Here she paused and gave the now empty glass a sad glance. Holmes kept her story going.
“And what did happen next?”
She shrugged. “Nothing much. Lady Flora seemed to settle down and give up, and that was the last we saw of her. Jeremy, the butler, says that the two of them might be meeting up in London for a little of you-know-what, but we never saw her again around the estate. And that sir, is the end of my story about Lady Miller.”
Mrs. Hudson had reappeared to clear away the supper and dishes, and she took the slightly wobbly Mrs. Kelly with her to her apartment.
“Are you quite certain,” I asked Holmes, “that you want to continue to investigate this case? Your client is dead and gone and he lived in a moral quagmire. What is to be gained by sorting out who killed him? Why not just leave it to Lestrade?”
Holmes stood slowly and walked first to the mantle of the fireplace where he filled his pipe from the Turkish slipper. He lit it and walked to the bay window, where he stood for some time with his pipe held in his left hand, the elbow supported by his right hand.
He turned to me and said, “For once, Watson, I must acknowledge that you are being more rational and logical than I am. You are quite correct in noting that from a commercial perspective there is no use in my continuing to pursue this case. I am compelled to confess that although I could claim it is my burning desire to see justice done that forces me to continue, if I am to be honest with myself and with you, I must admit that an element of my pride and my competitive spirit is at work. I really do get my back up when someone goes and kills my client and, confound it, I just will not stand for it!”
He uttered the final few words with a smile and a shrug of chagrin, and I knew that Sherlock Holmes was committed to following the scent of the chase wherever it might lead. I, in turn, have to confess that I was thrilled to tag along beside him.
He gestured to the three packing cases on the carpet. “Perhaps you could start with one of them and I with another, and we will keep reading until both of us have devoured all three of them.” He picked up one case as he spoke and dropped in on the floor at my feet. I opened it, sighed and pulled up my first batch of letters.
Chapter Five
The Leading Lady
THE FOLLOWING THREE DAYS WERE RELATIVELY UNEVENTFUL. I attended to my patients and spent some pleasant time together with my fiancée. Holmes was gone from dawn until dark collecting his data and meeting with whomever he could find that might shed some light on the murder of Lord St. Simon, and the continued disappearance of his wife, the murderess. Posters with her likeness were now adorning every newspaper billboard, but neither hide nor hair of her had been seen. The somewhat more responsible members of the press stated only that she was wanted in connection with the murder of her husband. The sensational ones had already convicted her and were issuing dire warnings to other middle-aged noble bachelors to run away if they encountered her, so as to avoid seduction, ruin, and bullets in their tummies.
The Evening Star went so far as to have their artist adapt a painting of Ulysses lashed to the mast to avoid the irresistible call of the sirens. The sketch showed a bevy of bare-breasted mythical monsters, all beautiful from the waist up, but below a vile mass of tentacles and teeth and claws. The most prominent of them was wearing a cowboy hat. Yet again I sighed and thought, “I guess that is what it takes to sell newspapers today.” I duly noted that copies of the Evening Star appeared to be flying off the racks and out of the hands of the newsboys.
By the third evening, Holmes and I had both thoroughly examined the letters, diaries and personal effects of Lady St. Simon.
“Any observations, Watson?”
“Really Holmes, you know that I always fall short of seeing what you do, but since you asked I noted a few things.”
“Excellent. Do enlighten me.”
“Young Hattie adored her ‘Pa’ and was loved and doted on in return. She had quite the wild upbringing out in the west, and both she and her father were courageous, bordering on reckless, and not above thinking that rules were made to be broken. She had a passionate love affair with Major Moulton and a joyful marriage. She was devastated terribly by his death and infuriated by the false accusations made about her in the press. Her father ended up taking her to see half the doctors in San Francisco to help her get over it all. It does not say how she met Lord St. Simon but she attached herself to him, it would appear mostly out of boredom and a desire to escape to another life. Her diary ends sometime before the birth of her second son, so we have nothing to go on concerning her current connections. Beyond that, I did not see much that was not to be expected for a young American woman, given the peculiar events of her life to date.”
“You did not say much about her children.”
“Right. I did not. Hmmm. I gather I did not because she did not. She wrote some about her first pregnancy but less about the second. For a young mother, she is rather surprisingly detached from her sons. Would you agree, Holmes? What did I miss in spite of my best efforts?”
“Yes, my good doctor, I would agree. And no, I have nothing of importance to add. The lack of recent data is disappointing, but there is no denying that we are dealing with a very independent, self-assured young woman. She is determined to live her life the way she wishes and has a history of having done so. I look forward to meeting her when she finally comes out of hiding.”
We returned to reading through some of the most substantive letters one more time. At nine o’clock Holmes put down the one he was holding and opened his violin case and began to tune the instrument. Frankly, I did not enjoy his playing but it seemed to calm his spirits and was certainly a healthier tonic than his injecting himself, or for that matter even his tobacco.
He had only played a few bars of Offenbach’s Barcarolle when we heard the bell ring from the door on Baker Street. Billy had gone home after the supper hour and Mrs. Hudson attended to the summons. I heard a sharp, loud gasp, almost a cry from her, as she opened the door. It was followed by footsteps ascending the stairs quite quickly.
“A woman, by the sound of her tread,” said Holmes. “Quite a vigorous one.” He stopped and stood up. “On your feet Watson, our Lady of Oklahoma is about to enter.”
I leapt to my feet as a woman appeared in our doorway. She was tall and broad-shouldered with a graceful if buxom figure and wearing an expensive ulster and a bonnet that covered golden blonde hair that hung in ringlets beside her pale and strikingly beautiful face. Covering her large dark eyes was a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, perched on her nose above her exquisite mouth. Before she said a word, she doffed the ulster and tossed it a few feet away to an empty chair, removed the spectacles and then lifted a blonde wig from her head, exposing raven black hair. She dropped the spectacles and wig onto one of the small tables beside the door and started walking confidently toward Sherlock Holmes with her hand outstretched.
She stopped suddenly before reaching him, turned and looked down at the side table next to my chair. She bent over and let out a loud laugh. “Aha! All my letters! And my diary! Well yippee. That lame-brain Bob had the good sense to send them over to Sherlock Holmes for safe-keeping. Wouldn’t have thought he was bright enough to do that.”
She then walked directly to the settee and sat down, stretching out her legs and exposing a strongly muscled set of calves covered in part by a finely tooled and stitched set of boots of the sort that were considered stylish in western America. “I reckon I don’t even have to introduce myself, seeing as you two have read everything and know all about me. So, take a load off your minds boys and set down. We got a bit of talking we have to do.”
She caught me staring at her boots. “Whoa, Doc. You like my boots? You would have thought I had them made in Kansas but no, Pa orders them from some bootmaker in Toronto of all places. He says they’re the best money can buy.”
Holmes remained standing and spoke to the woman. “Lady St. Simon, while it is an honor and a delight to have you visit us, I have
a duty to tell you …”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. I’m a wanted woman and a fugitive from justice and you’re going to have to let the law know otherwise you could be cited for harboring a fugitive. Relax, Sherlock. My next stop after this one is the sheriff’s office, where I will turn myself in. My attorney is sitting out in the carriage, and he and the police can wait until I’m done with you two.
“And hey there, doc,” she said looking over at me. “You should edit my diary and get it published. Not up to the steaminess of The Pearl but its pretty darn juicy, don’t you think? I bet it would sell a few thousand, and you and I would make a pile.”
“I will take that under advisement,” I said. “But I fear that any such plans will have to wait until more pressing matters are attended to.”
“Yeah. Right you are, Doc. So Sherlock, wondering why the murdering Lady Hattie is sitting in your parlor?”
“I am quite certain that is the result of your having been charged with murder, your protesting your innocence, and your requiring my services to help prove your alibi, and perhaps track down the real killer. Would that be correct Lady St. Simon?”
“Bingo. You got it on the button there boy. And by the way, Sherlock, I’d be real happy if you would call me Hattie and no more of that stuffed-shirt Lady Saint Slimey. It kind of rattles me. So, what do you say there Sherlock? Are we partners?”
“And just what makes you so certain, Miss Hattie, that I would be the least bit interested in your case?”
“Ahh, Sherlock. Now don’t you go throwing up your hand so easy. Of course, you’ll take me on. You had my dear departed late husband as your client before someone went and filled him full of lead. And I read all about you there, feller. I know you won’t touch an everyday case with a barge pole, but if something pops up that’s crooked as a dog’s hind leg then you’re all in, ain’t you? So what say? Shake on it?”
Somewhat reluctantly Holmes extended his hand and she pumped it vigorously. “Atta boy, Sherlock. You’re going to have to meet my Pa someday. He’d like as not take a shine to you.”
“First things first, Miss Hattie. Kindly deliver your story. You will have to be able to convince a judge and jury, so it would be wise to start with me.”
“Sure thing. Where do I get going? Oh, I know. I bet you Bob told you that we met on board a liner when I was all heartbroken. Right? Thought so. Golly, Bob had more you-know-what in him than a manure wagon. Truth is we met in a saloon in ’Frisco. Pa sent me there after my Frank got killed because I was all sick over it. It wasn’t just losing my Frank that rattled me so, it was that vile snake of a reporter, Al White, and his newspaper in Kansas City that started accusing me of having Frank killed. And then there were the letters, that right away the cops knew were forged but got printed anyways, and soon instead of being a widow that everybody was caring for, I became a black widow spider, and everybody shuns me.
“So, I hightail it out of Dodge and off to ’Frisco, but some days I was so bored that I would go down to a saloon just for the company. I been in a lot of saloons all over the west. My Pa was kind of fond of them, and since I had no Ma, he just dragged me along. Well one day I was there and watching a bunch of the boys whoop it up over a card game, and there was this one feller, real nice-looking Englishman, and he was losing real bad. And I watched him and could see that he didn’t know a one-eyed Jack from a jackass, so I just sat down beside him and started telling him what cards to play. Sitting around a campfire out on the open range there’s not a lot to do, so all the fellers play poker and I kind of got real good at it. Well, now it wasn’t very hard to beat the rest of the boys at the table because they were breaking the first rule of playing high-stakes poker.”
“And what,” I interrupted, “might that be?”
“No liquor. Not a drop. You can either guzzle your whisky and whoop it up, or you can win at poker. You sure as shooting can’t do both. Well, I was stone sober, and before long I had won all of Lordy Dordy’s money back, and then I went on to relieve all the boys of theirs, and so Bob’s made a pile and he starts thinking that I must be a real fun gal. So, he asks me if I want to join him for dinner at his hotel, and he’s a real classy gent so I says sure. And we take a cab to The Palace and I’m real impressed because it’s the poshest digs in ’Frisco. And we get there and he says that the hotel restaurant ain’t up to snuff and we should go up to his suite and order some room service. Well, I can see where this is going, but I reckon that if he gets rough or anything, well, I can just punch his lights out and leave. So, we’re up in his room and he offers me a drink he calls a martini, and he says that it was invented around the corner at the Occidental Hotel. So, I says sure, one drink can’t hurt. But all I ever had to drink before with my Pa was bourbon or corn whisky, and I ain’t never had anything so wonderful as this martini. So, I had two, and then three. Well before long we’re doing what we gals from the West call ride ‘em cowboy, and Lordy Dordy gets real happy invites me to come to England with him. He says his ship sails from New York in two weeks and wouldn’t I love to come along. Well, the next afternoon after I woke up I talks it over with Pa, and he says may as well. He’s happy just to see me not all down in the dumps like I’d been after losing my Frank and smeared all over the press. So I get on the train and go to New York and get a ticket on the same boat, and then I walks up to him in the dining room after we were out to sea and I say “surprise” and he just about does a faint and falls off his chair because he wasn’t real serious about his offer. But now he’s stuck with me for near a week as we cross the ocean.
“So, we have a real good time for a few days, but then we’re one day out of Liverpuddle and I get seasick, except I look out and the sea is calm, so I know it’s not the seasickness. It’s because I’m in the family way again and got one in the oven. Well, I go to Bob and he tells me to go back to America, and how can I prove that it’s his anyway. Having no Ma, I had no one to prepare me for such a crisis.
“So I get myself to a telegraph office as soon as we get off and I wire Pa, and he wires back with the name of a solicitor, and I send that feller a note and he says he would love to help me, and could I meet him at the Brooks’s Club in London. So, I go there and he’s real happy to see me because he doesn’t like Tories, whatever they are, and he writes up some papers and the next day they get delivered to Bob, and he comes around and says we have to get married. I learn later that his brother Larry cussed him up and down, but not really because Larry’s a real church-going type, but he twisted his arm and made him marry me.
“Well Mr. Holmes, I’m just a cowgirl from Kansas and always had a hankering for the soft-bed-and-pillow life and now I have a chance to change from a country gal to a British peeress. So whee-dooggies and why not? Won’t never get a chance like this again. So, I tells myself that I must do my duty by him and be as good a wife as it is in me to be. Pa always told me that you can’t command your love, but you sure can your actions.
“Well now, for the first little while life’s just a bed of roses. We go off to Ascot and the Westbury Homes festivities, but of course, I’m knocked up and soon my backside is looking like the backend of Clydesdale, and Bob’s interest in …well … you know … it sort of peters out. And then he says he has to spend more time in London, and he leaves me out in the woods in his big old mansion. And then the baby is born, who he insists on naming Robert Walsingham de Vere Junior; well actually the Eighth, but then he’s back to London and the summer is over and the cold weather sets in, and I’m stuck out in the woods in his mansion and the windows are closed up and I tell you, this place is stinko.
“Now, Mr. Holmes, I grew up with cattle and I know the smell of a dead animal from a mile away, and this big old house smells like a herd of mice and rats holed up and died behind the walls. And then the maids, who I got kind of friendly with, tell me that Bob has a girl, maybe two, in London. So, I just use my common sense and reckons that I better find a life of my own, so I go and make one and I come into London too
and learn how to have a real good time, which is what I was doing when Bob got himself shot.
“And now Mr. Holmes I need you to figure out who done him in so I can go back to America with Frank Jr. and Bob the Eighth and my allowance from the estate and keep living the life to which I have become accustomed. And while you’re doing that I need you to make a trip out to Bucksure for me and get the rest of my documents. You’ll find them in hat box number fourteen in my closet, and those letters and diary would really put The Pearl out of business. And now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and turn myself in to the sheriff and spend a night in the clink.”
With that, she rose, but Holmes interrupted her. “Miss Harriot, you have been charged with murder. It is not something to be taken lightly. How is it that you expect to be back on the streets?”
“Oh, I got myself a real good attorney. He says all I have to do is prove that I was holed up in the Savoy when Bob was getting shot and they have to let me go. Piece of cake.”
“Miss Harriot, as part of my service to your dear departed husband I checked at all of the better hotels of London while trying to find you. There is no record at the Savoy, or any other hotel for that matter, that you stayed there.”
Sherlock Holmes Never Dies - Collection Three: New Sherlock Holmes Mysteries - Second Edition (Boxed Sets Book 3) Page 12