A Study in Sherlock

raised a hand, but as the fever made everything around him seem disjointed, he was not sure if the hand belonged to the man or the woman, or whether it was simply something that floated in the air. Then the voices reached a crescendo.

“You are nothing but a philanderer, a thief, and a … a … a thoroughly nasty piece of work. I wish I had never met you.”

“And that, madam, is a sure case of the pot calling the kettle black!”

“Don’t you ‘madam’ me, you lout!”

The boy crinkled his eyes and pushed back his woollen school cap. It itched across his forehead. Silly, these English school caps—and at his age. Tiredness seeped through his being like waves at the seashore, and it made him think of the ocean; cool, cool water lapping over him, and how it might feel as it washed across his hot, sticky skin. Itch-itch-itch, scratch-scratch-scratch. Then there was a scream. A scream so loud, he thought everyone must hear. But there was no one else on the street to be alarmed, though at that very moment a brand-new shining motorcar bumped and blasted its way toward him, barely allowing margin for a costermonger’s horse and cart. That’s when he thought he heard a gunshot. Crack! Crack! it went, into the air. Then it was gone, and there was no more screaming and yelling. And no more shadows.

“Fell down right in front of me, he did, missus. Luck’ly, he knew where he lived, told me the address right off when I asked him—mind you, I had to shake him a bit. Looks like he’s got a touch of the measles. Nasty, them measles. Had ’em when I was a lad.”

The coster helped the boy across the threshold, whereupon the mother took charge, her manner of speaking causing the man to look up as she pressed a few pennies into his hand.

“Long way from home, aren’t you, missus?”

“This is our home now, sir. Thank you for assisting my son—now I must get him to bed.”

She closed the door, and at once she and the boy’s aunt—there was no father present—helped him upstairs to his room at the front of the house. Having removed his school uniform, they laid him out on the bed, washed him with warm water and carbolic soap, and daubed the livid rash with calamine lotion before sending for the doctor. The boy remembered little of this, though he could, when he was on the mend, remember trying to press the point that he thought someone had been shot on Margaret Street. His words served only to convince the women of the severity of his fever, and the dangers inherent in a bout of childhood measles, which, they thought, would never have come to pass had mother and son remained in America. This was the 1900s now, after all, and London seemed a backward place to an immigrant from across the Atlantic, even though there was family here to help. It was to be some days before the illness became a source of boredom for the boy and a slight nuisance for the mother and aunt.

“He’s on the mend, but I do wish he’d stop going on about hearing a gunshot on Margaret Street. The coster said he saw him collapse after the motorcar backfired and the horse shied, so of course it must have sounded like a shot from a gun to a sick boy.”

The aunt had returned from a walk to the shops, ready for the mother’s complaint. “This might feed his appetite for murder, Florence.” She placed a brown-paper-wrapped book on the table.

“The Boys’ Sherlock Holmes?” said the mother, her eyebrows raised just a little. “I’m not sure the masters at school would approve, and he has a mountain of prep to finish—he mustn’t slip behind, you know.”

“He’s a good pupil, so a little something light might be just what the doctor ordered—and I think the nurse trumps the teachers in the management of convalescence.”

“Hmmm,” said the boy’s mother. “I’ll take it up with his tea.”

Turning the pages proved to be a problem, given the white cotton gloves his mother insisted adorn his hands so that if he attempted to scratch the spots, which were becoming even more itchy and crusty as they dried out, he would not break the skin. The calamine lotion helped to a degree—already his mother had sent out the maid for two more bottles—and he’d been encouraged to take a hot bath with a copious amount of Epsom salts added to the water, but still he’d taken off the gloves in a moment of frustration and scratched his forehead so much it bled. He licked a gloved finger and fumbled the page until it turned.

Without doubt, the adventures of Sherlock Holmes offered some respite from the Elizabethan authors he’d been studying, though he enjoyed the rhythm of the more ancient English employed by Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, and Christopher Marlowe. He liked Sidney above all, having considered himself something of a poet; indeed the boy had made a vow to have his work published by the time he came of age. He could readily imagine himself lingering in an oak-lined study at Penshurst Place in Kent, where Sidney penned sweet rhyming letters to his love. It was said there was no more noble character than Sidney, in his day, and the boy thought that in itself was something to aspire to, for he wanted to be considered a noble Englishman. The endearing thing about Sidney was that he wrote about love, and the boy rather liked the idea of writing romantic verse; it appealed to him. He brought his attention back to Sherlock Holmes, though as thoughts danced and wove in his mind, he began thinking, again, about what he had seen and heard as he’d walked home from school with a raging fever. Was it his imagination? Had he really heard the altercation between the man and the woman—the lovers, as he now considered them to be? He suspected that, had Holmes been on the street, he would have uttered the words, “The game’s afoot!”

There’s a point, as sickness leaves but before a return to good health can be claimed, that a young male, in particular, will become bored and may resort to mischief to entertain himself in the long hours of convalescence. The discomfort of healing skin did not help matters for the boy, but the itch was now one of attention, of a desire for something more exciting in the day than his mother’s footfall on the stairs as she brought a tray with breakfast, luncheon, tea, or supper. She assumed he read, wrote, or slept when alone, and to a point this was true. But now he wanted to move his limbs. And he wanted to indulge his curiosity.

A thought occurred to the boy when he had come to the end of A Study in Scarlet, so he took up his notebook and pencil, and began to turn the pages. He reread a snippet here, a sentence there. He copied whole paragraphs, and then tried to index them into some sort of order. According to the book, which included a serviceable biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, together with a few pages on the man who had inspired the character of Sherlock Holmes, the detective could solve a crime in three days. Three days. Today was Tuesday, so if he dedicated Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to the case—he now considered his experience a “case”—he would have all the answers he needed by the week’s end. It was crucial that the fledgling idea must work in the allotted time, for the doctor decreed that he could get up from his bed and remain downstairs on Saturday and Sunday, ready to return to school on Monday next. Three days.

He consulted the book again. Holmes had instructed Watson—the boy rather liked Watson; he seemed warmer, more affable than the cold, calculating Holmes—that it was important to engage in reasoning backward and analytically. He wasn’t sure how he could put such a process into practice with regard to his case, but he began to write down everything he remembered, backward from the time he arrived home from school. This was somewhat tricky, as he had been brought part of the way in the back of a coster’s cart, among an array of wilting vegetables. The cabbage had been particularly pungent. Of essence, he realized, as he read on, was Holmes’s dictate that the detective must examine on foot the property where the crime was committed. The boy began to scheme.

His mother and aunt walked after lunch each day, a perambulation that would extend for several hours, so having left the house at, say, one o’clock, they would return no later than four, when it was time for tea. During that time his grandmother would nod off in her chair, and be, to all intents and purposes, dead to the world. Since he had taken to his sickbed, his mother had called up the stairs as she left, then brought him a cup of tea and two plain oatmeal biscuits upon her return. Sometimes his aunt would come to his room, too, and together they would discuss his schoolwork, or an item in the newspaper of national import, and as they left, his aunt would be heard to say, “He’s such a sensitive boy, isn’t he?” or something of that order.

He decided to leave the house as soon as they had departed following luncheon on Wednesday, but he must be certain to return by teatime. Three days, three hours each day. Holmes would indubitably be able to find a solution in such a period of time—why couldn’t he?

Tools were gathered with some stealth. Sherlock Holmes always had at least a tape measure and a magnifying glass, and these items were procured with ease—the former taken from his mother’s sewing basket, and the latter from his grandmother’s bedside table. And it was clear that he needed a disguise—not least to conceal the livid spots dotting his face. Cosmetic powder on his aunt’s dressing table worked admirably, and soon it