Becoming Holmes (9 page)

“Sir, you need not convey your thoughts on that subject in such rich, descriptive words.”

“I suppose not.”

“You heard everything?”

“Oh, yes, everything, even that last part that you spoke out loud to yourself. But I believe I cut you short. You had more to say, did you not?”

“Yes.”

“So, your further plans are?”

Sherlock is reluctant to tell him. It is enough that the sickly old man was following Malefactor and the dangerous Crew through London to the shop. But then Sigerson Bell
begins to cough. He retches for almost a minute, holding his handkerchief up to his mouth, hiding the liquid that he ejects into it. Sherlock moves toward the spiral staircase, looking up at his master. He wishes he could at least put a hand on his shoulder to comfort him. He had done so just a week or so ago during another coughing fit. Bell had felt alarmingly bony and his skin had been hot and wet through his shirt.

My master is dying. I love him. He is thrilled by what I am going to do with my life. He has always, in his own way, wanted to be part of it. He will be dead very soon
.

“Sir, let me tell you what I am planning.”

The old man stops coughing and looks down at Sherlock with a suddenly resplendent expression.

“You read my note about what transpired last night and you burned it, I believe?”

“Indeed!” Bell is veritably glowing, leaning slightly forward as if to urge more information out of his ward.

“As you heard, while I spoke out loud to myself, I am now sure that Malefactor is not aware that I suspect he knows Sir Ramsay Stonefield’s secret. He and his closest associates were not on the streets of Hounslow last night.”

“Yes, that was very clever, my young knight! You drew that out of him without his detecting it! Brilliant!”

“Thank you, sir, it was a trifle.” Sherlock is surprised to feel his face glowing. “That information combined with an incomplete theory I have has hatched my next move.”

“You are going back to Hounslow in the small hours of the morning!”

Sherlock pauses. Bell has done it again. He has veritably read the boy’s thoughts, and not
just
his thoughts, but rather involved plans that he hadn’t assumed the old man would follow. But this is not new.

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

“My secret entrance will come into play concerning that, but go on.”

“Something worried me about what I saw last night, and it had nothing to do with simply discovering that Stonefield has a secret. It is the fact that this secret is not exactly what it seems.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because they are both sad.”

“They?”

“Sir Ramsay
and
his wife. I do not think that this secret is just his. I think it is somehow
theirs
, together.”

“So, that is why you must go back!”

“Precisely. This is not a matter of simply being aware that Malefactor knows Stonefield has a woman on the side. If it were so, then my only task would be to, first, bring Grimsby down, and then perhaps to expose the Governor as a cad.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t do that. None of your business, sir! Gentleman must be allowed such things.”

“I’m not sure I agree, but nevertheless, he may not be such a cad after all. I must go back and find out just
exactly
what this is about. That and that alone will lead me to what I will do next. It is the key to everything I must undertake.”

“And so, I give you my secret entrance! You must use it. You cannot go out our front door. You must slip out the back!”

“That is an excellent suggestion, sir, but not enough.”

“Not enough?”

“I must be in disguise as well. Who knows what sort of surveillance Malefactor has in place. He is desperate to protect Grimsby’s position at the Treasury, anxious to push him forward very soon. He will want to know
exactly
what I know. Going out a back entrance will help, but if I go out as myself, someone will see me in the streets before too long. The very letterboxes will be watching.”

“You could go dressed as Sigerson Bell again!”

“We must not repeat ourselves.”

“Then what?”

“You have an unusual array of clothing, sir.”

Sigerson Bell has been known to dress in some of the strangest apparel in London, and that is saying something. A red fez, a green greatcoat, a pink Egyptian robe, loincloths, fighting leotards, and some of the most colorful nightshirts on the earth hang in his wardrobe. Or lie in piles at the bottom of it.

“I do?”

“Let us take a look at
all
of them.”

Moments later, the old man is throwing every spot of clothing he owns down the spiral staircase toward the boy. It is indeed a remarkable collection. Not only do the spectacular nightshirts, fezes, greatcoats, leotards, and robes descend, but there are many items that look to have been featured in
costume balls, including crowns, furs, and a few dresses (the boy doesn’t ask). But one item, which billows in the air and takes a long time getting to the bottom of the stairs, catches Sherlock’s eye.

“What is this?” he asks, holding the massive piece of material up to the old man, who slides his face over and peers down from above.

“Just the Fat Man’s trousers,” he says and yawns.

“A fat man?”

“No, no, no, not
a
fat man,
the
Fat Man. Oberon Obese, they called him. He weighed more than fifty stone in his heyday. That is rather large, my boy. He came to me in retirement, asking to shed some flesh. I managed, through skillful control of his diet and a regimen of exercise, to cut him in half, down to a svelte, how would your generation put it, 350 or so pounds? He gave me his trousers as a souvenir.”

“And you kept them?”

“Of course! Why not?”

“Yes.” Sherlock smiles. “Why not?” He looks up at his master. “I have an idea.”

9
A DEEPER SECRET

S
herlock Holmes doesn’t attend Snowfields School every day any more. There is little that they can teach him now. He has had the best grades in this working-class institution near the London Bridge Railway Station since the day he entered it and lately has been applying himself like an addict in an East London den to his opium. He has been a pupil-teacher for two years and has been urged to take his papers to become a full-fledged teacher. His headmaster assures him that he could someday helm the school. But Holmes has informed him that he has other, undisclosed ambitions that involve his attending one of England’s best universities. Though the headmaster has come to admire Sherlock Holmes a great deal, he wonders how a half-Jew in a lowly school, however brilliant, can even consider the idea of being an Oxford or Cambridge man. Both schools have only recently allowed Jews admission, and the poor, of course, never attend. But not wanting to discourage his prize pupil, the master is tutoring him in advanced subjects required at the great schools. This is being given twice a week in exchange for three days of Holmes’s own tutoring of Snowfields’ most accomplished students.

Sherlock is scheduled to be at school the morning after Malefactor’s appearance in the shop. His enemy will know if he does not attend. Crew or others (or perhaps the letterboxes) will not only be watching the shop’s front door, but all of Denmark Street, the adjoining arteries, and probably the boy’s entire route to Snowfields.

Just before six o’clock that morning, a good three hours before school begins, an enormously fat man emerges from the apothecary shop’s secret rear entrance, after sliding back the long painting of Hermes that hangs low on a wall of the laboratory. The gargantuan chap then edges along the narrow lane at the back of the building and moments later plods out onto Denmark Street from the alleyway five doors down. He is wearing a big floppy felt hat that looks like something a swashbuckling French musketeer might sport. It hangs down over his face, which is also obscured by long, strangely thick, black and white hair. He wears a coat so huge that it looks like two stitched together, and inside his bloated trousers is one of England’s most spectacular bellies, a shelf-like protrusion that extends a good three feet out at his middle, leading him this way and that as he waddles along. He turns north on Denmark, not south, heads up to Oxford Street, and then hails a cab. The first few will not take him, their drivers noticing his girth and perhaps taking pity upon their horses, but finally one allows him in and the vehicle sags like a deflated balloon and pulls away,
westward, toward Hammersmith, Chiswick, and Hounslow.

But magically, the hansom cab has
two
passengers by the time it reaches the far end of Hyde Park, and drops one of them there, a very thin one. He is an old man in the shape of a question mark and he is carrying a huge coat and gigantic trousers. He slowly strolls south toward Whitehall, leaving a sixteen-year-old boy in the cab to travel all the way to Hounslow.

Inside the carriage, Sherlock grins at his plan. When the boy had seen Oberon Obese’s extraordinary trousers, an outlandish idea had come to him. He had considered how slight and light Bell had become and how his own height – he now towers over Bell – and the master’s unique shape might be put together in the guise of a single remarkable man. He then devised a scheme in which the apothecary’s forehead would be placed against his own midsection, the old feet on top of the young ones, and the rest of Bell’s withering little frame put inside those huge trousers with him and under two coats stitched together. Horse-tail hair (a key apothecary’s medicinal ingredient) was used for human locks under the hat.

Within an hour, Holmes is on High Street in Hounslow. No one is following him. He must get back to the apothecary shop and then on to school without being detected. It has to seem, to anyone who might be observing, that today is a normal day for him. Bell has given him enough money to get to the far suburbs and back. They have agreed to meet near Hyde Park Corner at about the time Big Ben strikes eight and slip into the trees there to re-costume themselves
as the Fat Man. Simply wearing padding underneath the big trousers was not an option – a mighty amount would have been needed to give Sherlock the girth he wanted and everything would have to have been stashed before he went to Hounslow
and
still be available when he returned. As well, he could not secretly watch the house as a huge Fat Man; he would have stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb in the suburbs. Neither would he have been able to effectively run away in such a disguise. And with Bell (magically) out of the shop and unobserved as such, the old man could spend his time near the Treasury, making sure that Grimsby was still going to work.

Sherlock instructs the driver to turn off High Street at exactly the spot where Sir Ramsay’s carriage turned the other night, but stops him before he gets to the narrow road where the house sits. He asks him to wait there. The boy gets out, turns onto the little street, and cautiously makes his way along it until he comes to the front of the residence.

The house looks quiet. Sherlock is guessing that it is nearing seven o’clock. It is likely that this “kept” woman has no occupation outside her home, but Sherlock is figuring she does
something
on her front step or beyond in the morning, even if she simply emerges to water her many flowers or goes out of doors to take the air. He desperately hopes that this is a perfect time for her to appear, otherwise this daring outing is for nothing. He needs to observe her again in the hope that doing so will help him unravel the exact nature of this secret. But he doesn’t have much time, hardly any at all.

After another ten or fifteen minutes of nothing stirring at the house, the boy, who is by turns hiding behind the hedge he used the other night and strolling back and forth along the street, decides to do something he knows is very risky. He thinks of the danger Grimsby’s superior may be in.
I have to learn something, anything
.

He walks past the house and stops right on the front walkway. He glances through the little front window and cannot see any movement inside. He looks down, but at first can’t make out any markings on the brick walkway, which is covered with a thin film of dirt.
At least it hasn’t been thoroughly swept
. Sherlock knows he shouldn’t, but he drops down anyway, onto his knees on the bricks. He examines them closely.
There!
He sees shoe prints. But there are several: faint ones from well-made, expensive footwear, and others, more clearly marked, from a gentleman of more modest means. He spots lady’s prints too, and lines, as if made by narrow wheels. He had thought that such indicators on the walkway might tell him something. But they have made things even more mysterious.