Becoming Holmes Read online

  “Dark arts?” the boy had queried.

  “Sherlock, stay with me! Do not question the adornments, the flourishes I may add to my descriptions. Fiction contains the greatest truths!”

  Holmes had had no idea what the old man meant by that, but he kept quiet. Bell began slamming the sticks together, wielding them in all sorts of ways and directions, and then pivoted and swung them toward a shelf filled with glass bottles. “Pin-point accuracy is the hallmark of the use of Swiss Fighting Sticks. One must be able to swing at something and hit it upon the nose! Or miss by a quarter of an inch!” But then Bell swung at the bottles, a mighty swoop that cut the air with the sound of a bullwhip and would have killed a rhinoceros had it been standing in the shop (and the boy wouldn’t have been surprised to see one, one day) and hit the glass containers dead in their centers, sending them, and the shelf, crashing to the floor with the sound of two locomotives colliding.

  It took several seconds for the sound to subside. The old man had stood there staring at what he had done for almost a full minute. The boy had not dared to utter a word.

  “Well …” Bell finally said, looking sheepish, “one sometimes misses!”

  But the apothecary then taught the boy to never miss. At first, he was shown how to use the Fighting Sticks to knock a lemon-flavored sweet from the old man’s mouth from a distance of five feet, and had several times loosened Bell’s teeth. But within a month the entire art had been added to his repertoire. Sherlock Holmes could swipe a pea from the top of the apothecary’s balding head … while wearing a blindfold.

  The bee buzzes near the invalid’s veiled face. The young dustman steps forward, lifts his broom in a decidedly martial-art grip, hands exactly six inches apart, the business end of the weapon pointed directly at his target, and swings his weapon at the bee, sweeping both it and the invalid’s veil across the footpath and thirty feet toward the flowerbed. The end of the broom, of course, does not touch the girl’s face, but passes a tiny fraction of an inch from her right cheekbone and her nose, lifting the veil away as cleanly as if he had delicately done it with a feather touch of his fingers.

  The woman behind the wheelchair screams.

  And when Sherlock Holmes looks at the face staring out at him from that chair, he nearly does too.

  11

  EVIL INCARNATE

  Sitting before him is a monster. Or, at least, it is the face of a monster atop the body of a teenage girl. His father never allowed him to attend circuses and see the freaks in the sideshows, and since Sherlock left home he has never once succumbed to the temptation to visit the penny gaffes on Whitechapel Road in the East End where strange people are exhibited in back rooms, often presented as part elephant or crossbred with some other exotic animal.

  “They are suffering from diseases, my boy!” Sigerson Bell once proclaimed. “We are not to gawk at them as if they were creatures from the Dark Continent.”

  But the boy cannot help but “gawk” at this person, with a head twice the normal size, hideous growths ballooning from her forehead, skin like a crocodile’s, lips puffed and bloated, all framed with beautiful blonde hair, as blonde and glowing as Irene Doyle’s. Sherlock looks into the monster’s eyes. They stare back, blue like the June sky, filled with curiosity.

  “You beast!!” cries the woman, rushing to pick up the veil.

  But the boy cannot respond. He cannot offer his excuse: that he had been merely swatting at the bee, protecting the girl in the chair. Repulsed by the horrible face, standing there almost catatonic with shock, his eyes remain locked on her eyes, which now begin to smile back.

  The woman retrieves the veil and knocks into the boy with a thump as she rushes past him. Then she snatches the disguise over the girl’s face again, screams at Sherlock once more, and wheels her charge away. They march back toward their street.

  Sixteen or seventeen years old; right arm and leg horribly deformed too; left leg incapable of movement. She is –

  But he can’t go on. He can’t analyze this person. He doesn’t have the heart. He pities her from the bottom of his soul. The deformities sear into his memory as he remains rigid, standing in exactly the same position he was in the instant the veil came off. That face will wake him up at nights. It is a complicated reaction. He sees those eyes too – their curiosity and their smile.

  He shakes himself from his haze and turns back toward the street. I must apologize.

  There is no sign of them, either here or in the distance. As he stumbles out of the park, he realizes that he must have been standing there for a very long time. He wonders what, in God’s name, he can say to them. I must tell them the truth. They need to know why I was here. They deserve to hear it. I must come clean.

  When he first sees the house, the door is closed and all appears quiet. But as he reaches the walkway, he hears voices. They are raised. One belongs to the woman and the other seems familiar. He moves closer.

  Grimsby!

  “How did you get in here?” He hears the woman cry. “Who are you?”

  Grimsby’s long response is muffled. Sherlock can only hear parts of it.

  He must have been waiting for them at their door! The other man, this woman’s man, obviously isn’t here. He must have gone out while we were in the park. Did Grimsby know he would be away at this hour? He has the woman all alone in there and is beginning to shout at her. Grimsby isn’t just a villain; he’s a coward too! Sherlock had been trying to summon the courage to knock on the door but now he bursts in.

  “I shall be wanting two bob a week for meself!”

  “But I can’t pay you that! We can’t afford that!”

  The detective in Sherlock stops him just inside the door. The other two are yelling so loudly now that they don’t hear him enter. He is in a tiny vestibule, a few out-of-doors clothes hanging on hooks in an open closet to his right and a narrow wall blocking the next room, the parlor, from view. Grimsby and the woman are in there, embroiled in their argument, unaware of his presence.

  You must listen. Learn. This might unlock everything.

  “Ask Stonefield for the money, woman.”

  “He won’t give it to me.”

  “Yes, ’e will. You keep ’is secret; ’e is much obliged to you. I knows ’uman nature and I knows folks pays for what they must ’ave, for what they wants. Just asks ’im for a raise in what ’e pays you.”

  “I will not! I will expose you! Blackmailer! I will notify the police!”

  “You ain’t listening, is you? I told you, your guvna’ ’e don’t want this ’ere situation to get out, so ’e pays me boss what ’e must.” Then Grimsby’s voice drops, almost as if he is talking to himself. “Me boss sent Crew ’ere yesterday and I followed ’im I did, on the quiet. Taught well, I was.” His voice rises again. “So, now I knows.”

  Yesterday, thinks Sherlock. The only day I didn’t come here. Crew was sent to see if I was on the trail. What would he have done if he’d found me?

  “Sir Ramsay pays the man you work for?” says the woman. “Some scoundrel?”

  “It’s not in coins.”

  “Then, in what?”

  “Never you mind in what. I wants two quid from you and your ’usband, starting Monday next. Or I tells The News of the World. No more questions.”

  Husband. That man is her husband.

  “But I can’t ask Sir Ramsay. He has been through so much. He and the Missus! Have pity!”

  “Pity on the rich? Me?” Grimsby lets out a horrible giggle.

  “He loves her. He loved the other one too!”

  Loves her? The other one too?

  “I ain’t ’ere on a mission of charity or to ’ear the sob stories of the privileged. Now you do as you is told or your master’s secret will be public knowledge.”

  “Leave this house immediately!”

  Sherlock hears a struggle and the woman begins to scream. He also hears a garbled sound, the pitiable cry of a teenage girl, terrified but wordless.

  Holmes springs i
nto action. He darts out of the vestibule and into the parlor. He sees the woman and Grimsby grappling with each other. He attacks the rascal from behind, gripping him in a lock that drives his forearms down and against his hips, and pulls him away from woman, releasing her. But Sherlock doesn’t stop at that. He is incensed. Locking Grimsby so tightly that he almost cracks his ribs, he effects a Bellitsu move, placing his right foot in front of his opponent’s, twisting him violently and sending him sailing backward over his own upper thigh and hips. The startled little man lets out a cry as he crashes down onto his head and shoulders in the parlor and rolls all the way into the tiny back kitchen. Holmes is at him in a flash. Grimsby leaps to his feet, his little hands balled in fists. The woman lets out a scream. As Sherlock nears his enemy, he sees that the girl in the wheelchair is right there, inches from the blackguard, near the top of the stairs to the cellar. Holmes wants to kill him now; failing that, he wants to maim him for life. A hatred for Grimsby and Malefactor and for the man who killed his mother and for everyone who brings evil and hatred and injustice into the world rises up in him. He hates the fact that the poor girl sits in that wheelchair, disfigured and crippled. His eyes are on fire, the veins pop out on his neck and forehead, and he flushes red. The time has come.

  But the girl in the chair is in his line of vision, behind Grimsby. Her veil is off and she holds her hands in front of herself in shame, terrified, sobbing, her shoulders heaving. Those blue eyes peek out from between her fingers, catching sight of Sherlock. When their eyes meet, hers turn hopeful.

  He cannot hurt anyone in her presence, not even this devil. The woman sees Sherlock clearly now.

  “Why, you’re the dustman!” she says.

  But Holmes is glaring at Grimsby.

  “Villain!” he cries.

  “ ’Ow did you find this place ’olmes? You is an arse, but you ain’t without wits. I –”

  “Out from here, you wretch! Now!”

  “It won’t matter. I will return!”

  “Not on my watch!”

  “You can’t make me, ’olmes.”

  “No, but Malefactor can.”

  Grimsby goes silent. Sherlock grins.

  “He won’t like this, will he? He doesn’t know you are here. This is just your scam, isn’t it, you thug. Thought you’d shave a little more off the top without his knowledge, did you?”

  “What do I gain from working in the Treasury? It’s not enough.”

  “Can’t wait for the rewards, can you?”

  “They’re mostly ’is.”

  “You thought you could do this without anyone knowing, didn’t you? This is a tissue of lies and secrets. You thought you’d add one more and, because these folks don’t know what is really going on, you’d be safe.”

  “I is.”

  “Not now.”

  “You wouldn’t tell ’im.”

  “I would!”

  “But ’e’s your enemy, ’olmes!”

  “Enemies can be used, especially to destroy other fiends!”

  The woman steps forward, taking the veil from the kitchen table, about to put it over the young one’s face. “What are you two talking about? This poor girl is none of your business! You must leave! Both of you!” The invalid in the wheelchair is smiling up at Holmes.

  “You put his enterprise in danger, Grimsby,” says Sherlock, ignoring the woman. “When I tell him, he will be VERY angry.”

  Grimsby’s face looks as if it might explode. His hatred for Sherlock Holmes rises within him. He stands there boiling, thinking about how his master opposes the brilliant half-Jew but somehow still respects him, much more than he respects his own lieutenant. Now, the half-breed is threatening to destroy even his opportunity at the Treasury, his chance of being someone special in Malefactor’s eyes, not to mention his own little blackmailing scheme.

  “I ’ate you, Sherlock ’olmes!” he cries. He turns and sees the cripple. Tears burst from his eyes like water released from a dam. “Useless freak!” he cries. It is hard to know if he means her or himself, but as he speaks he rears back and kicks the wheelchair as hard as he can. It tips over and falls with a crash to the top of the cellar stairs, and keeps rolling from the force of Grimsby’s blow, rocking over onto the first step, and picking up momentum as it descends, thudding and slamming with great violence down the stairs, landing on its side, then its wheels, and then, at the bottom … on the invalid’s huge, deformed skull. The woman shrieks. “Angela!!!” She runs to the top step. Sherlock and Grimsby stand where they are, their mouths wide open. The girl has landed on the hard cellar floor, and blood is running from her ears. Her neck is twisted at a grotesque angle. She isn’t breathing.

  The woman flies down to her. “Angela? Angela!!”

  The girl’s blue eyes are wide open. They stare up at Sherlock Holmes, unblinking and still.

  “She’s DEAD!” cries the woman, gasping and bringing her hands to her mouth.

  Grimsby runs. In an instant he is out the door and down the street. Holmes wants to pursue him, tear him limb from limb. Their street fights were one-sided at first, but became closer affairs, and Holmes, with another year of lethal Bellitsu behind him, knows what he can do now. He can do the little one grievous harm.

  But Sherlock can’t run away. Not from this house. They need him. He forces his rubbery legs to move down the stairs. The woman turns, spits in his face and shoves him away.

  “I was trying … to help,” he pleads.

  “You killed her, you and that little beast! Our beauty is dead! Just like Gabriella! What will Sir Ramsay say? It will break him!”

  What will Lady Stonefield say? Will this break her too?

  Sherlock wipes the spittle from his face.

  The woman sobs for a while and he kneels near them, feeling helpless. “I am … sorry,” she finally says to him through her tears. “It wasn’t you. You were trying to help. It was that other little man, that horrible one.” She sobs again. “I am sorry.” She holds the big, broken head in her arms, the blood running onto her sleeve. “Oh, so sorry.”

  Sherlock can’t believe that in her terrible grief she is able to take back her angry words, that she has concern for him. She is a good person, indeed.

  He ascends the stairs. There is nothing else he can do here. His target is out there, running away.

  After him!

  “Who are you, really?” asks the woman.

  Sherlock looks down at her. “A friend,” he says quietly. Then he tears out the door.

  But out on the street there is no sign of the criminal, not even in the distance. Holmes races to his hansom cab. It is gone. Grimsby has bribed the driver. Sherlock will never catch him.

  He must walk back to London.

  But then he hears something behind him. The woman has come running in his direction. She stands a hundred feet away on the foot pavement down the street and cries out, “Don’t tell anyone! Do not try to bring him to justice! You can’t!” She turns and rushes back to the house.

  But Holmes is barely listening. He walks the first half of his journey in tears, and the last in growing anger, from red to white hot.

  There are places I can search to find that rat. It is Saturday. He won’t be at the Treasury. He will hide during the day.

  But Sherlock is too distraught to go anywhere other than home. Because today was perhaps his last chance to go to Hounslow without being detected, he hadn’t arranged to meet Bell and get back into their Fat Man costume. He had intended to go straight back to the apothecary shop in the dustman’s clothes. So he does, but with absolutely no concern for being spotted. He doesn’t care anymore.

  It isn’t his intention to tell Bell what he witnessed, but the moment he enters the shop, he scurries to the laboratory and pours his heart out to the old man.

  “Go to the police. Tell your young Lestrade friend. They can be in Hounslow at a moment’s notice. Both you and the woman are witnesses, and the crime scene is fresh!”

  “I cannot do that.” />
  “You what?”

  “There are dark secrets there. The Governor wants them to stay hidden. That woman came all the way down the street to insist that I not tell anyone.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Normally, Sherlock Holmes would have been hot on this trail, consumed with not only passion but curiosity. Nothing fascinates him more than a puzzle, a real and living puzzle, and this one matters deeply. But he is heartbroken. He wonders if he can ever summon the energy again to be the crime fighter he wants to be. On top of everything, it seems to him that, once again, he has been the cause of a terrible tragedy. If he had not gone into that house and confronted Grimsby, that poor girl would still be alive.

  He says nothing else to Bell and goes to bed. The old man senses his pain and wants to embrace him. But that sort of thing has never been a part of their friendship.

  Sherlock lies in bed in his wardrobe and tosses and turns. He can’t get the girl’s blue eyes out of his mind: blue like his mother’s and kind like Beatrice’s, her blonde hair the very glowing image of Irene’s, all on a hideous face. His anger at Grimsby and Malefactor and Crew grows. Finally, he gets to his feet and goes out into the dangerous London night, seething.

  12

  EVERYONE SINS

  He wakes in a sweat and cries out. He can barely remember what he did last night, running through the darkest streets of London. He doesn’t want to remember. He had returned with his head and heart pounding, stripped off his clothes, poured a cold bath in Bell’s big tub in the lab, and washed himself over and over before finally crawling to his bed and, still naked, falling into a deep sleep.

  But now, he tells himself, he must move forward. What matters is what is before me, not behind. There are things I need to do.

  He decides upon a bold move. There is no time to waste. He will go directly to Stonefield and speak to him. He must know exactly what Sir Ramsay’s secret is. The things he heard during that traumatic scene in the house in Hounslow paint a picture of what the Governor is hiding, but one without details. He remembers the woman calling Grimsby a “blackmailer” and the scoundrel replying that his boss was being paid but “not in coins.” The woman pleaded that Sir Ramsay had “been through too much. He and the Missus!” “He loves her,” she had said and, “He loved the other one too.” She had screamed the poor girl’s name when she went crashing down the stairs: “Angela!” And when it was over, she had cried, “Our beauty is dead! Just like Gabriella! What will Sir Ramsay say? It will break him!” Sherlock remembers wondering why the woman had not said that this death would break Lady Stonefield too. If the Governor was somehow supporting this poor, unfortunate girl, then why did he not tell his wife? And if he did, why would she, who seems so close to her husband, not be hurt by the girl’s death too? Was this girl a hidden love child from an extramarital affair? Did he keep that secret from her? But Lady Stonefield was so sad when I saw her, so united with him in grief.