“Poppy,” Sherlock said and I turned to look at him. “You see who it is.”
The color draining from my face, I nodded. I felt water drip on the back of my neck as snow heaved off the muzzle of fog and broke through.
Go back to the Broads, my mind told me. Skip along the water’s edge. Let it roll down and slide along the top of your foot. Dip your toes in and cast a long glance back to London and laugh at her. You are not supposed to be there, you are supposed to be here with us, the creatures called.
“Poppy, I spoke with Womack yesterday. I inquired as to Jonathan. He is the one who told me of his almost nightly visits to avail himself of... of this. A friend of Jonathan’s who works at London Hospital has introduced him to many of these... women. I spoke to Womack about the house where Dr. Younger meets his... his-”
I spit out, “Stop!” and Wiggins walked a few paces away as if to hide from this unusual spat between two people he admired. I longed for Sherlock’s face to slip away as well, out of the glare of the light. I longed for darkness to surround me, soft and restful, for the light to desert me for as long as I willed it.
I tried to think of something clever. Instead I blurted, “You are cruel, Sherlock. You... you do not want me yourself but you don’t want anyone else to want me either.”
“It would be a pity if you truly believed that, Poppy. You may not like the message but I am simply the messenger,” he said softly. “Sometimes the very thing you wish least to hear is that which you need most to hear. And, in this case, to see, because I do not think you would have listened to me if you did not see it for yourself.”
In the deepest levels of my soul, I knew he was right. Still, I was angry. And there awakened in me an anguish that would later emigrate to resolve and become forever inseparable from it. That resolve would be indissolubly united with all the pain that loving Sherlock had caused me. I determined that I would never give into my emotions so completely again.
“I should like to leave now, Sherlock.”
“We have things to discuss. I have a lead on the killer. And possibly a connection to the person who is destroying the swans.”
“I do not care.” I walked away briskly and Wiggins raced up to me.
“But, Miss, yer was wantin’ me t’ talk about the grave diggin’.”
I saw a hansom coming toward me, stepped into the roadway and waved to it. It stopped. “Not now. I will talk to you... another time.”
“But, Poppy,” Sherlock said.
As I stepped up into the cab, Sherlock took my wrist and borrowed a little fragment from the truth. “Forgive me,” he said. “I was trying to be helpful.”
I knew he wanted to show me he was right about Jonathan after all. In fact, he probably wanted to show me how senseless and illogical it was to be in a romantic relationship. But he may also have been sorry to hurt me.
“And you have been. Very helpful indeed.”
I had chosen. My fate was settled. I would fend off lofty romantic notions that might pull at my soul; I would allow them no longer to get in my way. In separating from Sherlock, I needed to be like him. Cold, disentangled from love and emotion, oblivious to the incessant stream of images from our night together.
As the cab pulled away, I heard him call out my name. I did not look back.
Chapter 19
The cab bumped along and my mind sputtered and spun, but as I, too, tended toward the science of deduction, the logical course of things, I summarily dismissed Jonathan as a non-entity. I quickly decided that he did not matter. His sordid night life did not matter. I would at the proper time relate this evening’s revelations to my dear brother who thought of Jonathan as a friend - he needed to know the sort of man he was befriending. But right now, Jonathan’s lifestyle, his existence was insignificant.
In my mind, just as in Sherlock’s, what mattered at this instance was the case. I did not have all the facts and that is what I needed. I knew that Kate had had a loving father but after he died, her life went to hell. I knew that she’d ended up a prostitute to support the child her married lover had fathered. I sensed her affinity to swans and from her comments, I sensed that she detested the fact that she was a woman in a man’s world, that she respected me for having forged my way through the barriers. I knew that she had seen something that resulted in a terrible beating. A warning to keep her silent. If all this was connected to the boy who had disappeared from the Queen’s employ and the rumours about the member of the Privy Council, if it was related to the dead Cecil Gray, I certainly could not prove that yet.
But as we trotted along, as London’s filth spewed around us, as loquacious beggars ran beside the cab and pawnbrokers and dealers hawked their wares, as the rambling residents of London’s underworld and the shrill sounds of her desperate characters propelled like shooting stars through the night, I realized that this was exactly where I needed to be and Sherlock was exactly who I needed to speak to.
To him and to Kate Dew. Wiggins would know exactly where to find her. Rattle had given me the addresses after he followed her and Wiggins knew the area.
I shouted to the cabbie to turn around. He made a turn so sharp that I thought I would cascade from the cab as we headed
