Sherlock Holmes and The Adventure of The Cold-Served Revenge

IX: One Woman for Two Men

I was in heaven for about sixty seconds, although it seemed like much longer. When Alice Darringford’s lips met mine the world around me ceased to exist. Everything fell silent. The room seemed to float far away from my conscious awareness, together with my resolve not to succumb to the lady’s allure.

Never have I experienced a sweeter kiss. Alice smelled like a mixture of exotic scents, which pervaded my nose up to my brain, where they burned an indelible trail, while her white and silky hands played with my hair. She slid her fingers over my neck, caressing and kneading it with her hands, running over my Adam’s apple, and sometimes pressing it so that I almost ceased breathing. There was something so unbelievably exciting about this that I shuddered and trembled. I would not have believed that at my age I could experience something so intense.

In my ecstasy I did not hear the door opening or the footsteps leading to the drawing room. I only came to my senses when I heard a loud outraged gasp.

The lady, sitting with her back to the door, felt the presence of someone else in the room and broke away from me. But it was vain to pretend that nothing had happened. We had been caught in flagranti.

“Watson!” cried Holmes, holding a dossier in his hands. “What is the meaning of this?”

I froze and extracted myself from the woman’s grasp. My guilty cheeks were blushing, confirmation of our loss of reason.

The detective was frowning like an angry judge and he measured us with an aggrieved look. A black cloud formed over me. My moral credit was shot, as much as though I had been caught by my wife.

“I should probably go,” said Alice after a pause, in which I searched for an answer, but only managed to gape.

She did not expect me or my companion to object, but only smiled with confusion, fixed her hair and brushed past Holmes to the door. He did not say a word to her or so much as look in her eyes. In fact, he looked away.

When the door shut behind her an embarrassing silence descended on the drawing room broken only by the crackling of the wood burning in the fireplace and the distant din of the street.

Then I grew angry.

An adult man, his face wrinkled by experience, who has seen and lived through so much, is never happy to find himself in the position of a chastised schoolboy. I alone was responsible for my behaviour, and I alone had to deal with its consequences. Holmes may have meant well, but his actions crossed the line of what I was prepared to tolerate. It was not his place to play the moralist. I decided to go on the offensive and tell him so in no uncertain terms.

“We are both adults and I do not owe you an explanation,” I said.

Holmes, who was still standing in the doorway, levelled his steely eyes on me with such a stony glare that I nearly shook.

“I had no idea you were such a cynic,” he barked, clenching the stack of papers even tighter.

“What is cynical about my feelings for Lady Darringford?” I said, defending myself. “Of course I am married, but please leave these matters up to me. I can fully devote myself to our investigation.”

“Do not play the innocent! You acted against all principle! I confided my feelings for Lady Alice to you, even that I might be in love with her. I told you that I saw her reserved nature as a challenge, and she herself has indicated that I should try to win her! You acted like a friend, but only to stick the knife in my back and seduce the woman at the first opportunity!”

Now it was my turn to stare with astonishment.

“Excuse me?” I said. “But you were not talking about Lady Darringford! At least, that is not how I understood it! I thought that the woman you were talking about was...”

He did not even let me finish and lifted his hand in front of my face.

“Silence!” he shouted.

He slowly lowered his hand and his cold look turned into something worse: disdain. God as my witness, it was a horrible mistake.

“When did I stop knowing you?”

“For God’s sake, Holmes, you know that I would never knowingly do that to you!”

He shook his head.

“You betrayed my trust, and even worse, my friendship,” he whispered in a parched voice, turning his back to me. “I am disappointed, Watson.”

I did not know what to say.

Holmes was finished. I was not even worth looking at anymore. He collected himself and went without another word upstairs to his room. His heavy footsteps sounded on the staircase like the death knoll of our long friendship.

I prescribed myself sleeping pills, but they only half helped. I spent the night in a delirium of terrible nightmares and hallucinations. I awoke drenched in sweat, with the knowledge that the bad dreams reflected the cruel reality that my life was collapsing like a house of cards.

How could I have been so stupid? But the whole morning I only stared dully at the ceiling. I did not have the courage to leave the room and meet Holmes.

At least it gave me time to think about what had happened and why. Of course I easily understood why he had fallen in love with Lady Alice. Her intelligence and charm rivalled that of Irene Adler, and she was much more Holmes’s type than Grace Pankhurst. The idea that the detective may have fallen for that girl all at once seemed laughable and twisted. How could the thought have even occurred to me?

I thought too about my own actions. I now considered my relationship with Alice a closed chapter. I would not sacrifice my marriage on the altar of a senseless infatuation and I hoped that my wife would never find out about this incident.

I could not, however, understand what attraction I held for Alice, a man so many years her senior. Intelligence, social position, experience, maturity? These were qualities that she would surely admire more in Holmes.

In addition, her behaviour did not fit with what my old friend the officer had said during the garden party. Perhaps the stories about the broken hearts of her admirers were just gossip whispered by bored aristocrats? In any case, the Lady was still unmarried and unattached, which again did not fit with her beauty and social position.

I considered all of the possibilities, but none of them seemed the right one.

I felt empty and sore. What would I do if I lost my best and oldest friend? And all due to a misunderstanding, a failure in judgement, and my rash impetuousness.

Just before noon the doors banged in the hallway and I heard the detective go downstairs and leave the house. I could now descend and have breakfast. But I was not the least bit hungry, and just ate some coffee and biscuits.

I was tempted to spend the whole day in my housecoat, but finally decided to do what I would have advised any of my patients who came to me similarly depressed: I got dressed and went into town.

Aimlessly I wandered through the streets, sat for a while in Regent’s Park and watched the people go by; ladies with parasols and gentlemen in straw hats, drawn outdoors by the beautiful weather. But nothing could cheer me or distract me from my melancholy and all-consuming guilt. For all I cared it could start raining.

I increasingly began to recognise that there was only one solution to this unpleasant situation. I had to explain everything to Holmes rationally and continue on in our investigation, which the detective was no doubt presently engaged in without me. Reconciliation was now my chief aim.

I ate lunch in a restaurant on Russel Square and slowly headed home.

It was quiet in the house. I gathered up all my courage and went up to Holmes’s room. I hoped that he would be at home. I wanted to find him in a mood in which we could talk.

But he was gone.

The room was impeccably tidy. I recognised that he had been there during the day; on the table he had left a plate with unfinished lunch, but he had once again left.

On the bureau was the dossier that he had brought back with him the evening before. It lay open and several yellowed pieces of paper were visible within. On the title page Holmes had written “Pankhurst” in black ink.

So the detective’s interest in young Grace persisted. But if not love, what guided him?

I took the dossier to the drawing room and settled into my favourite armchair in front of the fireplace. But today I would not under any circumstances open the door for Lady Alice.

I opened a bottle of wine and began to read.

To my surprise the file was not about Grace, but about Richard Marsden Pankhurst. Although the notorious left-wing attorney and politician had been dead these past thirteen years, I remembered him well, thanks mainly to his radical opinions, chief among them home rights for Ireland, Indian independence, the dissolution of the Anglican Church and liquidation of the House of Lords, all of which led to him being dubbed the Red Doctor. Although he was never elected to parliament, his controversial vision of the world gained him respect among the Independent Labour Party and his legacy lived on long after his sudden death[19].

I also learned from Holmes’s notes that he was the cousin of my old friend Harry Pankhurst, Grace’s father.

“Again the connections escape me, my friend,” I whispered under my breath and sipped my wine. It was good and strong, perhaps a little too strong. In any case, the detective had managed to fog over the reason why he was so interested in the Pankhurst family.

I returned to reading in the hope that the next lines would reveal the solution to this riddle.

But all I found was a flood of seemingly unrelated information. Richard Pankhurst had founded the National Society for the Support of Women’s Suffrage and had authored a bill that became the Act on Property of Married Women in 1882, giving wives absolute control over their property and profits.

He married Emmeline Goulden[20], an activist twenty years his junior, with whom he formed the Women’s Rights League. He belonged to the same political circle as George Bernard Shaw. Emmeline Goulden-Pankhurst, who after her husband’s death founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, a militant suffragette movement, was without a doubt the aunt who had raised Grace Pankhurst.

Now I was beginning to understand where Holmes was headed. He feared that under the influence of her aunt Grace would take up the violent methods of the suffragettes, which had been escalating in intensity for several years, and I dare say had made them a threat to the very fabric of society.

He certainly did not want Lady Alice to become embroiled in leftist radicalism, especially as she was torn away from her brother and was groping for something to give meaning to her life. Hence her interest in Grace. From the start Holmes had been interested Grace’s influence over Lady Darringford, not the other way around! How blind I had been to confuse it with love and to overlook his real feelings for Alice!

In a state of agitation I finished my glass of wine and discovered that in the course of my reading I had managed to drink the whole bottle. I still had a few pages to read and the feeling of guilt still had not left me.

I went to fetch another bottle and continued along the trail of Holmes’s thoughts. The dossier also contained files about the participation of the Pankhursts in the Bloody Sunday riot in Trafalgar Square on November 13, 1887.

I remembered it well.

The long period of crisis that began in 1873 and lasted almost until the end of the century created difficult social conditions in Britain and similar economic malaise in the Irish countryside. Falling food prices led to unemployment, which resulted in a great internal migration. Workers moved by the thousands to the cities, where they crippled the labour market, and devalued their working conditions and wages. As often happens in British politics, the problems in Ireland were also reflected in a number of domestic affairs. In November 1887 there were demonstrations by unemployed workers from London’s East End. Their daily conflicts with the police regularly made headlines.

Trafalgar was the symbolic place where the working class met the middle class from West End. This captured the attention of the small but growing socialist movement. The police and government attempts to put pressure on the demonstrators only served to energise the radical wing of the Liberal party and activists for free speech, who saw the square as a public space, necessary for public as well as political use.

To my understanding the closeness of British and Irish radicalism was also due to the fact that the working classes in English cities were often made up of a large number of native Irishmen. London as well as the industrial areas of northern England had a large number of Irish workers, concentrated in the East End, where they competed with other groups, such as the wave of Jews arriving from Eastern Europe. Among the recent arrivals the Irish and the Jews were the most beset by unemployment. And then there was the international dimension: the workers made common cause with the fate of the anarchists arrested after the Haymarket riots in Chicago the previous year. The hanging of four of them on November 11 indeed led to the demonstration, which turned into Bloody Sunday.

I could see it as clearly as though it were yesterday.

Some ten thousand people marched to Trafalgar Square from several directions, led by Elizabeth Reynolds, John Burns, Annie Besant and Robert Cunningham-Graham, the leaders of the Social-Democratic Federation. With them marched George Bernard Shaw, who made a speech.

Two thousand policemen and four hundred soldiers were on hand to suppress the demonstration. The skirmishes that broke out between them and the marchers, including women and children, led to the first acts of violence. Hundreds of workers were injured and at least three of them succumbed to their wounds. In the end there were even more dead and wounded. Two hundred people needed medical treatment; many others never made it to hospital, either out of fear of arrest or simply because they could not afford the fees. Most of the injuries were caused by the fists and truncheons of the police.

It was fortunate that more people did not lose their lives that day, as both the infantry and the cavalry were present. The soldiers who defended their positions with bayonets were not allowed to open fire and the cavalry were ordered to keep their sabres sheathed.

Bloody Sunday remained an important milestone in the modern history of the British and Irish left. It kick-started public interest in the social question, represented mainly by the appalling living conditions of the poor in the East End. But the murders of Jack the Ripper, which took place in the period shortly thereafter, distracted the press, which always focused on sex and violence, best of all in combination with each other.

At the bottom of the page Holmes had written two names followed by a question mark: Darringford and Bollinger.

Did it refer to Rupert or Alice Darringford?

My vision was starting to blur under the influence of the strong wine. My eyelids began to shut and I was no longer able to focus on the letters. I leaned my head back for a moment and involuntarily fell asleep, for all the world like the worst drunkard.

I awoke only the next day at daybreak.

The back of my neck ached and my spine was stiff from the night spent in the chair. My breath smelled of alcohol. The fire had long ago gone out, but someone had thrown a warm blanket over my legs.

Had my wife returned? Or had Holmes decided to take pity on me?

As though my thoughts had beckoned him, at that moment the detective stepped into the room.

I could not say, however, that his expression had become any more agreeable since our argument.

“Get up, Watson,” he said. “It is time to settle the score.”