The House at Baker Street (8 page)

‘The river police fished Mr Shirley out,’ Billy said quickly. ‘I saw them. They just happened to be patrolling the docks in a boat, and I called out to them. He was
unconscious, but alive. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, I got distracted.’

‘Understandable,’ Mary said.

‘’E saw me,’ Wiggins suddenly said, in a low, almost frightened voice. ‘I don’t remember much, but he must ’ave seen me. I think I ran up the stairs . .
.’

‘You did,’ Billy said. ‘But he came after you. He reached you at the top of the stairs, and he grabbed you and shook you and then threw you down. I’m so sorry I
didn’t reach you in time,’ Billy told him, almost in tears. ‘I ran so fast but I couldn’t get there.’

‘And what would have ’appened if you ’ad got there?’ Wiggins demanded. ‘He’d have thrown you down the steps too, and we’d’ve both lain there
bleeding to death with no one giving a damn what happened to us.’

‘We give a damn,’ Mary said. ‘We’d’ve found you.’

‘Not down there you wouldn’t have. You’d’ve looked, I’ll grant you that, but you’d not have found us. No, Billy saved both our lives,’ Wiggins reassured
the traumatized Billy.

‘And I brought him here,’ Billy said. ‘Apparently police and doctors ask too many questions,’ he added, darting a glance towards Wiggins.

‘Quite right too,’ I said, standing up. ‘And now, I ought to tell Mr Holmes.’

‘No!’ Wiggins and Billy cried in unison.

‘But, Wiggins, you yourself said if anyone got hurt . . .’ Mary objected.

‘I said if you were hurt, you or Mrs ’Udson,’ Wiggins said firmly. ‘Not me, I’m not important.’

‘You are very important,’ I told him.

‘Not in the way I mean,’ Wiggins insisted. ‘I know you sort of like me, and I like you and we talk and all that,’ and he blushed fiercely. ‘I meant, it’s me
that got hurt, and I’m used to it. But I got hurt by the bloke you’ve been looking for and that makes it my case now. I want it solved, I’m asking you to solve it for me, and I
don’t want Mr ’Olmes to do it. He’s brilliant and all that, but I want you. You started it, you asked me to help, and I want you to finish it, and you owe me that.
Understand?’

‘A question of honour,’ Mary said gently.

‘That’s it, missus,’ Wiggins replied, staring back at her.

‘Very well,’ Mary agreed. ‘I’m married to a soldier and I’m a soldier’s daughter. I know what that means. No matter how foolish it may seem, we continue
ourselves, without Mr Holmes’ help. Agreed?’

I looked round at the bruised yet defiant boy, his staunch friend at his shoulder, my strong-willed friend standing beside me, and thought of all I could lose.

‘Agreed,’ I said.

Billy, determined as always (and, I think, racked with guilt over Wiggins’ injury), tracked down Mr Shirley to an infirmary. He was alive, barely, still unconscious. It
was severely doubted that he would live, let alone wake. Mrs Shirley had been by his bed since the moment she had heard, and now she was making arrangements to have him moved to their home. She
would not speak to anyone about the incident or the letters. Billy, telling her he came from Mary and me, stayed only long enough to tell her that if she had secrets, so did her husband. The same
man had hurt them both and, Billy, wise beyond his years, told her the best revenge was to love each other, no matter what. She nodded, and agreed. I didn’t feel we could do much more for Mrs
Shirley. We had the evidence from Wiggins, we had the evidence of what happened in the docks, and a few days later, we would have far more evidence from other victims.

Now it wasn’t simply a case of Mrs Shirley and the letters. Now it was a case of attempted murder, not just of Mr Shirley, but Wiggins too. And who knew what else this
man had done? A man to write such despicable letters, to throw a defenceless boy and a man to a probable death, must have a long history of vileness.

Hours later, Mary and I sat in the kitchen, opposite each other, both lost in our own thoughts – not pleasant ones, I fear. We had the vent drawn back, though we were not
really listening. I was vaguely aware of John – who must have reopened the vent at some point the previous night – complaining that Mr Holmes’ new tobacco made the rooms smell
like a Turkish bazaar. (It did. I have no idea what a Turkish bazaar actually smells like, but I can imagine it smelled the same as the thick odour coming through the air vent.) Mr Holmes retorted
that the best way to learn to distinguish between different tobacco types was to smoke them all. The two were rubbing each other up the wrong way today, and nothing in the house seemed right. A
moment later, John said he would see Holmes tomorrow and came downstairs.

‘Tomorrow,’ I said to Mary.

‘Tomorrow,’ she replied softly.

Once they had gone, I made some sandwiches and took them up to Mr Holmes. I recognized the signs – the increased tobacco smoking, the peevishness with company of any
sort, the restlessness and silence. It was his time. He had a case to solve, something I knew nothing about, as I had been caught up in my own puzzle lately. Tonight he would solve it, he had that
air about him.

He was sat on a great pile of cushions culled from the sofa and armchairs, in front of the blazing fire. The room was in darkness, lit by only the flames and the fast-fading twilight outside,
lending the room a disturbing, almost sinister air. It is in atmospheres like this that ghost stories are told, and believed. Thick huge shadows flickered in the corners, lending the books and
pictures a life of their own, heavy and mysterious in the half-light. All the precarious piles of manuscripts and notes and papers seemed to writhe and twist in the flickering firelight, as if they
would be free. The room was full of smoke and fog, from the fire and from the street and from Mr Holmes’ pipe, blurring the edges of the furniture, dimming my eyes, making the whole place
seem almost hellish. It was more a cave than a room. In the dim, murky light, Mr Holmes sat perfectly still, his face saturnine, set in stone, a pagan statue of a god to be worshipped and feared
and placated.

For a moment, in that room, I shivered, despite the heat – but my mother’s sensible Scotch blood prevailed. I strode in, placed the sandwiches on the table, opened the windows wide
to clear the smoke and stir the air, and poked the fire so it cast a kindlier light. Mr Holmes did not move during all these tasks. It was only when I was about to leave that he spoke.

‘I’m not hungry, Mrs Hudson.’

‘Not now, perhaps,’ I told him. ‘But you will be when you have solved your case at three o’clock in the morning, and I don’t wish you to be ringing for me
then.’

‘At three o’clock?’ he asked, curious, and turning to me. ‘How do you know I will solve the case then?’

‘It’s always three in the morning, or thereabouts,’ I said, with a touch of asperity. ‘I am woken by a great shout, and the sound of you charging about your rooms,
throwing things around, yelling out incomprehensible facts, and calling for Dr Watson or Billy.’

He grimaced. I do not think he liked to be known so well. Or perhaps it gave him a pleasure he was uncomfortable in acknowledging. Perhaps he did not actually know how often he set the household
into an uproar in the early hours of the morning. However, when he was not in the throes of a case, or boredom, he was unfailingly polite to me, and so he said, ‘I apologize. I shall
endeavour to express triumph silently tonight.’ He turned back to the fire, casting his face half in shadow again.

‘No, don’t,’ I said impulsively, walking back into the room, towards him. ‘I like to hear it. I like to hear you crow in victory, and know that another case is solved.
The world seems such a dark and soulless place sometimes, especially at three o’clock in the morning. I lie awake in bed, and think of all I have seen and read, and it can be hard to believe
that there really are good men and women, and if there are, that they can hold back the dark and the terror and the evil. Then I hear you, and I know that someone is out there, trying to bring
light into someone’s life. I hear you shout, and I know another problem has been solved, perhaps a life saved, or a danger averted, and I feel safe again. I feel there is hope
again.’

I don’t think I had ever spoken to him like that before. I had certainly never said so much. John had once told me that Holmes was the worst tenant in London, and I only put up with him
because of the rent he paid. I put it up every time he destroyed another part of his rooms. He was paying – uncomplainingly – a very high rent by now. But it wasn’t that. It was
because I knew of the miracles he wrought, the pain he healed, the comfort he gave, under my roof.

Mr Holmes turned to look at me, curious and unsettled, as if I were a cat that had sprouted a pair of wings and proposed to fly about the room.

‘You have such faith in me, you and Watson,’ he said quietly.

‘Well-deserved faith,’ I told him firmly, my hands clasped in front of my black bombazine dress, the very picture of a respectable housekeeper, oh-so-successfully concealing the
raging emotions within.

‘And if I should fail?’ Mr Holmes asked, his voice even, his face unreadable in the firelight. ‘I have failed before, Mrs Hudson. I will fail again.’

‘But you tried,’ I said, wanting so much to tell him what he, and what he did, meant to me, and yet shaking with nerves that what I was saying was inappropriate to speak to a tenant.
Maybe this was not my place. My place was to incline my head silently and leave until called for. Yet now I had started, I could not stop. ‘And you will keep trying. It matters that you try,
when so many walk away.’

‘It matters that I win,’ he said, and a log fell in the fire and the flames shot up, and for that moment, that one moment, I saw his face so clearly. His eyes looked bleak, and I
caught a glimpse of the desperate battle always raging in his mind. Sherlock Holmes against the world. Sherlock Holmes, one man, against all the evil and corruption and hate in London. Then the log
settled and the fire died down and his face was in darkness again. I looked around. On the table I saw a small scrap of grey paper. I saw my name – Hudson – and a message about game and
fly-paper.

‘Is this meant for me?’ I asked.

‘Not unless you sailed on the
Gloria Scott
,’ Mr Holmes said dryly. ‘It’s a souvenir. That is where it all began, really. My first case.’ He was silent for a
moment.

‘Wiggins will recover?’ he asked, abruptly changing the subject, as he was prone to do.

‘He will. I will look after him.’

‘As he, apparently, looks after you, I hear,’ Mr Holmes said. I glanced up at the vent. Sound could drift through it both ways . . .

‘Good night, Mrs Hudson. Thank you for the sandwiches,’ Mr Holmes said politely.

‘Good night, Mr Holmes,’ I replied, closing the door softly as I left.

Perhaps that would have been the moment to tell him about Laura Shirley, and all that had happened since then. He would have taken the case. I could have so easily lifted the
burden from my shoulders and placed it on his, already so weighed down. But I could not. I remembered his bleak eyes, and I would not add one single grain to his problems. As he had his
responsibilities, his promises, our faith to live up to, I also had. Mary and I had started this. Mary and I had taken on this burden. We would carry it until, one morning at 3 a.m., we finished
it.

Seven months ago almost to the day, John had come down to my kitchen, sat down at the table, and told me he loved Mary Morstan but could never marry her. He sat right there, at
the end by the stove where it was warmest, and drank tea and ate scones – or rather, sipped aimlessly at the tea, and crumbled the scones between his fingers. He talked of the fabulous Agra
treasure, and a tale of mystery and betrayal in India and the Sign of Four and he talked most of all of brave, beautiful Mary Morstan at the centre of it all.

‘She’s clever,’ John said, his eyes shining as he stared out of the window and thought of her. ‘Even Holmes admires her intelligence. And she’s kind; kind to
everyone and so calm. Even in the most dangerous moments, faced by murderers and villains and death, she didn’t shrink, though she must have been frightened. She just threw her shoulders
back, as if she were a soldier like her father. And when she smiles . . .’ He looked down at the tea cup in front of him.

‘Your heart feels as if it has missed a beat,’ I finished for him. He looked at me, suddenly seeing I understood. ‘I remember mine used to feel like that when Hector – Mr
Hudson – smiled at me. He didn’t smile often, except when he was with me, and, each time, I felt something inside me give a queer little flutter. That was when I knew I loved
him.’

John smiled, and blushed slightly. It was so touching, that blush, as if something of the schoolboy remained in the battered old soldier.

‘I do,’ he admitted. ‘I do love her. I must love her, how can I not? If you knew her . . . ’

‘I will know her,’ I said, picking up the cups, ‘when she becomes Mrs John Watson.’

He didn’t answer, and I turned to look at him. The blush had gone from his face and he stared ahead of him, bleakly.

‘You are going to ask her to marry you?’ I asked.