A Monstrous Regiment of Women

My dear Holmes, whatever it was and however you found me, we are well met. I was coming to see you tomorrow, in fact. I don’t suppose you have an umbrella tucked beneath your assorted raiment?” I asked hopefully as a dollop of icy rain from the diabolically designed hat brim gushed down the back of my neck.

“You are dressed somewhat inadequately,” he agreed unsympathetically, “and from the ill fit, I observe that the clothes are not your own. Perhaps another layer would not go amiss,” and he began to undo the fastenings of the long, caped greatcoat he wore. I protested, but as he shrugged it off, I saw that underneath he wore a similar garment, in an unfortunate houndstooth check. He shook the coat free of half a gallon of water and dropped it onto my shoulders. It was enormously heavy but still dry inside. I straightened my buckling knees and fancied I could feel the inner layers of wool beginning to steam.

“Thank you, Holmes, that was most gallant of you. Precisely what I should expect of a Victorian gentleman. I don’t suppose you have a Primus stove and teakettle in an inner pocket? Although an all-night restaurant with good radiators would do nicely.”

“If your feet will carry you a mile in those shoes, I might offer you a greater degree of hospitality than a brew-up in a sheltered doorway.”

“You have a room?”

“I have a hole-in-the-wall. You’ve not been to this one, I think, but it is one of the more comfortable.”

“Any bolt-hole in a storm, Holmes. Lead on.”

Although we began by walking side by side, he did in fact lead in the end, down several narrow passageways, up a fire ladder, across a roof, down another ladder, and through the crawl space beneath a large department store. We ended up at a blank wooden wall surrounded by blank brick walls. Holmes took out an electric torch and a key and inserted the latter into a tiny fissure in the wood. With a low click, one section of the wall lost its solidity. He set his shoulder against it, we slipped into the resultant dark space, and he pushed the door to and bolted it. With his torch, he indicated the way, undid and locked another door, led me up numerous stairs, then through a shadowy office and into a mahogany wardrobe hung with musty overcoats. We unfolded from the back of it into a space that smelt of coffee and tobacco and coal fire and the ineffable essence of books.

“Guard your eyes, Russell,” he warned, and flicked on a dazzle of electric lights.

We were in one of his bolt-holes, the sanctuaries he maintained across London, each of them a small, self-contained, and invisible hideout equipped with the means of withstanding a siege (water, food, and reading matter) and an assortment of disguises, weapons, and the like that might be called upon in venturing out into a hostile city. I had been in two others, and this was the most elaborate, if not sumptuous, of the three. It even had paintings on the wall, something Holmes rarely bothered with: He preferred to use the space for bookshelves, corkboards, or target practice. I dragged off my sodden outer garments and looked for a place to drape them. Holmes held out a hand.

“Give them to me; I’ll hang them in the airing cupboard.”

He opened a narrow panel in the wall and took some clothes hangers from the metal-lined space. I went to look over his shoulder, and found a vertical ventilation shaft about two feet across, into which he had set a length of metal pipe as a clothes rail.

“Emergency exit?” I asked, peering into the depths.

“Only in a considerable emergency. There is a bar forty feet down that ought to stop one from actually entering the furnace, although whether or not a person could remove the four screws from the access panel before being roasted or asphyxiated, I have yet to determine. I estimate that it is possible, but I have actually attempted it only when the furnace was cool. However, it is an eminently successful means of drying wet clothing.” He closed the door. “Tea, coffee, wine, or soup?”

We decided on the last three, the wine splashed into the tinned soup to enliven it, and while he pottered with kettle, pan, and gas ring, I lit a fire and looked around, fetching up at one of the paintings, a large, too-perfect evocation of hills, trees, and sheep.

“This is a Constable, isn’t it?” I asked him. “And who did the shipwreck?” This latter was a powerful, savage scene of pounding waves and drunken masts—like the Constable, very dated in its romanticism, but technically superb.

“That’s a Vernet.” His voice came muffled by cupboard doors as he shovelled about looking for edibles.

“Ah yes, your great-uncle.”

“His grandfather, actually. Do you prefer turtle or cream of tomato?” he asked, emerging with two tins.

“Whichever is newer,” I said cautiously.

“Nothing has been here longer than three years. However, a comparison of the respective dust layers would seem to indicate that the tomato is half the age of the other.” He eyeballed them judiciously. “Perhaps eighteen months.”

“The tomato, then. Did you bring everything in through the back of that wardrobe?”

“Hardly, Russell. I arranged the rooms, then bricked up the wall behind.”

“It’s nice, Holmes. Cosy.”

“Do you think so?” He sounded pleased, and standing with a spoon in one hand and a jagged-topped tin in the other, all he needed to complete the picture of domesticity was a lace apron. I was much taken aback by this utterly unexpected side of Holmes—I had never known him to be so much as conscious of his surroundings, save where they intruded on his work, and to have him admit to a deliberate choice and arrangement of household furnishings—well, I was taken aback.

“It was an experiment,” he explained, and returned to his soup tin. “I was testing the hypothesis that one’s surrounds influence one’s state of mind.”

“And?” I prompted, fascinated.

“The results are hardly conclusive, but I did find that after seventy-two hours here, I seemed to be less irritable, more rested, and had a higher threshold of distraction than after seventy-two hours in the Storage Room.”

The ‘Storage Room’ was the first of his bolt-holes I had encountered, an ill-lit, ill-furnished, claustrophobic survival space in the upper floors of a large department store. Seventy-two hours in it would have sent me raving into an asylum.

“You don’t say,” I commented mildly, and shook my head.

“Yes, quite interesting, really. I intend to work the results into a monograph I’ve been writing, ‘Some Suggestions Concerning the Long-Term Rehabilitation of Felons.’ ”

“Rehabilitation through interior decoration, Holmes?”

“There is no call for sarcasm, Russell,” he said with asperity. “Drink your soup.”

There followed a meal even odder than my breakfast/tea of eight hours previous, consisting of cream of tomato soup liberally dosed with Madeira, rock-hard water biscuits, two cold boiled eggs, half an orange that had begun to ferment, a slab of good crumbly cheddar, and the offer of a box of congealed after-dinner mints, which I refused in favour of a second wedge of the cheese. Holmes cleared the plates off onto a tray.

“Thank you, Holmes,” I said politely.

He paused with a soup bowl in one hand, scowling down at the scum of dirty brown-red liquid that had been the result of wine meeting soup.

“Do you know, Russell,” he mused, “I once earned an honest living for six entire months as a sous-chef in a two-star restaurant in Montpellier.” He shook his head in self-reproach and rattled the dishes off into the cupboard-sized kitchen, leaving me to stare openmouthed at his retreating back.

Never, never would I get his limits.

He came back some minutes later with black coffee and a bottle of crusty port, handed me a cup and a glass, and lowered himself with a sigh into the other chair, feet towards the fire.

“So, Russell, are you going to tell me why you have suddenly become a church-goer, or shall I invent another topic of conversation?”

“If you knew I was there, you must know whom I went with. Did you find me through that amazing tea shop?”

“You left your philanthropic tracks across London like hob-nailed boots on a snowy hillside,” he snorted in comfortable derision. “What on earth moved you to give that child five whole pounds? The entire parish was on fire before noon, though there was considerable disagreement over whether the series of gifts was, like lightning, a solitary occurrence or if it marked the beginning of a run of angelic visitations, and, if the latter, whether the better approach would be to wait calmly to be one of the chosen or to drag in benighted strangers from the streets and force food and drink into them. You may laugh,” he protested, “but your little gesture has caused the whole of Limehouse to be overrun with beggars. Word got out that good meals were to be had, and hungry men from all over the city are now lurking under all the steps. Or they would be, if they weren’t snatched up and fed before they had the opportunity to settle. At any rate, yes, after that, the general drift of your movements led me to the chestnut-seller who had found silver among the ashes, various elderly and unprosperous ladies of the evening, and finally to the denizens of the dockside tea shop. All except the chestnut seller remembered the inexplicable and unrewarded generosity of a bespectacled young man dressed for the country, and at the end, one of them knew the whereabouts of the young lady this singular young man finally went away with. Discreet enquiries proved that she was in the habit of going to hear the words of a certain woman of the cloth, if that be the right term, of a Monday night. That lady is not listed in Crockford, but I found her, and you. I had not realised you should be closeted with her for half the night, though. My bones protest.”

“Come now, Holmes, your rheumatism only bothers you when it’s convenient. Besides, you hadn’t been there all that long.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked, a spark of amusement in his grey eyes.

“The coat was damp, but the water was on the surface,” I answered him unnecessarily. “If you had been in the doorway for very long, the water would not have shaken out so easily.” He twitched his lips in appreciation and approval, and it occurred to me that since the term began, I had been either absent or preoccupied. Had he missed our exchanges, too? It was not something I could ask. I smiled back at him. “You might have saved your bones the discomfort by ringing the bell and asking the watchman to give me a message.”

“And risk disturbing you at a case?” He sounded shocked, which meant he was making a mild jest.

“There’s no case here—I’m sorry to disappoint you, Holmes. Nothing but my own peculiar interest in things theological. And yet, if you can set aside your instinctive response to these irrational matters, I should like your reaction.”

“That is what you were coming to see me about?”

“In part, yes.”

“Very well, let me get my pipe and I shall prepare myself to listen.” To my amusement, in this place, his pipes were kept in a pipe rack, his tobacco not in a Persian slipper or a biscuit tin or beneath the nonexistent roots of an artificial aspidistra, but in a pouch, and his matches in a silver matchbox. What-ever would Watson say—or Mrs Hudson?

“I shall begin with Veronica Beaconsfield, rather than Margery Childe, not only because she led me into contact with Miss Childe but because she can be taken as the foundation upon which Miss Childe’s movement is being built. Without Ronnie, and women like her, there would be no Margery Childe.”

I went over my day, beginning with seeing Veronica’s face through the steamed-up window and ending with being let out into the rain by the night watchman, with considerable attention to detail, seeking to clarify my own thoughts as well as present the history of the matter to Holmes. I told him about Veronica’s charitable deeds and her lost lover, about Margery Childe’s magnetic speaking persona and her interaction with the women who came to her for comfort and strength. I was honest about my own response to the woman, both the attraction and the unthinking, almost visceral aversion to the control she held over her listeners, a reaction which had, in turn, prompted her finally to drop the pretence and give to me, a stranger, what was to all appearances her honest, unadorned self.

It was an indication of the similarity of our minds, or perhaps of the extent to which he had trained me in his techniques, that he did not interrupt me for clarifications during the hour I spoke. He refilled his pipe once and our glasses three times, but he made no remark aside from the occasional grunt and the noises of his pipe. When I finished and glanced at my watch, I was amazed to see that it was after 3:00 a.m.

“You are tired perhaps, Russell?” he asked, his eyes closed.

“Not really. I slept most of the day. Perhaps I’ll have a brief nap before meeting Veronica for lunch.”

“What is it you want of me, Russell? I agree this is all very interesting, from the point of view of the human mind, but why bring it to me?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I thought that telling it to you might help me to clarify it in my own mind. It’s all so— Why are you laughing?”

“At myself, Russell, at a voice from the past.” He chuckled. “I used to say the same thing to Watson.”

“Oh. Well, the parallel is not exact, because I truly do want your opinion, as a judge of humankind.”

“I’m glad you did not say ‘a judge of men.’ ”

“Not in this case. But what do you think, Holmes? Can she possibly be genuine? Or is she a charlatan? On the surface, it has all the earmarks of chicanery, a subtle and high-class dodge. And yet, she herself rings true, despite her obvious manipulation of her followers.”

Holmes packed his pipe thoughtfully, and I reflected that somewhere the room had good ventilation, or we should have suffocated long before this.

“You say there is considerable money involved here?”

“There were fourteen women in that room aside from myself. A third of them were related to men who sit in peer’s stalls, another third have mothers whose surnames came from Boston and Wall Street. The cost of the clothing in the room would keep one of London’s parishes in food for a year; the coiffures alone would feed a family for several months. Miss Childe owns the hall and the two adjoining houses. Her gown was a Worth, several pieces of furniture I saw would cause a Sotheby’s auctioneer to croon, and her skin has been under sunny skies within the past two months. Yes, there is money behind her. A great deal of money.”

“She may have lived in a cold-water flat when she was twenty, but not now, eh?”

“Far from it.”

Holmes tapped his teeth with his pipe and stared into the fireplace.

“In my experience,” he said thoughtfully, “the alchemists were wrong in assuming gold to be incorruptible. Religion and money form a volatile mix. I have had several such cases come my way. There was ‘Holy’ Peters, who put on the face of a missionary to lure lonely ladies and relieve them of their burdensome inheritances. Later, I met a certain Canon Smythe-Basingstoke, who gave such stirring public addresses concerning the poor children of Africa, complete with recordings of their voices singing and lantern slides of their pinched and winsome faces, before accepting donations to his valiant mission outpost. That case was too bald and uncomplicated for Watson to bother with, as I remember. And, of course, the case that brought Jefferson Hope to my door, although on second thought, that concerned a woman as well as money. No, the path of God has often been diverted to lead to a human desire, the word of God twisted to suit human ambition. Were this lady living among the poor, I might be happier, but the tanned face and her silk Paris gown can only count against her sincerity. However, I am not telling you anything new, am I, Russell?”

“No, I had reached the same—hardly a conclusion. It’s sad, in a way. I should greatly enjoy meeting someone who, as it were, talks with God. She is, however, very intelligent, and she is doing some fine work for the women of London.”

“Time will tell,” he said, and then he took his pipe out of his mouth and fixed me with a suspicious gaze. “Unless you were planning on a spot of independent criminal investigation?”

“No, Holmes. I told you, it’s only mild curiosity—in my field, not yours.”

“Another whim, Russell?”

“Another whim,” I said evenly, and as our eyes came together, I was made abruptly aware of how alone we were and of the silence of the building around us. At that moment, something entered the room, a thing compounded of the memory of our argument atop the hansom, of the intimacy of the hour and the place, of my thin and clinging blouse and his long legs stretched out towards the fire and of my growing sense of womanliness. I suppressed a shudder and cast about rapidly for a red herring. “Speaking of criminal investigation,” I said, reaching for my glass, “Veronica asked if there was anything I might do about her fiancé Miles and his drug habit. Have you any suggestions?”

“Nothing can be done,” he said dismissively.

“He seems to have been a good man, before the trenches,” I persisted.

“Most of them were.”

“Surely there’s something—”

He jumped to his feet and circled his chair, ending up back at the fireplace, where he leant down to smack his pipe against the bricks and send the still-alight dottle spraying onto the coal and the hearth. His voice was high and biting now.

“Russell, I am hardly the man to impose sobriety on another, save perhaps by my own wicked examples. Besides which, even discounting my unfitness for temperance work, I refuse to act as the world’s nursemaid. If young men wish to inject themselves with heroin, I can no more stand in their way than I could stand in the way of a Boche shell in the trenches.”

“And if he were your son?” I asked very quietly. “Would you not want someone to try?”

It was a dirty blow, low and unscrupulous and quite unforgivably wicked. Because, you see, he did have a son once, and someone had tried.

He rotated his head slowly towards me, eyes cold, face rigid.

“That was unworthy of you, Russell,” was all he said, but the intonation of it brought me to my feet and to his side, and I laid my hand on his arm.

“Dear God, Holmes, I am sorry. It was cruel and thoughtless of me. I am so very sorry.”

He looked at my hand, covered it briefly with his own, and turned away to his chair.

“However,” he said, “you are right. It is irresponsible of me to say that I can do nothing, without having reviewed the case. If you would be so good as to give me the information on the young man, I shall think about what possible courses of action might be open.”

“I…” I stopped, at a loss. “His name is Miles Fitzwarren,” I began weakly, but broke off at his gesture.

“I know him,” he said, and corrected himself. “Rather, I knew him. I shall see what can be done.”

I might have been some tediously importunate client being dismissed with a scrap of comfort.

“Thank you, Holmes,” I said miserably, and went back to my chair.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him, slumped down, chewing at the stem of his empty pipe. My red herring had performed its function, but I knew that this particular old hound would not be misled for long before backtracking to the main scent. For the moment, he sat staring blindly past the mended toes of his woollen stockings, into the glowing coals. I knew him, however. I knew every movement and gesture of the man, the lines and muscles of his face that were more familiar to me than my own, the mind that had moulded mine, and I knew that when his thoughts returned from the contemplation of that particular byway, he would fix me with his all-seeing gaze and with a few deft words unearth the topic I’d been trying so desperately to divert him from. It would happen in a minute, and when it did, the peculiar chilling awareness, a presence almost, that had already passed through the room would return tenfold, and it would not be dismissed.

I waited tensely for him to look up, feeling the quivering silence build in the space between us, and it was a shock, as if an adder had appeared in the bathwater between my toes, to realise that for the first time in my life I was uncomfortable in the presence of Sherlock Holmes. He did not look at me, and I took it as a judgement, and I was sore afraid.

But in the end, he did not fix me with a steely eye; he did not even glance at me. Rather, he moved, with a calmness that in another person would have meant a total unawareness of any untoward currents in the room. He bent forward and placed his cold pipe on the table, then reached for the salt-stained boots drying on the hearth and began to put them on.

“I must go out,” he said. “I shall be back in three or four hours. You get some sleep, and I’ll wake you by eight if you’re not up already. It’s good to be out of the building by nine, when the office workers begin to arrive.” He finished tying his laces and stood up.

“Holmes, I—” I stopped abruptly, lost. What he said then made it apparent that he had not been unaware of the silence.

“It’s all right, Russell. I do understand. The bed is in the next room. Sleep well.”

He rested one hand briefly on the back of my chair as he went around it to the ventilation shaft, and one long finger brushed my shoulder. I wanted to reach up and grasp his hand and not let him leave, but I held myself still and allowed him to fold himself out through the wardrobe door. Then I sat and listened as a very different silence lowered itself onto the room.

The walls closed in, and the quiet was loud, and I was far from sleep. I went into the kitchen and did the washing up, wiped down the surfaces, made myself a cup of milkless tea, put his pipe on its rack, took a book from the shelves, and sat staring at the first page as the cup cooled. Sometime later, I remembered it and grimaced at the taste of the cold tannin, took the cup to the sink and dumped it out, washed it, dried it, put it away, and walked across the room to the internal door.

I looked at the bed a long time. In the end, I went back and took the throw rug from the back of the sofa, turned down the lights, curled up under the rug by the low glow of the fire, and wondered what the hell I was going to do.