A Monstrous Regiment of Women (2 page)

I digress. When I reached London, the streets were still crowded. I took a taxi (a motor cab, so I hadn’t to look too closely at the driver) to the agency Holmes often used as his supplier when he needed a horse and cab. The owner knew me—at least, he recognised the young man who stood in front of him—and said that, yes, that gentleman (not meaning, of course, a gentleman proper) had indeed shown up for work that day. In fact, he’d shown up twice.

“Twice? You mean he brought the cab back, then?” I was disappointed, and wondered if I ought merely to give up the chase.

“T’orse ’ad an ’ot knee, an’ ’e walked ’er back. ’E was about ter take out anuvver un when ’e ’appened t’see an ol’ ’anson just come in. Took a fancy, ’e did, can’t fink why—’s bloody cold work an’ the pay’s piss-all, ’less you ’appen on t’ odd pair what wants a taste of t’ old days, for a lark. ’Appens, sometimes, come a summer Sunday, or after t’ theatre Sattiday. Night like this, ’e’d be bloody lucky t’get a ha’penny over fare.“

With a straight face, I reflected privately on how his colourful language would have faded in the light of the posh young lady I occasionally was.

“So he took the hansom?”

“That ’e did. One of the few what can drive the thing, I’ll give ’im that.” His square face contemplated for a moment this incongruous juxtaposition of skill and madness in the man he knew as Basil Josephs, then he shook his head in wonderment. “ ’ad ta give ’im a right bugger of an ’orse, though. Never been on a two-wheeler, ’e ’asn’t, and plug-headed and leather-mouthed to boot. ’Ope old Josephs ’asn’t ’ad any problems,” he said with a magnificent lack of concern, and leant over to hawk and spit delicately into the noisome gutter.

“Well,” I said, “there couldn’t be too many hansoms around, I might spot him tonight. Can you tell me what the horse looks like?”

“Big bay, wide blaze, three stockin’s with t’ off hind dark, nasty eyes, but you won’t see ’em—’e’s got blinkers on,” he rattled off, then added after a moment, “Cab’s number two-ninety-two.” I thanked him with a coin and went a-hunting through the vast, sprawling streets of the great cesspool for a single, worn hansom cab and its driver.

The hunt was not quite so hopeless as it might appear. Unless he were on a case (and Mrs Hudson had thought on the whole that he was not), his choice of clothing and cab suggested entertainment rather than employment, and his idea of entertainment tended more toward London’s east end rather than Piccadilly or St John’s Wood. Still, that left a fair acreage to choose from, and I spent several hours standing under lampposts, craning to see the feet of passing horses
(all
of them seemed to have blazes and stockings) and fending off friendly overtures from dangerously underdressed young and not-so-young women. Finally, just after midnight, one marvellously informative conversation with such a lady was interrupted by the approaching clop and grind of a trotting horsecab, and a moment later the piercing tones of a familiar voice echoing down the nearly deserted street obviated the need for any further equine examination.

“Annalisa, my dear young thing,” came the voice that was not a shout but which could be heard a mile away on the Downs, “Isn’t that child you are trying to entice a bit young, even for you? Look at him—he doesn’t even have a beard yet.”

The lady beside me whirled around to the source of this interruption. I excused myself politely and stepped out into the street to intercept the cab. He had a fare—or rather, two— but he slowed, gathered the reins into his right hand, and reached the other long arm down to me. My disappointed paramour shouted genial insults at Holmes that would have blistered the remaining paint from the woodwork, had they not been deflected by his equally jovial remarks in kind.

The alarming dip of the cab caused the horse to snort and veer sharply, and a startled, moustachioed face appeared behind the cracked glass of the side window, scowling at me. Holmes redirected his tongue’s wrath from the prostitute to the horse and, in the best tradition of London cabbies, cursed the animal soundly, imaginatively, and without a single manifest obscenity. He also more usefully snapped the horse’s head back with one clean jerk on the reins, returning its attention to the job at hand, while continuing to pull me up and shooting a parting volley of affectionate and remarkably familiar remarks at the fading Annalisa. Holmes did so like to immerse himself fully in his roles, I reflected as I wedged myself into the one-person seat already occupied by the man and his garments.

“Good evening, Holmes,” I greeted him politely.

“Good morning, Russell,” he corrected me, and shook the horse back into a trot.

“Are you on a job, Holmes?” I had known as soon as his arm reached down for me that if case it were, it did not involve the current passengers, or he should merely have waved me off.

“My dear Russell, those Americanisms of yours,” he tut-tutted. “How they do grate on the ear. ‘On a job.’ No, I am not occupied with a case, Russell, merely working at the maintenance of old skills.”

“And are you having fun?”

“ ‘Having fun’?” He pronounced the words with fastidious distaste and looked at me askance.

“Very well: Are you enjoying yourself?”

He raised one eyebrow at my clothes before turning back to the reins.

“I might ask the same of you, Russell.”

“Yes,” I replied. “As a matter of fact, I
am
enjoying myself, Holmes, very much, thank you.” And I sat back as best I could to do so.

Traffic even in the middle of London tends to die down considerably by the close of what Christians mistakenly call the Sabbath, and the streets were about as quiet now as they ever were. It was very pleasant being jolted about in a swaying seat eight feet above the insalubrious cobblestones, next to my one true friend, through the ill-lit streets that echoed the horse’s hoofs and the grind of the wheels, on a night cold enough to kill the smells and keep the fog at bay, but not cold enough to damage exposed flesh and fingertips. I glanced down at my companion’s begrimed fingers where they were poised, testing the heavy leather for signs of misbehaviour from the still-fractious beast with the same sensitivity they exhibited in all their activities, from delicate chemical experiments to the tactile exploration of a clue. I was struck by a thought.

“Holmes, do you find that the cold on a clear night exacerbates your rheumatism as much as the cold of a foggy night?”

He fixed me with a dubious eye, then turned back to the job, lips no doubt pursed beneath the scarfs. It was, I realised belatedly, an unconventional opening for a conversation, but surely Holmes, of all people, could not object to the eccentric.

“Russell,” he said finally, “it is very good of you to have come up from Sussex and stood on cold street corners for half the night striking up inappropriate friendships and flirting with pneumonia in order to enquire after my health, but perhaps having found me, you might proceed with your intended purpose.”

“I had no purpose,” I protested, stung. “I finished my paper more quickly than I’d thought, felt like spending the rest of the day with you rather than listening to my relations shrieking and moaning downstairs, and, when I found you missing, decided on a whim to follow you here and see if I might track you down. It was merely a whim,” I repeated firmly. Perhaps too firmly. I hastened to change the subject. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“Driving a cab,” he said in a voice that told me that he was neither distracted nor deceived. “Go on, Russell, you may as well ask your question; you’ve spent seven hours in getting here. Or perhaps I ought to say, six years?”

“What on earth are you talking about?” I was very cross at the threat of having my nice evening spoilt by his sardonic, all-knowing air, though God knows, I should have been used to it by then. “I am having a holiday from the holidays. I am relaxing, following the enforced merriment of the last week. An amusing diversion, Holmes, nothing else. At least it was, until your suspicious mind let fly with its sneering intimations of omniscience. Really, Holmes, you can be very irritating at times.”

He seemed not in the least put out by my ruffled feathers, and he arched his eyebrow and glanced sideways at me to let me know it. I put up my chin and looked in the other direction.

“So you did not ‘track me down,’ as you put it, for any express purpose, other than as an exercise in tracking?”

“And for the pleasurable exercise of freedom, yes.”

“You are lying, Russell.”

“Holmes, this is intolerable. If you wish to be rid of me, all you need do is slow down and let me jump off. You needn’t be offensive to me. I’ll go.”

“Russell, Russell,” he chided, and shook his head.

“Damn it, Holmes, what can you imagine was so urgent that I should come all the way here in order to confront you with it immediately? Which, you may have noticed, I have not done?”

“A question you finally nerved yourself up to ask, and the momentum carried you along,” he answered coolly.

“And what question might that be?” I did leave myself right open for it, but once launched in a path, it is difficult to change direction.

“I expect you came to ask me to marry you.”

I nearly fell off the back of the cab.

“Holmes! What do you… How can you…” I sputtered to a halt. In front of me, the speaking vent in the roof of the cab was rising, and in a moment I could see two sets of eyes, dimly illuminated by the carriage lights and a passing streetlamp. One set was topped by a bowler, the other by a frippery gobbet of flowers, and they passed over us like two pair of roving spotlights, apprehensively examining the two men who were carrying on this lunatic dialogue above their heads.

Holmes lifted his hat and gave them a genial smile. I waggled the brim of my own and gave what I felt to be a look of criminal idiocy, but was apparently only slightly disconcerting. They stared between the reins at us, mouths agape.

“Sumfing Oi can do fer you, sir?” Holmes asked politely, his voice sliding down towards the Cockney.

“You can explain the meaning of this extraordinary conversation which my wife and myself have been forced to overhear.” He looked like a schoolmaster, though his nose was dark with broken capillaries.

“Conversation? Oh yes, sorry, Oi’s‘pose it sounded sumfing mad.” Holmes laughed. “Amatoor dramatics, sir. There’s a club of us, rehearses parts whenever we come across one another. It’s an Ibsen play. Do you know it?” The heads shook in unison, and the two looked at each other. “Fine stuff, but taken out of context, like, it sounds summat potty. Sorry we disturbed you.” The eyes studied us dubiously for another long moment, then looked again at each other, and the hats sank slowly back into the cab. Holmes began to laugh convulsively in complete silence, and reluctantly I joined him. Some minutes later, he wiped his face with his filthy gloves, snapped the horse back to its trot, and took up a completely different topic.

“So, Russell, this gentleman and his lovely wife are going to number seventeen Gladstone Terrace. Kindly search your memory and tell me where it is to be found.” It was an examination, and out of habit, I reviewed my mental picture of the area.

“Another nine streets up, on the left.”

“Ten streets,” he corrected me. “You forgot Hallicombe Alley.”

“Sorry. This is getting far out for my knowledge of the map. I admit that one or two of the areas we’ve been through I’ve never seen before.”

“I should think not,” he said primly. Holmes tended to recall his Victorian attitudes and my gender at the oddest times—it always took me by surprise.

Holmes drew to a halt on a deserted side street and our passengers scurried for the shelter of their dark terrace house, not even waiting for the change from their coin. Holmes shouted a thanks at the closing door; his voice bounced off the disapproving bricks and scuttled off into the night.

“Jump down and get the rug, will you, Russell?”

When we were settled with the thing around our knees, he flicked the reins and the horse circled us back into the main road. We took a different route for our return to the stables, through streets even darker and dirtier than those we had come by. I was enjoying myself again, half-drowsing despite the continuous jolts, when Holmes spoke.

“So, Russell, what say you? Have you a question for me?”

It is difficult to pull away from a man when the two of you are compressed shoulder-to-shoulder and wrapped in a rug, but I managed.

“Come now, Russell, you are a great proponent of the emancipation of women; surely you can manage to carry out your intentions in this little matter.”

“Little?” I seized on the word, as he knew I would. “First you place the proposition in my mouth, and then you denigrate it. I don’t know why I even—” I bit back the words.

“Why you thought of it in the first place, is that what you were about to say?”

Before I could respond, a fast blur shooting out of a dark alley brought Holmes to his feet, nearly knocking me from my perch. A black shape was at the heels of the horse, snarling and snapping with a flash of white teeth as it dodged into the dim light from our lamps. In one smooth movement, Holmes wrapped the reins around his left hand and hauled back on them as he snatched the long whip from its rest with his right, and with considerable accuracy he turned the yaps into yelps. Sheer brute strength brought the horse back onto its haunches and kept it from bolting, but sheer artistry allowed it just enough of its head to resume progress. The animal’s blinkered head tossed and fretted the reins from its shoe-leather mouth to the driver’s arms, and its heavy and graceless neck gleamed with sweat, but it obeyed its driver. In a moment, still on his feet and with both hands now on the reins, Holmes resumed as if there had been no interruption.

“So, why
did
you think of it?” he pressed, his voice calm but with a finely honed edge to it. “Have I given you any reason to believe that I might welcome such a suggestion? I am fifty-nine years old, Russell, and I have long been accustomed to the privacy and freedom of the bachelor life. Do you imagine that I might succumb to the dictates of social norms and marry you in order to stop tongues from wagging when we go off together? Or perhaps you imagine that the pleasures of the wedding bed might prove irresistible?”