A Study in Lavender: Queering Sherlock Holmes (13 page)

“Still, we would like to hear about you. And perhaps it would be good for you to tell yourself to people who would listen with no motive or hostility.”

“All right. My father was a soldier, a sergeant with the Berkshires, in the 66th Regiment of Foot.”

My breath caught as I heard young Tanner mention the unit that was my own old regiment. It was with them that I received the injuries that ended my career as an army doctor, brought me back to England, and led to my meeting Sherlock Holmes in 1881 and becoming his friend across the thirteen years since. My mind raced. Yes, searching my store of old memories, I recalled Sergeant Edward Tanner. The Arthur Tanner before us, though elegantly trim, resembled his much larger father. His facial features were similar to his father’s and equally handsome, yet carefully, exquisitely modelled. I’d known the father while treating a lance wound he received in a skirmish. Now, in my distracted mind, my old comrade was transported to us, as if walking down Oxford Street at night in uniform, nodding agreement with his son’s tale.

Arthur Tanner continued, “He was a big, muscular man, or so my mother always told me. He seemed huge to me. She loved him to distraction. She said he had a laugh that filled the room, that filled her life. My own recollection of him is vivid but confused, for he went away at the outbreak of the Second Afghan War, in 1878 when I was only four years old.”

“It was on a Tuesday, the twenty-seventh of July, in 1880. Three weeks later, my mother received a letter. She called me to her and hugged me tight and told me that he’d died.”

I had been in the battle that day, tending the injured, and had only escaped, badly hurt myself, through the courage of my orderly.

One thing, though, surprised me. Arthur Tanner was educated. He did not dress like the son of an Army sergeant, nor did he speak like one. Hoping to distract him from the memories of his father’s death, I asked him about it.

“At first I felt only my own childish loss. Later I began to feel my mother’s. Then I realized that she was not only sad, she was ill, and worried. We had no other relatives. The pension we received from the Army was merely a supplement to what she brought in by sewing and doing odd work. By the time I was ten years old, she died.

“They had taken her body away, and I lay in my bed sobbing. I did not know how long it would be before they sent me to live in a workhouse. I also did not know whether such a place would be better or worse than the life I saw boys live on the street. Parents in poor families would scare us children with old tales of Oliver Twist, for we could see evidence all around of the lessons those stories illustrated. I was afraid of the workhouse – and equally of the streets.”

I looked at Holmes and saw that Tanner had given him too a shiver. Mr Dickens is universally admired among people able to read him, but many of those readers are too unrealistic to accept his serious meaning. Literate souls like them are outnumbered, still today, by the majority who cannot read and know his stories by hearsay – people who live like characters in his novels but with less hope. Only in a book would Oliver Twist be discovered the natural child of a gentleman. Young Arthur Tanner’s birth, to a fallen soldier, was noble enough for me, but he would more likely come into the hands of a Fagin than of a kindly Mr Brownlow. I awaited the sequel of his story uneasily.

Tanner continued, “Mrs Renfrew came in, without knocking. She was a woman my mother had done work for. She comforted me and told me she knew a man, a certain Mr Kent, who occasionally interested himself in lost boys and might wish to help me. I begged her eagerly to take me to him.

“She told me no boy might meet Mr Kent who was not properly presentable. She made me bathe, she cut my hair and fingernails, and she dressed me in my best clothes. I enquired if I were presentable yet, and she said, ‘No, but you’re as good as might be in the circumstances. It’s a blessing you’re such an uncommon pretty lad to begin with.’

“Mrs Renfrew brought me to a block of flats at some distance away, and we climbed to an apartment high up under the roof and entered it. There was no one there at the moment. It had only a single, irregularly shaped room with a ceiling that sloped in different directions. It was clean and of a good size – nicer than any of the rooms my family had lived in, even while my father was alive and still in London. I responded to the plain but good quality of its furnishings, though I did not yet have the knowledge to recognize the features that gave the room such taste. There was a spinet piano. The window showed the leafy branches of the top of a tree. I neared the window and saw more trees, and grass below surrounding the neighbouring houses across the quiet lane behind the building.

“‘I’ve sent Mr Kent a message. We must wait for a while until he comes. Perhaps you’d like to look at some of those books? You can lie on the bed.’

“There were shelves of books. I’d never seen so many books in a single place. At first I was frightened to go near them, since I didn’t want to betray my inability to read. Then I saw a shelf that had picture books with only a few words. I wondered if one of the room’s inhabitants were a boy.

“I curled up snug on the bed, looking at pictures and using my incomplete knowledge of letters to puzzle out what words I could. Of course, I eventually fell asleep.

“When I awoke, it was dark outside. The candles that had now been lit in the room showed a pleasant man seated in a chair next to the bed, looking at me and smiling gently. Mrs Renfrew had gone.

“After several such words my interest in reading flagged. Instead I was aware of being in the cosy room, sitting on someone else’s bed and talking with an adult who seemed to find nothing in the world more urgent than paying attention to me. At first, the temporariness made it delicious, a stolen pleasure. Then it became real to me that sooner or later I’d be back on my own bed in my mother’s empty lodging, worried about the future.

“I surprised Mr Kent by breaking into tears while he was explaining the different ways of pronouncing the letter ‘c.’

“He reached down to pick me off the bed where I sat beside him. I reached up to hold his neck and scrambled onto his lap. He brushed my tears with his fingertips. ‘Tanny… Tanny, Tanny, Tanny,’ he cooed. ‘Mrs Renfrew has told me how you lost your parents, and what a good and intelligent little boy you are.’

“I cried even more and hugged him even harder. Ten years old, I had been fancying myself too grown up to cry, and it upset me to be so unrestrained in front of this nice man in the room with the books.

“He waited patiently for a lull in my sobbing. ‘Tanny, perhaps I can help you. Perhaps we might help each other.’

“‘Why?’ I asked.

“He had allowed me to sit on his lap, to hug him, and to get him wet with my tears. Now it was he who initiated physical contact. He caressed me along each of my arms. One of his hands ruffled my hair and then the other in front traced the features of my face. He said, ‘I’m lonely now too. I would like to be with an affectionate boy. Perhaps that boy might be you.’

“In response, I held him tightly again.

“He ran a hand down my chest and rubbed my tummy. He stroked my bottom through the fabric of the trousers. I knew it was wrong to permit this, but I was lonely and frightened and I trusted him. I loved the feeling of being held by the strength of an adult male, and so I moved my position to answer the pressure of his hand. He asked if I would like to spend the night in that room.

“‘Yes.’ I would.

“Mr Kent told me to take off my clothes except for my shirt, and he brought me to the wash stand. When I had washed, he opened the bedding, let me climb in, and closed it again. Then, after blowing out the candles, he lay down on top of the other side of the bed, still in his clothes, and put his arm over the covers above me. I lay there, warm under several layers – my shirt, my bedding, his clothing, and the weight of his arm. I fell back to sleep.

“The next morning, he was gone and Mrs Renfrew had returned. She said that Mr Kent would visit me again that night. She gave me breakfast and took me shopping for groceries and a new set of clothes. When we came back, she showed me how to tidy the room and she made me bathe and change. I protested at bathing two days in a row, but she told me I must plan now to keep myself clean every day.

“Mr Kent greeted me and asked me about the events of my day. I told him I enjoyed staying in the room but I worried its owners would return and not like me being there. He smiled gently and told me that the room belonged to him and had been untenanted. It could now belong to me.

“Our routine began. Mornings, I remained alone, reading and working on assigned studies. In the afternoon, Mrs Renfrew would come to shop with me, teach me to cook, and supervise my housekeeping. Almost every day Mr Kent appeared late, ate dinner with me, and stayed the evening. He was most careful and patient in teaching me to speak with a proper accent and to converse well. He told me it would be no good to him to have a boy who spoke poorly or dressed badly or was ignorant. I would have to be a boy he could be seen with. Indeed, after some months, I regularly attended him outside and adults would fuss over me and think I was his nephew or his son.

“He encouraged me to read the books that my room was stocked with, and he taught me mathematics and school subjects. A music teacher taught me to sing and to play the piano. As I became older, Mr Kent made sure I understood history and current events and appreciated the arts. None of this work seemed burdensome to him. He acted as if being able to interact with me, moulding me, were itself a main reason why I was worth keeping and spending money on – equal in importance to the other reason for his interest in me, the one I’m sure is evident to you and to Dr Watson.”

Holmes was thoughtful. “Yes,” he said. “The man you describe is certainly fascinating. A monster with an exquisite and demanding conscience.”

“But,” I interrupted, “a monster, nonetheless. I mean he took a child and, for his own pleasure, made it into an invert.”

Tanner shook his head. “No, Dr Watson. You’re quite right that he was a monster, but he did not have it in his power to make me an invert. I would be one anyway, and would find out later when I began in my own time to be aware of the more tender feelings. I never for a moment have felt a sentimental interest in any female. I have met many of my fellow inverts and never known one who believed he was changed to become that way or could, even in theory, change back.”

I had no facts to dispute this assertion. Nonetheless, I found myself straining at the leash with indignation on Tanner’s behalf, despite noticing Holmes look at me with surprise and a smile that was both kind and sardonic. I demanded, “You would attempt to justify the fiend who took advantage of you?”

“I have no wish to justify him, none at all. I repeat, he was a monster. But it is important to my own peace of mind to be accurate in my complaints against him, to be careful in distinguishing what made sense in my life from those aspects on which I rightly should concentrate my outrage. Otherwise I find living too much turmoil.”

“What made sense in it? How can any of it make sense?”

“You mean none of it made sense? You mean my life is lost?”

I immediately repented my implicit and unintentional condemnation of him. “No, Tanner. I apologize for the haste of my words. I am angry for what was done to you.”

Tanner laughed to me, quietly. He resumed, “What did make sense? To begin, there’s the part you’ve already granted. Without Mr Kent, I’d have spent my youth in the workhouse or on the streets. Who else but he would have held me from that fate? As it is, I’m an educated man with taste and some small financial means to enjoy my life. But the streets, which the workhouse could only have postponed, would have prepared me for crime of some kind, or deadening poverty. How do you imagine most people in London live? I don’t mean your friends or the people in your stories, but the majority who did not start out with advantages. The crime I learned in the streets might after all have been the one that I practice now, selling myself, but squalidly, dangerously, and far more meanly.”

“But the price you paid for your education!”

“You speak as if I could give it back and make a different bargain. I have already paid the price. I can only live now as who I am and become the best man I may.”

“So you thank Mr Kent for making you a criminal?”