And if not, was there really any way to leave this man who wielded so much power over me?
I sat there for a long time. Then, like a sudden gust of wind sending a chill through the room, I thought of him, alone, unprotected, standing toe to toe with the murderer of six men. Sherlock drove me insane at times. He drove everyone insane at times. But I was shackled by my affection for him. Love is, indeed, an obstinate shackle, and my heart ached too deeply when I tried to break from it.
Overcome by the prospect that Sherlock would harrow this danger alone, I blew out the candles, turned off the gas lamps, and tossed my cape over my shoulders. Then I rushed down the stairs and out to the street. I hailed a cab and blurted, “Regent Park. And please hurry!”
46
On the way to Uncle’s house, instead of thinking about the danger Sherlock was in, I tried to distract myself by concentrating on all the things I would say to him when this case was resolved. It was fantasy, but I still foolishly wanted to believe that my relationship with Sherlock could rise, like a phoenix, from the ashes.
Ashes, I thought. Sherlock was forever scrutinizing ashes, like he had that afternoon in the lab. Cigar ashes, pipe ashes, ashes from a fireplace, ashes from ashes! Sherlock had convinced me that each kind of tobacco has a different smell, a different look, and thus, a different quality. Given the prevalence of the habit - every man seemed to indulge in smoking a pipe or rolling a cigarette - I supposed it was possible to use it as a means of identification.
Then there were thumb and hand prints. Prints on a letter, prints on glass. He’d corresponded with Sir Henry Faulds, a Scottish surgeon who had established a mission in Japan, about Faulds’ work in using fingerprints to identify a criminal.
“This man,” Sherlock had told me, “is convinced, as am I, that the pattern of ridges is unique to each individual. In fact, when his hospital was broken into, the local police arrested a member of his staff, whom Faulds believed to be innocent. Faulds collects fingerprints.”
“He what?” I had asked.
“He studied ancient fingerprint markings on caves and started a collection of prints. He recently discovered that someone had taken a bottle of alcohol from his office. The police accused one of his medical students. But Faulds matched the student’s fingerprints which he had on file to those on a cocktail glass and compared them to those left behind at the crime scene. The prints were different. On the strength of that new evidence, the police released the man they had suspected of the crime and caught the true thief. The Yard should take note of that, but they have not. Faulds has even written to a man you admire very much, Poppy. Charles Darwin. He keeps trying to persuade the Yard to establish some sort of fingerprint identification system. They are, as usual, sorely lacking in vision.”
I glanced out and saw some street orderlies, young boys dressed in frock, leggings, boots and shiny hats, risking life and limb as they scurried about the streets with scrapers and brooms to rake up mud and horse dung. I sighed. Many were no older than Archie and they laboured from late at night to late morning for the astronomical sum of five shillings a week and the right to dip into a pint of hot cocoa. By the end of the shift, they were covered in dust and slop and horse muck and mud.
Mud stains, I thought. Sherlock endlessly tested them. And rust stains, stains caused by fruit juice, and blood stains, of course, for he was also convinced that testing it could determine whether the blood was old or new and that it could lead to identification of a criminal. My brother Michael had told me that often in the wee hours, he’d catch Sherlock out in the lab, dissolving blood in water, adding white crystals to it, and then adding a transparent liquid.
I thought back to the day I had watched him test it.
“These are the steps one must take to identify the type of hemoglobin in blood,” he’d said.
“I don’t understand,” I’d said.
“Oh, Poppy, use your brain - it’s slightly less ordinary than the average person’s! Now, I want to be able to differentiate the types of blood that run through our veins.”
“Types?”
“Yes, yes! Determining the type of hemoglobin in the blood will lead to less erroneous identifications. Don’t you see? Soon we shall be able to separate one wild, unruly savage from another by his blood!”
He had added water to a drop of human blood, mixed the contents, added a pellet of sodium hydroxide in a crushed, crystalline form, and mixed it until the crystals dissolved. What was left was a brown dust at the bottom of the test tube. He had not perfected this procedure yet, but I was certain he would. Because he was focused. Because he was mono-maniacal. Because he would not let anything else in. Because he kept his emotions in check and avoided entanglements and commitments to the fair sex.
But there was more to Sherlock’s single-mindedness, his devotion to examining ashes or deciphering codes, than that one explanation. Sherlock really did ponder whether there was anything beyond this life and, in his own way, I think he - like many others - sought his own form of the Fountain of Youth, some achievement of immortality. Though he had thus
