A Study in Lavender: Queering Sherlock Holmes (7 page)

“I think that will be all,” Holmes said. “Thank you.”

Mrs Braddon looked as if she wanted to say something else, but then there was a tread on the stair and a quietly dressed middle-aged man appeared in the doorway. Mr Braddon, as I understood him to be from the brightening of the lady’s face when she saw him, looked the pattern of a respectable solicitor.

“Ah, Mr Braddon,” Lestrade said from behind Holmes. “Our specialist is here to examine the crime scene. Mr Braddon, Mr Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson.”

Mr Braddon greeted us graciously, with somewhat more warmth than his wife. “I trust you will be able to offer us some hope, gentlemen?”

“I think it is very probable that we can locate your daughter,” Holmes said. “At this time I cannot guess at how quickly, however.”

“Well, we are at your disposal if there is anything we can do.”

“I do have one or two questions for you, Mr Braddon,” Holmes said. “Is there anything going on in your daughter’s life at the moment that might have caused upset?”

“Why do you ask that?” Mrs Braddon put in.

“I simply want to cover all of the possibilities for her disappearance.”

“I hope you aren’t suggesting that our daughter left of her own volition, Mr Holmes,” Mrs Braddon continued. “We have the ransom note to attest to that. And the idea that she might leave willingly with some person who hoped to extort money from us is preposterous.”

“I wouldn’t dare suggest anything yet,” Holmes said affably, and turned his eyes to Mr Braddon.

“It is true that she has been a little upset of late. She has not yet warmed to her fiancé, Mr Blake Woodard. Mr Woodard is a Manchester man of very admirable means, and Alice is nervous about meeting his friends. The society she will enter upon their marriage will be quite different from that with which she has lately been acquainted.”

“She is afraid she will see little of her own friends, you mean.”

Mr Braddon smiled thinly. “Yes, Mr Holmes, you could put it that way. I understand that you must gather this information, but why do you not focus more on possible suspects? You have questioned Robert Chapman, I assume?”

“We still have Chapman in custody and Mr Holmes may question him if he likes,” said Lestrade, “but I’ll remind you that both his mother and father attest to his presence at home all Sunday night.”

“Well, of course they would say so,” Mrs Braddon said. “They are field workers. They have no interest in seeing justice done for us.”

“I would like to speak with the servants if I may,” Holmes said, moving past the Braddons and down the stairs. Lestrade and I followed him. “And then I must return to Baker Street to follow a lead or two, Lestrade, but I shall send word to you the moment I find anything conclusive.”

We interviewed the Braddons’ small staff – a cook, a maid, and a groom – but they were as little help as the young lady’s parents. They had seen nothing and heard nothing, but the groom slept above the mews, so he could hardly have heard anything taking place in the house late at night. The maid was as offended as her mistress at the suggestion that Alice Braddon had not been taken against her will, and the cook protested to know nothing whatever of the matter. She was a singular person: she had a burn that disfigured one eyebrow and cheek, and she was partially without sight in that eye. She protested, and I saw no reason to disbelieve her, that she slept downstairs in the kitchen and could not see well in the dark anyway.

We left Lestrade behind us at Clapham and took a cab back to the train station. As soon as we entered our car, Holmes seated himself and leaned back with his steepled hands pressed to his lips, his eyes fixed somewhere on the wall over my shoulder. The gesture was jarring in its familiarity – it was something I associated so strongly with him and I had not seen him do it in more than three years. As accustomed as I had become to his all-excluding focus when on a case, I was surprised that he did not ask my opinion as he usually did immediately after we viewed evidence. Had he not told me that listening to my theories, as inaccurate as they might be, helped him form his own? But as he said, he had been long without a roommate.

At any rate, he did not seem to remember my presence and I didn’t dare interrupt him. Finally he blew out a breath and dropped his hands in a gesture I felt gave me permission to intrude on his thoughts.

“Do you have any idea who could possibly have done this?” I ventured.

“I have a strong indication,” Holmes said, “but unfortunately little conclusive data.”

“The leads you mentioned to Lestrade will surely turn up something,” I said, trying – rather lamely, I felt – to sound encouraging. “We must act swiftly, in any case, before further violence is done to this girl.”

I stared in unabashed confusion for a split second, and then Holmes’s question to Mrs Braddon about the family’s fruit consumption fell into place. “How on earth do you know it was pomegranate?” I asked.

“You observed the basin of water on the washstand?”

“Yes, of course.”

“There were pieces of pomegranate rind floating in it,” he said. “The easiest method of extracting seeds from a pomegranate is to score the skin and pull it apart underwater. The seeds sink, and the rind floats.”

“But Mrs Braddon was adamant that they do not eat fruit.”

“Exactly, and imported fruit in particular,” Holmes said. “Our climate is not conducive to growing pomegranate fruit – though I understand they can do well ornamentally – so they would likely have been purchased from a green-grocer who imports them. This is one of the leads I mentioned to Lestrade.”

When we arrived at Baker Street, Holmes wasted no time in changing into a seedy frock coat and setting off for the markets. I’m ashamed to say I felt too timid to ask if there was anything I could do to help, so I settled down to organize my never-ending collection of papers while he was gone. He returned sometime after dark, humming and looking flushed. His searches had been a success, then.

“Did you know, Watson,” he said as he re-entered the sitting room in his dressing gown, “that there are dozens of stalls at which one can buy pomegranates now?” I confessed I did not. “But,” Holmes continued, collecting his pipe from the mantel, “there is only one stall that receives a very peculiar visitor three times a year – a woman with half her face scarred who buys one pomegranate and wraps it in a silk scarf instead of carrying it with her other purchases.”

“The Braddons’ cook! But why three times a year?”

“Excellent, Watson! I’ve been asking myself that very question ever since the grocer mentioned it. I had to throw my mind back quite a way to remember why the three dates were significant, but I can tell you that every schoolboy awaits them eagerly. This cook has bought a pomegranate at the end of every term for the past two years. And what’s more, the last person to buy a pomegranate for the Braddon household was not our singular cook. The vendor came to recognize the scarf she wrapped the fruit in, and he reported to me that he had not seen the cook recently and a light-haired lady bought a pomegranate from him last week and used the same scarf to wrap it.”

“It could not have been a coincidence?”

“I do not think so. Additionally, I made enquiries into this fiancé – Mr Blake Woodard has a reputation for harshness as well as riches. And now,” Holmes said, going from the fireplace over to our bookshelves, “there is one more lead I need to follow before we take ourselves off to Chelmsford.” He busied himself pulling down several years of dusty periodicals.

“Chelmsford?” I asked. “Where Alice Braddon goes to school?nate

Holmes merely gave a knowing shrug of the eyebrows and sat down on the carpet to leaf through the bound volumes. I remained in my chair, trying to imagine what on earth pomegranates bought at the end of each school term could suggest to my friend. He had made a connection between the kidnapping and her school, that much was clear, but he seemed far more cheerful than I would be, considering such a tenuous link. Some time and several stacks of perused volumes later, Holmes uttered a little satisfied “ha!” and tapped definitively on the page open in his lap.

“Have you found something?” I asked.

“Indeed I have. I found Bill Chapman.” Holmes rose and dragged his chair over to mine. “You see this article? It’s from February of 1835. Titled ‘Extraordinary Case – A Man-Woman.’ It is the proceedings of a complaint against Bill Chapman for being ‘a common cheat and impostor.’ An inspector ‘stated that although the thing before them, that called itself Bill Chapman, was attired in man’s apparel, he had ascertained that it was a woman.’”

Holmes closed the book with a snap. “It’s too late to start tonight, but if you would be so good as to check our Bradshaw, Watson, we’ll be on the first train to Chelmsford in the morning.”

We stepped off the train the next morning, and I was grateful to breathe in the clear country air. The school was reportedly situated on the edge of town, but Holmes insisted on first visiting the local inns to procure our rooms for the night; he seemed certain that our investigations would last more than one day. I stood silently by while Holmes rejected four of the offered lodgings after a lengthy perusal of each. I knew he had his reasons but I confess I was in the dark as to what they might be. He finally accepted the fifth and we had our bags brought up to our room. The manager’s boy had been putting on his coat to run to the telegraph office, and Holmes sent word down to catch him if he had not yet gone. He had, but Holmes said he had an important wire to send and he was content to wait until the boy returned. After several minutes of pacing around our room, Holmes went down to the manager and asked that he send tea up with the boy when he arrived.

It was three-quarters of an hour later when there was a soft knock at our door and the boy entered with a full tray. “Your tea, sirs,” he said. “And Mr Hardy said you needed a telegram taken to the station?”

“Yes,” Holmes said, “It’s right here on the table. Let me just –” As he reached across the tea tray, Holmes knocked over one of the empty cups and it tumbled to the floor and shattered. The boy bent to pick up the pieces while Holmes, looking chagrined, offered his apologies. Then he said, to my confusion, “Incidentally, I’ve spilled lamp oil on my coat. Would you take it down to the manager’s wife and ask her to wash it with lemon juice?”

“It’s turpentine mixed with fuller’s earth that will take out lamp oil, sir, not lemon juice,” the boy said distractedly, still searching for slivers of china. Suddenly he froze, and Holmes bent and twitched off his cap. Long dark hair fell around his face, and as he backed up, I realized with astonishment that this was no boy – it was a young woman.

“Miss Alice Braddon, I expect?” Holmes said, with no surprise whatever. “I’m Sherlock Holmes, and this is my friend and associate Dr Watson.” She stood up slowly, clutching the hat to her chest.

“How did you find me?” she breathed.

“It was a fairly simple series of inferences,” Holmes said. “The town where you go to school is the only place you would logically go – it is the only place where you would know your way. Searching the local inns for one which employed a messenger boy was the hardest part.”

“But – my clothes –”

“If I may say so, Miss Braddon, you succumbed a little to arrogance when you included Bill Chapman in the ransom note. I admit I did not recall the reference at first, but it was only a matter of locating the article. I would of course have looked for a woman dressed as a man after that hint. When I saw you button your coat downstairs, I noticed that you reached for the side with the buttonholes first – the side where, on a woman’s coat, the buttons would be. I needed only to devise a question to which only a woman would know the answer, and find the time to ask you.” Holmes motioned to a chair. “Please, sit down. You did disguise your handwriting admirably. Only an expert could have seen through it.”

I took my own seat as Holmes motioned for me to do, trying to keep up with the facts as they merged together at what I felt was bewildering speed. Miss Braddon’s round face was smeared with soot – I could not be blamed for mistaking her for a boy – but a rebellious courage shone through her fear.

“Are you going to send for my parents?” she asked.

“I would appreciate an explanation first,” Holmes said. “I understand that you wrote the ransom note and left through the window, after smashing the glass and apparently consuming a pomegranate.” Miss Braddon blushed deep red at this. “What I would like to know is why.”

The young lady’s face did not lessen in colour, but she straightened up with admirable dignity. “My mother and father have made an arrangement for me with a gentleman from Manchester. There is a person that I love very much, with whom, I have been informed, I shall have no further contact after my marriage. I could not accept that.”

“You must have expected your parents to pay the ransom. What did you plan to do after that?”

“They could not possibly get the money together so quickly,” she said. She lifted her chin defiantly. “I was going to send another letter tomorrow reporting that the kidnapper had run out of patience and killed me. I would run away and hide in another town, and the police would never find my body. Once they gave up, I could join the one I love and we could live together somewhere far away.”