The House at Baker Street (9 page)

‘She will be rich, when we solve the case,’ John told me, and his eyes were so, so sad. ‘She will finally have the fabulous Agra treasure that her father left her, and wealth
beyond her dreams, and I am so poor. I barely scrape by on my army pension.’

‘How do you know what her dreams are?’ I said angrily. On the other hand, how did I know what her dreams were? Given the choice between treasure and the love of a man like John,
I’d have chosen John, but what did I know of her? But still, I defended her. If he loved her, she must be worth his loving. ‘Besides,’ I told him, ‘if it were the other way
round, you rich and her poor, it would not matter.’

‘A man is supposed to take care of a woman,’ he said gently. ‘He should support her, not the other way round. A poor man marrying a rich woman sounds – feels –
contemptible, somehow.’

‘She won’t care!’ I told him. ‘If she loves you, the money won’t matter.’

‘I don’t even know if she loves me,’ he said, walking across the room to me. He looked so forlorn and lost.

‘If she knows you, she loves you,’ I said firmly. ‘How can she not?’

I turned away, so he could not see my face. It was so unlike me to reveal how fond of him I was, how highly I regarded him. My emotions were mine alone, and I had not shared them since my Hector
died. Besides, I could not bear to see the sadness in his eyes.

‘She’s so far above me, Mrs Hudson,’ he said. ‘And when I place the treasure in her hands, she will be unreachable.’

Of course, she was not unreachable.

Wiggins stayed on in the little room by the kitchen in 221b. He had wanted to leave, to recover with his gang around him, but Billy had given him a stern telling off about how
hurt I would be if he left, and how rude that would be, so Wiggins stayed, temporarily.

Two days after he had arrived, he gave me my next step as I brought him soup. Billy was sitting on the bed, and the two of them were having an urgent whispered conversation. It was getting quite
heated before they saw me and stopped talking.

I settled the tray on Wiggins’ lap and exhorted him not to spill the soup, but to eat it all at once. John had said that Wiggins was healing quickly, and I knew that once the pain had
gone, the boy would be away, back to the streets. Until he was, I was determined to feed him up as much as possible. The sight of his thin chest when John had undressed him had disturbed me.

As Wiggins ate his soup, I glanced round the room. I could see the pile of books, and the fresh flowers Mary had left. Wiggins occasionally glanced at the bright flowers as if he’d never
seen anything so lovely in his life – which he probably hadn’t. I don’t know where Wiggins had learnt to read – I know it was a skill he had acquired before he met Mr Holmes
– but he devoured any books he could find. I knew Billy spent every spare second in here with his friend, intensely chatting about whatever case Mr Holmes was working on, and cases he had
worked on in the past. And, judging by the cigarette ash on the floor, Mr Holmes himself had visited a few times. Billy saw me glancing at the ash.

‘Wiggins didn’t tell Mr Holmes anything about the case,’ Billy said anxiously. Wiggins glanced up at him, and I saw Billy nod at the ash and mouth ‘She knows’.

‘Not a thing,’ Wiggins confirmed. ‘I meant what I said.’

‘No matter what anyone else says,’ Billy murmured, and I saw Wiggins glance mutinously at him. I guessed the two of them had been discussing rather fervently, as boys (and men) do,
the relative merits of keeping me safe or keeping promises. It looked like Wiggins had won. I glanced over at Billy and smiled at him, to reassure him. He nodded at me, this boy so near to becoming
a man.

‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’ I said, looking at them. ‘Something you’re not sure whether to tell me about.’

‘It may be nothing,’ Billy said.

‘Or everything!’ Wiggins disagreed hotly.

‘She’ll end up going to Whitechapel! Do you want her in Whitechapel?’ Billy shouted back.

‘I’m not going to lie and, before you argue, not telling something is as bad as lying!’

I sat down on the bed, straightened the sheets, and said, ‘Tell me.’

‘There’s a lady down in Whitechapel,’Wiggins said quietly.

‘There’s a lot of ladies down in Whitechapel,’ I replied dryly. Even a musty old housekeeper like me knew a thing or two, especially one that regularly borrowed Mr
Holmes’ copy of
Illustrated Police News
and read the advertisements as well as the stories.

‘No, this one’s a proper lady,’ Wiggins continued. ‘And not like them other proper ladies what visits Whitechapel, always praying and wittering and moaning, like we
don’t have anything better to do than listen to them trying to save our souls, as if we had any souls to save in the first place.’

‘Since the Ripper, ma’am,’ Billy said shyly, as if he was embarrassed to even mention that name to me, ‘lots of ladies – fine ladies – have taken to doing
missionary work in Whitechapel. Setting up churches and trying to save the . . . the fallen women.’

‘How do you know all this?’ I asked, curious as to what Billy actually did with his time off.

‘I read about it, ma’am,’ he told me, which I knew was a half-truth. Wiggins had been known to run around Whitechapel, and Billy ran with him occasionally. Still, I knew better
than to keep them apart, and knew Billy was probably quite safe with Wiggins. I didn’t have the heart to split them up and keep Billy at home. I decided to swallow the lie.

‘But this lady, the one I’m talking about,’ Wiggins continued, ‘she ’elps people. Proper ’elp, I mean. She has a sort of free clinic anyone can go to, and she
gives out medicines and food and stuff and never mentions God or prayers or nothing. But she’s sad, missus. Not like the others, all proud and happy and smug that they’re doing
God’s work, whatever they think that is. This lady – the Whitechapel Lady we call ’er – she’s always sad.’

‘What else can you tell me about her?’ I asked, watching him intently. This was a new side to Wiggins, and Billy too. This was an insight into the lives they lived away from Baker
Street.

‘She never leaves Whitechapel. Not never, not at night, not on Sundays, never. Sometimes I see her watching other people walk out of there, and she kind of stares after them, like she
wishes she could leave too, but she never does. But it’s hard to tell, ’cos her face is covered.’

‘Covered?’

‘The Whitechapel Lady wears a black veil, missus. So you can’t see her face. And she won’t tell no one her name, neither. It’s like she’s got no face, and no
name.’

‘Then how can you tell she’s sad?’ I asked.

‘You know, the way you tell anyone’s sad, even when they smile. Like you, sometimes. The way she stands, and the way she moves. Slow and ’eavy, like. And her voice – you
can tell when someone’s smiling, even if you can’t see it, in their voice, can’t you? Well, there’s never a smile in her voice.’ Wiggins leaned forward eagerly. I had
no idea he was such a good observer of human nature. I had no idea he’d observed me that closely either.

‘Have you ever talked to her? This Whitechapel Lady?’

‘Once,’ he said. ‘I’d bin helping her one day hand out some stuff, some food to people who couldn’t walk to the clinic. I do that sometimes, ’cos then I get a
bit for the Irregulars too. Anyway, I could tell by the way she was spending that she had money, lots of it, and I asked her why she lived in Whitechapel all the time, why don’t she just
visit, like the other rich ladies, and she said, “Because of a cruel man. The cruellest man who ever lived.”’

‘We used to think she meant a lover or a husband,’ Billy added. ‘But when I watched Laura Shirley, she reminded me of the Whitechapel Lady. They moved the same way, sort of
watchful and frightened. Always looking behind them and flinching away from strangers and jumping at any noise. And letters – the Whitechapel Lady always hates getting letters. I think
that’s what she meant. I think she’s hiding from this cruel man in the one place he’d never think to look. I think the Whitechapel Lady was blackmailed too.’

It wasn’t difficult to find the Whitechapel Lady. It seemed everyone knew of her, the kind woman with the veiled face, who never spoke of God or redemption. Billy guided
Mary and me through the streets of Whitechapel. It was a foul place, crowded with sad-eyed souls, with vicious men and women and frightened ones too, scurrying back and forth, the only smiles
accompanied by a drunken bellow of laughter. I can’t blame them for that. I would have obliterated that world with alcohol too, if I were condemned there. Leading off all the streets were
filthy narrow alleyways thronged with rats and rubbish. Even that rubbish had desperate people picking through it. The smell was choking and heavy, so I could scarcely breathe, with the only sweet
scent coming from the old women who sold violets. Even in the daytime I saw women persuading and importuning men to come into an alleyway or a yard with them, or a room if they were lucky. Some of
the women looked pretty and fresh, and talked and giggled. Most looked tired and raddled and wanting nothing more than for the act to be over so they could spend the money on drink, and forget.
They must have had hopes and dreams once. Everyone does. But their dreams had choked and died on the noxious fumes of Whitechapel years ago.

Since the crimes of Jack the Ripper had brought the horrors of Whitechapel vividly to the attention of the rest of society, some work to alleviate the suffering had been done – but not
nearly enough. It had become fashionable for society ladies to descend upon the place, dispensing food and clothes, but mostly handing out exhortations for the Whitechapel residents to give up
their sinful ways and return to God. They handed out religious tracts about how much more glorious it was to die in poverty and hunger than live an unclean sinful life. These tracts made no mention
about how painful dying of starvation was. These women were despised by the people they thought they were helping. I could see why. The people of Whitechapel starved. They choked. They bled. They
suffered. They shivered. They died. What use was prayer to them? What use is a pure soul in a body that is falling apart? They did what they could do to live, and I would not condemn them for
it.

Even now, it is the smell of Whitechapel I remember: a thick, choking, sour stench that lay in the back of my throat. It almost made me vomit. I craved cool water and fresh
air. The only water I saw came out of the street pumps, and it was brown and brackish. The only air had come through docks and hospitals and graveyards and butchers and cobblers and dyers and was
poisoned before it ever reached us. Even the sunshine was grimy. If I looked up, I could see a tiny patch of blue sky, way up above the houses, but the shadows of the street robbed the sunlight of
any warmth. I shivered in my thick wool coat, but the people around me stood around in thin rags, never moving, as if they had never known what warm sun on the skin felt like. I was struck by their
eyes. Dead eyes, all of them, as if their souls had died long ago, whilst their bodies continued the struggle to breathe.

We were not molested or called at in any way, which puzzled me, until Mary pointed out a tall, strong boy following us.

‘He’s one of Wiggins’ lads,’ Billy explained. ‘He’s here to protect you. You didn’t think he’d let you come here unprotected, did you?’

Wiggins, always and forever my knight in grubby armour.

Billy took us to a sort of square, near the edge of Whitechapel. Three sides of the square were made up of houses that must have been prosperous at one time, but now were verminous and rotten.
In the centre of the square was a pump, set in cobbles. On one side of the square was a large plain brown building. ‘Clinic’ was scrawled above the door in whitewash. Billy led us round
the back of the building to a set of stairs that climbed to the second floor. Billy nodded to the tall boy, who left us.

‘She won’t open this door if there are strange men about,’ Billy told us. ‘Wait here, I’ll check she’ll see you first. She knows me; I’ve run errands
for her before, to the finer parts of town, where Wiggins and the others boys would get thrown out.’ Billy ran upstairs like someone who knew his way, and I wondered again about what his life
away from my home was like, his life in these streets. This was not where he was born, but somehow he had a place here, just like he had a place in 221b.

He ran down again.

‘She’ll see you,’ he said breathlessly. ‘She wants to!’

He ran back upstairs and opened the thin, cracked door for us. We stepped through, uncertain what we would find. On the other side was a darkened room, with closed shutters. The only light came
through the cracks in the shutters themselves. I could just see enough to make out there was only the bare minimum of furniture – a single bed, a chair, a crooked table. But it was clean
– very clean. There was an overwhelming smell of lye and soap.

‘The Whitechapel Lady,’ Billy announced, with as much élan as if he had been in a Mayfair drawing room. ‘May I present Mrs Hudson and Mrs Watson.’

He closed the door behind us, and then went to stand between us and the Lady.

‘They’ll help,’ he told her. ‘Tell them about him.’

The Lady sat in the darkest corner of the room, on a plain, straight-backed wooden chair. Her face was completely in darkness. I could only see her dress, also plain. It had
once been fashionable, about ten years ago, but now it was shabby and patched, washed too many times.

‘I won’t tell you my real name,’ she said, haltingly, as if she were not used to speaking. Her voice was low and gentle, but had a husky quality, as if she had a sore throat.
There was an odd accent to it, an unfamiliar tone I could not place. ‘They call me the Whitechapel Lady here. You can call me what you like. My real name was lost a long time ago.’

‘We don’t need your name,’ Mary said, stepping forward into the room. ‘We’re sorry to bother you, but there is a man who has hurt people. We just want to . . . We
just need to know . . .’ Mary’s voice faltered. She did not know how to ask what we needed.

‘The man that destroyed you hasn’t stopped. He’s still destroying people,’ I said, surprising myself as I spoke boldly and clearly. ‘We need to know what you know
about him. We will stop him.’