A Study in Lavender: Queering Sherlock Holmes (14 page)

“That’s not so easy to decide. You forget that the law makes me a criminal in any case, merely for being an invert, which I could not have avoided. No. Mixed with the hatred I feel for Mr Kent, I would be unfair and inhuman if I did not also feel gratitude. He might have done worse.”

“So you do hate him, then?”

“Yes, in its due place.”

He laughed again, this time with humour. “Fine detectives we are, gentlemen! What would Mr Sherlock Holmes think if he found us drawing conclusions before I finish recounting the story?”

Holmes smiled. “Pray, continue.”

“The life I’ve described to you went on for several years. Mr Kent gave me a sum of money on each of my birthdays, forty pounds when I was eleven, two hundred when I reached fifteen. He made me use this money, under his supervision, as a small laboratory to reinforce the lessons he gave me in stocks, bonds, and markets. The goals he set me were to balance my investments to earn good profits but always with security.

“He enjoyed taking me to certain restaurants where he quietly showed me off. I was proud of his obvious pride in me. Towards my sixteenth birthday, he concentrated on restaurants in the hotels attached to the great railway stations, and he made a new variation. Before we went in to eat, he would have us stop first to sit for a time in the hotel lobby. I did not see a reason for this, but did not find it unpleasant. I would watch the people in their variety. There were families travelling. There were solitary businessmen. However, there were always a few handsome young men I admired. These often would seem to have made arrangements to meet older friends there, for they would approach, smile, converse briefly, and then go into the restaurant together.

“As my birthday neared, he gave me to understand that he would have special gifts for me, but also that our relationship would alter in a way that I might find hard to accept. I would have to overcome these changes like a man and make a future for myself with the means he was giving me.

“Indeed, on the day when I became sixteen, he brought me to a nice restaurant and ordered a sumptuous meal for us. As we ate dessert, he gave me presents. The first was a deed making me the legal owner of my room and its contents. He asked me how much money my investments amounted to. I was surprised because he would know their value well: it was about nine hundred pounds. He gave me certificates that were worth another nine hundred and pointed out that my total was now some £1800. If I were content to keep them with my broker and live solely from the interest, then, considering that I owned my lodging, I had enough for the necessaries of life and need worry about nothing.

“I was, despite his reassurance, worried about everything. I had already been full with foreboding, and now this kind of talk frightened me out of my wits. I asked, ‘But, why are you speaking this way?’

“‘Because, Tanny, you need to face up to the truth. I can no longer come to visit you in your room. You have done nothing wrong. Only, you have become too old now. You develop into a man. You have done nothing wrong. I want you to be sure you know you are the best boy I ever could have had. You are perfect. But I am not. I am… May God help me, I am what I am! …And you are too old for me. We will not be able to see each other again after this dinner.’”

At this, Holmes gave an angry growl. “What an elegant solution! He had no need to throw you out. He merely needed to not come back.”

“Exactly.”

“He fancied he need feel no guilt. He left you able to fend for yourself. He needed only to step neatly back into his own life.”

“Exactly… I felt as if I had been run over by a carriage in the street, and he kept talking and talking, earnestly and eagerly as if it were important to him that I understand and that I go on to live happily. I could barely hear him. I watched his lips move. He explained that, unlike himself, most inverts did not care at all for boys but only for men of my present age or preferably older. They usually would not want to keep someone permanently, but many would pay generously for an evening’s discreet company. He pointed around the room at couples I had noticed before and thought were merely friends. He said they would have met in the lobby, where they quickly, easily came to an agreement. He emphasized how important it was that I invest in my clothes and my appearance, so that I could fit inconspicuously into a situation like this, as the other young men did.

“Then he pressed my hand, smiled, left money for the waiter, and walked out of the restaurant.”

Only a moment ago, I had been enraged with Mr Kent for keeping Tanner – and now I would horsewhip him for giving Tanner up.

Tanner looked at me quietly and said, “Now you know why I hate him. Perversely, it was what he did on my behalf – giving me the stocks and the deed to the apartment – that hurt me most. His need to make a pointed gesture of doing that put the seal on the fact that, without my consent, our relationship had been a business transaction, the kind he taught me to have with my clients now. I had come to him as a small boy, in need. I gave him, in the limited, special way I could at that age, my trust and my tenderness. And, indeed, he wanted those things, given in that way, and was willing to pay handsomely for them. But they meant nothing deeper or more permanent to him than that.

“What had I, in my turn, felt for him? It was not romantic love, not what two adults share. Yet it was a group of feelings that might differently be ‘love.’ I’d been filled with gratitude to him for rescuing me from the streets. I accorded to his intelligence and his knowledge the admiration only a boy can. I soon learned that, for unknowable reasons, I could drive him mad by sitting in certain poses or by allowing my shirt to fall open, and I enjoyed that. I was not physically attracted to him, but as a young invert I found the things we did powerful, new, and most pleasurable in themselves.

“It was the reverse of what you would think. He was the child and I was the adult. It was he who pined to remain impossibly arrested in a twilight moment, not night and not yet day, where I would be ten years old forever and he would forever be my kind schoolmaster. But each new thing I learned made me eager to grow. I often could make no sense of my emotions or of his, and there was no point in looking to him for insight. He had none.

“How was I, at that age, to disentangle such complicated skeins about which I felt so strongly and had so little experience? Long before I could, it ended abruptly. He paid me for my services and left me.”

In our walk together, we had turned up Orchard Street to Portman Square, at the beginning of Baker Street. Before Holmes and I proceeded to our door, we stood while Tanner finished. I had been glad to hear his tale, so interesting in itself and concerning matters so exotic to me – as if it were about a foreign, unexplored city embedded within familiar London. I was glad to have met Tanner, who by now I quite liked. Still, I was also glad for the story to finish. It was late, and I was tired. The story had shaken me.

It did not seem to have shaken Tanner, certainly not to have broken him. He was poised in a self-understanding I could only admire. He glowed with his youth and physical beauty. I felt I ought to be sorry for him, that he was trapped in the life of an invert and prostitute, but his very being denied that there was any unsolvable problem. He seemed, if not happy, yet substantial and able to be happy.

A moment ago, I had been sympathetic to Tanner. I accepted that he was an invert. Now he impudently supposed Holmes might be an invert. And Tanner even wanted…

Holmes said, “Tanny, please understand me carefully. I cannot be the one for you. In any case, I feel that you have been used very badly. I could not continue that.”

Holmes reached out to stop him. “Don’t! …Tanny, I would like to be your friend. Here.” Holmes took out a card and wrote on it, saying, “If you are ever in trouble, with the police or with anyone, use this card. Tell them to send for me and I will come.”

“Yes.” Disconsolately, Tanner put the card in his pocket.

“Be reasonable. You know the only solution for you is to find a young man like yourself to share the love you want. That man will be fortunate.”

3. The Truth

One afternoon, I came home and there was a boy in the front hall, polishing the wooden bannister. He was a happy, pleasant-mannered, healthy boy, about thirteen years old. He put down his cloth and rose to greet me. But, before saying anything, he gave a start of surprise and said, “Oh, you must be Dr Watson.”

He looked as though he had much more he wanted to tell me and to ask, but instead he blurted out, “Mr Holmes said he would explain me to you.”

I too had given thought to Tanny in the three weeks since we had met him. I was disturbed he had not fulfilled his promise to visit us again. But how would mentioning him be a prelude to explaining Jack Wright?

“Do you sometimes wonder, Watson, if I suffer from delusions of grandeur? …No, don’t trouble to evade answering. I mean, before I enter a case, the world is working along in a certain way. After my efforts, people’s lives differ, sometimes greatly. It’s enough to make a man feel he’s playing at being a tin god. The only way I satisfy my conscience is to remember I come into the case by the invitation of someone injured, and any ensuing harm would fall to those who did it.”

“I have done so. Some slight thought about what Tanny told us suggested that somewhere in London there must be another boy, between the ages of ten and fourteen, who had been lost but was now living in a nice room filled with books, and who was being attentively educated, and who was generally enjoying the munificence of Mr Kent. If not for Tanny’s sake, then for the sake of that other boy, I ought to take it upon myself to investigate.”

“Mr Kent let Tanny go four years ago. He would have started a new ten year old as soon as he could. The conditions of the market might have delayed him or forced some small variation in the age, but not probably by much.”

“That villain! Would he have been able to recruit a boy so easily?”

“Watson, do you have any idea of the number of lost boys in London? Even for Mr Kent’s special needs, the supply would be unlimited.”

“You had no difficulty finding Mr Kent?”