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acdholmesfestFair Hearts of Finest Glow
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garonne
Author:tweedisgood
Pairing: Holmes/Watson established relationship
Rated: R in parts – nothing too hair-raising
Word Count: ~ 6,300
Summary: Being, some of the time, a tale of Sherlock Holmes and his female friends.
Warning: Victorian attitudes in spades. You name the ‘ism’, it’s here, because it was there. No need to say, I hope, that no character’s views reflect the author’s.
Notes: Title is from “Hafiz to the Cup-bearer”, Edward Carpenter. Beta thanks tomad_with_july
In all my stories of Sherlock Holmes, the great detective, a paragon of reasoning and deduction, the sword of truth and the balancing scales of the law of England - my friend in that truth and, what is the great silence between every published word, my spouse but for that same law - I have, perhaps, nevertheless done him one significant injustice.
I have implied – no, I have outright stated – that he dislikes women.
It is… somewhat more complicated than that. He dislikes the idea of them, certainly. Strong perfumes and rustling petticoats that announce their arrival before he has had time to get their measure with a glance; the roles that polite society will have them play whether they can learn the lines or no and the falseness and triviality that go with them: these discomfit and irritate him.
Individual women are another matter. He treats them all at first with a wary reverence, as one who fears the spirits of the shrine rather than worships at it: as The Great Other. Yet there are some few whom he has let in closer, who treat him and are treated as, if not quite equals - after all, he has none among men, either - worthy of respect, even friendship.
It was an afternoon late in one of those final years of Holmes’ London career. Once the new century had turned, he had begun uncomfortably often to speak of himself as almost played out, as belonging to a vanishing world. He had been in that vein today. After, with my protests still hanging in the air, he had taken up his fiddle and was playing a composition of his own at once lyrical and wistful, a simple melody giving way to soaring phrases in a minor key.
The trill of the front door bell broke his rhythm.
“Client?” I asked.
“Miss Tibbs…” he answered, tone poised between a negative reply and a question of his own. As a short conversation between two ladies, one of them Mrs Hudson, took place in the front hall, he answered the next question that I had long since left off asking – how he could tell?
“She has a particular way of pressing the button tentatively once, then more decisively. An exterior of silk plush and a core of steel, that one.”
It was odd, because she was not expected. Miss Tibbs and her companion Miss Porter, whom I had first met on a night in the East End which I will never forget, did on occasion take tea at Baker Street. However they never visited separately and never without notice or invitation. There was always a pretext – a new discovery in science, a recent Royal Institution lecture which they wished to discuss with a fellow-enthusiast. I was not fooled. Holmes enjoyed their company and they, his.
Miss Porter had a sharp way about her, a habit of criticism in looking at the world that could rise to a fine pitch of indignation at a piece of spectacular unfairness or deliberate stupidity. Sometimes her mood spilled over into biting character dissections of the supposed culprits but Miss Tibbs had only to interject with an: “I don’t think you are being quite fair, dear” for her to subside, ruled by a loving glance.
“She is well, thank you,” Miss Tibbs replied in response to my anxious enquiries, and Holmes’ cool ones, on the absence of her friend. “To tell you the truth,” – she coloured with embarrassment, but would not deceive – “she does not know I am here. She prefers to tackle the problem on her own. In my opinion that does not always yield the best results. She has a tendency to be…rather direct, when a more considered approach might be more successful in the long run.”
“Quite so. Just what I am always telling Dr Watson,” said Holmes gravely, with an apologetic wink in my direction. A less indirect personality than his can hardly be imagined: Miss Tibbs raised both eyebrows at him over her spectacles but carried on with her story.
“She has been having great trouble with one boy in Standard Five, Thomas Larrup. He has always been a forward lad, keen and quick to learn; she had thought of making him a paid monitor in the course of time. The extra income would surely help his family, for his father, a woodturner, is hard put to support a family of seven children. Lately, though, she reports he has been either absent altogether or badly distracted in his lessons, and several times had to be beaten for bullying a little Jewish boy in the form below, my class.”
Holmes had compressed himself in his chair like potted meat: long legs folded away, head bowed, eyes closed, every nerve nevertheless at full attention. The seeming triviality of the tale so far would normally have made him impatient, but he knew Miss Tibbs well enough to know she would not have come bearing trivia.
The Settles Street Board School, where both the ladies earned their bread by teaching, lay in the heart of Whitechapel, home to teeming multitudes barely existing on casual, unskilled labour and piece work on the sweating system: a strange haven, but a haven nonetheless, for the displaced Jews of Poland and Russia, hunted from their villages as if they were vermin.
“Hope; the hope of better times; the hope of life, of something more for their children: how else can men live here?” as Holmes once said to me after a foray east of Shoreditch, where we had lost our quarry in the warren of alleys and ‘courts’ – narrow, soot-blackened, stinking with refuse, where legend had it that the policemen went in twos if they went at all. “One might as well throw oneself in the Thames and have done with it.” And in the night he had woken suddenly, clung to me in our comfortable bed and shivered.
“All that is preliminary data,” went on Miss Tibbs, as if she knew very well she had better throw the dog a bone before it slunk off to better pickings. “It is the events of last night which bring me here. Mr Kibicz, father of my pupil Pawel, was found murdered in a court off Boyd Street.”
“What was his occupation?”
“He collected rents in many streets for number of landlords – including our own. I daresay his profession did not make him popular – but enough to murder? I have always found him civil enough, not a man to make enemies.”
“But then, perhaps, you have never been unable to find the rent?”
Miss Tibbs looked around our well-appointed sitting room and pursed her lips. His tone had been gentle, and he was probably right, but neither he nor I really understood what it was like to live on thirty shillings a week. As for those even lower down the pile…
“Mr Holmes, I doubt we have a single pupil whose parents – should they have any – have not been unable to find the rent at some time or other. For the majority, it is a weekly battle. They try – if they want to avoid the streets or worse, the workhouse, they must. There is little protest offered, barely any goods to seize, almost never any violence. Sometimes a room will simply become vacant, the former occupants vanished in the night. A new family move in who will pay – usually at a higher rate. Do you know that, per square foot, returns on property in Whitechapel are three times that in Mayfair? Besides, the Police found something very odd about the body.”
Holmes perked up and leaned forward, rubbing his hands together.
“His satchel was still over his shoulders, the rent book in his pocket. Nothing had been stolen. He had on him some forty-seven pounds in coin: a year’s living – just about – in Boyd Street.”
“The robbers were disturbed,” suggested Holmes.
“He was discovered this morning, and had been dead for many hours. Neither his murderers, nor anybody else robbed his corpse. That, I put to you, Mr Holmes, is a point of considerable interest.”
Holmes sprang up from his seat and made automatically for his pipe rack. Wavering there between good manners and necessity, he waited for Miss Tibbs to beg him not to mind her. Fortified with Black Virginia flake, he resumed his line of questioning.
“Describe the inhabitants of Boyd Street.”
“In a word, poor. In two words, desperately poor. Yet aside from some thieving, a great deal of drunkenness, illegal gaming and what they call ‘cadging’ – really, begging - not criminals.”
"They routinely break the law; does that not make them criminals, Miss Tibbs?”
She looked from him to me. “Surely we can agree, gentlemen, that routinely breaking the law may be a matter of choice, or one of necessity: on occasion, both at the same time.”
There was a short pause before Holmes stopped contemplating the rug and I was able to turn the next page in my notebook. None of us have ever referred to that exchange since.
“The Larrup family live there?”
“They do.”
“Indeed. For why else did you first mention the boy? Is the father suspected?”
Miss Tibbs surprised us both by promptly bursting into tears.
Amid many apologies, my fresh handkerchief and Holmes’ best soothings, she collected herself enough to continue.
“Mr Holmes, Doctor Watson, they have arrested Tommy. Millicent – Miss Porter – went to the Police station straight after school to plead his case.”
“J Division: Inspector Beech.” Holmes fetched the name from his brain attic. “On a good day, at least half his mind functions; they must have some evidence. Watson, be so good as to get Miss Tibbs’ coat.”
Inspector Beech was respectful but not in awe of his famous visitor. He did indeed have evidence, and of a compelling sort.
“The boy doesn’t deny it’s his knife - hardly could, seeing as he carved his name in the handle. Says he lost it a week ago but well, of course he would say that.”
“Found in the body, you say?”
“Under it, strictly speaking. The force of spraying blood pushed it out of the wound, but the surgeon could demonstrate how it plunged into the…” - he turned away, pulling us with him and lowered his voice so that Miss Tibbs, sitting vainly attempting to placate her outraged friend, would not hear – “groin, so that the artery was opened. He must have staggered about, trying to escape but never made it to the flight of steps up from the crossway. He was collapsed in a far corner. They have cellars doubling for passageways down there, filthy pits under the floorboards with nothing but rotten ladders to get in and out at each end. The buildings are packed together tight in those courts - some without even a back door to get out to the privies.”
“Murder was meant, Mr Holmes, and the height of the blow – low down, y’see. These boys – around here, they’re not children, you understand. They are adults in wickedness and vice long before their voices break. I’d rather it were another way; I’m a father myself. But how else can one read it?”
“One may read fiction as well as fact,” said Holmes, ”in which case one takes from a tale what the author, if he has any skill, intends one to take.”
Beech drew in a sceptical breath but continued to listen as my friend laid out his case.
“Supposing one wished to commit cold-blooded murder and escape punishment. It is possible for a victim to lie, like Kibicz, murdered and undiscovered for some time in such courts?”
“Undoubtedly. People aren’t looking out for trouble, nor wanting the Law to come calling.”
“But an unsolved mystery is a stain on the good name of the Police. They will surely make greater efforts to clear it up, make deeper and wider enquiries, than if a plausible culprit is near at hand. A canny murderer takes out insurance. Why did no-one hear Kibicz as he ‘staggered about’, bleeding out, surely crying for help all the while? Where are the sprays of blood on the walls? Why not take the weapon away from the scene? Even a boy knows that much. I do not believe he was killed in that cellar, nor by Master Larrup. Certainly he was not killed for mere gain.”
“Which leaves a thousand and one suspects within a mile of this station, Mr Holmes, and not a teaspoon of evidence to go on. Kibicz collected rents all over, not to mention the trouble we’ve had with Jewish anarchists, socialists, and who-knows-what quarrels between all the groups disputing and arguing about workers’ ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’. I ask you: what good’ll freedom do ‘em if there’s no bread to eat?”
The inspector’s voice had risen and Miss Porter, drawing herself up where she still sat a few feet away, hit back:
“If they were truly free, they’d have bread too, inspector.”
Beech smiled, as if at a precocious child who has vowed that one day he will be another Nelson.
“And while we wait for the New Jerusalem, Miss, I have to make a report. Show me why it’s not the boy, and I’ll gladly hear you, Mr Holmes. Until then, he stays here.”
I made some remark under my breath about expecting his family to be here, too. Miss Porter rounded on me in the inspector’s place:
“They can’t come, Doctor Watson. An hour away from the turning bench is a table leg less, fourpence less, a pawn ticket unredeemed, a meal missing. Mrs Larrup stuffs mattresses whilst she looks after the little ones. They were very thankful I could be here in their stead. Tommy knows I’ll not give up. Not after the tussle we had over long division.”
She thrust her chin up and rose, departing arm- in-arm with Miss Tibbs, bidding Holmes wire them if he needed anything.
There followed some close negotiation over viewing the knife (grudgingly conceded), interviewing the prisoner (“you’ll get precious little out of him, mind”) and inspecting the corpse (highly irregular, he must understand; he should consult the surgeon).
Tommy Larrup was a defiant, grey-faced ghost with dirty hands and cropped black hair, a little better dressed but not so sturdy as the band of urchins Holmes had been using as his invisible agents for twenty years by that time. There were the signs of rickets in his knock-knees and bad teeth but Miss Tibbs was right – despite everything, he was sharp as a tack. He gathered we were something to do with the Police and was wary until he found we were also friends of Miss Porter; the signal promptly turned green.
He freely confessed to deliberately tripping up Pawel Kibicz in the playground several times, hiding his skullcap, slate and pencil, cuffing him around the ear and calling him all manner of foul epithets.
“He stinks of fish and he cheats at marbles. Thinks I don’t know what a kucker is, neither. Known that since I were five."
I didn’t ask.
“But I never touched his pa. Never! That I swear in blood, on me mother’s head, in church, fall down dead in an open grave if I lie. That knife – I always keep it on me, so’s Mum don’t put it in hock – was lost from out my pocket Wednesday last on Christian Street, on my way back from school. I went back soon as I missed it, but you might as well expect a barrow-load of fruit to still have all its bleedin’ apples if you leave it round here for more than a minute and no one watching it.” He grinned, a swift flash in a face pinched with anxiety. “Sometimes if there is someone watching it, an’ all.”
“His pa was all right; played it straight. People cursed him on a Monday when the rents fell due – ‘stead of cursing the landlords they’d never get to see - but he never gave any lip nor took on airs. I can’t see who’d have wanted to rough him up, leave alone kill him.”
Holmes didn’t try to conceal from the boy his real peril behind some false promise that all would be well. The force of his full attention, the refusal to dismiss Tommy’s story untested and that magic of his own self-belief which made others believe too (and I freely include myself in that number): it was quite enough to leave the little figure tucking in with a will to a supper the like of which he must rarely have seen in Boyd Street and saying he hoped Miss Porter got home all right.
The knife, which a very young constable brought out with some ceremony from the station safe, was an ordinary pocket model such as I myself had carried as a lad. I suspected Tommy had not come by it quite honestly, but there was no reason to suppose he meant it for a weapon.
“It’s been sharpened almost to a point, very recently,” said Holmes after a swift examination.
“Which the boy would easily have had done,” the constable objected. “The knife grinders that ply the local streets will be given his description, as soon as we round them all up.”
Holmes fixed him with a narrow-eyed stare.
“I presume you mean they will be given a description of the knife.”
“Just so, Mr Holmes, just so. Slip of the tongue.”
Gaining access to the body of the rent collector proved more difficult. Scotland Yard had become more inclined to process, procedure and “the proper channels” than they had been in the early days, and it was only the thought of the newspapers should Holmes be able to say he solved a case only in the face of Police obstruction that they allowed him to see all the same evidence as they had and take what he could from it.
“In this case, the manner of death may only be staging, but it is indisputable. A single, deep wound to the femoral artery. Either a lucky strike or a practised killer. One killer, for there are no marks to show he has been grasped by the arms or legs to hold him still.”
“Might it resemble the way their butchers are said to prepare meat, by draining all the blood?” I asked.
Holmes clicked his tongue. “Ritual killing by a rival Hebrew gang? Contain yourself, Watson. This is not a penny dreadful. This man was killed doing business; it is to his business we must look.”
Property in the East End turned out to be a maze with a hundred dead ends. Nominally, Kibicz worked for a landlord named Peach. Peach, however, owned neither ground nor bricks, but only dozens of subleases for which he paid dues to men who in turn leased from others and so on up more layers than a French pastry. Peach had a few, mostly fragmentary, names of some above him, but the freeholders might as well have been Olympian gods for all the traffic he had with them.
Meanwhile, a twelve-year-old boy languished in a cell and Holmes, whose appetite for physical intimacy usually disappeared during a case, wordlessly lifted up his nightshirt late that night and offered me his prick to suck. He allowed himself to be led to ecstasy, submitted to being drained of every drop he had and drifted, gentled by loving arms, into a sleep that wouldn’t come by itself. If he little understood women, he understood children even less, and would never let sentiment cloud his professional judgement. It did not make him immune to the memory of Tommy Larrup swinging his bare feet over the edge of a pallet made for a grown man and saying that he’d left his boots behind when he was arrested. Then at least his younger brother might get some wear out of them, since his own had no soles to speak of.
*************************************
Miss Porter, who had after a day and a half had nearly forgiven me for my comment about the Larrups, invited us by telegram to their lodgings at tea time the day after. The magistrates would see Tommy in the morning, and unless we could put something in the hands of the Police, remand in an adult prison was the next step into an abyss from which he might never return.
Waiting for us in the Misses’ home was a gentleman in clerical garb, introduced as the minister of the Unitarian chapel at Bethnal Green. The Reverend Mr Samuel Samuelson proved to be somewhat under middling height and bulk but with a presence that filled the room with bustling moral industry and muscular benevolence. He also possessed the peculiar skill of breathing in as punctuation, so that it was extremely difficult to have a conversation with him rather than simply be talked at.
“The whole affair is troubling, most troubling. The dear ladies, my friends here, have already relayed all the facts as they are so far known and I am in the fortunate position of being able to lay certain additional information before you. As Secretary of the Committee for Improved London Dwellings (Aldgate and Points East) - a scheme somewhat modelled on the ‘four percent’ principle established some years past by Messrs Rothschild and Montagu – I have been charged with mapping the ultimate ownership of all the houses in the triangle formed by Leman Street, Cable Street and the Commercial Road. Others have been assigned different sets of streets and we hope by this means to identify and persuade at least some of the owners to sell their freeholds to our Committee. The foul and crumbling shelters will be swept away and modern tenements raised up in their place. One only has to look at the work done by the London County Council in my own district. A voluntary society has the added advantage of improving not only the bodies of the tenants but the souls of the subscribers: no grudging compulsion on the rates; only pure, free Christian charity.”
“Who owns Boyd Street and its courts?” Holmes took his opportunity, as Samuelson chanced a sip of tea instead of breathing.
“An interesting question, one to which I have devoted many hours of work in libraries and much correspondence with solicitors. The land was once part of the estates of the Matfelon family, builders of the first St Mary’s church, from which the very name Whitechapel derives, paying tithes to the Rector of Stepney, from land redistributed many times under the Eighth King Henry, King James and after the Commonwealth and so on through the Baronetcy of –"
Miss Tibbs began to cough violently. As Miss Porter stoutly patted her on the back and the Revd Samuelson begged me to administer medical aid, Holmes swiftly offered his own untouched and cooling tea to dislodge the morsel of seed cake which seemed to be to blame. As she dabbed her eyes, my friend and his co-conspirator exchanged sly smiles and he pounced before the budding antiquarian could resume his seat.
“The final outcome of your labours is a name or set of names who currently have the freehold of Boyd Street and the neighbouring slums. I need those names.”
“The Peel Trust, whose income is paid out to a widow and her daughters in Maidstone; Sir Reginald North, MP; the Lord of the Manor – that is to say, the Bishop of London, and a somewhat mysterious body named the Half Part Shares Company, Limited . That is, of course, not counting surviving ecclesiastical, educational and charitable endowments, but these are comparative small fry.”
“And have you approached any of these freeholders?”
“My Lord Bishop,” Samuelson dripped polite acid over the title, “directs me to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Mrs Peel-Hunt has a weak heart and her daughters begged me not to trouble her further. Sir Reginald, a well-known radical firebrand in the Commons, made a speech last week on the lines that model housing merely sends the very poorest to the wall, or rather, outside any walls but the poorhouse. As for –“
“Half Part Shares…” Holmes, who had cocked his head at the first mention of the name, like a man hearing a faintly remembered tune, interrupted him and thrust out a hand in my direction. “Watson, you have the notes of Kibicz’s rent book entries, and I trust you have faithfully observed my charge to omit nothing.” I handed them over. “Good, I see that you have.”
He rifled through the loose sheets, throwing some to the floor and keeping others. As I crawled about on hands and knees to retrieve the spares, Miss Tibbs and Miss Porter stifled unladylike snorts of laughter at our antics. Samuelson observed them wide-eyed. Holmes ignored us all, some variation on “Hum” and “Ho” his only comment as he worked.
“Ha!” he cried at last. Spreading the papers, and a map of Whitechapel that he had fished out of a pocket, over a small table that Miss Porter had provided without needing to be asked, he pointed to places in the rent book where a ‘½’ had been noted in the margin.
“I had assumed it meant half the rent paid, or one of a pair of rooms, or some such distinction. Now I believe it to signify this mystery of yours, Mr Samuelson. Observe the arrangement of courts and alleys. To the casual eye there is no pattern to the marked rent records. However, such is the close crowding the building and rebuilding on the yards of older buildings behind these streets, that the addresses in book order only reveal themselves in spatial relation to one another once they are mapped. Here, we see Boyd Street.” He stabbed at the map with a bony forefinger, pinning down the corresponding page of notes beside it with his thumb. “As in the other streets, all the marked entries correspond to single physical buildings with a footprint of land, and thus to their freeholder. In this case, I venture to suggest, the Half Part Shares Company, Limited.”
He sat back and folded his arms - but not yet in triumph. Chin sunk on his chest, he carried on staring at the pages, willing them to give up their deepest secrets. Who held the Half Part shares? Who would want to kill their agent? Why?
“And Why,” he wondered aloud, “separate out those rents from the rest? Watson, call a cab.”
As we rattled up the City Road, to the shouts of the cabbie warning folk to get out of the way or be run down (ah, the wonders wrought by a five pound note), Holmes rattled off all the things he wanted to know which might conceivably be found in the vaults of the Register of Companies. He was disappointed at some points, but armed with a vital name before the doors closed behind us, we set off again, this time in the direction of Gordon Square.
“Seek out the exception, dear boy,” he said as he wrung his hands together, at a pitch of excitement so high that his eyes shone and his smile resembled that of a hunting wolf. He was dangerous at such times – to himself, deaf to reason in his pursuit of answers; to me, for I could scarcely stop myself from kissing him in public; above all to evildoers, for once he caught the faintest whiff of their scent, they were done for before they even knew he was coming.
“The exception in this case is Mr Parmenter Lloyd. All the other Directors of the Half Part Share Company have addresses in the country. All of them save him have served for the whole fifteen years the company has existed. He has been on the Board less than a month.”
If there was logic here, it foxed me, even after all the years of exposure. It was all on instinct, it must be: one of Holmes’ leaping intuitions that he would find a way to explain away, as if they embarrassed him, but in which I gloried. ‘Severe reasoning from cause to effect’, my left foot. This was art.
Flesh tones can be rendered dark or ruddy, fresh or drawn, by the artist’s brush. Sherlock Holmes produced deathly pallor in the instant he told Parmenter Lloyd why he had called.
“Dead, you say? Good lord…dead? Killed?”
I steered him to a chair.
“I was to have met him today – this afternoon, in fact. When he did not keep the appointment I thought only that I had perhaps been mistaken, or he took profit himself from the swindle, and dared not risk discovery. I had not known…” He shuddered. “I caused this. I wrote to him; it must have been intercepted. A man is dead, and my doing!”
He twisted his hands beneath his chin and rocked back and forth piteously, until I thought I might have to get out the smelling salts. Holmes, longing only to get on with his search, plied him with impatient questions. What swindle? What had Kibicz to do with it? Where had they arranged to meet?
Gradually, the shadowy scheme emerged from the fog of Lloyd’s distress. The Half Part Shares Company had been systematically defrauded of around a third of its income over a number of years. The new Director, conscientious to a fault, had made it his business to compare the accounts with a calculation of expected rents and found the shortfall. Before contacting his fellow directors he wished to check directly with the rent man ‘on the ground’. The Wayfarer Public House was to be their rendezvous but Kibicz never came.
The Half Part rents were rendered, with others, to a solicitor, Nathan Staithe of the partnership Staithe and Hollins, 49 Carey Street.
“I do not know his private address. The boy: what time will he appear before the magistrate tomorrow?”
“Whatever time, we ourselves must be at the Carey Street office the very second it opens. Mr Lloyd: you will meet us there?”
“With a good will, Mr Holmes; Dr Watson. Some good must be brought out of this dreadful business.”
Holmes would not be touched that night, shrugging off even my hand on his shoulder as he crouched on the floor over the accounts provided by Parmenter Lloyd, checking and cross-checking. And, as always on such occasions, I was on fire for him: for the phenomenon, the concentrated concentrate, for I knew what it was like to be concentrated upon when it came to my turn. In bed, in the extremity of desire, commanding even as he begged, never more alive than when he died the little death, there was no-one more entirely himself than this man. My Holmes.
Seek out the exception, John Watson. He was the great exception: however often I found him, I never tired of looking; however often fed, I would always be hungry for more. He glanced up briefly from his study to meet my eyes, and knew it.
“Tomorrow, John.”
It was all I needed to hear, today.
***********************************
Staithe and Hollins had fallen upon hard times. Two thin and harried clerks scurried past us as soon as the doors were unbolted from the inside by a watchman so ancient I should not have been surprised if he’d watched the late Queen’s coronation procession. The wooden floors were grey with dust and neglect. Mr Hollins, we were given to understand, was indisposed. He was expected to remain so for the foreseeable future. Mr Staithe would be in directly, if we could just wait here, gentlemen.
Four out of the six desks in the front office remained empty, their former servants having not left behind so much as a spare inkpot. Nathan Staithe, a tall man with heavy jowls and slicked back hair, stomped the street mud of a long walk in the rain from his boots as he arrived. He stared at us for a moment with something like hope, until Holmes began to speak.
“We are here to seek your assistance Mr Staithe, but it is in the matter of the Half Part Shares Company and Mr Reuel Kibicz. Shall we go to your private office?”
He denied it to begin with, blustering at Lloyd as a “tinkering amateur” and Holmes and me as “notorious adventurers”. Faced with the evidence of the accounts and rent books, the façade began to crumble, flaking off a piece at a time like the plaster on his office ceiling, hanging in curling strips around the ruins of his plans. He was a wretch; nevertheless, had it not been for the bled-out body in an East End morgue, a softer soul might have pitied him.
“Livelihoods – lives – depend on me, sirs, you must understand. My clerks, my wife, my widowed mother, poor Mr Hollins, dying by inches, beset by doctors’ bills even for quelling his pain. What matter a few shillings here and there, taken from a company no-one kept a close enough eye on to care, owned by men who will never know even the tiniest pinch of want?”
Mr Lloyd fidgeted, fingering his gold cufflinks.
“Your arithmetic,” observed Holmes, implacable, “is as crooked as your moral sense. In what school is some five hundred pounds a year to be equated with ‘a few shillings here and there’?”
Staithe put his head in his hands. “The school of life, sir,” he whispered. “The school that teaches us self-reliance and industry are the way to freedom, but fails to add that those who fall despite both will lie in chains unbreakable unless they hammer them to pieces with whatever tool comes to hand.”
“Including murder?”
“A stranger. A foreigner. Would he have cared had it been I who had to die? Who in this great City notices a sparrow fall, let alone a man?”
Sherlock Holmes rose to his feet, put on his silk hat and pointed the way to the door.
“There is at least one, Mr Staithe. I do.”
His worship, Justice Mears, was not at all pleased to have proceedings interrupted by “this unseemly circus”. Yet he listened keenly to our evidence and the testimony of Staithe: that he had paid certain ruffians from a well-known family of Whitechapel threateners far more than they could gain from his pockets to ‘do the Jew in’, in such a way as to provide a scapegoat to content the Police, and send an incidental warning to any other collectors who might have been party to Kibicz's knowledge. Staithe swore that he had never seen nor heard of Thomas Larrup before that morning.
The sound of clapping echoed from the public gallery. Holmes looked up, tipped his hat to Miss Porter, and received a neat little curtsey in return.
“What of the murdered man’s family?” I said to Holmes, as we took a long walk from the court down the Mile End Road and back to what we are pleased to call civilisation.
"Miss Porter tells me that Rabbi Stern and the Jewish Board of Guardians will see to their future. They will not at least be in financial want. The loss of a father: who can say what that may mean?”
He had never spoken of his own father and brushed aside all my attempts to draw him out on the subject. Brother Mycroft stood for father, brother and teacher - all in one, capacious package. I knew better than to push, and opted for a little ‘pawky humour’ instead.
“How Miss Porter got the morning off is a mystery in itself.”
Holmes smiled. “I should not care to be the Board of Education official who stood in her way.”
************************
“Is this what passes for a happy ending, Watson?” he asked me later, as we indulged in sponging each other down before bed, ready to get thoroughly filthy in several thoroughly enjoyable ways thereafter. “Freedom for one boy to go back to a house where a week’s sickness means a man’s whole family starves; freedom for the landlords to amass an obscene fortune on the backs of the poor, instead of a merely handsome one?”
I confess I was not much inclined to dwell on melancholy – my mind had already begun the process of deserting my head for points directly south – or philosophy. I never had an answer for such questions, and distrusted those who claimed to. I did not demand, as Holmes did, that the whole world make sense.
“We put right what we can. Perhaps Tommy Larrup will have a better life than his father; perhaps Mr Samuelson will house him.” I wrung out my sponge and put it away. “We jumped in part way through more than one story, just as you disapprove of me doing in mine. Perhaps they are more true to life than you know.”
“One might wish that life was more true to reason.”
“One might wish no such thing. We are, I sincerely hope, about to risk a lengthy term at His Majesty’s pleasure by engaging in an unnatural, infertile, unhygienic sexual act. Not the course two reasonable men would take.”
He dabbed at my moustache with random precision. “Hygiene assured. Nature...” – he glanced down at our rising cocks and stepped closer, tossing the sponge over his shoulder where it landed in the perfect centre of the bowl on the washstand – “seems, on the evidence, to approve.” He kissed me. “Finally, we must surely be grateful that the world is spared the prospect of me as a parent.”
And if on that score I had made my own sacrifice, nothing worth having comes without cost.
We were not free, any more than Tommy, or the clerks at Staithe and Hollins, or the Misses Tibbs and Porter of Maria Terrace, or any of the players on stage with us over the past few days. The law - like society, poverty, or despair – hung heavy about us in twisted coils. I could walk arm in arm with Holmes down a London street, but never hand in hand. Every exchange in front of others must be weighed, edited, guarded. Love must live in the silences between the words.
It did. It does. Certainly, there were not many words that night.
But oh, what silences.
END
For:
garonneAuthor:
tweedisgoodPairing: Holmes/Watson established relationship
Rated: R in parts – nothing too hair-raising
Word Count: ~ 6,300
Summary: Being, some of the time, a tale of Sherlock Holmes and his female friends.
Warning: Victorian attitudes in spades. You name the ‘ism’, it’s here, because it was there. No need to say, I hope, that no character’s views reflect the author’s.
Notes: Title is from “Hafiz to the Cup-bearer”, Edward Carpenter. Beta thanks to
mad_with_july In all my stories of Sherlock Holmes, the great detective, a paragon of reasoning and deduction, the sword of truth and the balancing scales of the law of England - my friend in that truth and, what is the great silence between every published word, my spouse but for that same law - I have, perhaps, nevertheless done him one significant injustice.
I have implied – no, I have outright stated – that he dislikes women.
It is… somewhat more complicated than that. He dislikes the idea of them, certainly. Strong perfumes and rustling petticoats that announce their arrival before he has had time to get their measure with a glance; the roles that polite society will have them play whether they can learn the lines or no and the falseness and triviality that go with them: these discomfit and irritate him.
Individual women are another matter. He treats them all at first with a wary reverence, as one who fears the spirits of the shrine rather than worships at it: as The Great Other. Yet there are some few whom he has let in closer, who treat him and are treated as, if not quite equals - after all, he has none among men, either - worthy of respect, even friendship.
It was an afternoon late in one of those final years of Holmes’ London career. Once the new century had turned, he had begun uncomfortably often to speak of himself as almost played out, as belonging to a vanishing world. He had been in that vein today. After, with my protests still hanging in the air, he had taken up his fiddle and was playing a composition of his own at once lyrical and wistful, a simple melody giving way to soaring phrases in a minor key.
The trill of the front door bell broke his rhythm.
“Client?” I asked.
“Miss Tibbs…” he answered, tone poised between a negative reply and a question of his own. As a short conversation between two ladies, one of them Mrs Hudson, took place in the front hall, he answered the next question that I had long since left off asking – how he could tell?
“She has a particular way of pressing the button tentatively once, then more decisively. An exterior of silk plush and a core of steel, that one.”
It was odd, because she was not expected. Miss Tibbs and her companion Miss Porter, whom I had first met on a night in the East End which I will never forget, did on occasion take tea at Baker Street. However they never visited separately and never without notice or invitation. There was always a pretext – a new discovery in science, a recent Royal Institution lecture which they wished to discuss with a fellow-enthusiast. I was not fooled. Holmes enjoyed their company and they, his.
Miss Porter had a sharp way about her, a habit of criticism in looking at the world that could rise to a fine pitch of indignation at a piece of spectacular unfairness or deliberate stupidity. Sometimes her mood spilled over into biting character dissections of the supposed culprits but Miss Tibbs had only to interject with an: “I don’t think you are being quite fair, dear” for her to subside, ruled by a loving glance.
“She is well, thank you,” Miss Tibbs replied in response to my anxious enquiries, and Holmes’ cool ones, on the absence of her friend. “To tell you the truth,” – she coloured with embarrassment, but would not deceive – “she does not know I am here. She prefers to tackle the problem on her own. In my opinion that does not always yield the best results. She has a tendency to be…rather direct, when a more considered approach might be more successful in the long run.”
“Quite so. Just what I am always telling Dr Watson,” said Holmes gravely, with an apologetic wink in my direction. A less indirect personality than his can hardly be imagined: Miss Tibbs raised both eyebrows at him over her spectacles but carried on with her story.
“She has been having great trouble with one boy in Standard Five, Thomas Larrup. He has always been a forward lad, keen and quick to learn; she had thought of making him a paid monitor in the course of time. The extra income would surely help his family, for his father, a woodturner, is hard put to support a family of seven children. Lately, though, she reports he has been either absent altogether or badly distracted in his lessons, and several times had to be beaten for bullying a little Jewish boy in the form below, my class.”
Holmes had compressed himself in his chair like potted meat: long legs folded away, head bowed, eyes closed, every nerve nevertheless at full attention. The seeming triviality of the tale so far would normally have made him impatient, but he knew Miss Tibbs well enough to know she would not have come bearing trivia.
The Settles Street Board School, where both the ladies earned their bread by teaching, lay in the heart of Whitechapel, home to teeming multitudes barely existing on casual, unskilled labour and piece work on the sweating system: a strange haven, but a haven nonetheless, for the displaced Jews of Poland and Russia, hunted from their villages as if they were vermin.
“Hope; the hope of better times; the hope of life, of something more for their children: how else can men live here?” as Holmes once said to me after a foray east of Shoreditch, where we had lost our quarry in the warren of alleys and ‘courts’ – narrow, soot-blackened, stinking with refuse, where legend had it that the policemen went in twos if they went at all. “One might as well throw oneself in the Thames and have done with it.” And in the night he had woken suddenly, clung to me in our comfortable bed and shivered.
“All that is preliminary data,” went on Miss Tibbs, as if she knew very well she had better throw the dog a bone before it slunk off to better pickings. “It is the events of last night which bring me here. Mr Kibicz, father of my pupil Pawel, was found murdered in a court off Boyd Street.”
“What was his occupation?”
“He collected rents in many streets for number of landlords – including our own. I daresay his profession did not make him popular – but enough to murder? I have always found him civil enough, not a man to make enemies.”
“But then, perhaps, you have never been unable to find the rent?”
Miss Tibbs looked around our well-appointed sitting room and pursed her lips. His tone had been gentle, and he was probably right, but neither he nor I really understood what it was like to live on thirty shillings a week. As for those even lower down the pile…
“Mr Holmes, I doubt we have a single pupil whose parents – should they have any – have not been unable to find the rent at some time or other. For the majority, it is a weekly battle. They try – if they want to avoid the streets or worse, the workhouse, they must. There is little protest offered, barely any goods to seize, almost never any violence. Sometimes a room will simply become vacant, the former occupants vanished in the night. A new family move in who will pay – usually at a higher rate. Do you know that, per square foot, returns on property in Whitechapel are three times that in Mayfair? Besides, the Police found something very odd about the body.”
Holmes perked up and leaned forward, rubbing his hands together.
“His satchel was still over his shoulders, the rent book in his pocket. Nothing had been stolen. He had on him some forty-seven pounds in coin: a year’s living – just about – in Boyd Street.”
“The robbers were disturbed,” suggested Holmes.
“He was discovered this morning, and had been dead for many hours. Neither his murderers, nor anybody else robbed his corpse. That, I put to you, Mr Holmes, is a point of considerable interest.”
Holmes sprang up from his seat and made automatically for his pipe rack. Wavering there between good manners and necessity, he waited for Miss Tibbs to beg him not to mind her. Fortified with Black Virginia flake, he resumed his line of questioning.
“Describe the inhabitants of Boyd Street.”
“In a word, poor. In two words, desperately poor. Yet aside from some thieving, a great deal of drunkenness, illegal gaming and what they call ‘cadging’ – really, begging - not criminals.”
"They routinely break the law; does that not make them criminals, Miss Tibbs?”
She looked from him to me. “Surely we can agree, gentlemen, that routinely breaking the law may be a matter of choice, or one of necessity: on occasion, both at the same time.”
There was a short pause before Holmes stopped contemplating the rug and I was able to turn the next page in my notebook. None of us have ever referred to that exchange since.
“The Larrup family live there?”
“They do.”
“Indeed. For why else did you first mention the boy? Is the father suspected?”
Miss Tibbs surprised us both by promptly bursting into tears.
Amid many apologies, my fresh handkerchief and Holmes’ best soothings, she collected herself enough to continue.
“Mr Holmes, Doctor Watson, they have arrested Tommy. Millicent – Miss Porter – went to the Police station straight after school to plead his case.”
“J Division: Inspector Beech.” Holmes fetched the name from his brain attic. “On a good day, at least half his mind functions; they must have some evidence. Watson, be so good as to get Miss Tibbs’ coat.”
Inspector Beech was respectful but not in awe of his famous visitor. He did indeed have evidence, and of a compelling sort.
“The boy doesn’t deny it’s his knife - hardly could, seeing as he carved his name in the handle. Says he lost it a week ago but well, of course he would say that.”
“Found in the body, you say?”
“Under it, strictly speaking. The force of spraying blood pushed it out of the wound, but the surgeon could demonstrate how it plunged into the…” - he turned away, pulling us with him and lowered his voice so that Miss Tibbs, sitting vainly attempting to placate her outraged friend, would not hear – “groin, so that the artery was opened. He must have staggered about, trying to escape but never made it to the flight of steps up from the crossway. He was collapsed in a far corner. They have cellars doubling for passageways down there, filthy pits under the floorboards with nothing but rotten ladders to get in and out at each end. The buildings are packed together tight in those courts - some without even a back door to get out to the privies.”
“Murder was meant, Mr Holmes, and the height of the blow – low down, y’see. These boys – around here, they’re not children, you understand. They are adults in wickedness and vice long before their voices break. I’d rather it were another way; I’m a father myself. But how else can one read it?”
“One may read fiction as well as fact,” said Holmes, ”in which case one takes from a tale what the author, if he has any skill, intends one to take.”
Beech drew in a sceptical breath but continued to listen as my friend laid out his case.
“Supposing one wished to commit cold-blooded murder and escape punishment. It is possible for a victim to lie, like Kibicz, murdered and undiscovered for some time in such courts?”
“Undoubtedly. People aren’t looking out for trouble, nor wanting the Law to come calling.”
“But an unsolved mystery is a stain on the good name of the Police. They will surely make greater efforts to clear it up, make deeper and wider enquiries, than if a plausible culprit is near at hand. A canny murderer takes out insurance. Why did no-one hear Kibicz as he ‘staggered about’, bleeding out, surely crying for help all the while? Where are the sprays of blood on the walls? Why not take the weapon away from the scene? Even a boy knows that much. I do not believe he was killed in that cellar, nor by Master Larrup. Certainly he was not killed for mere gain.”
“Which leaves a thousand and one suspects within a mile of this station, Mr Holmes, and not a teaspoon of evidence to go on. Kibicz collected rents all over, not to mention the trouble we’ve had with Jewish anarchists, socialists, and who-knows-what quarrels between all the groups disputing and arguing about workers’ ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’. I ask you: what good’ll freedom do ‘em if there’s no bread to eat?”
The inspector’s voice had risen and Miss Porter, drawing herself up where she still sat a few feet away, hit back:
“If they were truly free, they’d have bread too, inspector.”
Beech smiled, as if at a precocious child who has vowed that one day he will be another Nelson.
“And while we wait for the New Jerusalem, Miss, I have to make a report. Show me why it’s not the boy, and I’ll gladly hear you, Mr Holmes. Until then, he stays here.”
I made some remark under my breath about expecting his family to be here, too. Miss Porter rounded on me in the inspector’s place:
“They can’t come, Doctor Watson. An hour away from the turning bench is a table leg less, fourpence less, a pawn ticket unredeemed, a meal missing. Mrs Larrup stuffs mattresses whilst she looks after the little ones. They were very thankful I could be here in their stead. Tommy knows I’ll not give up. Not after the tussle we had over long division.”
She thrust her chin up and rose, departing arm- in-arm with Miss Tibbs, bidding Holmes wire them if he needed anything.
There followed some close negotiation over viewing the knife (grudgingly conceded), interviewing the prisoner (“you’ll get precious little out of him, mind”) and inspecting the corpse (highly irregular, he must understand; he should consult the surgeon).
Tommy Larrup was a defiant, grey-faced ghost with dirty hands and cropped black hair, a little better dressed but not so sturdy as the band of urchins Holmes had been using as his invisible agents for twenty years by that time. There were the signs of rickets in his knock-knees and bad teeth but Miss Tibbs was right – despite everything, he was sharp as a tack. He gathered we were something to do with the Police and was wary until he found we were also friends of Miss Porter; the signal promptly turned green.
He freely confessed to deliberately tripping up Pawel Kibicz in the playground several times, hiding his skullcap, slate and pencil, cuffing him around the ear and calling him all manner of foul epithets.
“He stinks of fish and he cheats at marbles. Thinks I don’t know what a kucker is, neither. Known that since I were five."
I didn’t ask.
“But I never touched his pa. Never! That I swear in blood, on me mother’s head, in church, fall down dead in an open grave if I lie. That knife – I always keep it on me, so’s Mum don’t put it in hock – was lost from out my pocket Wednesday last on Christian Street, on my way back from school. I went back soon as I missed it, but you might as well expect a barrow-load of fruit to still have all its bleedin’ apples if you leave it round here for more than a minute and no one watching it.” He grinned, a swift flash in a face pinched with anxiety. “Sometimes if there is someone watching it, an’ all.”
“His pa was all right; played it straight. People cursed him on a Monday when the rents fell due – ‘stead of cursing the landlords they’d never get to see - but he never gave any lip nor took on airs. I can’t see who’d have wanted to rough him up, leave alone kill him.”
Holmes didn’t try to conceal from the boy his real peril behind some false promise that all would be well. The force of his full attention, the refusal to dismiss Tommy’s story untested and that magic of his own self-belief which made others believe too (and I freely include myself in that number): it was quite enough to leave the little figure tucking in with a will to a supper the like of which he must rarely have seen in Boyd Street and saying he hoped Miss Porter got home all right.
The knife, which a very young constable brought out with some ceremony from the station safe, was an ordinary pocket model such as I myself had carried as a lad. I suspected Tommy had not come by it quite honestly, but there was no reason to suppose he meant it for a weapon.
“It’s been sharpened almost to a point, very recently,” said Holmes after a swift examination.
“Which the boy would easily have had done,” the constable objected. “The knife grinders that ply the local streets will be given his description, as soon as we round them all up.”
Holmes fixed him with a narrow-eyed stare.
“I presume you mean they will be given a description of the knife.”
“Just so, Mr Holmes, just so. Slip of the tongue.”
Gaining access to the body of the rent collector proved more difficult. Scotland Yard had become more inclined to process, procedure and “the proper channels” than they had been in the early days, and it was only the thought of the newspapers should Holmes be able to say he solved a case only in the face of Police obstruction that they allowed him to see all the same evidence as they had and take what he could from it.
“In this case, the manner of death may only be staging, but it is indisputable. A single, deep wound to the femoral artery. Either a lucky strike or a practised killer. One killer, for there are no marks to show he has been grasped by the arms or legs to hold him still.”
“Might it resemble the way their butchers are said to prepare meat, by draining all the blood?” I asked.
Holmes clicked his tongue. “Ritual killing by a rival Hebrew gang? Contain yourself, Watson. This is not a penny dreadful. This man was killed doing business; it is to his business we must look.”
Property in the East End turned out to be a maze with a hundred dead ends. Nominally, Kibicz worked for a landlord named Peach. Peach, however, owned neither ground nor bricks, but only dozens of subleases for which he paid dues to men who in turn leased from others and so on up more layers than a French pastry. Peach had a few, mostly fragmentary, names of some above him, but the freeholders might as well have been Olympian gods for all the traffic he had with them.
Meanwhile, a twelve-year-old boy languished in a cell and Holmes, whose appetite for physical intimacy usually disappeared during a case, wordlessly lifted up his nightshirt late that night and offered me his prick to suck. He allowed himself to be led to ecstasy, submitted to being drained of every drop he had and drifted, gentled by loving arms, into a sleep that wouldn’t come by itself. If he little understood women, he understood children even less, and would never let sentiment cloud his professional judgement. It did not make him immune to the memory of Tommy Larrup swinging his bare feet over the edge of a pallet made for a grown man and saying that he’d left his boots behind when he was arrested. Then at least his younger brother might get some wear out of them, since his own had no soles to speak of.
*************************************
Miss Porter, who had after a day and a half had nearly forgiven me for my comment about the Larrups, invited us by telegram to their lodgings at tea time the day after. The magistrates would see Tommy in the morning, and unless we could put something in the hands of the Police, remand in an adult prison was the next step into an abyss from which he might never return.
Waiting for us in the Misses’ home was a gentleman in clerical garb, introduced as the minister of the Unitarian chapel at Bethnal Green. The Reverend Mr Samuel Samuelson proved to be somewhat under middling height and bulk but with a presence that filled the room with bustling moral industry and muscular benevolence. He also possessed the peculiar skill of breathing in as punctuation, so that it was extremely difficult to have a conversation with him rather than simply be talked at.
“The whole affair is troubling, most troubling. The dear ladies, my friends here, have already relayed all the facts as they are so far known and I am in the fortunate position of being able to lay certain additional information before you. As Secretary of the Committee for Improved London Dwellings (Aldgate and Points East) - a scheme somewhat modelled on the ‘four percent’ principle established some years past by Messrs Rothschild and Montagu – I have been charged with mapping the ultimate ownership of all the houses in the triangle formed by Leman Street, Cable Street and the Commercial Road. Others have been assigned different sets of streets and we hope by this means to identify and persuade at least some of the owners to sell their freeholds to our Committee. The foul and crumbling shelters will be swept away and modern tenements raised up in their place. One only has to look at the work done by the London County Council in my own district. A voluntary society has the added advantage of improving not only the bodies of the tenants but the souls of the subscribers: no grudging compulsion on the rates; only pure, free Christian charity.”
“Who owns Boyd Street and its courts?” Holmes took his opportunity, as Samuelson chanced a sip of tea instead of breathing.
“An interesting question, one to which I have devoted many hours of work in libraries and much correspondence with solicitors. The land was once part of the estates of the Matfelon family, builders of the first St Mary’s church, from which the very name Whitechapel derives, paying tithes to the Rector of Stepney, from land redistributed many times under the Eighth King Henry, King James and after the Commonwealth and so on through the Baronetcy of –"
Miss Tibbs began to cough violently. As Miss Porter stoutly patted her on the back and the Revd Samuelson begged me to administer medical aid, Holmes swiftly offered his own untouched and cooling tea to dislodge the morsel of seed cake which seemed to be to blame. As she dabbed her eyes, my friend and his co-conspirator exchanged sly smiles and he pounced before the budding antiquarian could resume his seat.
“The final outcome of your labours is a name or set of names who currently have the freehold of Boyd Street and the neighbouring slums. I need those names.”
“The Peel Trust, whose income is paid out to a widow and her daughters in Maidstone; Sir Reginald North, MP; the Lord of the Manor – that is to say, the Bishop of London, and a somewhat mysterious body named the Half Part Shares Company, Limited . That is, of course, not counting surviving ecclesiastical, educational and charitable endowments, but these are comparative small fry.”
“And have you approached any of these freeholders?”
“My Lord Bishop,” Samuelson dripped polite acid over the title, “directs me to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Mrs Peel-Hunt has a weak heart and her daughters begged me not to trouble her further. Sir Reginald, a well-known radical firebrand in the Commons, made a speech last week on the lines that model housing merely sends the very poorest to the wall, or rather, outside any walls but the poorhouse. As for –“
“Half Part Shares…” Holmes, who had cocked his head at the first mention of the name, like a man hearing a faintly remembered tune, interrupted him and thrust out a hand in my direction. “Watson, you have the notes of Kibicz’s rent book entries, and I trust you have faithfully observed my charge to omit nothing.” I handed them over. “Good, I see that you have.”
He rifled through the loose sheets, throwing some to the floor and keeping others. As I crawled about on hands and knees to retrieve the spares, Miss Tibbs and Miss Porter stifled unladylike snorts of laughter at our antics. Samuelson observed them wide-eyed. Holmes ignored us all, some variation on “Hum” and “Ho” his only comment as he worked.
“Ha!” he cried at last. Spreading the papers, and a map of Whitechapel that he had fished out of a pocket, over a small table that Miss Porter had provided without needing to be asked, he pointed to places in the rent book where a ‘½’ had been noted in the margin.
“I had assumed it meant half the rent paid, or one of a pair of rooms, or some such distinction. Now I believe it to signify this mystery of yours, Mr Samuelson. Observe the arrangement of courts and alleys. To the casual eye there is no pattern to the marked rent records. However, such is the close crowding the building and rebuilding on the yards of older buildings behind these streets, that the addresses in book order only reveal themselves in spatial relation to one another once they are mapped. Here, we see Boyd Street.” He stabbed at the map with a bony forefinger, pinning down the corresponding page of notes beside it with his thumb. “As in the other streets, all the marked entries correspond to single physical buildings with a footprint of land, and thus to their freeholder. In this case, I venture to suggest, the Half Part Shares Company, Limited.”
He sat back and folded his arms - but not yet in triumph. Chin sunk on his chest, he carried on staring at the pages, willing them to give up their deepest secrets. Who held the Half Part shares? Who would want to kill their agent? Why?
“And Why,” he wondered aloud, “separate out those rents from the rest? Watson, call a cab.”
As we rattled up the City Road, to the shouts of the cabbie warning folk to get out of the way or be run down (ah, the wonders wrought by a five pound note), Holmes rattled off all the things he wanted to know which might conceivably be found in the vaults of the Register of Companies. He was disappointed at some points, but armed with a vital name before the doors closed behind us, we set off again, this time in the direction of Gordon Square.
“Seek out the exception, dear boy,” he said as he wrung his hands together, at a pitch of excitement so high that his eyes shone and his smile resembled that of a hunting wolf. He was dangerous at such times – to himself, deaf to reason in his pursuit of answers; to me, for I could scarcely stop myself from kissing him in public; above all to evildoers, for once he caught the faintest whiff of their scent, they were done for before they even knew he was coming.
“The exception in this case is Mr Parmenter Lloyd. All the other Directors of the Half Part Share Company have addresses in the country. All of them save him have served for the whole fifteen years the company has existed. He has been on the Board less than a month.”
If there was logic here, it foxed me, even after all the years of exposure. It was all on instinct, it must be: one of Holmes’ leaping intuitions that he would find a way to explain away, as if they embarrassed him, but in which I gloried. ‘Severe reasoning from cause to effect’, my left foot. This was art.
Flesh tones can be rendered dark or ruddy, fresh or drawn, by the artist’s brush. Sherlock Holmes produced deathly pallor in the instant he told Parmenter Lloyd why he had called.
“Dead, you say? Good lord…dead? Killed?”
I steered him to a chair.
“I was to have met him today – this afternoon, in fact. When he did not keep the appointment I thought only that I had perhaps been mistaken, or he took profit himself from the swindle, and dared not risk discovery. I had not known…” He shuddered. “I caused this. I wrote to him; it must have been intercepted. A man is dead, and my doing!”
He twisted his hands beneath his chin and rocked back and forth piteously, until I thought I might have to get out the smelling salts. Holmes, longing only to get on with his search, plied him with impatient questions. What swindle? What had Kibicz to do with it? Where had they arranged to meet?
Gradually, the shadowy scheme emerged from the fog of Lloyd’s distress. The Half Part Shares Company had been systematically defrauded of around a third of its income over a number of years. The new Director, conscientious to a fault, had made it his business to compare the accounts with a calculation of expected rents and found the shortfall. Before contacting his fellow directors he wished to check directly with the rent man ‘on the ground’. The Wayfarer Public House was to be their rendezvous but Kibicz never came.
The Half Part rents were rendered, with others, to a solicitor, Nathan Staithe of the partnership Staithe and Hollins, 49 Carey Street.
“I do not know his private address. The boy: what time will he appear before the magistrate tomorrow?”
“Whatever time, we ourselves must be at the Carey Street office the very second it opens. Mr Lloyd: you will meet us there?”
“With a good will, Mr Holmes; Dr Watson. Some good must be brought out of this dreadful business.”
Holmes would not be touched that night, shrugging off even my hand on his shoulder as he crouched on the floor over the accounts provided by Parmenter Lloyd, checking and cross-checking. And, as always on such occasions, I was on fire for him: for the phenomenon, the concentrated concentrate, for I knew what it was like to be concentrated upon when it came to my turn. In bed, in the extremity of desire, commanding even as he begged, never more alive than when he died the little death, there was no-one more entirely himself than this man. My Holmes.
Seek out the exception, John Watson. He was the great exception: however often I found him, I never tired of looking; however often fed, I would always be hungry for more. He glanced up briefly from his study to meet my eyes, and knew it.
“Tomorrow, John.”
It was all I needed to hear, today.
***********************************
Staithe and Hollins had fallen upon hard times. Two thin and harried clerks scurried past us as soon as the doors were unbolted from the inside by a watchman so ancient I should not have been surprised if he’d watched the late Queen’s coronation procession. The wooden floors were grey with dust and neglect. Mr Hollins, we were given to understand, was indisposed. He was expected to remain so for the foreseeable future. Mr Staithe would be in directly, if we could just wait here, gentlemen.
Four out of the six desks in the front office remained empty, their former servants having not left behind so much as a spare inkpot. Nathan Staithe, a tall man with heavy jowls and slicked back hair, stomped the street mud of a long walk in the rain from his boots as he arrived. He stared at us for a moment with something like hope, until Holmes began to speak.
“We are here to seek your assistance Mr Staithe, but it is in the matter of the Half Part Shares Company and Mr Reuel Kibicz. Shall we go to your private office?”
He denied it to begin with, blustering at Lloyd as a “tinkering amateur” and Holmes and me as “notorious adventurers”. Faced with the evidence of the accounts and rent books, the façade began to crumble, flaking off a piece at a time like the plaster on his office ceiling, hanging in curling strips around the ruins of his plans. He was a wretch; nevertheless, had it not been for the bled-out body in an East End morgue, a softer soul might have pitied him.
“Livelihoods – lives – depend on me, sirs, you must understand. My clerks, my wife, my widowed mother, poor Mr Hollins, dying by inches, beset by doctors’ bills even for quelling his pain. What matter a few shillings here and there, taken from a company no-one kept a close enough eye on to care, owned by men who will never know even the tiniest pinch of want?”
Mr Lloyd fidgeted, fingering his gold cufflinks.
“Your arithmetic,” observed Holmes, implacable, “is as crooked as your moral sense. In what school is some five hundred pounds a year to be equated with ‘a few shillings here and there’?”
Staithe put his head in his hands. “The school of life, sir,” he whispered. “The school that teaches us self-reliance and industry are the way to freedom, but fails to add that those who fall despite both will lie in chains unbreakable unless they hammer them to pieces with whatever tool comes to hand.”
“Including murder?”
“A stranger. A foreigner. Would he have cared had it been I who had to die? Who in this great City notices a sparrow fall, let alone a man?”
Sherlock Holmes rose to his feet, put on his silk hat and pointed the way to the door.
“There is at least one, Mr Staithe. I do.”
His worship, Justice Mears, was not at all pleased to have proceedings interrupted by “this unseemly circus”. Yet he listened keenly to our evidence and the testimony of Staithe: that he had paid certain ruffians from a well-known family of Whitechapel threateners far more than they could gain from his pockets to ‘do the Jew in’, in such a way as to provide a scapegoat to content the Police, and send an incidental warning to any other collectors who might have been party to Kibicz's knowledge. Staithe swore that he had never seen nor heard of Thomas Larrup before that morning.
The sound of clapping echoed from the public gallery. Holmes looked up, tipped his hat to Miss Porter, and received a neat little curtsey in return.
“What of the murdered man’s family?” I said to Holmes, as we took a long walk from the court down the Mile End Road and back to what we are pleased to call civilisation.
"Miss Porter tells me that Rabbi Stern and the Jewish Board of Guardians will see to their future. They will not at least be in financial want. The loss of a father: who can say what that may mean?”
He had never spoken of his own father and brushed aside all my attempts to draw him out on the subject. Brother Mycroft stood for father, brother and teacher - all in one, capacious package. I knew better than to push, and opted for a little ‘pawky humour’ instead.
“How Miss Porter got the morning off is a mystery in itself.”
Holmes smiled. “I should not care to be the Board of Education official who stood in her way.”
************************
“Is this what passes for a happy ending, Watson?” he asked me later, as we indulged in sponging each other down before bed, ready to get thoroughly filthy in several thoroughly enjoyable ways thereafter. “Freedom for one boy to go back to a house where a week’s sickness means a man’s whole family starves; freedom for the landlords to amass an obscene fortune on the backs of the poor, instead of a merely handsome one?”
I confess I was not much inclined to dwell on melancholy – my mind had already begun the process of deserting my head for points directly south – or philosophy. I never had an answer for such questions, and distrusted those who claimed to. I did not demand, as Holmes did, that the whole world make sense.
“We put right what we can. Perhaps Tommy Larrup will have a better life than his father; perhaps Mr Samuelson will house him.” I wrung out my sponge and put it away. “We jumped in part way through more than one story, just as you disapprove of me doing in mine. Perhaps they are more true to life than you know.”
“One might wish that life was more true to reason.”
“One might wish no such thing. We are, I sincerely hope, about to risk a lengthy term at His Majesty’s pleasure by engaging in an unnatural, infertile, unhygienic sexual act. Not the course two reasonable men would take.”
He dabbed at my moustache with random precision. “Hygiene assured. Nature...” – he glanced down at our rising cocks and stepped closer, tossing the sponge over his shoulder where it landed in the perfect centre of the bowl on the washstand – “seems, on the evidence, to approve.” He kissed me. “Finally, we must surely be grateful that the world is spared the prospect of me as a parent.”
And if on that score I had made my own sacrifice, nothing worth having comes without cost.
We were not free, any more than Tommy, or the clerks at Staithe and Hollins, or the Misses Tibbs and Porter of Maria Terrace, or any of the players on stage with us over the past few days. The law - like society, poverty, or despair – hung heavy about us in twisted coils. I could walk arm in arm with Holmes down a London street, but never hand in hand. Every exchange in front of others must be weighed, edited, guarded. Love must live in the silences between the words.
It did. It does. Certainly, there were not many words that night.
But oh, what silences.
END
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Date: 2013-10-27 05:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-20 11:03 pm (UTC)Indeed: detective stories tend to the neat: life, less so.
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Date: 2013-10-27 05:44 pm (UTC)Masterfully done, Anon. Each word chosen with precision for the effect it produces, all the characters portrayed with the kind of detail that brings them vividly to life, and period-perfect atmosphere, plus a corking mystery with a (reasonably) happy ending.
This is a loving portrait of Holmes at his finest - a reasoning machine, certainly, but one with both a heart and a brain.
I should mention that one typo did leap out at me. "Freedom for one boy to go back to a house where a week’s sickness means a man’s whole family starvse" but that's a mere nothing in a masterful story.
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Date: 2013-10-27 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-05 07:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-27 07:21 pm (UTC)Realistic ending for a Victorian (well, Edwardian) time: yay, the pauper boy is saved from the gallows so he can go home and die of TB or get killed by factory machinery instead.
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Date: 2013-11-05 07:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-27 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-05 07:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-27 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-05 07:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-28 04:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-05 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-05 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-28 11:00 pm (UTC)I particularly appreciated the case itself. I do like my reading matter to contain a good dose of what you might call social realism, for want of a better word, and this was a particularly fine example. It wasn't pleasant, and it wasn't warm and fluffy, but it's how things were.
We jumped in part way through more than one story
This was perhaps what I loved the most about the fic (if I were forced to choose only one thing, an almost impossible task!). It was peopled with well developed characters, their lives tangential to Holmes' and Watson's, but just as vividly drawn.
In short, this was just perfect, and I adored it!
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Date: 2013-11-05 07:20 pm (UTC)And social realism ftw. Tons of research which probably bores most people but thankfully not you, I'm so glad :-)
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Date: 2013-10-30 02:18 pm (UTC)Also, it seems to me that this fic is of a pretty distinctive style which feels highly familiar. I may be wrong, of course. :)
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Date: 2013-11-05 07:23 pm (UTC)Thank you. ACD probably didn't see the bleakness, as to him it was everyday fact and he was to an extent insulated by a level of privilege [though his struggles as a young doctor, sleeping on the floor and living on potatoes, are quite illuminating with regard to his character] - the past is a foreign country, as I have constantly to remind myself.
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Date: 2013-11-05 09:05 pm (UTC)I hadn't thought of that - it may have seemed so normal that he didn't find it worth mentioning. Also I suppose that his average readership would rather not take a closer look. That's not quite as foreign as I'd like to believe..
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Date: 2013-11-05 10:05 pm (UTC)I meant more that what seems very odd to us seems less odd to the inhabitants of that country. There's a strange post over on Fandom Secrets objecting to Watson calling Holmes 'my master' and comparing himself to a dog, showing utter fail in understanding how Victorians expressed themselves in print.
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Date: 2013-11-05 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-05 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-05 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-05 04:57 am (UTC)Also the casual intimacy, I liked that. ;D
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Date: 2013-11-05 07:37 pm (UTC)Thank you, what a lovely compliment and that was exactly what I wanted to achieve.
Victorian husbands are love...
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Date: 2013-11-05 07:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-05 07:35 pm (UTC)I've known for years that I needed to come back to Miss Tibbs and Miss Porter; the only question was how. Thank you,
And thank you, I'm so pleased you enjoyed this.
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Date: 2013-11-05 07:41 pm (UTC)Thanks again, fic like this is something to cherish and re-read.
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Date: 2013-11-06 08:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-06 07:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-08 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-08 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-16 10:10 am (UTC)Superb and delicate as always. Both for the plot, the original characters and your ever marvellous Holmes and Watson. I love how Holmes and Watson here are not just at ease and automatically in their element with the poverty. Often one or the other is portrayed as such, when well. As Watson says, they cannot begin to imagine that level of disenfranchisement. No one really can, but you do a remarkable job of bringing the whole thing to life.
I was bemused to find I can picture the area quite well because of over exposure to lots of nineteenth century maps of London to work out cholera epidemic patterns ... the things I end up doing for money (although in truth that is probably something I would do of my own accord anyway.).
My night is now made a whole lot more blissful.
Sneaking in always welcome
Date: 2013-12-16 08:33 pm (UTC)The more social history I re-read, the more I want to show the gents in that context, in the way (so far as research and imagination can render it) they would be, rather than the way we would idealise them to be. They can take it.
Thank you!