Fic for coloredink: The Other Tenant
Title: The Other Tenant
Read on A03: Here
’Verse: ACD Canon
Recipient: coloredink
Author: tweedisgood
Pairing: Holmes/Watson implied
Rating: G
Word count: ~6,200
Warnings: None really, usual Victorian homophobia , racism, classism, sexism.
Summary: “The Doctor made no mention of the other tenants of Baker Street when he began to write about Mr Holmes and his cases.” The Landlady, however, has quite a few things to say about one of them.
Notes: have played slightly with the chronology of the stories to fit my plot, but probably not much more than did ACD. Beta thanks to mad_with_july and spacemutineer .
I was not their servant. Let’s be quite clear about that, thank you. I don’t care to hear some silly nonsense about the loyalty and discretion of domestic staff regarding their ‘betters’. I was, and am, a woman of property - rare enough even now, a miracle back then. A miracle usually worked by the reaper that cut down so many strong men at the knees, like green corn, before their time. Property but no income, once he was gone: and so I let rooms.
The Doctor made no mention of the other tenants of Baker Street when he began to write about Mr Holmes and his cases. He knew they would be of little interest to his readers; but I think, too, that some quiet warning sounded in his ears after the first few conversations on the landing with his new neighbour. Intuition is not the sole preserve of my sex.
Later on, much later, when they could pay me whatever was needed to keep other people out, those two dwelt in solitary splendour on the first floor. The ground floor was occupied by some business or other with short hours and few visitors, the maids lived out and Dr Watson’s old room…well, I am getting ahead of myself.
When the Doctor and Mr Holmes took residence in the Spring of 1881, I had already let the ground floor to an oculist (who never seemed to have any patients) and the single set of rooms across the landing on the second floor. He had seemed respectable, reliable and sober, quite the ideal tenant, Mr Barnaby Forbes. So, in many respects, he proved to be; but as there is more to life than bread, so there is more to a harmonious house than neatly stacked crockery and a man who cleans his own boots. I came slowly to discover that I had unwittingly let a snake into the nest.
Was it the bringing together of Mr Forbes and Mr Holmes that nearly brought disaster on us all? Or was it, as some might say, the bringing together of Mr Holmes and Dr Watson? The reader may decide. Only, remember: a diamond is proven when you cut glass with it, but it was a diamond before you did that, and you had to be looking for a diamond to test it in the first place.
I didn’t ask exactly how Mr Forbes got his living, although he had hinted at a small private income which he added to by a minor, salaried position at the University of London, occasional publications and so on. Fanatics do not often reveal themselves all at once.
To begin with, the three of them passed like ships in the night - a nod on the stairs, a tip of the hat in the street outside. Then I caught Mr Forbes sneaking about on the first floor where he had no business being. He never even troubled to hide what he was up to. Instead, he brazened it out, saying wasn’t I just as curious as to what exactly the stream of odd visitors as all about, what ‘business’ it could be that brought silk hats, ragged shawls and everything between to my door? I’ve no time for nosey parkers and told him so, but he only laughed. You’ll know what I mean, I hope, when I say that if that laugh had brushed by me on the underground, my dress would have been for the copper as soon as I got home. I tried to dismiss the incident from my mind. But that laugh nagged at me like a raised nail in a floorboard. I could never quite hammer it down, not for years.
Yes, years. One is not obliged to make friends with one’s tenants - indeed, the books all advise against it. So the other tenant, as I often thought of him, stayed on despite my misgivings. I learned what Mr Holmes’ business was; learned, too, to tolerate the piles of paper, the pungent explosions and grubby-fingered urchins. I’d come up to remonstrate with him and he would be sitting opposite Dr Watson in silent, amiable contentment in front of the fire, reading and smoking. If alone, he’d often start playing some plaintive air from my Scots childhood - he must have sensed me coming - and I’d be struck with a feeling of…rightness so deep I wondered how he did it, he who carried on so about reason and logic and claimed stoutly that sentiment was for fools.
Spring to summer, autumn to winter; the calendar changed but little else did. That suited me admirably: I can’t abide rush and hurry, the latest fashions and new for new’s sake. It was a long six years, you’ll recall, before the world at large began to hear of Sherlock Holmes. From time to time his name had popped up in the papers, in court reports and accounts of sensational crime and more sensational arrests, but more often it was a police inspector who got the credit. Word of mouth was enough to keep him busy. The rent was paid; his tailoring grew smarter; the concert hall became a habit, not a luxury. It suited him admirably.
“A Study in Scarlet” provoked their first real quarrel, Mr Holmes and the Doctor. Not a quarrel of raised voices and slammed doors but of pursed lips, awkward silences, a brown bowler hat missing from the hallway and gone to a club for the evening. I guessed at once who had started it. Watson had misread him, his subject insisted peevishly. He had never wanted vulgar fame, the open-mouthed wonder of idle seekers after adventure and not justice, the admiration of those not his peers. It seemed, for all that, that the regard of a certain medical man was not quite so unwelcome. I found a bill for violin strings and another for microscope slides stuck between certain pages of my copy of Beeton’s Christmas Annual, unaccountably migrated to the first floor hall table.
Mr Forbes had read it, too. He tried to engage me in conversation about his neighbour, asking all manner of impertinent questions. What did I know of Mr Holmes’ family? Did he have brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews? A lady friend? He had a personal interest in such matters, he said, a sense that it was his duty as a “man of science” to discover and encourage the propagation of “superior traits” in the population. As if Mr Holmes were a prize pig!
“Had you not better ask him all those things yourself, sir? “
I knew the answer well enough. He didn’t dare.
Then again, nor should I.
Snooping: that was the only word for it. In the weeks following I saw him peeking at letters laid out for the postman in the hall, passing along the landing often and slowly, canting his ear toward the doors, watching the comings and goings of the house. Betty, the little housemaid I had ‘on approval’ from the Girls’ Domestic Institute, told me, using words I won’t repeat but which got her mouth a wash-out with soap, that he had accosted her and offered her money to carry tales, as if she was that sort of girl. He denied it, naturally.
“My dear lady; girls of that class are always inventing stories: too much leisure time to spend reading fiction. She would do better to improve her fire-laying skills - really not up to par, you know.”
A lie is enough to dismiss a girl, but I noted that he did not demand it, and that his eyes skittered over my face, never quite catching my eye. Then he laughed again. I’d have given him notice to quit then and there, but there was nothing in the paperwork about decency and honour. Hints as broad as the Thames at Woolwich that he might find better lodgings than these and far more convenient to the University, had no effect on him. He stayed.
It was when the Doctor came to me bearing an engraved invitation card and asking whether, as Mr Holmes had refused outright, I might do him the honour of going with him to a lecture organised by Mr Forbes, that I put two and two together.
“The Julius Marvell Society for Social Health Inaugural Lecture
‘Observations upon an Uncertain Future’
To be given at the Large Lecture Theatre, King’s College, The Strand
Thursday, March 9th, 1888
8 o’clock pm
Open to members of the public by invitation only.
Questions will be received from the audience at the conclusion.
Reply: B. Forbes, personal secretary to Professor Marvell”
Professor Julius Marvell was a name spoken as a blessing by those who hailed him as the great enlightener, freeing the slaves of religious superstition. Others, who’d read of his bitter personal animosities and persecutions in print, detested him. For my part, I find cruel folk not the sort I want to praise, however right they may be.
No, you are quite wrong there. Sharp-tongued, inconsiderate, aye, downright selfish at times - yes, Mr Sherlock Holmes was all those. Yet, for all that: not cruel, not mean-spirited.
Professor Marvell, who held the Chair of Zoology at the University, had lately attracted entirely too much notice by a stream of letters to The Times forecasting the demise of the Empire, pressing urgent reform to preserve the Anglo-Saxon race, by strenuous medical education and legislation if necessary. He denounced as useless sentiment the notion that we should support the poor and shelter the crippled and feeble-minded. Weakness should not be permitted to reproduce itself through the generations: that was Nature’s Law, and we, as any other animal, were bound to follow it. If there must be civilisation, let it be strong; let it be rational; let it bear the seeds of prosperity; let it be built on good stock.
I was not sure I wanted to hear any more in the same vein, but Dr Watson declared himself not content with the work of editors and professional controversialists, preferring to judge for himself. He confessed he had wondered, sometimes, if there were not just too many people in London: too many for all to live in a decent condition, too many for whom life was a burden rather than a gift. Much of what Professor Marvell wrote was deplorable, indeed. Yet if the saner parts could be teased out and encouraged and the inhumanity of the rest fairly exposed, some good might nevertheless come of it.
There are some people so determined to see the best in other people that they are a positive caution, mark my words.
*******************************************
“…and to that end I have founded this Society, bowing to the entreaties of friends and sponsors that it bear my own name. It is all our members’ hope and intention that reason will prevail in our seats of government, in the medical profession and in the minds of those with the power to shape opinion in this great country and its Empire across the seas.”
The applause came loudest from a knot of young men gathered towards the front and centre of the room, but there were other enthusiasts. The Doctor clapped just long enough for good manners. He looked as I’d seen him the day young Mrs Parmenter came to him with a cancer and he didn’t know how to break the news - miserable, but steeling himself to his duty.
Mr Forbes, who’d been lurking in the shadows in a way I quite recognised, bowed to his master and announced that he would now take questions. Dr Watson raised his hand.
“Professor, I am a medical man. We are first sworn to do no harm. How do you suggest we reconcile that duty with the programme you have laid out? It seems to me there are serious objections to a proposal to deny aid to so many of our fellow men.”
Marvell sighed and stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat before turning to the rest of the audience.
“There, ladies and gentlemen, is an example of the kind of antiquated thinking that must be struck from professional education altogether. ‘Do no harm’? What greater harm to the health of the whole can it be to refuse to cut off a gangrenous limb? Make no mistake, Doctor,” and he looked the dear man up and down with a sneer, “every hour you spend in the charity wards patching up the unfit so that they may drag their sturdy peers down, every pigeon-chested wreck you sustain with milk and eggs and seaside air beyond their natural span, every woman you do not render fit above all to bear healthy children, which is females’ whole purpose in nature - waste, sir; it is all wasted time and effort.”
Other questions flew down thick and fast upon the Professor, some to be dismissed as he had done Dr Watson’s, some planted by sympathisers, to be petted and gilded with praise and congratulation. If he could have had it so, the whole chamber would have been one giant hall of mirrors telling his own words back to him. The workhouses, prisons and asylums should have no doctoring whatsoever; the so-called pagan ancients knew what to do with unwanted births (he said no more, out of consideration for the “ladies present” - as if none of us could fathom his meaning for ourselves). As for the “pathetic fad” for women’s education - did any of us “dear creatures” wish to be rendered sterile and prematurely aged by brainwork for which all true scientific evidence clearly demonstrated we were not fitted?
**************************************
Mr Holmes’ satisfaction at not having wasted his own time listening to Professor Marvell was short-lived. About a minute or so. When Mr Forbes returned he was waiting for him in the hall.
Yes, yes, shame on me for eavesdropping and for judging others for doing the same; but it was my responsibility to see that Betty had learned how to properly polish a stair banister. I didn’t hear it all, only the end of a conversation in which one man blustered and stewed and the other sliced at him like a man attacking a side of beef with a freshly ground blade.
“Furthermore, Mr Forbes, if you do not of your own accord cease insulting my friends, prying into my affairs and sullying the good name of science, rest assured it is well within my power to compel you.”
“I...I serve science, sir. Surely a man of your abilities can see the wisdom of our cause?”
“I see a failure to distinguish ability from worth, science from prejudice, and a presumption of personal superiority which I note does not seem to have communicated itself to any young ladies of your acquaintance. In your place, I should be less concerned at the marrying of others and more with my own. Then at least the members of this household - and the working girls of Shepherd Market - would be left in peace.”
Mr Holmes does not fear to make enemies. I think that is because he expects to meet them in open contest, and to emerge victor. So he does, by and large. But the face I saw as Mr Forbes passed me on the stairs promised nothing open, nothing fair.
He - or more likely his employer - seemed to have some powerful friends. Apart from occasional police cases, work began to fall off from that day, so far that there were whole weeks when no-one called at all. The lack of occupation turned into more and more visits to the chemist’s shop, until Mr Price shot me worried glances over the tooth powders and hoped that Mr Holmes was quite all right, Mrs Hudson? So it was more than Miss Morstan’s sensitive face and trim figure that commended her to the Doctor.
I could have mapped the case, and Dr Watson’s lightning courtship, almost hour by hour merely from Mr Holmes’ own mood. The case with its mysteries and strange characters brought new light into his eyes. He delighted in the outrageousness of playing captain to a band of street urchins, in a disguise so thick that not even his friend knew him, in dangerous adventure and the chase on the river as he closed in on his quarry. Yet as he watched the Doctor begin to think of another life and another, gentler companion, he reached out to pull him back from that brink, hardly knowing how to do it but only that he must. How will it compare to this, he seemed to plead - those quiet evenings in front of the fire, a list of tradesmen with bunions and their caged, flirtatious wives?
The day after the engagement was announced in the papers I went in for the breakfast things and found him laid out on the sofa, insensible under the influence of heaven-knew-what. Crumpled in his hand was a letter; it fell to the floor as he slipped deeper into a sleep that had nothing of peace in it, only escape. I put it back on his chest - it was not mine to read, but it seemed to be from Miss Morstan. A note of thanks, no doubt, and not only for a puzzle solved.
Mr Forbes offered his congratulations grudgingly - I supposed, half from envy, half from a barely-concealed opinion that of his neighbours the inferior, not the superior, was set to found a family.
He was not invited to the wedding.
We did not see the Doctor for months after. It made my heart ache to see Mr Holmes work alone, successful as ever but seeming untouched by it now, to fear he was dying by inches from lack of sleep, food, fresh air…from lack of love. There, I will say it. He can’t stop me saying it now, couldn’t stop me thinking of it then. I offered what I could. He said he had a mother already and told me to go away and looked again at the empty chair opposite his own by the fireside.
I asked one day if he had heard how the Watsons were getting on - the practice, the new house, whether there was any… special news. He shrugged, nose in his newspaper.
“I saw him in the street last week. Business is adequate - he had been to the country for an extended stay, tending to a prosperous patient who is fond of dogs - Mrs Watson is keeping him well fed and better shod. No ‘special news’.” The thought of his friend peering into a baby carriage with a fond expression passed across his face like a premonition of catastrophe.
“Well, you might have mentioned it at the time, Mr Holmes. I do hope you gave him my best regards.”
“I gathered that intelligence from a cursory inspection - he did not see me.” He snapped the paper open with a flick of his wrists, making it clear that if I asked why he did not call out to the Doctor, he would deem it interference. “Mr Forbes continues his crusade, I see.”
Professor Marvell had been felled by a stroke and his secretary was now his mouthpiece, signatory to his every published opinion. The Julius Marvell Society had lately turned its attentions to that great social evil, the “confirmed bachelor”. It was one thing to lack the means to marry, another to know oneself tainted by hereditary weakness and thus to sacrifice one’s prospects for the good of all. But to shun the society of women altogether from mere preference was gross dereliction of duty. There were dark hints of more, withheld from print only out of the wish that certain pernicious habits should not be dignified by public discussion.
Just as well no-one cares to listen at keyholes to the talk at landladies’ gatherings. I’ve been grateful for the secret of Miss Penross’ special blend soaking salts - sovereign for removing stubborn stains of a particular kind from gentlemen’s bed linen and handkerchiefs - for years.
Yes, I am well aware what else the articles may have been talking about. I was well aware then. Landladies know what is going on in their own houses; and when a certain silence falls at a gathering at the mention of name, of a pair of names, they know what goes on elsewhere, too.
What proceeded to go on at 221b Baker Street turned very queer indeed, by and by. Mr Forbes began to get a daily letter, addressed to him personally and in the same hand. After a week or two, he started to haunt the front door at delivery times. The professor grew no better in his health, he said, and had begun to think of his lasting legacy, in case his life was cut short. Unable to campaign on the lecture circuit, he had petitioned members of Parliament, Police Inspectors and Judges by letter, urging a zealous prosecution of “moral crimes which put the health of the nation at risk”, as Mr Forbes framed it to me with an embarrassed cough. No, the sudden tide of correspondence was not from his master. It was a rather more personal matter he did not quite feel able to disclose as yet. Perhaps, in time…Then he smirked and all but skipped away up the stairs.
The day, about a month later, that a small parcel came for him, he sidled up to me as I was putting away linen.
“Mrs Hudson, I wonder if you might do me a small favour? I am due a visitor this afternoon. Propriety forbids that this visitor, a young lady, be entertained alone in my quarters. Might we use your own sitting room, and you stay on hand to reassure her that I am sensible of her modesty and discretion?”
He somehow contrived to imply that Mr Holmes, merely by seeing lady clients without a chaperone, was cheapening their virtue. Nevertheless, that was hardly this young lady’s fault. I agreed; Mr Forbes was effusive in his thanks and snapped open the clasp of a small hinged picture frame to show me the face behind all the letters.
The photograph was not very well done, and the sitter had been unable to sit perfectly still, so that ghostly extra limbs blurred her dress and boots. The face was sweet enough, but terribly young, scarcely enough to be out of school, and Mr Forbes thirty at least. I was not sure that I approved.
They had been exchanging letters, at least once a day, since she had dared congratulate him on a notably pompous leading article in the Julius Marvell Society’s Newsletter. Something (Mr Holmes, having found a copy slipped under his door, had used it to wrap a broken test tube) about Woman’s Role in the Future of England. Miss Perry confessed herself so convinced as to the truth of his views that she had abandoned her plans for further study of music and devoted herself instead to learning household management and hygiene, readying herself for her true calling.
I’d be happy enough to talk about that when I’ve seen her clean a mirror without leaving streaks; but doubtless she imagined she’d have a maid for that kind of thing.
Five o’clock approached and Mr Forbes paced up and down in my parlour as a man possessed. From the first floor the distinct strains of a cheeky music hall song about a shy young man and his rather forward lady-friend, picked out on a violin used to sneering at such fare, mocked him none too gently. His face twisted in rank annoyance and he was about to storm up and demand Mr Holmes stop it at once, when in the second the doorbell rang the strings stopped as if cut and the whole house fell silent.
She was very polite, every deferential to me, taller than she had seemed in her photograph and slender as a reed with a neat little green hat and veil. Her voice rose rarely above a murmur, not the excitable, impressionable figure cut by Mr Forbes’s enthusiastic account of her that morning. I tried not to eavesdrop on their conversation. In all honesty, there was no need. Mr Forbes needed no words to tell her (and me) that he was utterly smitten, and if her shy glances over the rim of a teacup were anything to go by, his luck was set fair in that direction.
There was a definite hint of orange blossom in the air.
Talk had flagged a little when someone knocked on the front door. Visitors rang, tradesmen knocked, as instructed - we having no separate entrance as there is at grander establishments - but I had ordered nothing. I made my excuses and went to see if there was perhaps some mistake in the address: although, since Mr Holmes became famous, such mistakes have been rare as leeks in April.
A tall, fat man with ginger whiskers and half-glasses under a broad-brimmed felt hat stood jumping from foot to foot, wringing his hands and begging in a piping voice to be admitted to see Mr Barnaby Forbes without delay, as he had news of the gravest nature concerning Professor Marvell.
I tried to put him off, indeed I tried, but tears sprang to his eyes and he mopped them with a fold of his sleeve. If there is a thing I cannot abide -judge me for it if you wish - it is a crying man. Not that I have much time for tears in general; after all, it’s the same life whether we spend it crying or laughing.
The visitor tipped his hat graciously at Miss Perry, extended a black-gloved hand to Mr Forbes and wrung his arm until he winced.
“Oh, dear, oh dear ; oh, my good man, now I come to it I find I can hardly get the words out. Professor Marvell, our dear Professor, light of our lives, sage of our age; he is…he is…”
The Professor’s Secretary sat open-mouthed, his own imagination supplying the missing word in a whisper.
“…dead?”
“No, no, not in the slightest,” broke in the fat man impatiently. “What a notion, indeed no: I am sorry to say it is so very much worse than that.”
“ Worse?”
“He is unlucky enough not only to be a fool, but to have one as a constant companion,” declared a familiar voice. Mr Sherlock Holmes (for it was he), turned swiftly on one heel despite the padding which added a good foot to his girth and swooped on the figure sitting opposite, who seemed suddenly on the edge of flight.
“…and you, boy!” he cried, just in time to see that figure jump and cringe before a hasty recovery and a fan put up in front of the face.
“This, sir, is beyond outrage! What is the meaning of it, of your insult to my employer and myself, that unspeakable remark to Miss Perry?”
“Simple enough, Mr Forbes. You have been duped, and I fancy you have me to thank that I saved you from public humiliation in the very near future. You were intending to propose today, were you not?”
A furious scarlet flush on the other’s face was his only answer. Mr Holmes nodded. “Quite so; followed, no doubt, by a celebratory photograph, engineered by the grateful recipient of your affections. The fatal objection is this,” and he lifted Miss Perry’s hat and veil clean off her head, taking a hairpiece with it. Underneath was a close-shaven scalp. “She” was most definitely in fact “he”, a fair and pretty youth with false lashes and touches of greasepaint so well done that you wouldn’t see unless you were already looking for them. Mr Forbes sat down heavily in his chair.
The lad would not let on who had put him up to it.
“The precise name is incidental. It is bound to be one of a list recently shown to me by Inspector Gregson of Scotland Yard; persons of eminence against whom you and Professor Marvell urged investigation under the Criminal Law Amendment Act on the grounds they have…unnatural inclinations and pose a threat to your vision of ‘improved’ society . In the majority of cases, it constitutes a clear libel. Were you counting on embarrassment to prevent them taking open action against you? “
Mr Forbes at last had the decency to hang his head; or perhaps it was only shame at being found out.
“The innocent had nothing to fear,” he whined. “The Professor only wanted…”
“…The power of the law to do his bidding. Persuasion is one thing: argument, reason, appeal; the other party remains free to accept or reject. This is not persuasion: it is persecution, an offence against justice. Put a stop to it, Forbes. I believe you owe me at least that much return for my help. And do not, pray, say whatever you were about to say.”
Mr Forbes, whose face had taken on a mutinous cast for a second or so, closed his mouth.
The youth slipped away - he had committed no crime, and took with him a note promising that Forbes would be dealt with by a third party, and that he should not suffer for his failure to pass as Miss Perry. After all, as I imagine the note concluded, he had been exposed to the most skilled scrutiny in London.
“How ever did you know?” I asked afterwards. “I had not an inkling until you took off her…his headgear.”
“Why, my dear Mrs Hudson,” and there should have been another name there, it was plain as the nose on his face - which, I’m sure he won’t mind me saying, is a feature very hard to miss - that he felt it, and smiled in a crooked kind of way , “Observation and deduction. How else? Mr Forbes, puffed up with amatory success, showed me this morning the same photograph he showed you. It is a notable fact that males sit in a different way to females. The shifting of pose caught by the camera was suggestive, though not conclusive. I habitually scan all the incoming post, not just my own,” here he sent me an apologetic glance, not that I have secrets I would care to keep from him, even if I could, “and seen the recent regular correspondence, also Mr Forbes’ preoccupied air and the singular way in which he handled those particular letters.”
“They were written by a woman, not by the person who called today. I note by the way that he is right-handed - inference from the photographic pose with right hand on the chair back - and the letter writer favours the left. Really an unpardonable error, right-handers are two a penny. Who do they think lives in this house besides Forbes, another dunderhead? I hope you do not mind, but I prevailed upon your fellow landlady Mrs Scott-Roberts to watch out at the post office in Queen Street this morning for someone posting an envelope matching the copy I gave her. She is most observant, as you yourself lately remarked.”
What I’d actually said was: “She’d spot a single drop of candle wax on a polished sideboard at twenty feet, that one,” but no matter.
“No lady posted it, but a gentleman. Not a footman, not a messenger. It was just possible that a brother or trusted friend acted as her envoy, but taken together with the rest, I was forced to conclude that someone was deliberately playing a trick. Marvell is protected - even those accused of dishonourable crimes have honour enough not to target a dying man. Even so, I believe that the true poison springs from that source; Forbes merely dips his pen in the well.”
“Imagine,” I chuckled. “A man finding himself engaged to another man!”
Mr Holmes didn’t laugh. When I looked up at his face it was grave and distracted. His gaze seemed fixed on something far away, some ghostly glimpse of a ship on the far horizon which he strained to catch. When he replied, I had some effort myself to hear him.
“Yes, imagine that.”
It didn’t seem much of a victory, not like the old days when we’d often raise a celebratory glass together, the three of us, the Doctor promising to immortalise some little slip-up, Mr Holmes scoffing that he had done whatever-it-was on purpose, dear fellow. I had another try at cheering him up.
“You’ve taught Inspector Gregson well, that he came to you instead of running amok with that list and ruining a lot of good folk’s reputations. I expect that, knowing he lodges here, he wanted you to take Mr Forbes to task about it, and so you have, and no-one truly hurt by it.”
He stood very straight, there in our hall, shook his head, took gentle hold of both my hands and, as it seemed, put his very life and worth into them for safekeeping.
“No, Mrs Hudson. He brought the list to me only because one of the names on it was mine.”
*****************************************************
It was a nine days’ wonder at our gatherings: Mrs Scott-Roberts was fit to burst at her part in it, telling me how pleased she was to help, what a scandal for me to have a man dressed as a women coming through my door, lucky it didn’t make the papers after all, think of the talk! I headed her off from fishing for the details of whatever grudge made someone do something so very unkind to ‘poor Mr Forbes’.
What did I think about what Mr Holmes had told me? If he’d said the accusation was false, of course I’d have believed him, no question. Although, he never did say that, only made sure any copies of the list were tracked down and destroyed. The others accused never knew; no libel suits were filed. In any case, who would want such things discussed in open court? True or false, once rumour has its claws in a person, their good name is in shreds before you know it.
The Professor dismissed Mr Forbes once he refused to follow orders. Search as he might, which in his circumstances was not very far, he could not find a replacement. His landlady - Mrs Simpkins, nice woman but needs a better dressmaker, if you want my opinion - and a nurse saw to his needs. He passed away the next year and you won’t find many people nowadays who even remember the name Marvell. The Society collapsed. Mr Forbes moved to Manchester soon after, to work at the University there. We heard nothing more of him. He didn’t write.
So then it was just the two of us, and often just the one. Mr Holmes took to gallivanting off abroad - places I’d never heard of - at a moments’ notice. That, or lying in the sitting room, solving cases in his head at the point of a needle. The cocaine helped him think, he said.
“And the morphine?” I had seen the empty bottles.
“…Helps with other, less soluble problems.” There it was again, the glance he could hardly help making, towards the empty chair.
So many times I was on the point of wiring to Kensington, that he missed his friend; what stopped me was that Mr Holmes would surely find me out. Out of pride, he would deny it to Dr Watson’s face and send him away with some thoughtless jibe. These things take the time they take, they cannot be forced.
At the right time the Doctor came to call again, though not to stay, not yet. At all the right times, when Mr Holmes needed him most, he was there, and they did as much good as any reforming society.
At the right time, for all the tears and falsehoods, they parted again.
In the three years after, one of them came to understand a thing or two about himself and the other learned a particular sort of courage. At the right time they were reunited and, God forgive me for saying it but it’s true, at the right time Mrs Mary Watson had already passed into blessed memory, and Dr Watson never found the right time to marry again. Instead, this time, he stayed.
No, Mr Holmes won’t ever marry. Not in the regular sense. In the other hand there is plenty to be said for the irregular sense. What, you think a piece of paper makes a marriage? I beg to differ, my dear. I may be called Mrs Hudson, I may wear widow’s black and have a picture of the late Mr Hudson on my mantelpiece, but piece of paper I never had nor needed none, and nor do they.
Whom do I mean by ‘they’? Well, as a certain gentleman of my acquaintance might say, observe and deduce.
END
Read on A03: Here
’Verse: ACD Canon
Recipient: coloredink
Author: tweedisgood
Pairing: Holmes/Watson implied
Rating: G
Word count: ~6,200
Warnings: None really, usual Victorian homophobia , racism, classism, sexism.
Summary: “The Doctor made no mention of the other tenants of Baker Street when he began to write about Mr Holmes and his cases.” The Landlady, however, has quite a few things to say about one of them.
Notes: have played slightly with the chronology of the stories to fit my plot, but probably not much more than did ACD. Beta thanks to mad_with_july and spacemutineer .
I was not their servant. Let’s be quite clear about that, thank you. I don’t care to hear some silly nonsense about the loyalty and discretion of domestic staff regarding their ‘betters’. I was, and am, a woman of property - rare enough even now, a miracle back then. A miracle usually worked by the reaper that cut down so many strong men at the knees, like green corn, before their time. Property but no income, once he was gone: and so I let rooms.
The Doctor made no mention of the other tenants of Baker Street when he began to write about Mr Holmes and his cases. He knew they would be of little interest to his readers; but I think, too, that some quiet warning sounded in his ears after the first few conversations on the landing with his new neighbour. Intuition is not the sole preserve of my sex.
Later on, much later, when they could pay me whatever was needed to keep other people out, those two dwelt in solitary splendour on the first floor. The ground floor was occupied by some business or other with short hours and few visitors, the maids lived out and Dr Watson’s old room…well, I am getting ahead of myself.
When the Doctor and Mr Holmes took residence in the Spring of 1881, I had already let the ground floor to an oculist (who never seemed to have any patients) and the single set of rooms across the landing on the second floor. He had seemed respectable, reliable and sober, quite the ideal tenant, Mr Barnaby Forbes. So, in many respects, he proved to be; but as there is more to life than bread, so there is more to a harmonious house than neatly stacked crockery and a man who cleans his own boots. I came slowly to discover that I had unwittingly let a snake into the nest.
Was it the bringing together of Mr Forbes and Mr Holmes that nearly brought disaster on us all? Or was it, as some might say, the bringing together of Mr Holmes and Dr Watson? The reader may decide. Only, remember: a diamond is proven when you cut glass with it, but it was a diamond before you did that, and you had to be looking for a diamond to test it in the first place.
I didn’t ask exactly how Mr Forbes got his living, although he had hinted at a small private income which he added to by a minor, salaried position at the University of London, occasional publications and so on. Fanatics do not often reveal themselves all at once.
To begin with, the three of them passed like ships in the night - a nod on the stairs, a tip of the hat in the street outside. Then I caught Mr Forbes sneaking about on the first floor where he had no business being. He never even troubled to hide what he was up to. Instead, he brazened it out, saying wasn’t I just as curious as to what exactly the stream of odd visitors as all about, what ‘business’ it could be that brought silk hats, ragged shawls and everything between to my door? I’ve no time for nosey parkers and told him so, but he only laughed. You’ll know what I mean, I hope, when I say that if that laugh had brushed by me on the underground, my dress would have been for the copper as soon as I got home. I tried to dismiss the incident from my mind. But that laugh nagged at me like a raised nail in a floorboard. I could never quite hammer it down, not for years.
Yes, years. One is not obliged to make friends with one’s tenants - indeed, the books all advise against it. So the other tenant, as I often thought of him, stayed on despite my misgivings. I learned what Mr Holmes’ business was; learned, too, to tolerate the piles of paper, the pungent explosions and grubby-fingered urchins. I’d come up to remonstrate with him and he would be sitting opposite Dr Watson in silent, amiable contentment in front of the fire, reading and smoking. If alone, he’d often start playing some plaintive air from my Scots childhood - he must have sensed me coming - and I’d be struck with a feeling of…rightness so deep I wondered how he did it, he who carried on so about reason and logic and claimed stoutly that sentiment was for fools.
Spring to summer, autumn to winter; the calendar changed but little else did. That suited me admirably: I can’t abide rush and hurry, the latest fashions and new for new’s sake. It was a long six years, you’ll recall, before the world at large began to hear of Sherlock Holmes. From time to time his name had popped up in the papers, in court reports and accounts of sensational crime and more sensational arrests, but more often it was a police inspector who got the credit. Word of mouth was enough to keep him busy. The rent was paid; his tailoring grew smarter; the concert hall became a habit, not a luxury. It suited him admirably.
“A Study in Scarlet” provoked their first real quarrel, Mr Holmes and the Doctor. Not a quarrel of raised voices and slammed doors but of pursed lips, awkward silences, a brown bowler hat missing from the hallway and gone to a club for the evening. I guessed at once who had started it. Watson had misread him, his subject insisted peevishly. He had never wanted vulgar fame, the open-mouthed wonder of idle seekers after adventure and not justice, the admiration of those not his peers. It seemed, for all that, that the regard of a certain medical man was not quite so unwelcome. I found a bill for violin strings and another for microscope slides stuck between certain pages of my copy of Beeton’s Christmas Annual, unaccountably migrated to the first floor hall table.
Mr Forbes had read it, too. He tried to engage me in conversation about his neighbour, asking all manner of impertinent questions. What did I know of Mr Holmes’ family? Did he have brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews? A lady friend? He had a personal interest in such matters, he said, a sense that it was his duty as a “man of science” to discover and encourage the propagation of “superior traits” in the population. As if Mr Holmes were a prize pig!
“Had you not better ask him all those things yourself, sir? “
I knew the answer well enough. He didn’t dare.
Then again, nor should I.
Snooping: that was the only word for it. In the weeks following I saw him peeking at letters laid out for the postman in the hall, passing along the landing often and slowly, canting his ear toward the doors, watching the comings and goings of the house. Betty, the little housemaid I had ‘on approval’ from the Girls’ Domestic Institute, told me, using words I won’t repeat but which got her mouth a wash-out with soap, that he had accosted her and offered her money to carry tales, as if she was that sort of girl. He denied it, naturally.
“My dear lady; girls of that class are always inventing stories: too much leisure time to spend reading fiction. She would do better to improve her fire-laying skills - really not up to par, you know.”
A lie is enough to dismiss a girl, but I noted that he did not demand it, and that his eyes skittered over my face, never quite catching my eye. Then he laughed again. I’d have given him notice to quit then and there, but there was nothing in the paperwork about decency and honour. Hints as broad as the Thames at Woolwich that he might find better lodgings than these and far more convenient to the University, had no effect on him. He stayed.
It was when the Doctor came to me bearing an engraved invitation card and asking whether, as Mr Holmes had refused outright, I might do him the honour of going with him to a lecture organised by Mr Forbes, that I put two and two together.
“The Julius Marvell Society for Social Health Inaugural Lecture
‘Observations upon an Uncertain Future’
To be given at the Large Lecture Theatre, King’s College, The Strand
Thursday, March 9th, 1888
8 o’clock pm
Open to members of the public by invitation only.
Questions will be received from the audience at the conclusion.
Reply: B. Forbes, personal secretary to Professor Marvell”
Professor Julius Marvell was a name spoken as a blessing by those who hailed him as the great enlightener, freeing the slaves of religious superstition. Others, who’d read of his bitter personal animosities and persecutions in print, detested him. For my part, I find cruel folk not the sort I want to praise, however right they may be.
No, you are quite wrong there. Sharp-tongued, inconsiderate, aye, downright selfish at times - yes, Mr Sherlock Holmes was all those. Yet, for all that: not cruel, not mean-spirited.
Professor Marvell, who held the Chair of Zoology at the University, had lately attracted entirely too much notice by a stream of letters to The Times forecasting the demise of the Empire, pressing urgent reform to preserve the Anglo-Saxon race, by strenuous medical education and legislation if necessary. He denounced as useless sentiment the notion that we should support the poor and shelter the crippled and feeble-minded. Weakness should not be permitted to reproduce itself through the generations: that was Nature’s Law, and we, as any other animal, were bound to follow it. If there must be civilisation, let it be strong; let it be rational; let it bear the seeds of prosperity; let it be built on good stock.
I was not sure I wanted to hear any more in the same vein, but Dr Watson declared himself not content with the work of editors and professional controversialists, preferring to judge for himself. He confessed he had wondered, sometimes, if there were not just too many people in London: too many for all to live in a decent condition, too many for whom life was a burden rather than a gift. Much of what Professor Marvell wrote was deplorable, indeed. Yet if the saner parts could be teased out and encouraged and the inhumanity of the rest fairly exposed, some good might nevertheless come of it.
There are some people so determined to see the best in other people that they are a positive caution, mark my words.
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“…and to that end I have founded this Society, bowing to the entreaties of friends and sponsors that it bear my own name. It is all our members’ hope and intention that reason will prevail in our seats of government, in the medical profession and in the minds of those with the power to shape opinion in this great country and its Empire across the seas.”
The applause came loudest from a knot of young men gathered towards the front and centre of the room, but there were other enthusiasts. The Doctor clapped just long enough for good manners. He looked as I’d seen him the day young Mrs Parmenter came to him with a cancer and he didn’t know how to break the news - miserable, but steeling himself to his duty.
Mr Forbes, who’d been lurking in the shadows in a way I quite recognised, bowed to his master and announced that he would now take questions. Dr Watson raised his hand.
“Professor, I am a medical man. We are first sworn to do no harm. How do you suggest we reconcile that duty with the programme you have laid out? It seems to me there are serious objections to a proposal to deny aid to so many of our fellow men.”
Marvell sighed and stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat before turning to the rest of the audience.
“There, ladies and gentlemen, is an example of the kind of antiquated thinking that must be struck from professional education altogether. ‘Do no harm’? What greater harm to the health of the whole can it be to refuse to cut off a gangrenous limb? Make no mistake, Doctor,” and he looked the dear man up and down with a sneer, “every hour you spend in the charity wards patching up the unfit so that they may drag their sturdy peers down, every pigeon-chested wreck you sustain with milk and eggs and seaside air beyond their natural span, every woman you do not render fit above all to bear healthy children, which is females’ whole purpose in nature - waste, sir; it is all wasted time and effort.”
Other questions flew down thick and fast upon the Professor, some to be dismissed as he had done Dr Watson’s, some planted by sympathisers, to be petted and gilded with praise and congratulation. If he could have had it so, the whole chamber would have been one giant hall of mirrors telling his own words back to him. The workhouses, prisons and asylums should have no doctoring whatsoever; the so-called pagan ancients knew what to do with unwanted births (he said no more, out of consideration for the “ladies present” - as if none of us could fathom his meaning for ourselves). As for the “pathetic fad” for women’s education - did any of us “dear creatures” wish to be rendered sterile and prematurely aged by brainwork for which all true scientific evidence clearly demonstrated we were not fitted?
**************************************
Mr Holmes’ satisfaction at not having wasted his own time listening to Professor Marvell was short-lived. About a minute or so. When Mr Forbes returned he was waiting for him in the hall.
Yes, yes, shame on me for eavesdropping and for judging others for doing the same; but it was my responsibility to see that Betty had learned how to properly polish a stair banister. I didn’t hear it all, only the end of a conversation in which one man blustered and stewed and the other sliced at him like a man attacking a side of beef with a freshly ground blade.
“Furthermore, Mr Forbes, if you do not of your own accord cease insulting my friends, prying into my affairs and sullying the good name of science, rest assured it is well within my power to compel you.”
“I...I serve science, sir. Surely a man of your abilities can see the wisdom of our cause?”
“I see a failure to distinguish ability from worth, science from prejudice, and a presumption of personal superiority which I note does not seem to have communicated itself to any young ladies of your acquaintance. In your place, I should be less concerned at the marrying of others and more with my own. Then at least the members of this household - and the working girls of Shepherd Market - would be left in peace.”
Mr Holmes does not fear to make enemies. I think that is because he expects to meet them in open contest, and to emerge victor. So he does, by and large. But the face I saw as Mr Forbes passed me on the stairs promised nothing open, nothing fair.
He - or more likely his employer - seemed to have some powerful friends. Apart from occasional police cases, work began to fall off from that day, so far that there were whole weeks when no-one called at all. The lack of occupation turned into more and more visits to the chemist’s shop, until Mr Price shot me worried glances over the tooth powders and hoped that Mr Holmes was quite all right, Mrs Hudson? So it was more than Miss Morstan’s sensitive face and trim figure that commended her to the Doctor.
I could have mapped the case, and Dr Watson’s lightning courtship, almost hour by hour merely from Mr Holmes’ own mood. The case with its mysteries and strange characters brought new light into his eyes. He delighted in the outrageousness of playing captain to a band of street urchins, in a disguise so thick that not even his friend knew him, in dangerous adventure and the chase on the river as he closed in on his quarry. Yet as he watched the Doctor begin to think of another life and another, gentler companion, he reached out to pull him back from that brink, hardly knowing how to do it but only that he must. How will it compare to this, he seemed to plead - those quiet evenings in front of the fire, a list of tradesmen with bunions and their caged, flirtatious wives?
The day after the engagement was announced in the papers I went in for the breakfast things and found him laid out on the sofa, insensible under the influence of heaven-knew-what. Crumpled in his hand was a letter; it fell to the floor as he slipped deeper into a sleep that had nothing of peace in it, only escape. I put it back on his chest - it was not mine to read, but it seemed to be from Miss Morstan. A note of thanks, no doubt, and not only for a puzzle solved.
Mr Forbes offered his congratulations grudgingly - I supposed, half from envy, half from a barely-concealed opinion that of his neighbours the inferior, not the superior, was set to found a family.
He was not invited to the wedding.
We did not see the Doctor for months after. It made my heart ache to see Mr Holmes work alone, successful as ever but seeming untouched by it now, to fear he was dying by inches from lack of sleep, food, fresh air…from lack of love. There, I will say it. He can’t stop me saying it now, couldn’t stop me thinking of it then. I offered what I could. He said he had a mother already and told me to go away and looked again at the empty chair opposite his own by the fireside.
I asked one day if he had heard how the Watsons were getting on - the practice, the new house, whether there was any… special news. He shrugged, nose in his newspaper.
“I saw him in the street last week. Business is adequate - he had been to the country for an extended stay, tending to a prosperous patient who is fond of dogs - Mrs Watson is keeping him well fed and better shod. No ‘special news’.” The thought of his friend peering into a baby carriage with a fond expression passed across his face like a premonition of catastrophe.
“Well, you might have mentioned it at the time, Mr Holmes. I do hope you gave him my best regards.”
“I gathered that intelligence from a cursory inspection - he did not see me.” He snapped the paper open with a flick of his wrists, making it clear that if I asked why he did not call out to the Doctor, he would deem it interference. “Mr Forbes continues his crusade, I see.”
Professor Marvell had been felled by a stroke and his secretary was now his mouthpiece, signatory to his every published opinion. The Julius Marvell Society had lately turned its attentions to that great social evil, the “confirmed bachelor”. It was one thing to lack the means to marry, another to know oneself tainted by hereditary weakness and thus to sacrifice one’s prospects for the good of all. But to shun the society of women altogether from mere preference was gross dereliction of duty. There were dark hints of more, withheld from print only out of the wish that certain pernicious habits should not be dignified by public discussion.
Just as well no-one cares to listen at keyholes to the talk at landladies’ gatherings. I’ve been grateful for the secret of Miss Penross’ special blend soaking salts - sovereign for removing stubborn stains of a particular kind from gentlemen’s bed linen and handkerchiefs - for years.
Yes, I am well aware what else the articles may have been talking about. I was well aware then. Landladies know what is going on in their own houses; and when a certain silence falls at a gathering at the mention of name, of a pair of names, they know what goes on elsewhere, too.
What proceeded to go on at 221b Baker Street turned very queer indeed, by and by. Mr Forbes began to get a daily letter, addressed to him personally and in the same hand. After a week or two, he started to haunt the front door at delivery times. The professor grew no better in his health, he said, and had begun to think of his lasting legacy, in case his life was cut short. Unable to campaign on the lecture circuit, he had petitioned members of Parliament, Police Inspectors and Judges by letter, urging a zealous prosecution of “moral crimes which put the health of the nation at risk”, as Mr Forbes framed it to me with an embarrassed cough. No, the sudden tide of correspondence was not from his master. It was a rather more personal matter he did not quite feel able to disclose as yet. Perhaps, in time…Then he smirked and all but skipped away up the stairs.
The day, about a month later, that a small parcel came for him, he sidled up to me as I was putting away linen.
“Mrs Hudson, I wonder if you might do me a small favour? I am due a visitor this afternoon. Propriety forbids that this visitor, a young lady, be entertained alone in my quarters. Might we use your own sitting room, and you stay on hand to reassure her that I am sensible of her modesty and discretion?”
He somehow contrived to imply that Mr Holmes, merely by seeing lady clients without a chaperone, was cheapening their virtue. Nevertheless, that was hardly this young lady’s fault. I agreed; Mr Forbes was effusive in his thanks and snapped open the clasp of a small hinged picture frame to show me the face behind all the letters.
The photograph was not very well done, and the sitter had been unable to sit perfectly still, so that ghostly extra limbs blurred her dress and boots. The face was sweet enough, but terribly young, scarcely enough to be out of school, and Mr Forbes thirty at least. I was not sure that I approved.
They had been exchanging letters, at least once a day, since she had dared congratulate him on a notably pompous leading article in the Julius Marvell Society’s Newsletter. Something (Mr Holmes, having found a copy slipped under his door, had used it to wrap a broken test tube) about Woman’s Role in the Future of England. Miss Perry confessed herself so convinced as to the truth of his views that she had abandoned her plans for further study of music and devoted herself instead to learning household management and hygiene, readying herself for her true calling.
I’d be happy enough to talk about that when I’ve seen her clean a mirror without leaving streaks; but doubtless she imagined she’d have a maid for that kind of thing.
Five o’clock approached and Mr Forbes paced up and down in my parlour as a man possessed. From the first floor the distinct strains of a cheeky music hall song about a shy young man and his rather forward lady-friend, picked out on a violin used to sneering at such fare, mocked him none too gently. His face twisted in rank annoyance and he was about to storm up and demand Mr Holmes stop it at once, when in the second the doorbell rang the strings stopped as if cut and the whole house fell silent.
She was very polite, every deferential to me, taller than she had seemed in her photograph and slender as a reed with a neat little green hat and veil. Her voice rose rarely above a murmur, not the excitable, impressionable figure cut by Mr Forbes’s enthusiastic account of her that morning. I tried not to eavesdrop on their conversation. In all honesty, there was no need. Mr Forbes needed no words to tell her (and me) that he was utterly smitten, and if her shy glances over the rim of a teacup were anything to go by, his luck was set fair in that direction.
There was a definite hint of orange blossom in the air.
Talk had flagged a little when someone knocked on the front door. Visitors rang, tradesmen knocked, as instructed - we having no separate entrance as there is at grander establishments - but I had ordered nothing. I made my excuses and went to see if there was perhaps some mistake in the address: although, since Mr Holmes became famous, such mistakes have been rare as leeks in April.
A tall, fat man with ginger whiskers and half-glasses under a broad-brimmed felt hat stood jumping from foot to foot, wringing his hands and begging in a piping voice to be admitted to see Mr Barnaby Forbes without delay, as he had news of the gravest nature concerning Professor Marvell.
I tried to put him off, indeed I tried, but tears sprang to his eyes and he mopped them with a fold of his sleeve. If there is a thing I cannot abide -judge me for it if you wish - it is a crying man. Not that I have much time for tears in general; after all, it’s the same life whether we spend it crying or laughing.
The visitor tipped his hat graciously at Miss Perry, extended a black-gloved hand to Mr Forbes and wrung his arm until he winced.
“Oh, dear, oh dear ; oh, my good man, now I come to it I find I can hardly get the words out. Professor Marvell, our dear Professor, light of our lives, sage of our age; he is…he is…”
The Professor’s Secretary sat open-mouthed, his own imagination supplying the missing word in a whisper.
“…dead?”
“No, no, not in the slightest,” broke in the fat man impatiently. “What a notion, indeed no: I am sorry to say it is so very much worse than that.”
“ Worse?”
“He is unlucky enough not only to be a fool, but to have one as a constant companion,” declared a familiar voice. Mr Sherlock Holmes (for it was he), turned swiftly on one heel despite the padding which added a good foot to his girth and swooped on the figure sitting opposite, who seemed suddenly on the edge of flight.
“…and you, boy!” he cried, just in time to see that figure jump and cringe before a hasty recovery and a fan put up in front of the face.
“This, sir, is beyond outrage! What is the meaning of it, of your insult to my employer and myself, that unspeakable remark to Miss Perry?”
“Simple enough, Mr Forbes. You have been duped, and I fancy you have me to thank that I saved you from public humiliation in the very near future. You were intending to propose today, were you not?”
A furious scarlet flush on the other’s face was his only answer. Mr Holmes nodded. “Quite so; followed, no doubt, by a celebratory photograph, engineered by the grateful recipient of your affections. The fatal objection is this,” and he lifted Miss Perry’s hat and veil clean off her head, taking a hairpiece with it. Underneath was a close-shaven scalp. “She” was most definitely in fact “he”, a fair and pretty youth with false lashes and touches of greasepaint so well done that you wouldn’t see unless you were already looking for them. Mr Forbes sat down heavily in his chair.
The lad would not let on who had put him up to it.
“The precise name is incidental. It is bound to be one of a list recently shown to me by Inspector Gregson of Scotland Yard; persons of eminence against whom you and Professor Marvell urged investigation under the Criminal Law Amendment Act on the grounds they have…unnatural inclinations and pose a threat to your vision of ‘improved’ society . In the majority of cases, it constitutes a clear libel. Were you counting on embarrassment to prevent them taking open action against you? “
Mr Forbes at last had the decency to hang his head; or perhaps it was only shame at being found out.
“The innocent had nothing to fear,” he whined. “The Professor only wanted…”
“…The power of the law to do his bidding. Persuasion is one thing: argument, reason, appeal; the other party remains free to accept or reject. This is not persuasion: it is persecution, an offence against justice. Put a stop to it, Forbes. I believe you owe me at least that much return for my help. And do not, pray, say whatever you were about to say.”
Mr Forbes, whose face had taken on a mutinous cast for a second or so, closed his mouth.
The youth slipped away - he had committed no crime, and took with him a note promising that Forbes would be dealt with by a third party, and that he should not suffer for his failure to pass as Miss Perry. After all, as I imagine the note concluded, he had been exposed to the most skilled scrutiny in London.
“How ever did you know?” I asked afterwards. “I had not an inkling until you took off her…his headgear.”
“Why, my dear Mrs Hudson,” and there should have been another name there, it was plain as the nose on his face - which, I’m sure he won’t mind me saying, is a feature very hard to miss - that he felt it, and smiled in a crooked kind of way , “Observation and deduction. How else? Mr Forbes, puffed up with amatory success, showed me this morning the same photograph he showed you. It is a notable fact that males sit in a different way to females. The shifting of pose caught by the camera was suggestive, though not conclusive. I habitually scan all the incoming post, not just my own,” here he sent me an apologetic glance, not that I have secrets I would care to keep from him, even if I could, “and seen the recent regular correspondence, also Mr Forbes’ preoccupied air and the singular way in which he handled those particular letters.”
“They were written by a woman, not by the person who called today. I note by the way that he is right-handed - inference from the photographic pose with right hand on the chair back - and the letter writer favours the left. Really an unpardonable error, right-handers are two a penny. Who do they think lives in this house besides Forbes, another dunderhead? I hope you do not mind, but I prevailed upon your fellow landlady Mrs Scott-Roberts to watch out at the post office in Queen Street this morning for someone posting an envelope matching the copy I gave her. She is most observant, as you yourself lately remarked.”
What I’d actually said was: “She’d spot a single drop of candle wax on a polished sideboard at twenty feet, that one,” but no matter.
“No lady posted it, but a gentleman. Not a footman, not a messenger. It was just possible that a brother or trusted friend acted as her envoy, but taken together with the rest, I was forced to conclude that someone was deliberately playing a trick. Marvell is protected - even those accused of dishonourable crimes have honour enough not to target a dying man. Even so, I believe that the true poison springs from that source; Forbes merely dips his pen in the well.”
“Imagine,” I chuckled. “A man finding himself engaged to another man!”
Mr Holmes didn’t laugh. When I looked up at his face it was grave and distracted. His gaze seemed fixed on something far away, some ghostly glimpse of a ship on the far horizon which he strained to catch. When he replied, I had some effort myself to hear him.
“Yes, imagine that.”
It didn’t seem much of a victory, not like the old days when we’d often raise a celebratory glass together, the three of us, the Doctor promising to immortalise some little slip-up, Mr Holmes scoffing that he had done whatever-it-was on purpose, dear fellow. I had another try at cheering him up.
“You’ve taught Inspector Gregson well, that he came to you instead of running amok with that list and ruining a lot of good folk’s reputations. I expect that, knowing he lodges here, he wanted you to take Mr Forbes to task about it, and so you have, and no-one truly hurt by it.”
He stood very straight, there in our hall, shook his head, took gentle hold of both my hands and, as it seemed, put his very life and worth into them for safekeeping.
“No, Mrs Hudson. He brought the list to me only because one of the names on it was mine.”
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It was a nine days’ wonder at our gatherings: Mrs Scott-Roberts was fit to burst at her part in it, telling me how pleased she was to help, what a scandal for me to have a man dressed as a women coming through my door, lucky it didn’t make the papers after all, think of the talk! I headed her off from fishing for the details of whatever grudge made someone do something so very unkind to ‘poor Mr Forbes’.
What did I think about what Mr Holmes had told me? If he’d said the accusation was false, of course I’d have believed him, no question. Although, he never did say that, only made sure any copies of the list were tracked down and destroyed. The others accused never knew; no libel suits were filed. In any case, who would want such things discussed in open court? True or false, once rumour has its claws in a person, their good name is in shreds before you know it.
The Professor dismissed Mr Forbes once he refused to follow orders. Search as he might, which in his circumstances was not very far, he could not find a replacement. His landlady - Mrs Simpkins, nice woman but needs a better dressmaker, if you want my opinion - and a nurse saw to his needs. He passed away the next year and you won’t find many people nowadays who even remember the name Marvell. The Society collapsed. Mr Forbes moved to Manchester soon after, to work at the University there. We heard nothing more of him. He didn’t write.
So then it was just the two of us, and often just the one. Mr Holmes took to gallivanting off abroad - places I’d never heard of - at a moments’ notice. That, or lying in the sitting room, solving cases in his head at the point of a needle. The cocaine helped him think, he said.
“And the morphine?” I had seen the empty bottles.
“…Helps with other, less soluble problems.” There it was again, the glance he could hardly help making, towards the empty chair.
So many times I was on the point of wiring to Kensington, that he missed his friend; what stopped me was that Mr Holmes would surely find me out. Out of pride, he would deny it to Dr Watson’s face and send him away with some thoughtless jibe. These things take the time they take, they cannot be forced.
At the right time the Doctor came to call again, though not to stay, not yet. At all the right times, when Mr Holmes needed him most, he was there, and they did as much good as any reforming society.
At the right time, for all the tears and falsehoods, they parted again.
In the three years after, one of them came to understand a thing or two about himself and the other learned a particular sort of courage. At the right time they were reunited and, God forgive me for saying it but it’s true, at the right time Mrs Mary Watson had already passed into blessed memory, and Dr Watson never found the right time to marry again. Instead, this time, he stayed.
No, Mr Holmes won’t ever marry. Not in the regular sense. In the other hand there is plenty to be said for the irregular sense. What, you think a piece of paper makes a marriage? I beg to differ, my dear. I may be called Mrs Hudson, I may wear widow’s black and have a picture of the late Mr Hudson on my mantelpiece, but piece of paper I never had nor needed none, and nor do they.
Whom do I mean by ‘they’? Well, as a certain gentleman of my acquaintance might say, observe and deduce.
END