Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets (5 page)

“He must’ve been very good indeed, then. Ternac’s specialty is lens grinding for scientific instruments.”

“Is it?” Lilly said, “I knew only that he made lenses for reading spectacles.”

“And how did
you
know of this speciality?” Watson asked of his friend.

Holmes smiled. “Neither by witchcraft nor deduction. Mr. Ternac has a shop off Church Street. I chanced upon it on my earlier errand. Although I saw no strange markings above the door, one of the specialties writ upon it was high-magnification lenses. You know ocular lenses of that type are a particular interest of mine, Watson. I have long wished to study the techniques for grinding these very small lenses in order to create ones more suited to my needs, but such secrets are guarded closely in London.”

Rev. Lilly laughed. “They guard them closer here. We make the best and most varied glassware in all of England, as I’m sure you know. Even the formulas for the glass they use to make the lenses are locked within the minds of the master glaziers, and only shared upon their death beds.”

“And did Mr. Vandernedon share his secrets with his apprentice on his death bed?”

“Poor Vandernedon had no opportunity to share his secrets with anyone. He fell from a ladder and broke his neck. An unfortunate accident. There were many witnesses.”

“Bowen would have learned much of the trade by eighteen years of age, though, surely?”

“Oh, yes! He was already quite skilled when his master died. Jimmy was a very clever lad, very good at blowing the glass. There were plenty of others who’d have been glad to take him on. It was his mother convinced him to accept Ternac’s offer. Wenzel Ternac was lucky to get him at any price, for he was that good. But he was humble as well, and kind, not a vain bone in his body, though he was handsome as any gentleman.” The reverend’s voice had thickened at that last, and he pulled a linen square from his sleeve ruff. “Forgive me. I’d known him since he was a child.” Watson looked away to spare the man’s dignity. Though it was likely the boy had been a babe at the breast when John Watson lived with Rev. Lilly, the depth of his benefactor’s loss made him feel guilty for not sharing his suffering.

After a moment, Lilly had recovered enough to continue. “Those who saw him last claim he was not himself that evening. That he’d been raving drunk, which was not at all like him.”

“Could he have simply passed out, aspirated vomit perhaps?” Watson asked.

“Dr. Green, who examined him, believed the physical cause to be asphyxiation as the result of a coma, but he could only speculate as to why a strapping young man fell into such a state.”

“He speculates poison, I’ll warrant,” Holmes said.

“Yes, I’m afraid he does.”

“Poisoning happens by accident or intent, sir. Poison is not witchcraft. Poison is ordinary murder.”

“Ordinary to you, perhaps, Mr. Holmes. And for that I am sorry for you and will pray fervently on your behalf.”

“That’s very kind, Reverend, but you’d do better to aim your prayers at your girl Alice. You said she knows herbs—”

“Alice Mills isn’t capable of murder,” the man stated with great conviction. Watson hissed in a breath between his teeth, anticipating the lecture he himself had heard often enough about how anyone is capable of murder given motivation and opportunity. But it was a different lecture this time.

“Of murder by witchcraft?” Holmes said. “Quite so. She’s not guilty of that. No one has ever been guilty of that in the history of the world. Perhaps it was an herbal charm gone wrong. Perhaps he took the poison himself, for pleasure or stimulation. The point here being that poison was likely the cause, not witchcraft. That witchcraft is asserted at all means that someone wanted it to appear that way.”

“Someone wanted Alice to be blamed for it, you mean?”

Holmes didn’t bother to answer. Instead he went still, his eyes open but fixed on the puzzle inside his head. Long, uncomfortable moments passed before he cried, “Ha!” and leapt to his feet, headed to the door. “Come, Watson! We must pay all the key players a visit before nightfall.”

With his hat in hand, he paused and turned again to the Reverend. “How long has Mr. Ternac been in Stourbridge, do you know?”

“Hm. A year come September. It was in the last days of Stourbridge Fair, as I recall. Brought samples of his goods to show, and then stayed and opened shop.”

“And when did the unfortunate Vandernedon meet his demise?”

“August.”

“Excellent.” Sherlock Holmes set the hat upon his head at a jaunty angle and strode out into the glorious midsummer sunshine of a town not London.

A
S IT WAS
midsummer and no one could be spared from the harvest, or from shearing sheep, or from road repairs, or the numerous other important tasks best done in the long days of summer, there was no one available to escort a witch to the county gaol. The deputy constable’s buttery had been conscripted until such time as an escort could be found.

Jeb Cafferty, deputy constable, was practically gushing over the brilliance of the gentleman investigator up from London. It seemed that Sherlock Holmes’s errand in the first hours of their arrival in Stourbridge had been to finger a highwayman in the town’s midst.

“I’d ha’ taken you for a witch yourself, Mr. Holmes, the way you divined Rob Duggar was the culprit from just a thrown horseshoe and the sag of his coat.”

“Mere observation, Mr. Cafferty, nothing supernatural I can assure you.”

“So that’s where you hared off to,” Watson said, mostly to himself.

“Takes a keen eye is all I’m saying,” Cafferty went on. “His coat was well-lined, sure enough—with stolen jewels and coin. He’s in the stocks for now. I suppose Alice ought to be there as well,” he said, unlocking the door at the back of his house, “and you may think me weak and a fool, but I just couldn’t do that to her.”

Alice Mills was still quite... sturdy, Watson noted, though no longer little by any means. Quite a large girl, really, thick through the middle and heavy-breasted like her mother had been. No great beauty under the best of circumstances, but worse for wear here in what served as her prison. At least the buttery provided cool respite from the summer heat. Even so, grime and misery seemed embedded into every crevice of her being. The skin around her eyes looked bruised from exhaustion. A few stray black curls lay greasy against her neck where they’d escaped from her cap, and the dimples of her ready smile now clung to the corners of her mouth like abandoned children.

Holmes showed neither pity nor horror at her appearance or circumstance. “Have you confessed?”

Alice drew back, oddly affronted by his directness, her gaze darting to Watson.

“Hello, Alice. Do you remember me?

Her brow furrowed, but it seemed more out of irritation than confusion. “Master John. Yes. It’s been some years.”

“Indeed. Rev. Lilly sent for me to stand as witness to your character. I asked my good friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes if he would look into your situation.”

“He’s a famous examinant,” Cafferty said, puffed up by association.

“I prefer the term ‘investigator,’” Holmes said with a sniff.

“He’ll find the truth about what happened to Jimmy, no mistake.”

Alice squeezed her eyes shut at the name. Watson said, “We’re—we’re here to help you if we can.”

“In which case,” Holmes interjected, “if they’ve wrung some sort of confession from you, then we’d be wasting our time. I mention it because sleep deprivation is one of the less-overt methods of torturing confessions out of those accused of witchcraft, and you look as if you haven’t slept in a week.”

“It’s not because I’m keeping her awake!” the deputy constable cried.

“Mr. Cafferty’s done nothing to keep me from sleeping, sir. I’ve not slept because I’ve been arrested for murdering my own true love. I try to sleep, I do—but then I start awake remembering he’s dead.” She took a shuddering breath, and closed her eyes again, but couldn’t seem to shut out the horror of it.“My Jimmy’s dead. He’s dead. Oh, God!” She swayed on her feet. Watson moved towards her, but Holmes was quicker, lifting a chair from the wall and setting it behind her just as her knees buckled. Her eyes shot open and she gazed at him, pleading. “Please, sir, I’ve not done what they accuse me of. I loved Jimmy and he loved me. I would never have harmed him. We were to be married.”

“Hush now,” Holmes said, “I believe you.”

Watson, in the midst of applying a wine-dipped cloth to her the back of her neck, shot his friend a warning look. Why was he giving the poor thing false hope?

Alice seemed to wonder the same thing. She emitted a short bitter laugh. “Do you? On both counts? Because you’d be the only one who believed he wanted to marry the likes of me.”

“Now girl, none of that,” Cafferty said, not unkindly.

“It’s true, though. Jimmy was handsome as anything. Could have had any girl he wanted, but he chose me. He had a pure heart and he weren’t vain like some.”

“Alice. We’ve spoken with Mrs. Bowen,” Holmes said.

Her head dropped, eyes locked upon her hands clenching and twisting the filthy apron. “I cannot understand her hatred of me. Jimmy and I had been friends since we were little. She was never unkind to me then.”

“You were not a threat to her son’s future success then.”

In fact, when they’d interviewed Mrs. Margaret Bowen, she’d painted quite a rosy picture of what could have been. “Why, in a few years’ time, my boy could have had a Foley girl to wife, or even a Sparry. Though I dare say there are richer, finer young ladies in London whose fathers would have been pleased of so enterprising a son-in-law as my Jimmy.” Her once handsome face had twisted in anguish and spite. “Well, that’s not to be now, is it? She’s a wicked, scheming girl, is Alice Mills. She cursed my boy rather than let anyone else have him. And I’ll see her hung for it.” Holmes asked if there had, in fact, been anyone else that she knew of and she admitted she didn’t think so, “— but that don’t mean he was sweet on that great cow of a girl!”

Before taking their leave, Holmes wondered, rather unkindly, if Mr. Ternac had withdrawn his proposal of marriage now that her son was dead. The only answer they’d received to that was in the form of crockery thrown at their retreating backs.

“If she thought you were trying to keep him here in Stourbridge—” Holmes ventured.

Alice gave a snort of hot derision. “He was never going to London with Mr. Ternac, no matter what she believed. He’d an offer from the Henzley glaziers.”

Cafferty heaved a sigh of paternal frustration. “Joseph Henzley himself told us Jimmy refused that offer, Alice. I’ve the letter Jimmy wrote in evidence waiting to show the magistrate. Says right on it, ‘got a better offer, taking it.’”

Confusion burrowed its way between Alice’s heavy brows. “Yet another offer?”

“Presumably Mr. Ternac’s,” Watson pointed out.

“No,” Alice said softly, then again with certainty, “No. That can’t be. Henzley was going to make him foreman of bottles right off, and Jimmy was so happy because it meant he could stay in Stourbridge. He’d have money enough to take care of his mother and... and a wife.”

“Oh, Alice...” Watson whispered.

“You can believe me a foolish girl, deluded by love. And maybe that’s so. But Jimmy didn’t want to go to London. I swear it. He hated the very idea.”

Cafferty said, “That’s just from the boys at the Ram’s Head, telling as how fellows far less handsome than Jimmy were constantly murdered for their fine white teeth and pretty hair.”

Even in the dim shadows of the buttery, Watson couldn’t fail to see Holmes roll his eyes. “Oh, yes,
constantly
.”

“Jimmy had such good teeth too,” Alice said. “And his
hair
— like golden barley.”

“He sounds a very paragon,” Watson said.

“Oh he is—
was
, was, he was.” Her dark eyes welled with tears. “I could have run off, you know. Escaped. Anytime. Could have been long gone before anyone knew I was missing. But what would that serve me? What would I do? Where would I go? How could I live on without my Jimmy?”

A
LICE
’
S DECLARATION REGARDING
the potential ease of escape should she so desire had prompted Cafferty to lay in extra measures. Holmes and Watson waited for him outside in the lazy heat of an afternoon that seemed to stretch on forever—so much like the summers of his youth that Watson felt a twinge of resentment at the sound of Holmes’s voice pulling him back to the realities of the case.

“To curse and to kill are not synonymous.” Holmes said rather peevishly.

“Right. Yes. Your point being?”

“Mrs. Bowen accused Alice of
cursing
her son, not killing him. To her, these acts are synonymous. Indeed, most everyone here assumes the same, and yet we’ve been given to understand that only one person actually heard Alice place a curse upon Jimmy.”

“Ternac.”

“Indeed. We can assume he wanted Mrs. Bowen sufficiently motivated to make certain Jimmy took the offer to move business to London. Jimmy alive in London and working at his side was the goal, I’m certain. Jimmy resisted for whatever reasons, and so Ternac invented the tale of Alice’s spite, which he told the mother, and the mother made the witch’s bottle and buried it. I suspect the intention was only to cast suspicion on Alice, and once they were safely away she would likely be exonerated.”

“But Jimmy dies.”

“Yes. Jimmy dies.” Holmes stood thoughtfully tapping one finger against his lips then heaved a sigh. “Speak with the doctor who examined the body. He may have noticed details that none thought to ask of him. I will examine the evidence in Mr. Cafferty’s possession and we’ll meet at Ternac’s shop in an hour or so.”

Watson nodded and went off to seek out Dr. Green, glad to be strolling in the sunshine rather than holed up in a close room with Holmes, Cafferty and a collection of nails, hair and broken crockery. He passed the stocks, and there, its lone occupant, the highwayman Rob Duggar, strangely unbowed by confinement for all that he was on his knees with his neck in a vice. His fine shirt was filthy and stuck to his flesh with sweat and blood. There was dried blood in the tangle of his locks, blood that trailed down the side of his sharp jaw. He seemed to be biding his time, not a care in the world, and he smiled. Watson could feel the man’s eyes on his back, long after he’d left the square.