A Soul of Steel (26 page)

“Perhaps he has served the interests of the French and the Russians in those matters,” Phelps said darkly.

“He serves his own country first and foremost,” I admonished.

The man’s melancholy grew wearing. At that moment I could have done with a dose of Mary Watson’s patient kindness.

“When Holmes can assist a foreign personage without harming England, he does—there was the scandal involving the King of Bohemia, for instance, and the astonishingly beautiful I—”

“Bohemia is a pretend-dukedom sewn onto the selvage edge of Austro-Hungary!” Phelps interrupted petulantly. “This stolen treaty could irritate a Russian emperor and the ruling body of all France!”

“Holmes has been of service to individuals as highly placed as those,” I replied a trifle stuffily, “though I can say nothing of the specifics. You underestimate him, and myself, Phelps. I am not merely a dull and domestic London physician. I have aided the world’s first consulting detective, and am a veteran of one of the most grueling conflicts of the past decades.”

“It is true, it is true!” Phelps cried pathetically, pressing his trembling hands over his pale face. “Pray excuse me. I am distraught. Of course your friend Holmes is my only hope! Of course you are an absolutely splendid fellow to come to my aid! But, Watson, I am sorry, I have been through too much of late. At the moment, I simply am not up to hearing your war stories.”

“Oh. I see.” Certainly I had heard enough of his difficulties all the day.

“I cannot concentrate on anything trivial when I am bedeviled by larger issues. Where has the treaty gone? Who removed it in such a devastating manner? And what is your Mr. Holmes doing in Woking?”

Trivial!

“I am only trying to distract you. I’ve told you before that you must remove your mind from this current puzzle. Such fruitless speculation will only excite your nerves—and mine. You must retire and manage a good night’s sleep, dear fellow. I beg you to rest and think no more about it. In the morning we will know more.”

I finally persuaded him to lie down in the spare bedroom, though he was still visibly fretting. I myself did not find Morpheus easily that night. My attempts to show Phelps that others had survived circumstances as difficult as his had only revived my few memories of Maiwand and the fever.

I found it hard to lie upon my left shoulder and seemed to sniff Afghanistan’s dust-laden air in the high summer of July. It was the same month, nine years later. Phelps had suffered from brain fever for nine weeks. A woman bears a baby for nine months before it is delivered fully formed.

For a moment, I glimpsed fragments of Maiwand I had not recalled before: wounded faces beseeching me for aid; a sudden dull shattering sensation in my shoulder; a bone-rattling ride over a packhorse led by the loyal Murray; delirious days and nights on my back in some makeshift dispensary, during which I imagined poisonous serpents writhing around me and my comrades on the adjoining cots.

I knew that I had made the unpleasant overland trek to Sinjini where the new railway began after the siege of Kandahar was lifted at the end of August, but I remembered nothing of it. My memories of the difficult train journey from Sinjini to Peshawar in India were fuller, and unappetizing, especially in regard to the scanty sanitary arrangements. I certainly recalled my relapse into fever once I reached Peshawar, where the bitter taste of quinine baptized all my liquid intake.

For the first time since I had received Phelps’s letter I began to regret my involvement in the case.

For the first time since my association with Holmes I was moved to wonder if a middle-aged doctor belonged at home with his wife, rather than nursing querulous acquaintances in questionable circumstances and reviving old campaign days long gone and forgotten.

Chapter Seventeen

THE THIRD MAN

In a
great, humming metropolis of four million persons it is possible to live for many years without traversing every street. I approached Baker Street for the first time with a sense of visiting an alien locale, and yet, the sensation of finally seeing what I had always known.

Godfrey’s companionship in the hansom cab was little comfort.

Our sturdy horse’s hooves clattered on the pavement, a sound magnified by dozens of drumming hooves. Around us, the very air dispensed the mingled odors of horse and hazy summer heat. The interior of the hansom cab, the shopfronts and signs passing beyond the windows, the sounds and the smells were all as familiar as tea, Yet... yet.

Baker Street.

Those words were inextricably associated with the key event of my life, my chance meeting with Irene Adler outside Wilson’s Tea Room in 1881. Never mind that I was homeless, hungry, unemployed, desolate. Perhaps that merely sharpened my senses, for every detail of the following twenty-four hours is engraved upon my brain: Irene, in all her intimidating, energetic splendor, which I soon discovered to be gallantly counterfeit, for she was as impoverished as I, had seemed like some glamorous machine, an urban Titania descending upon a lost child in the forest of the great city.

I had followed her, benumbed, into a world of ghastly figures (consider the tragic Jefferson Hope, doomed murderer and avenger, who had driven our first shared, extravagant cab) and treachery hidden in homely symbols (consider the unholy wedding ring that was the sole souvenir of that episode).

Thus I had come in a sinister London twilight to the modest but eccentric rooms Irene rented in Saffron Hill, the Italian district, where arias and sausages scented the everyday air. I remember Irene’s purloined pastries toasting on the fireplace fender that evening, and her faded, crackling Oriental robe; a bottle of wine prized open with a button hook.

My confusion, my concern, my disorientation at the unaccustomed wine. My relief at being in hands as certain as hers, however Bohemian. And later, the newspaper column announcing the death of Jefferson Hope. And Baker Street, 221 B Baker Street, where dwelt the amateur detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, was where Jefferson Hope had sent a crony to collect the unholy wedding ring from a certain Dr. Watson only days before his death....

So, Baker Street. From the first mention of that locale my life had changed, and so had Irene’s, and ultimately, Godfrey’s. We were all three hopelessly entwined with that plain address, and
the
man who lived there. Now I was, at last, to see it.

Godfrey was watching out the hansom window with an intensity so like Irene’s on a quest that I smiled. He seemed consumed by an unadmitted curiosity about the man who had piqued Irene’s competitive instincts.

Baker Street itself was commonplace—a series of functional four-story Georgian facades, some performing as shops on the street level, other as entries for offices or lodgings. Wrought iron fenced the fronts, bracketing doorways and guarding windows and below-street trade entrances.

“There!” Godfrey said, a trifle tensely. His cane urgently rapped the ceiling to signal the driver to stop. “I want to approach on foot.”

We disembarked upon a well-maintained pavement, and I gratefully took Godfrey’s arm. For some reason I needed moral support. We ambled along in a current of hurried passersby. Brass numerals and a letter flashed into my mind like daggers. Two. Two. One. B.

“There it is,” Godfrey said unnecessarily in a low tone.

We strolled past a perfectly ordinary entryway: two stone steps, a graceful break in the wrought-iron railing, a fanlight over the door greeted us.

In only a moment, we had walked past it.

“Well,” I said, sounding breathless.

“An ordinary address,” said he.

“I could not agree with you more. What do we do next?”

For the first time in my experience, Godfrey seemed uncertain. He examined the street both ahead and behind us, then nodded at a shop across the way.

“There is an ABC tearoom, Nell. We can quite properly stop for refreshment there, and keep watch on the address we are concerned with.”

“Oh, tea should be quite proper,” I answered, “but can we ensure a proper view?”

“We will,” said he, guiding me across the street with nary a brush with a hansom or a misstep into the unfortunate residue of an equine engine.

And so we settled in for the afternoon. Godfrey had requested, nay demanded, a window table. Men do have their uses. Ensconced in it we had a fine view of bustles, canes, horse hindquarters and, when the intervening traffic permitted, the entrance to 221 B Baker Street.

From all that we could survey in the first hour, no one came or went from that benighted address. Finally Godfrey expressed a pressing need to visit the tailors of Regent Street, so I occupied the window seat alone for another two hours, dutifully noting any who came and went from number 221 B.

A resident left just after Godfrey did, a white-haired old lady in a violet cape somewhat out of fashion, with a straw bonnet tied firmly under her ample chin. Remembering that
the
man had once deceived us in the guise of an elderly clergyman, I placed a faint question mark next to the description. Irene had warned me to overlook nothing with an adversary of Sherlock Holmes’s caliber.

A rough-looking boy in a tweed cap several sizes too large came along twenty minutes later. He rang the bell, to no avail, leading me to speculate that the old lady was a housekeeper off on her day’s errands. The lad jigged his feet, turned his cap this way and that, and generally fidgeted until it was obvious he would get no response. At that he drew away from the doorway, looked cautiously in all directions, then jerked on the bill of his cap and leaned back to hurl something from his pocket up at the first-floor bow window.

I could not hear the impact, but saw a fistful of small stones rain down from the glass.

“The ruffian!” I muttered, looking about for a constable. But no such person appeared, and the rude boy was off, tossing his cap in the air and whistling quite boldly.

I noted the incident and his description, in case a constable should arrive on the scene later.

“Well, miss, and you’ve a right lot of work to do there.” The serving girl nodded at my notations as she brought a fresh pot of tea.

I shifted the papers discreetly out of view. “Merely catching up on some entries in my diary.”

The girl’s blue eyes widened to match the Delft saucer under my cup. “Lor’, miss, an’ you must lead an excitin’ life, with so much writin’ to do about it!”

“I manage,” was my curt reply. I kept her gaze until she bobbed a slovenly curtsy and went about her business.

Shortly after that an elegant equipage drew up to disgorge a heavily veiled lady attired all in summer white. She poised upon the stoop of 221 B like a bride; one small gloved hand reached out three times to ring the bell. The door was as indifferent to this intriguing figure as to the others. She retreated to her carriage and was barely out of sight when the old lady waddled back into view, bearing a number of brown paper parcels tied with string.

This, too, I noted down, along with my guesses as to the contents of the parcels. Lemon curd for tea tarts, I decided, and perhaps some crochet string. That is where I wished to be: at home having tea and doing my crochet work, even with Casanova and Lucifer at hand.

I began to keep a worried eye out for Godfrey. We had not been in London for more than a year. I was not anxious to lose him. Just then a hansom cab drew up across the thoroughfare, obscuring the entry. I sipped my Earl Grey in great impatience, but the hansom crouched before the door like a great shiny black beetle too lazy to move.

At length the driver bent down for his pay and the cab crept off, revealing two men by the door. Both wore soft country hats, but one appeared rather pale and weak. The second was a sturdy man with a mustache. The old lady, sans bonnet, cape and parcels, opened the door and they vanished within. And that was that.

Surveillance work, I concluded, could be quite boring.

I ate an inordinate amount of tea cakes, then removed my pince-nez and settled in for a good bout of worrying.

“Well, Nell!” Godfrey arrived at half-past four in a flurry of top hat and cane, looking flushed. “The traffic seems to have increased since my departure. What have you observed?”

“A good deal of nothing,” said I, turning my notebook around.

He frowned at the entries. “None of these visitors looks like Mr. Holmes. So you have not seen him?”

“Not in his own guise, certainly. But he is a ‘consulting’ detective; perhaps he seldom leaves his domicile.”

“He got about well enough in St. John’s Wood,” Godfrey said ruefully. “So no one was admitted until the two men. Your notes express suspicion of the old lady and the young boy.”

“Either could be a disguise, since both are the sort of persons often overlooked, as no one expects much from either.”

Godfrey laughed as he drank the tea the serving girl had rushed to him upon his arrival. Men, even of the most superior sort, are invariably oblivious to how thoroughly they are catered to.

“You sound like Irene,” he noted.