Sherlock Holmes

by

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Copyright 2004 Barbara Hambly

Cover art by Eric Baldwin

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The
Dollmaker of Marigold Walk

About The Author

Other Sherlock Holmes Stories by Barbara
Hambly

Sherlock Holmes

The Dollmaker of Marigold Walk

by

Barbara Hambly

“
I have seen too much not to know that the
impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of
an analytical reasoner.”

“
Folk who were in grief came to my wife
like birds to a light-house.”

-- “The Man with the Twisted Lip.”

My husband, Dr. John Watson, has written
often that his friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes loves the solving of
crimes, and the trapping of evildoers, as a huntsman loves the
chase, or an artist his brush and oils.

Yet as much as the solving of crimes – and
sometimes I think more so – I have observed that Mr. Holmes loves
the puzzles of human behavior for their own sakes, even when they
have no bearing on the breaking or keeping of the law. Cold-blooded
and logical himself, the eccentricities of human conduct delight
him: he takes more pleasure, I believe, in discussing with the
local cats-meat-man the mathematical system by which that gentleman
picks racehorses to bet on, than by bringing to justice a bank
director who embezzled thousands out of mere unimaginative
greed.

Thus when poor old Mrs. Wolff came into the
soup kitchen at Wordsworth Settlement House in Whitechapel, weeping
that she had been drugged and robbed – and left unhurt – by a
well-off gentleman, I am ashamed to say that almost my first
thought was to wonder what Mr. Holmes would make of such
astonishing behavior.

This particular Monday night was foggy and
chill, for it had rained on and off all day. I very nearly cried
off from the little class I teach there, for my health has always
been uncertain. But I knew the little shop girls I taught to read
looked forward to it. A number of my friends come down to the
Settlement House in daylight hours, to help with the washing and
folding of clothing donated for the poor, or to teach the girls and
boys of those horrible dockside slums – to teach also the
innumerable Russians, Roumanians, Hindus, and Chinese who huddle
ten and twelve to a tenement room enough English to seek employment
– but I am one of the very few who will work there at night. At
least one night a week, and sometimes two, John spends with his
friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, either adventuring on whatever criminal
case Mr. Holmes is pursuing, or dining with him and going somewhere
to listen to music. On such nights I will frequently come down to
the Settlement to teach, or help the regular workers there in any
way that I can.

Thus I was there at ten o’clock – just
finishing up that evening’s chapter of
A Tale of Two Cities
,
in fact – when Mrs. Wolff stumbled in from the brick-paved yard,
clutching with one hand the basket of oddments she carries to sell,
and with the other the dirty remains of a woolen shawl about her,
sobbing like a beaten child.

“Vhy vould any do so to a poor voman, Mrs.
Vatson?” she asked, when I’d brought her to the big room’s tiny
fire and sent one of the girls to get her soup. “Such nice
gentleman he look, too, mit his beard all combed so nice, and his
spectacles all rim mit gold. He buy me drink, he tell me I look
like his sister – and him a goyische gentleman all in varm coat on
such cold night! Look how I found my t’ings, vhen I vake up in
alley behind Vish und Ring, eh?”

Certainly the contents of her big wicker
basket – beautifully embroidered handkerchiefs, penwipers wrought
in curious shapes, dolls of woven wicker with bright ribbons around
their necks and cats wrought of folded tin with glass buttons for
eyes – had been rudely treated, being now all soaked and muddy from
having been dumped from the basket into the gutter and trodden
on.

“I make box out of tin,” she went on, as one
of the girls – Rebecca was her name, and a very sweet bright child
– brought her a cup of soup. “Beautiful box, all mit buttons on it;
two shilling I askin’ vhor dat box. And now it gone, an’ he stole
it from a poor voman, an’ him mit nice hat an’ his gloves an’ his
coat, an’ bein’ so nice to buy me schnapps, eh? Oy, the headache I
got vhen I vake—” And indeed the woman’s haggard face was the hue
of ashes in the grimy glow of the gas jet and the fire. “Vhy he do
a t’ing so, eh?”

“Maybe you were merely taken sick in the Fish
and Ring,” I suggested, “and stumbled in the alley and fell. The
streets around there aren’t terribly safe at this hour—” Which was
putting the matter mildly to say the least, the Fish and Ring being
in one of the least salubrious streets of a neighborhood renowned
for coshings, knifings, brawls, and hooliganism of all
descriptions. “Perhaps someone happened along and stole your
box?”

“Oy,” she moaned, and pulled her shawl more
closely about her. “Vhy vhould goyische gentleman vant poison poor
voman like so, eh?”

“I don’t know, Bubbe Wolff,” piped up
Rebecca, settling on the bench beside the woman and holding out her
chapped hands to the fire. “But Zoltan Berg, he told me how that
same thing happen to some woman his mama knows over Wapping.”

“What?” I’d been turning over one of the
wicker dollies in my hands, fascinated by the delicate workmanship;
now I set it back in the basket and regarded the child in
startlement. “This happened to someone else?”

“Zoltan’s mama said,” temporized Rebecca, an
accurate witness if ever there was one. “This man came up and
talked to her in the street, Mama Berg’s friend, and ask her to the
Blue Door Pub for mild and bitters, and next thing she know she
wakes up in the alley behind the pub all cold and in the rain. She
said he was a real nice gentleman, with a big brown beard and
spectacles like Mama Wolff said, and said he was lonely an’ she
remind him of someone he knew.”

The girl shrugged, skinny little shoulders in
a hand-me-down pinafore and eyes too wise for a ten-year-old.
Unprepossessing, the local police call them, and pert, but the more
time I spend in the East End, the more I think that if ever I am
granted the miracle of bearing John a living child, I would like
her to have that kind of pluck and wit.

“He didn’t rob her – anyway Mama Berg didn’t
say he did – and she got a drink out of it. And you know what
sometimes happens, around Wapping and here, it could have been lots
worse.”

I shivered, and put a reassuring hand on the
little girl’s shoulder. The other reason I was the only one of my
friends who would work the Settlement Hall at night was, of course,
that the fiend whom the popular press had called Jack the Ripper
had operated within a few streets of where I sat, only last year.
Though nothing had been heard of that ghastly assassin for nearly
twelve months – and though I’ve always believed that if one takes
sensible precautions one can remain reasonable safe wherever one is
– I was, when it came time for me to return home, escorted through
the Settlement’s grim courtyard to my cab by at least six stalwart
local gentlemen, and left to meditate, all the long rattling way
back to Kensington, on the peculiarities of human conduct.

*

In John’s stories about Mr. Holmes’s cases,
events follow neatly one after another, without the intervening
persiflage of day-to-day existence. This, I suppose, is the
necessary difference between a painting and a photograph – the
simplification of the background, that the foreground may stand in
clearer relief. But in fact we live much more in photographs than
in paintings, and for the next several days the Adventure of the
Friendly Gentleman was crowded from my thoughts by the Adventure of
the Imbecilic Maidservant, the Adventure of the Talkative Neighbor,
the Adventure of the Blocked Stovepipe, and the Adventure of Mr.
Stamford’s Wedding Present. If I did not mention the matter to John
it was only because it had become my habit to speak of the more
harmless curiosities and occurrences at the Settlement House; and
that, I suppose, indicates that however little harm had befallen
Mrs. Wolff or Mrs. Berg’s bosom friend at the Friendly Gentleman’s
hands, I guessed he was not quite as friendly as he seemed.

It was when I found myself in Portman Square,
nearly a week later, in quest of a patent fountain pen for John’s
birthday, that I bethought myself of Mr. Holmes – not that he ever
had the slightest idea of when John’s birthday was, nor his own,
I’m sure. And the thought occurred mostly because it had been some
weeks since I had visited Martha Hudson.

It was only the knowledge that Sunday
afternoons frequently found her at leisure in the narrow town
garden behind 221 Baker Street that induced me to turn my steps
along Audley Street. Ordinarily I would never have interrupted her
work, which I knew – she being the landlady of two sets of rooms
and two single chambers – was both physically demanding and
virtually unending.

I found her, however, as I had suspected,
pruning back her roses for the winter preparatory to wrapping the
more delicate varieties in straw against the cold, her tall form
swathed in a very atypical (for Martha) dress of blue and white
calico and her fair hair, instead of being confined to its usual
firm bun, hanging in plaits down her back like a schoolgirl’s. She
greeted me with a smile and a hug, and I sat on the single iron
bench in the bare garden until she’d finished, when we went inside
for tea. both her widowed sister-in-law, Jenny Turner, who was
living there then (thought she moved out not long after), and her
maid-of-allwork, the egregious Alice, were away for the afternoon.
The kitchen was warm and extremely pleasant with its smells of
cinnamon and sugar, and we covered a wide variety of topics from
John’s birthday (soon) to the shape of this winter’s hats (idiotic)
to the progress of John’s novel (frustrating, owing to the demands
of making a living for himself, a household, and a dowryless
wife).

“Had he not been wounded and sent home,” I
mused, “I think he would have remained with his regiment forever,
writing tales of adventure and romance and battle in the hills out
beyond Peshawar. For he has never wanted anything else, really. No
wonder he drives poor Mr. Holmes to distraction with ‘making
romances out of logic.’”

And the two of us gently laughed. “But had he
not been wounded and sent home,” Martha said, “he would not have
met Mr. Holmes – which would have been a shame, I think. Your
husband is good for him. I know it would never have occurred to Mr.
Holmes to seek out a friend, or to work at unraveling the mystery
of another human soul as your husband did at unraveling his. Mr.
Holmes watches people, the way he will watch the bees among the
roses in the summer: fascinated but apart.”

Which led us, naturally enough, to
speculation about why a man of evident substance should be going
about Whitechapel buying doped drinks for penniless women.

“I thought it sounded like the kind of thing
that would intrigue Mr. Holmes,” I said, dropping a fragment of
strong-tasting brown sugar into my tea. “I would have mentioned it
to Dr. Watson, only he worries about me enough going down there –
not that I would ever accept the offer of a glass of mild and
bitters from a total stranger. Certainly not in one of those
pubs.”

“No.” Martha gazed thoughtfully through the
many-paned glass of the pantry window out into the bare yard, her
large hands cupped around the blue-and-white porcelain of the cup.
“Though mind you, they’re simply neighborhood pubs. If you mind
your own business there you’re as little likely to come to grief as
you would be at the Lamb down the street – unless you drink the
gin, of course. Still… It’s curious you should mention the matter.
Something of the kind happened – or almost happened – two weeks ago
to old Mrs. Orris, who sells flowers, knitting, and apple dolls
about the streets.”

My whole face must have turned into a pair of
raised eyebrows, because Martha went on, “It gave her a turn,
because her niece knew Mary Kelly, one of he girls who was killed
by Jack the Ripper last year. Mrs. Orris was walking home along
Three Colt Street, which as you know is in a very bad part of the
Limehouse, when she became aware that someone was following her.
She heard the man behind her quicken his steps and she quickened
hers, but was too tired to go very fast, for it was late and she’d
been walking much of the day. She slowed down to go into the
Ropewalk, where there were lights on and people.