A Soul of Steel (29 page)

“And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.”

She?
Dubious and questionable? My gasp was echoed by the breeze sighing through the casement and buffeting the flowered curtains, as my hands—one gloved and one ungloved— made outraged fists.

The narrator, surely the selfsame doctor in whose rooms Godfrey and I now pried to our joint shame and my sole and swiftly receding regret, recounted how his recent marriage had created “complete happiness, and the home-centered interests... sufficient to absorb all my attention.” To this I could not take exception.

Then, one March night a year ago, this same upright doctor wrote, he was returning from a journey to a patient when his path led him through Baker Street. The events could have been set down in a modem
Faust
or
perhaps in
Dr. Jekyll and
Mr
.
Hyde,
as the ordinary physician finds himself drawn again into the web of his evil genius.

He finds himself passing That Doorway, which first recalls the circumstances of his wooing the woman now responsible for his bliss. But unhappy chance also reminds him of “the dark incidents” of the case during which the blissful couple had met. Soon the doctor is “seized” by “a keen desire” to see
the
man again and discover how he is using his “extraordinary powers.”

And there, within, he did indeed find
the
man “at work again. He had arisen out of his drug-created dreams, and was hot upon the scent of some new problem.”

A noise behind me made me start so guiltily that my foot kicked the rumpled rug with a dull thump. Something about the hummock was oddly... pliant. Godfrey was emerging from the inner room, frowning.

“Nothing in the consulting room but the usual remedies and supplies. Have you made any progress with those papers, Nell?”

“No!” I shouted, collapsing them back into a single pile like a flimsy deck of cards.
“Ouch!”

“What is it?” Concern brought Godfrey even closer, when I wished to prevent him from seeing the outrageous papers beneath my hands.

“Nothing, Godfrey, nothing,” I said, rising awkwardly. I always have been a most unconvincing prevaricator. “Only... my foot has struck some untoward object under the desk.”

“Oh?” At least Godfrey was peering now at the carpeting and need never read: “And yet there was but one woman to him...

I turned the papers upside down and weighted them with the Gray’s
Anatomy.
“It is nothing, really, Godfrey, merely some household appliance that I stubbed my toes on.”

“Why were you sitting at the desk, Nell?” He had bent to inspect the area beneath it.

“I was... feeling faint.”

“But the casement is open. Surely there was sufficient fresh air.”

“I, ah, am not used to criminal activities.”

“Hardly criminal, Nell.” Godfrey’s voice was muffled now as he burrowed under the desk. “Yes, there’s something here—and heavy. Stand by the other side of the desk and I’ll push it through. That will be easier.”

I took my position as requested. The papers were safe beneath their bookish disguise.

“You really ought not to disorder the office, Godfrey. Dr. Watson might notice.”

“This is extremely odd,” he said in an annoyed voice, ignoring my advice. “There!” He grunted, and something long and heavy rolled out from under Dr. Watson’s desk and onto my boot toes.

“Well?” Godfrey, somewhat flushed in the face, popped his head above the desktop.

I looked down.

I would have screamed, save that I did not have the breath for it. I stiffened as if turned to stone by a Medusa.

“Nell?” Godfrey rose and came around the desk. “Nell—?”

I could not find words, or the breath to speak them.

He looked down.

Then he bent, cautiously pinched the rug into a pair of folds and gingerly eased the five-foot-long cobra from my feet. “I believe that it is dead, Nell.”

“Believe?” I began to breathe again.

“Hope and pray, rather. It has not moved except by my exertions.”

“How reassuring.”

“It cannot be long dead,” he mused, “for the body is still amazingly flexible.”

“Godfrey! Please keep such revelations to yourself.”

“It could be the twin to the one Irene shot in Montmartre.”

“Good. We can call it the one my feet pummeled to death in Paddington.”

“I mean that it seems more than coincidence to find two dead Asian cobras of similar type in Paris and London.”

“Of course it is more than coincidence. It is appalling!”

He knelt over the long form on the rug. “The head seems almost jointed. I believe the neck is broken.”

“Can a serpent be said to possess a neck?”

“Certainly. A serpent is all neck.”

“I see. Godfrey?”

“Yes, Nell?”

“I appear to have dropped a glove under the desk. Could you—?”

“I am not anxious to explore and find another cobra.”

“Please.”

He sighed, returned to the desk’s other side, and vanished beneath it.

Moments later he surfaced, waving a white glove of surrender.

“No nest,” he reported cheerfully.

I regarded the mottled corpse. It all too precisely matched Dr. Sauveur’s description of the Asian cobra Irene had shot in Montmartre: perhaps five feet long but thick as a table leg, a speckled pattern of scales tapering to a tail end as delicate as little Oscar’s entire body.

A depraved mind might find beauty in its lethal, whiplike pliancy.

“Perhaps Dr. Watson was going to have it stuffed,
a la
Sarah Bernhardt,” I suggested.

“I think not. I believe that someone intended to have Dr. Watson stuffed full of cobra venom.”

“But who?”

“Come, Nell! Obviously the person that Stanhope wished to warn Watson against. Our outing is a success: we have found the very Watson we wanted.”

“I am most relieved,” I said faintly. “I doubt I could invade doctors’ consulting rooms on false pretenses indefinitely.” A thought came to me. “Godfrey, if cobra venom is so deadly, why are we coming upon dead cobras instead of dead victims?”

“Put like a prosecutor, Nell,” he congratulated me, bending to take hold of the carpet, which I was all too happy to vacate.

A few vigorous shakes of the rug and the cobra was once more concealed beneath the desk. “There, tidy again.”

“You are not going to simply leave it there?” I asked Godfrey.

“It is not my desk, and certainly not my business.”

“But what shall we do, then?”

Godfrey grinned and smoothed his hair. “Wait for Dr. Watson, as we intended, and ask him some questions about Afghanistan.”

Chapter Twenty

THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA

After forty
uneasy minutes, during which I watched Godfrey snooping about the premises when I was not eyeing the carpet beneath the desk for signs of movement—after all, some snakes hibernated, I understood, and there was no guarantee that this one should not rise from the dead—the door opened.

I do not know what kind of man I expected. A rather weak one, perhaps, to be so easily led from domestic and professional rectitude by an individual as apparently erratic as this Sherlock Holmes. Certainly I had wondered whether Watson had in fact visited Briony Lodge in company with the vaunted detective and the foiled King.

I remembered the detective’s companion as an ordinary, quite overlookable sort of person. I had not anticipated the solid citizen who now stood before me, a man not yet forty who was built like a boxer and possessed of a certain symmetry of feature as well as an unassuming mustache that made me miss Godfrey’s adornment.

“Mr. Marshwine?” the gentleman inquired. “Miss... er, Buxleigh?”

“Indeed,” said Godfrey as he rose, thereby avoiding an outright lie.

I myself was pleased to be mistaken for the fictional Miss Buxleigh, given our violations of hospitality in our host’s absence. This Dr. Watson certainly did not look like a writer, nor like a person who could be led willy-nilly by an extravagant but strong personality. He had the demeanor of a physician—and a former military man.

“What may I do for you?” the doctor inquired as he started for his desk. My eyes flew to the rug.

“Actually,” Godfrey began easily, “we are not here to consult you on a medical matter.”

“Oh?” The doctor sat, and yawned. “You must forgive me. I have been attending a nervously exhausted individual.” I heard his feet stretch out beneath the desk as he leaned back in the chair, which creaked.

The rug before the front of the desk wrinkled in response. I bit my lip.

“We are here on a personal matter,” Godfrey went on. He was being alarmingly frank for a person who only minutes before had been searching the premises.

“And that is—?” Dr. Watson’s tone had become a bit gruff. Now I recognized him! He was the hatted man who had helped the pale one into 221 B Baker Street yesterday.

“We are searching for a man missing since Maiwand.”

“Missing since Maiwand! My dear sir, odd that you should mention Maiwand; I had occasion to think of it for the first time in years only recently. How did you decide to approach me on this matter?”

Godfrey, like any perspicacious barrister, leaned forward persuasively in his chair even as he lowered his voice.

“You see, Dr. Watson, we have met one who remembers you ministering to the very man we seek during the battle of Maiwand. In your memories of that time we might discern some clue by which we could trace poor Blodgett.”

“Blodgett?”

“Ah, Jasper Blodgett, Miss... er, Buxleigh’s fiancé, gone missing these nine years.”

Dr. Watson looked from one to the other of us. “Blodgett? Buxleigh? Nine years?”

“Exactly. A tragic tale in its simple way. A man called up to war. A woman waiting at home. The confusion of a battle waged on alien soil. Men wounded, men killed, men gone off their heads and simply... lost. Miss Buxleigh has waited faithfully for almost a decade, Doctor, and now has received reports from India indicating that poor Blodgett is yet alive, if not wholly himself.”

“This Blodgett has been seen?”

“Indeed. And if we could find some kernel of incident in your memories of the wounded you tended, that might help us find poor Blodgett.”

The doctor’s face grew distressed. “My dear sir, my dear Miss Buxleigh, my own memories are uncertain. I was wounded myself at Maiwand.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed in my disappointment that our long-sought connection was so useless. Dr. Watson took my interjection for sympathy and went on more warmly.

“Jezail bullet in the shoulder,” he confided to Godfrey in a bluff man-to-man way that I was not supposed to overhear, though I did. “If it had not been for my orderly Murray slinging me belly-down over a horse and leading me from harm’s way, I would not be here.” He flung one of his limbs beneath the desk. “Took another in the leg and never knew it, I was so fever-ridden. Most embarrassing for a physician to suffer a phantom wound. I doubt I can help you.”

The wounded leg, once mentioned, thrashed again beneath the desk, like a child fidgeting when it hears its name called. I saw a mottled semicircle of snake protruding from under the bottom lip of the mahogany desk.

“Still, Dr. Watson,” I put in, “what you may have witnessed before your wounding could help us.”

The doctor nodded. “Many men escaped injury that day, but on my knees amid the battle dust it seemed that every man around me was half done-for. Well, Miss Buxleigh, I confess that I admire a woman eager after many years to reunite with the man who has commanded her love and loyalty. Jasper Blodgett is a lucky man.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” I said modestly, wringing the cords of my reticule and looking significantly at Godfrey rather than at the slow but steady resurrection of the cobra.

Time for Godfrey to play the barrister and begin questioning.

“Perhaps you remember Maclaine—?” he began dutifully.

“Poor devil! He was taken prisoner during the retreat, but I never knew him. Died, of course, at savage hands.”

“If he had not died, do you think he would have been blameless?”

A sharp glance from eyes used to making diagnoses appraised us. “That is politics, sir. I fear that war brings out the worst as well as the best in men, as do political skirmishes. I heard talk that Maclaine, being dead, made a good target on which to pin hindsight, though I have no opinion either way on the affair. I was a lowly medical officer in a battle that was no more than a rout for our forces. There is a tale with a different twist to it for every man who was at Maiwand.”

“Our man,” said Godfrey, “was wounded early in the afternoon, early in the retreat. He had a head injury.”

“How do you know if you have not found him?”

The doctor’s piercing eyes did not meet mine, for I was looking modestly down—at the carpet. Godfrey answered this challenge, as well he should, since the entire fairy tale was of his spinning.

“Those who have seen him in Peshawar saw the scar.” Dr. Watson nodded. “I remember a man with a blow to the head—odd, for we had not come to hand-to-hand combat. Of course, in the scramble to retreat one of our own might have given him a knock. It was not a pretty sight, miss, almost three thousand men trying to elude bullets and blood in blinding dust and artillery fire. I do not wonder that your Jasper lost his wits afterwards—and the head blow could have done it.