A Study in Sable (18 page)

“Cardn'l Woolsey!” Suki said immediately.

“Well done! It will be an all-day excursion, and Neville will have to stay home, I am afraid.” She felt both a twinge of self-satisfaction and a twinge of guilt. She and Sarah had visited once, and Sarah had said several times she would like to go back.
But Sarah is getting lavish dinners and opera performances. I think we're due some cheap fun.
“But we will certainly take the train!”

“Coo!” Suki exclaimed, truly excited now.

They came in the door to find Neville there ahead of them—not a great surprise, since he didn't have to take several 'buses to get home but could fly direct. Sarah was still in her dressing gown with her hair down, drinking a cup of tea at the fire and reading over some papers in her other hand. She looked up at them and smiled as Suki ran to show her the fan.

“Did you get to talk with the Ravenmaster?” she asked them both.

“Better than that, he took us to the raven mews, and then we had
tea with him and his wife. They spoiled Neville outrageously,” Nan replied. “Digestive biscuits soaked in blood, if you please! Now he's going to be wanting them here!”

“Might,” said Neville, giving a toss of his head.

Anything else they might have said was interrupted by a knock on the door. Sarah squeaked with embarrassment at being caught in her dressing gown so late in the day and ran for her room. Nan waited until she was safely inside before answering.

“Just the person I wanted to see!” said John Watson, looking particularly dapper in a very handsome dark suit and a school tie. “Holmes would like to make use of your special Talents, Nan.”

Nan blinked at him in shock. Since when did Sherlock Holmes have need of “occult” abilities? “Holmes? Surely not—”

“Oh I assure you, he is entirely serious. May I come in and explain?” John asked, making a little gesture at the sitting room. “You can at least listen to me and decide if what Holmes wants from you is practical or not.”

Nan stood aside and waved him in. “Take any seat, Doctor. Sarah will be out shortly—as you know, she is dealing with the spirits haunting Magdalena von Dietersdorf, and that can only be done at night, so she has been sleeping by day.”

“Well, as I said, it is you I wish to speak to principally,” Watson pointed out. He took the seat Sarah had been occupying until her flight to the bedroom. “Holmes wants to know something of the limits of your Talent, and whether or not you could use it to learn something of great importance to an exceptionally dangerous case. And he would like to discuss this at length with you.”

“Tonight?” Nan asked, startled. “Now?”

“If possible. He's under a time constraint, I fear, and
if
you can do what he needs, the opportunity to utilize your abilities on his behalf will come very soon and may not come again.” If she had any doubts that this was some whim on Holmes' part, they were immediately dispelled, both by the expression on Watson's face and the anxiety in his thoughts.

“But Magdalena has asked me to come to the opera again
tonight,” Sarah exclaimed in dismay as she came out of her bedroom, now properly dressed. “And I told her I would. That would leave Suki alone for the better part of the night—”

A flash of anger passed through Nan and she kept from snapping at her friend with the greatest of difficulty.
There is
nothing
important about going to the opera performance!
she thought with outrage.
This is
work
! Why is it that Sarah's pleasure should interfere with an important request?

But Watson was holding up a hand. “This won't take long. If Nan can run out now, I'll have her back before nine, ten at the most. Surely your landlady would be willing to look after Suki for an extra shilling or two for that long?”

“I don' need no lookin' arter!” Suki exclaimed rebelliously, but Sarah at least had the grace to blush and look discomfited.

Wasn't she just boasting about the obscene amount of money Magdalena is paying her? Surely she can spare a few shillings out of that!
Nan thought resentfully.

“Of course; what was I thinking?” Sarah said contritely. “I'll run down and ask her, but I am sure she will say yes.” Before Nan could say anything, Sarah had snatched up the small purse in which she kept the money she used for cabs and the like and was out the door.

“Well,” Suki said thoughtfully, looking at the closed door. “Mrs. 'Orace do make sugar-biscuits sometimes when she's mindin' me. . . .”

Sarah was back within a few minutes. “Run on down to Mrs. Horace, Suki,” she said as soon as the door was open. “She'll give you the birds' suppers. You're to feed them, make sure they can get to their night perches and leave a single gaslight burning here, then you're to have supper with her and make gingerbread afterward. If Nan is not back by bedtime, you are to nap on her sofa until Nan comes home.”

Suki gave a whoop and ran down the stairs. Sarah picked up her shawl, put her coin purse into the larger reticule, and pinned on her hat.

“I'll just leave a little early,” she said and, with a smile, before Nan
could say anything else at all, she did just that, putting on her shawl as she closed the door behind her.

Well . . . that was odd.

Neville and Grey had flown to their feeding perches and gazed quizzically after her. Then they both turned to look at Nan. Birds did not have facial expressions as such, but Nan sensed they were as puzzled by Sarah's behavior as she was.

Nan throttled down her annoyance, and turned to John Watson. “Well,” she said. “That's that. We might as well go.”

“Excellent.” He stood up; she gathered her things and they left together.
But there's going to be something said if this goes on much longer . . .

• • •

Holmes was pacing when they arrived, and by the scent of gunpowder in the air, he had been making additions to his “VR” design picked out in bullet holes in one wall. Nan mentally shook her head as they came in.
Mrs. Hudson is far more tolerant than virtually any other landlady in London. Holmes must be paying her a fortune for the privilege of living here and doing as he pleases.
Then again, given that he performed services for crowned heads, he could probably afford to pay a fortune.

He flung himself down in his favorite chair as they took their seats. “I am sorry to have brought you out with so little notice, Miss Killian, but I am in a position of some urgency. I am . . .” He hesitated; his long face betrayed no emotion, but she understood he was wrestling with how much to tell her. “I have been in pursuit of a very dangerous man for quite a long time. I can trace his actions, but so far, I have been at a loss to discover exactly who he is. Until now, however. I am now in a position to identify him absolutely—
if
you think you would be able to see into a person's thoughts from, say, a distance of a hundred feet or so.”

I am very glad I was able to demonstrate my power to his satisfaction!
The notion that
she
would be able to provide real assistance to
Sherlock Holmes was . . . rather heady. And it went a very long way toward salving her hurt feelings at being left on the sidelines. “I think I can do that,” Nan said cautiously. “Provided he does not have some form of protection on his thoughts.”

“Protection? As you instructed me to produce?” Holmes replied, tilting his head a little, and raising an eyebrow. “Or did you mean something else entirely?”

“Well, there are several kinds of protection that would make it either difficult for me to read thoughts, or dangerous,” Nan said slowly. “For instance, if he suspects, or actually
knows,
that such a thing as telepathy exists, and suspects there may be a telepath about, he could do as I taught you. If he himself is a telepath, he will
always
protect his thoughts, as a side effect of having to protect himself from being bombarded constantly by the random thoughts all around him.”

Holmes had opened his mouth as she got to “if he himself is a telepath,” but had not interrupted her, and now gave her a quizzical look. “Really?” he said instead.

“The control of this ability begins with locking others
out
of one's mind. When the Talent begins to bloom, the first thing that happens is that you are aware of the strong thoughts of those around you. Then their weaker thoughts. Then the thoughts of those farther from you, until there is a veritable babble in your head, like being in the middle of a huge crowd of people all the time. There are a great many natural telepaths who never had the training I did, and who are locked up in madhouses for that very reason,” Nan said with a sigh. “They cannot keep out the thoughts of others, and eventually they cannot tell the difference between their thoughts and those of everyone else.”

Holmes pondered that for a moment. “That is entirely logical,” he said. “A logical consequence of having the ability itself—but go on. How else could thoughts be protected?”

“Do not bark at me—but magicians like the Watsons can also protect their minds from being read, if they are protecting themselves from magic. And
they
have the ability to protect others as well. So.”
She clasped her hands in her lap and looked down at them for a moment, before looking up at him. “Do you have any reason to believe the person you want me to read would come under any of those categories?”

“No,” Holmes told her. “I believe him to be nothing more than an uncommon criminal. Clever, extremely careful, methodical, resourceful, intelligent, dangerous, and ruthless. But I have never seen anything to make me believe he is anything more than that. He is very high in the service of the man I wish to identify; very possibly one of the highest of his trusted lieutenants. He does not know that I know this. I am going to be able to approach him on another pretext entirely, but I will, in the course of our conversation, ask him several questions that I calculate will bring the thoughts of his master to the surface, even though those questions will superficially have nothing to do with the man. Those are what I hope you will be able to read.”

“I will certainly give it my best effort,” Nan told him. “And given what you have told me, I should be able to do as you request. When will this be, do you know?”

“My meeting with him will be the day after tomorrow,” Holmes replied. “I will have you in place before I arrive; I will take my place, and he will approach me. We are to meet at the British Museum Reading Room, where you will certainly have no difficulty in looking busy.” His mouth quirked in a sardonic smile. “I cannot imagine that you and Sarah do not have passes to the Reading Room, but if you do not, Mycroft can certainly procure them for you tomorrow.”

“We have passes. I am in greater danger of being distracted by my books than of being unable to look busy,” she admitted. “Tell me where you are to sit; I can arrange to be completely out of sight and out of earshot.”

Holmes sighed a little in relief. “That would be highly desirable. I do not wish him to connect you with me in any way. I am not exaggerating the danger, Miss Killian. The nearer I come to identifying this fiend, the more danger accrues to myself and to anyone associated with me. It is why Watson invented the ruse of living elsewhere, for he is known to be my friend and confidant, and if this monster
thinks I am close on his heels, he will not hesitate to strike at my friends. If Mycroft had not given me his assurance that you are as brave as a lioness and just as capable of defending yourself, I would not put you at hazard in this venture, at all.”

Nan inclined her head in acknowledgement, but smiled inwardly. So, Sherlock Holmes himself gave her the compliment of being “brave as a lioness!” And even more important, he acknowledged that she could defend herself. “So. British Museum Reading Room. Where?”

“I am to meet him at the absolute north, at nine in the morning,” Holmes replied. “By which I am sure he means to be at the desk nearest the circumference of the room at due north by the compass.”

Nan knew the Reading Room well; the walls of the great, round room were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and divided study desks ran like the spokes of a wheel from the double circular hub of the catalogue cases and the librarian's desk almost to the shelves.

“Then I will set myself up no later than eight within easy . . . let us call it eavesdropping distance. If he will be due north, then I will try for north-northwest. You might not recognize me, Mister Holmes, as I shall be in my most formidable bluestocking guise.” She smiled a little.

“All the better. Miss Killian, I am in your debt.” He reached across the space between them to shake her hand. She was pleased that it was the sort of good, solid handshake a man could have been expected to give a man, and she returned it in kind.

“Just leave your surface thoughts open to me, by concentrating on him,” she said. “I will be able to tell who it is you are meeting from that, and I should be able to find his mind in that way, if I have not already sensed him because he is thinking of you.”

“Logical. This Talent of yours follows good, sound logic.” He did
not
add,
Unlike your messy, ridiculous magic, Watson,
but she had the notion he was thinking it. He was, at the moment, literally guarding his thoughts, as she had taught him to. That was just as well; she had the uneasy feeling that there were a great many things she did not want to know tucked away in his head. Not about
him
—about some
of the sort of cases that Watson would never even hint about to Conan Doyle.

She hesitated a moment. “Mister Holmes . . . allow me to offer my services in this way indefinitely. I am sure you are perfectly capable of telling when a man is lying, for instance, but
I
can tell you what he is thinking at the time he is lying. If you are interviewing him, I can tell you what he is not revealing to you. I could be useful in similar ways.”