“Better?” I asked.
“Yes, I think so. I… ugh… thank you, Doctor.”
“Think nothing of it. Now, let’s have a look at that hand, eh?”
Four-fifths of which was fine. No problems. No damage. A bit dirty, perhaps, but overall devoid of troubles.
The other fifth was gone. Victor Hatherley’s right thumb had been severed by a single clean blow from a bladed instrument.
“Can you restore it?” he asked.
“No,” I scoffed, because the question was—on the face of it—an utterly stupid one. Yet this man had had his senses badly rattled and was likely in the process of getting a grip on the fact that he was… well… going to have difficulty gripping a lot of other things. “No,” I said, more gently. “I fear there is no way to regrow a severed thumb. All we can do is clean and dress the wound and see that it heals as best as it may, without infection. By Jove… what a terrible accident you must have had.”
“It was no accident, Doctor. I was attacked!”
“Attacked? This is horrible!”
“Ha! I almost had worse! Much worse!”
“Worse than this? Have you told the police?”
“I can’t! Would they even believe me? If it were not for this missing thumb, I would not believe it myself! How would I convince them I’m not mad?” Oh, what a strange expression of confusion and helplessness crossed his face as he said it. God help me, but it thrilled me to my core. Victor Hatherley had fallen victim to that particular brand of infamy Holmes and I had made our special purview.
Of course, I was currently banished from Holmes’s company. As such, I could not even perceive the door of 221B. Only those that needed Holmes could find him. But perhaps Victor Hatherley did. And, if I were the one to bring him to Holmes, might I not as well? Struggling to keep as much hopefulness as I could out of my voice, I said, “It will take me some time to see to your hand, Mr. Hatherley. While I work, why don’t you tell me what happened. What was the first occurrence that seemed strange?”
“Oh, that’s easy! I got a customer.”
“And that is… unusual?” I asked, as I began to clean the wound.
“Sure! You see, I apprenticed for seven years at Venner and Matheson—the famous hydraulic engineering firm. Nobody had more expertise than they, and frankly, none of them had more natural aptitude than I. Over the years, I learned every one of their techniques. So, when my term of apprenticeship was over, I told them, ‘Ha! I got the better part of that deal! Bet it won’t be long until I’ve surpassed you as the city’s finest firm, eh?’ Then I went into business for myself. I put up my shingle in the hallway and struck out on my own!”
“In the hallway?” I asked. Then, remembering his card, added, “The third floor hallway, on Victoria Street? You didn’t put a sign out in front of the building?”
“Oh, I don’t think they’d let me do that,” he scoffed. “It’s a residential building, after all. But lots of people go down that hallway! Why, practically fifty people a day, I bet!”
I choked down the observation that it was likely to be the same fifty every day and swallowed my question about what percentage of London’s populace Mr. Hatherley supposed might find themselves in need of hydraulic engineering help.
“But nobody came!” he complained. (Hardly surprising.) “And my old colleagues were no help at all. I can’t even count the times they called upon the help of their other past apprentices while I was there—or shuffled off smaller jobs they had no appetite for. Yet they never sent me a single one!”
“Peculiar,” I said, smothering a smile. “So, one supposes you failed to supplant them as the city’s finest firm?”
“In nearly two years of business, I’d had only two consultations and one small job. My total takings amounted to twenty-seven pounds, two shillings. I’ve been burning through my inheritance, just to keep myself fed. I’ve considered giving up any number of times. But then, I’d just be sitting at home with nothing to do. And, since I spend all my time sitting at home doing nothing anyway, it doesn’t seem that closing down the business would make a great change.”
“Right. But you had a customer?” I reminded him.
“Yes! Stark! He said his name was Colonel Lysander Stark. Oh, what a strange fellow he was! Thinnest man I’d ever seen. You’d almost doubt he was a man at all. He looked like a skull somebody had stretched cheesecloth over, then painted it to look like skin. You could see all the bones in his wrists and knuckles.”
“Did it seem like he might be sick?” I wondered. “Perhaps he had some form of wasting disease?”
“No, I shouldn’t think so. He was merely underfed. Or… not fed. In the course of our conversation he mentioned that he does not eat at all. He subsists entirely on juice.”
My eyes narrowed. “What kind of juice?”
Hatherley shrugged. “I don’t know. He just kept calling it ‘The Juice’. Mentioned it several times. And when I asked him what he meant by it, he just said, ‘We are what sustains us.’ Every time I said the phrase ‘The Juice’ that’s what he’d say: ‘We are what sustains us.’ Like a little prayer, you know? Like someone saying ‘amen’ when their priest is done speaking.”
“All right,” I said. “Slightly peculiar, but all right. Did he tell you how he’d heard of you?”
“Not really. He just popped in out of the blue yesterday morning and said I’d been recommended to him as an orphan and a bachelor.”
“Er… as a hydraulic engineer, you mean?”
“No. That was the peculiar thing. I mean, he did present himself as someone who wanted to hire me—that’s why I was so glad of his coming—but his first concern seemed
