Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets (4 page)

“Could be anywhere,” Crash said quickly. “It’s likely gone out on the lot somewhere.”

As Crash swept Agent Trenet out of the wagon, I noticed the pearl in her other ear.

My stomach fell. How had her other earring landed in that can?

In that moment, my years of wandering ended. All of the steps I’d taken—from Harlem, to South Carolina, to the beaches and trenches in France, to Alabama and now to this mud show in the middle of Arkansas—all roads seemed to have led to this moment. To this puzzle with the answer already filled in. A decision was made as I followed them out, although I’d not even asked myself the question.

“Moriarty,” I said under my breath.

“What was that?” she asked.

Over her head, Crash gave me a stern glance.

“Nothing, Adele,” I answered.

She shrugged and ran toward the crumb car, where a beefy man with a broad moustache waited. “Excuse me, Mr. Mars. A word,” she called.

I lingered behind, watching the work of a Pinkerton Agent at the top of her game, now a pawn in someone else’s.
Moriarty
. Our killer. He was there, somewhere at the circus, watching us. He’d followed us enough to pluck up the pearl earring when Adele dropped it. Had slipped into Crash’s wagon and had been kind enough to lock up on his way out.

The case was here. The answer to it all was here. Not on the road or behind a desk at the Pinkerton home office.

Crash put his hands in his pockets and sidled up beside me leisurely. “Payday is every Friday. First of May like yourself would get three aces a week for your pocket. Until we get something else square, you can kip in my bunk.”

“Excuse me?”

“Unless you would rather stay with Mrs. Hudson. She’d enjoy that.”

I laughed. “A dwarf and a one-legged negro. That belongs in your freakshow for certain, Crash.”

“Everyone works,” he continued. “Normally I’d start you as a candy butcher, but that requires a lot of walking the lot. No, you’re not a vendor. Though you might make a good talker. Inside talker, I’m thinking. You catch details. You’re not as good as me, but then, who is?”

“Humble son of a gun, aren’t you?”

“You can start tomorrow, Dandy. I’ll introduce you around tonight while Adele is questioning my folks.”

“Wait, wait,” I said. “I didn’t say I’d run off and join your circus.”

“Of course you did,” he said. “And you’re going to. It’s settled.”

“Shouldn’t I think about it?”

“You’ve already decided.”

I had, of course. But... “And just how do you know?”

Sanford Haus smiled wide as a Cheshire cat. “You called me Crash.”

Kelly was pretty much a perfect match for this collection, as the author of
Erasing Sherlock
, a time-travel paradox novel about the great detective; I’m hugely indebted to the indefatigable Deborah Stanish for putting me in touch. ‘Black Alice’ is a wonderfully mannerly Enlightenment-era story pitting our hero against the parochial superstitions of seventeenth-century Worcestershire. And I have a soft spot for Mrs. Malpass’s little spotted spaniel...

S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES DID
not care to leave London under most circumstances. Not even the plague. Not even the Great Fire had managed to stir him very far. It wasn’t so much the dangers of the road—the robbers and cutthroats and bands of gypsies—no. It was the horrors of being confined in a coach for days with lawyers and tax assessors.

So when he invited himself along on a four day journey to Worcester before the subject had even been broached, Watson, though grateful, was understandably surprised.

“My dear fellow,” Holmes admonished. “It was perfectly obvious you were about to beg me to accompany you.”

“Beg you?”

Holmes set the
Oxford Gazette
aside, oblivious to Watson’s affronted tone, and leaned back, waving airily at the paper the doctor had in hand. “You’re holding a letter from someone residing in Stourbridge with whom you regularly correspond. The letter is brief, compared with other such missives you’ve received from this person, and contains news of a troubling nature, judging from your expression as you read it. Something about the matter is suspicious and, dare I suggest, bizarre. Hence your desire to ask for my aid.”

“Well, that is it exactly, Holmes. You will recall my mentioning a benefactor, Rev. Lilly?”

Holmes grunted an affirmative.

“The matter concerns the daughter of Mrs. Mills, his housekeeper. It seems she’s been accused of murder.” Watson cleared his throat of residual embarrassment. “By maleficium.”

It was not often that Watson could surprise his friend, and never so much that the man’s mouth hung open. Even so, astonishment turned quickly to action. “You country people and your witches,” Holmes said, bounding from his chair. He then set about making travel arrangements with an irrepressible and unholy glee.

T
HE DUMPLINGS MADE
by Mrs. Mills, all fluffy and tender and coated in gravy, dwelt in John Watson’s memory with such high regard that he started awake from a dream of being in a storm at sea and trying to catch the dumplings in his mouth as they rolled back and forth along a plank. The dumplings only stopped rolling when the coach in which he dreamt also stopped rolling. On the bench across from him, Mrs. Malpass’s little spotted spaniel stared haughtily at him a moment, then politely averted its eyes as Watson wiped a bit of drool from the side of his chin.

His fellow travellers within the coach had dwindled over the course of the journey to just himself, Mrs. Malpass, her daughter and the dog.

The ladies, only just awakening themselves, looked about in confused hopefulness and were immediately cross about it. “What now?” the older woman said. She leaned across to open the shutter only to draw back at the ominous growling of her dog. The daughter shrunk against the older woman, whimpering, “Oh, Mama!” as the carriage door was thrown wide, to the screams of all and sundry.

Sherlock Holmes stood in the blinking sunshine. “Do calm yourselves, ladies.” He cocked an eye at Watson. “And
gentleman
.”

Seeing it was only Holmes, the spaniel set to wagging its tail enthusiastically. Holmes reached over to give it a quick scratch behind the ears. “We were plunged into a nasty rut in the road just then. Tully and son need to check for damage, and we’re being encouraged to make what ablutions we are able, and to breakfast if we are so fortunate as to still have food.”

Watson’s stomach whined fretfully. “How long a delay?”

“If there is no damage or little, we should reach Stourbridge by noon.”

Ideally it would have been mid-morning, but ideal travel schedules were rarely met even in midsummer when the roads were passable. Midsummer was a busy and opportune time for highwaymen as well, and they’d kept good luck on that count too.

Though they’d both paid for the relative comforts of the coach’s interior, Holmes had forgone those early on, preferring to ride up top with his pistol at the ready. Despite being covered in travel grime, he looked annoyingly well rested.

The spaniel ran off into the trees as soon as it was on the ground. Mrs. Malpass indicated that she and her daughter intended to follow it into a wooded area, and that they would be within shouting distance if they needed assistance. Watson took their meaning and went the opposite direction to relieve himself.

As he wandered back toward the coach, wondering if he could scrape together a meal of the crumbs left in his pack, the little dog burst through the brush ahead of its mistresses and dropped to the ground to worry at whatever it had in its mouth. The item drew Holmes’s attention immediately.

“What have you got there, my girl?” he said, crouching. She eyed him, lips pulled back in a snarl and then, having made her point, let him take it from her mouth.

“Is that a horseshoe?” Watson asked.

“It is indeed. French, by the looks of it.” Holmes wiped away the dog spittle, dirt and grasses. “Made for hard riding. It’s well- worn, but you can see here how the heel was much thicker than is preferred in England. One of the calkins has broken off, but this was quality work. Expensive, too, I should think. It could have been repaired and used a while yet.” He turned the thing over and over in his hands. “The rider must have been travelling fast, and either didn’t notice the loss—which is highly unlikely—or dare not return to search for it.”

Tully’s son, a youth of twelve, overheard the exchange and said excitedly, “Could belong to the fellow that robbed Bill Tucker’s coach in May—” The rest of his speculation was forestalled by his father’s hand on the back of his head.

Holmes put the horseshoe into the pocket of his coat.

There were no further incidents, and by noon they had arrived at the bustling little town of Stourbridge.

“A
LAS
, J
OHN
,”
THE
Reverend Lilly began with a wistful smile, “since the good Mrs. Mills passed a year ago, the secret of her dumplings has sadly passed with her. Alice tries, the dear, but she hasn’t her mother’s deft hand. She may—that is, I had
hoped
she would acquire the knack. I only took her on as cook three months ago. She was working the dairy farms before that.”

Watson remembered Alice Mills as a round-faced, sturdy little thing chasing chickens around the yard, black curls flying, dark eyes gleaming mischief. Full of laughter and endless questions, she’d been. Full of the Devil, some had said, though not in earnest, he was certain. She’d the sort of high spirits and bright disposition that made people fond and forgiving, not resentful. Her father had died a soldier in the battle of Worchester, though rumour had it he’d been a gypsy, not a soldier at all, and the soldier-tale mere invention of Mrs. Mills. Apparently this bit of gossip had calcified into a ‘fact’ used to explain Alice’s dark eyes and her apparent penchant for murder by witchcraft.

Watson drank to the memory of Mrs. Mill’s and to her dumplings, then filled the hollow of his stomach with the perfectly serviceable bread and cheese provided. His associate was somewhat more measured in taking his repast.

Holmes had gone out immediately upon arriving at the reverend’s house, the horseshoe weighing heavy in the pocket of his coat. When he’d returned, a quarter hour ago, the horseshoe had not returned with him.

Both refreshed by food and drink, they could now give full attention to the reason for their visit.

“Who has accused the girl of murder?” Holmes asked. It was not the question Watson assumed he would have asked first.

Rev. Lilly adjusted a wig that didn’t need adjusting, a telling habit indicative of the effort the old man was making not to pass judgement. “The dead boy’s mother, Margaret Bowen, and his employer, Wenzel Ternac. According to them, Jimmy had spurned her love and she’d set about exacting revenge. Jimmy and Alice had been overheard arguing some days before his death.”

“About what?”

“That he was going to London with Mr Ternac and she... was not.”

“And this conversation was overheard by whom?”

“By Ternac. He claims she threatened the boy with a ‘hexen,’ as he called it.” At Holmes’s expression, Rev. Lilly sighed. “I know it must seem ridiculous in this new age of science. But Alice is like many country girls, in that she knows the lore of the love charm, a few medicinal herbs, some tinctures and talismans and the like. Nothing more sinister, though, I’m certain of it. She was sweet on the boy, it’s true—and perhaps he didn’t return her affections, I don’t know—but the proof her accusers have given is hardly proof at all! They could have placed the items there themselves, and who could claim otherwise?”

“What items?”

“Alice had a little cloth bag worn on a string beneath her bodice, containing, amongst other items, a lock of the lad’s hair woven into a ring.

“Surely this is not unusual for sweethearts.”

“No, but in combination with a similar pouch found beneath Jimmy’s bed, and the strange symbols drawn in chalk over the door of Mr. Ternac’s shop, it was damning. Then there is the witch’s bottle the Bowen woman made to protect her son, found dug up and broken with its contents scattered.”

Holmes leaned forward, elbows upon his knees, and fingers steepled together. Something about the information had set the gears in motion. “Have these items been kept in evidence?”

“I believe so.”

“Good. I will want to examine them. But... I am confused about the broken bottle. The witch’s bottle. It is my understanding that a witch’s bottle is designed to
repel
the witch, to send her harmful intentions back upon her. If the witch believes herself to be a witch—that is, if she buys what she is selling—she’d be disinclined to touch the bottle at all, I should think, let alone dig it up and smash it to bits.”

“You seek to apply logic to the sadly illogical, Holmes,” Watson chided.

“Perhaps, but so, then, is someone else. If Jimmy Bowen were suddenly without the benefit of this magical prophylactic, he would then be exposed to malicious intent via witchcraft. If someone wished to imply murder by maleficium, then removing this barrier would certainly convince the boy’s mother, at the very least. We must determine who had the most to gain from the young man’s death.”

“I can’t fathom who that may be, Mr. Holmes. He was well liked by everyone. Mr. Ternac’s business was so much improved by Jimmy’s assistance that they’d made plans to move shop to London. And lest you think his mother suspect, she was to join them there.”

“So it would seem that only the spurned Alice Mills had cause to wish Jimmy dead.”

Lilly nodded, then immediately shook his head. None of this made sense to him.

Holmes looked thoughtful a moment before asking, “What was the actual physical cause of death, Reverend? Has it been determined?”

“Apparently, he went to bed that night as usual and never awakened. He was discovered in the morning by Mr. Ternac when he did not report for work.”

“Was Jimmy apprenticed to Mr. Ternac?”

“Oh, no. He’d been apprenticed to a glazier named Vandernedon, who died last year. Ternac was so impressed with Jimmy’s skill that he hired him as assistant.”