nothing. But she’s sad, missus. Not like the others, all proud and happy and smug that they’re doing God’s work, whatever they think that is. This lady—the Whitechapel Lady we call ’er—she’s always sad.’

  ‘What else can you tell me about her?’ I asked, watching him intently. This was a new side to Wiggins, and Billy too. This was an insight into the lives they lived away from Baker Street.

  ‘She never leaves Whitechapel. Not never, not at night, not on Sundays, never. Sometimes I see her watching other people walk out of there, and she kind of stares after them, like she wishes she could leave too, but she never does. But it’s hard to tell, ’cos her face is covered.’

  ‘Covered?’

  ‘The Whitechapel Lady wears a black veil, missus. So you can’t see her face. And she won’t tell no one her name, neither. It’s like she’s got no face, and no name.’

  ‘Then how can you tell she’s sad?’ I asked.

  ‘You know, the way you tell anyone’s sad, even when they smile. Like you, sometimes. The way she stands, and the way she moves. Slow and ’eavy, like. And her voice—you can tell when someone’s smiling, even if you can’t see it, in their voice, can’t you? Well, there’s never a smile in her voice.’ Wiggins leaned forward eagerly. I had no idea he was such a good observer of human nature. I had no idea he’d observed me that closely either.

  ‘Have you ever talked to her? This Whitechapel Lady?’

  ‘Once,’ he said. ‘I’d bin helping her one day hand out some stuff, some food to people who couldn’t walk to the clinic. I do that sometimes, ’cos then I get a bit for the Irregulars too. Anyway, I could tell by the way she was spending that she had money, lots of it, and I asked her why she lived in Whitechapel all the time, why don’t she just visit, like the other rich ladies, and she said, “Because of a cruel man. The cruellest man who ever lived.”’

  ‘W
e used to think she meant a lover or a husband,’ Billy added. ‘But when I watched Laura Shirley, she reminded me of the Whitechapel Lady. They moved the same way, sort of watchful and frightened. Always looking behind them and flinching away from strangers and jumping at any noise. And letters—the Whitechapel Lady always hates getting letters. I think that’s what she meant. I think she’s hiding from this cruel man in the one place he’d never think to look. I think the Whitechapel Lady was blackmailed too.’

  It wasn’t difficult to find the Whitechapel Lady. It seemed everyone knew of her, the kind woman with the veiled face, who never spoke of God or redemption. Billy guided Mary and me through the streets of Whitechapel. It was a foul place, crowded with sad-eyed souls, with vicious men and women and frightened ones too, scurrying back and forth, the only smiles accompanied by a drunken bellow of laughter. I can’t blame them for that. I would have obliterated that world with alcohol too, if I were condemned there. Leading off all the streets were filthy narrow alleyways thronged with rats and rubbish. Even that rubbish had desperate people picking through it. The smell was choking and heavy, so I could scarcely breathe, with the only sweet scent coming from the old women who sold violets. Even in the daytime I saw women persuading and importuning men to come into an alleyway or a yard with them, or a room if they were lucky. Some of the women looked pretty and fresh, and talked and giggled. Most looked tired and raddled and wanting nothing more than for the act to be over so they could spend the money on drink, and forget. They must have had hopes and dreams once. Everyone does. But their dreams had choked and died on the noxious fumes of Whitechapel years ago.

  Since the crimes of Jack the Ripper had brought the horrors of Whitechapel vividly to the attention of the rest of society, some work to alleviate the suffering had been done—but not nearly enough. It had become fashionable for society ladies to descend upon the place, dispensing food and clothes, but mostly handing out exhortations for the Whitechapel residents to give up their sinful ways and return to God. They handed out religious tracts about how much more glorious it was to die in poverty and hunger than live an unclean sinful life. These tracts made no mention about how painful dying of starvation was. These women were despised by the people they thought they were helping. I could see why. The people of Whitechapel starved. They choked. They bled. They suffered. They shivered. They died. What use was prayer to them? What use is a pure soul in a body that is falling apart? They did what they could do to live, and I would not condemn them for it.