The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle Read online

  Looming before me was the man undoubtedly their chief, though he resembled them no more than the hawk does the crow. His countenance was pale, with thin bloodless lips beneath a hussar’s moustache. His grey hair was cropped close under a bowler hat. His eyes were a calm grey sea beneath the welkin of heavy brows. He was carapaced like a turtle in a caped astrakhan greatcoat with blinding brass buttons. He paced back and forth in front of me, a malacca laid casually across his shoulder. He was watching me, waiting for me to come to my senses. Then he began:

  “Attention, please!” he rasped, in a thick German accent. “I have a message for your master.”

  Sherlock Holmes or Henry Higgins could have placed the accent within any of a score of petty principalities, and perhaps to the very village and street he had been born in. But they had not the disadvantage of six inches of cold Sheffield steel at their throats to distract them.

  “I have no master but the king of England, sir. Please remove your hands from my person.” I meant to show defiance, but my voice quavered like a dove’s.

  Quick as thought, the malacca whipped around and cracked against my temple. Fireworks exploded before my eyes. Were it not for the Freddies holding my wrists, I would have dropped to the pavement in a dead faint. “Attention, please! I speak of your employer, the Italian Morello, who attempts to seduce the fraulein Eliza Doolittle.”

  “My employer is not seducing any fraulein.” I was dazed, but I was certain of that much.

  “I have studied the courtship rituals of the English. I have seen him with the fraulein. They take the walks together, the afternoon rides in the park. They share the tender looks.”

  The idea of Holmes in a romantic engagement with any young lady was risible. In less dire circumstances I would have laughed. “You have confused him with the young gentleman. Mr. Eynsford-Hill.”

  “You think I do not know Herr Freddy?” He said something in Italian to his four accomplices. They all laughed. “They speak no English,” he said as an aside. “The young gentleman Herr Freddy is inept and entirely unworthy, but he is a gentleman. I have challenged him to a duel.”

  “Freddie? In a duel?”

  “Ach. I know, the outcome is inevitable. But we must observe the proprieties.” He said it as calmly as if he were a broker touting shares. The man was stark raving mad.

  “Who are you?” I asked, incredulous.

  I swear he winked at me. “I am the great detective Sherlock Holmes.”

  “You are not!” I cried shrilly. The sheer inanity of his answer infuriated me.

  But he meant to torment me. “Ach. Of this you are certain? You have met Herr Holmes? You are intimate friends?”

  “Sherlock Holmes is English!”

  “A common mistake. Because I speak English like the native.”

  “And who are these ruffians then? Baker Street Irregulars?”

  “Alas, no. I make do. These young men are in fact partisans of Don Salvatore Maranzano. Perhaps you have never heard of this man, but your employer knows and fears him. They are sworn to Signor Morello’s death. And now you have murdered their brother, Piero. Unfortunate.”

  “He shot at us!”

  The German shrugged. “In his eagerness, he exceeded his orders, ja. These Italians are more accustomed to the knife than the gun. His brothers have forgiven his sin, but they cry out for the blood of his killers.”

  “Then kill me,” I said, but it was a feeble retort.

  “Ach, nein. If I kill you, I should have no one to deliver my message. These partisans still obey me. But their instincts are for anarchy. That is the nature of their race. I cannot restrain them much further. But murder is undiplomatic. It draws too much official attention. I prefer that your Mr. Morello should live. Tell him therefore he must flee for his life. Time is of the essence. You can remember that, ja? You will tell him? Now: do you know the German word which translates as pig-dog’?”

  I was utterly mystified, but I nodded.

  “These men also know that word. It is the entirety of their German vocabulary. It is not my wish to turn you over to them, but they are expecting it. Your one hope of survival is to call me ‘pig-dog’ as loud as you might.”

  “Pig-dog?” I repeated in disbelief.

  “In German. Now, if—you—please!”

  “Schweinhund!” I cried.

  The effect was immediate. The malacca whistled round again. But it was not my face it struck. The stick cracked against the knife-man’s hand. He shrieked and dropped the blade. In their momentary shock, the other two Freddies lost their grip on my wrists. I flung myself to the ground. They went for me, but I went for the knife and came up first, slicing at the air. They fell back and I ran. The lookout tried to stop me, but I barreled past him. I believe I may have left the knife in his shoulder.

  I lurched down the street with two of them at my heels. My head felt light, but my legs were like lead. I heard footsteps drumming behind me, but could not turn to look. At some point I came up against a shop window and stopped, beating on the transom in a frenzy. I remember the shopman’s frozen face, then—wonder of wonders!—Pickering and Eliza staring out at me in blank disbelief. There were hands laid upon me and I felt myself drowning. From somewhere came a high piercing whistle, and shouting. A flash of lightning forked across my sight, and then I knew no more.

  Chapter Eighteen

  There were voices rolling about in my head, clacking together like a monk’s beads. My head throbbed in time with them. The first voice, a tenor tripping across the staff, that was Pickering, then the other, a soubrette, light and airy—and yet a third voice intruding, and from its gravelly steadiness, I marked it as a police constable’s—the second voice returning, lips and then eyes full of tender concern, and that was Eliza.

  I was in the bookshop, dusty yellow shelves suspended above me. There was a bandage wrapped round my forehead, threatening to slip down over my eye. Pickering leaned over me from one side, Eliza from the other, till their heads almost touched. Between them stood a police constable sawing at his notebook with a pencil. The bookseller hovered at his table off in the distance, shuffling papers like Jove’s thunderbolts.

  “Here he is come round, constable. I told you he was a tough old bird,” said Pickering.

  “Sir, can you hear me?” asked the constable, waving a hand in front of my eyes like a flock of pigeons.

  I was sunk deep in a horsehide armchair whose springs had long ago collapsed. I tried to rouse up. The pain hit me like a shot.

  “Do you know who it was attacked you, sir?”

  Who had he been? Not one of those comic-opera courtiers wearing monocles, with scarlet sashes across their fronts, or generals with gold braids and barrel-organ chests that I had imagined when Pickering first mentioned foreign spies. No one had posed the possibility of a quietly efficient killer in an astrakhan and bowler hat.

  “German.” The single word exhausted me.

  “Yes, sir. Couple of your foreign cutpurses, then?” The constable sounded bored.

  “They were dressed as gentleman, I thought,” said Eliza. I nodded vigorously, working my lips.

  “Calm down, old thing,” said Pickering. “You’ll have a stroke.”

  My mind was a chaos. How could I say anything in front of Miss Doolittle that would not expose our entire enterprise to her? I couldn’t even give the constable my proper name.

  Pickering must have fathomed my predicament. He beckoned to the constable and led him outside to talk. The bookseller followed, full of imagined importance.

  Eliza put her hand in mine, soft and warm. In that moment I realized that whatever the threat she faced, she would have my absolute protection, whether she proved a duchess or a bawd.

  “Poor Mr. Barton. How do you feel?”

  I smiled feebly. I may have spoken, but my words were less than a whisper. I touched my cheek where the wound still stung.

  “You’ll have some bruises. Mr. Barton, I don’t know how you ever got tangled up with th
at Mr. Morello. You’re like Colonel Pickering. Innocent of the world.”

  Innocent, thought I! I could tell her stories of London’s criminal underworld that would curdle her blood. And any man who has been with the army in India and Afghanistan has seen enough mayhem to last a lifetime.

  I found my voice at last. “I know what danger is, Miss.”

  “I don’t question your courage. But you walk down every street as if it were your own garden walk, and you greet every stranger as if he were your neighbor. You have to be a woman alone in the streets to know what a devil a man may be.”

  “You’ve nothing to fear from a gentleman.”

  “Few gentlemen are gentle.”

  “There are brutes in the world, I know.” Indeed I had seen them, countless numbers of them, wives and sweethearts in the wards of the Women’s Hospital of a Saturday night, bruised and bleeding from the loving ministrations of their helpmates. I thought of Eliza and her trysts with Hyde. “But some women let themselves be brutalized. Even invite it.”

  Eliza colored. “The brute fears every shadow in the dark, every whisper in the night, like a wild thing that scents the hunter. It’s the fear in their eyes that draws us to them.”

  “You have protectors now, Miss.”

  She looked at me searchingly. “Perhaps I do.” She withdrew her hand from mine and straightened up. I felt faint again and shut my eyes.

  “Tell the colonel I had a little errand to run,” I heard her say.

  “Wobbs?”

  I opened my eyes. Eliza had vanished. Pickering stood in her place. I saw the misgiving in his face. “I fear I may have put you and your friend in a bad spot.”

  The German’s threats flooded back upon me. “I’ve got to get back. Warn Holmes.” I struggled to my feet, but the world still heeled and yawed away from me.

  “Here, take my arm, there’s a good fellow. Where’s Eliza?”

  It was but a short distance to Wimpole Street, but in light of my weakness, Pickering elected to hire a cab. He had purchased several books, and he held them on his lap, stroking their spines fondly.

  “Look what I found at Trelawny’s. A monograph here written by your friend cataloguing two hundred and forty-three different types of tobacco ash. Can’t wait to dive into that one.”

  When we arrived at Wimpole Street, Mrs. Pearce took one look at me before she hustled me into the kitchen for repeated applications of vinegar and brown paper to my bruises. The cool efficiency of her ministrations drew the pain from me. She seemed an indispensable sort of woman, a ministering angel.

  Higgins caught Pickering in the hall. “Where’s Eliza?” we heard him snarl.

  “Running errands. Shopping. Swimming the Channel. What do you need Eliza for?” he asked cheerfully.

  “I do not need Eliza. I don’t need anyone. I am entirely self-sufficient. But after last night, I’m beginning to think Eliza needs looking after. What if that second-story man is lurking about, ready to knock her down in the street and snatch her jewels?”

  Holmes’s voice joined in: “I never seen that girl wearing jewels.”

  “Mr. Morello, get back in the laboratory and resume the exercise!”

  His anxiety soon reached a fever pitch. He called Robert and the housemaids on the carpet. They bore his abuse in silence. He came barging into the kitchen to berate Mrs. Pearce over the matter. What he made of my head wrapped up in brown paper like Ramses’s mummy I have no idea. Mrs. Pearce was having none of it, and scolded him like a schoolboy. He held his tongue under her instruction, but his face turned purple with indignation.

  Then Miss Doolittle walked into the kitchen, unpinning her hat. “Are you better, Mr. Barton?” she asked pleasantly. Her face was red and her hat askew. The hem of her dress was heavy with dust.

  “Where have you been?” thundered Higgins.

  “Don’t bully me!” she cried, and ran from the room. We heard her on the stair, her door slamming, then silence. The air seemed to have been sucked out of the room. Pickering and Holmes stuck their heads in the door. Higgins looked about him at the crowd he had gathered.

  “Did she seem upset?” he asked innocently.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We did not see Eliza again until dinnertime. She entered quietly, greeting us with a nod and a murmur, and took her place. Her face was pale, her eyes dull, but she seemed to be trying to put a brave face on whatever was troubling her. She thanked the servants when they brought her anything, and answered any questions that were set to her. But her answers were short and spiritless, discouraging any conversation. When left to herself, she lapsed into silence.

  For his part, Higgins went to work trying to trip up Holmes. He had played this game before, mentioning different obscure parts of London, or restaurants or shops, and asking Mr. Morello’s opinion of them. Holmes was voluble on the subjects of Buckingham Palace and Big Ben, but shrugged mulishly whenever Higgins mentioned any but the most famous landmarks of the city. Then he bragged about the wonders of Brooklyn, New York, waxing poetic on the Soldier’s Arch and the Brooklyn Firehouse.

  After Mrs. Pearce had mended my hurts, which Pickering put about were the result of a run-in with a foreign strong-arm, she had ordered me up to my room for bedrest and complete isolation. Holmes had been able to sneak in for only the briefest exchange before the upstairs maid ran him off. It was not until after dinner that I could fill him in on the details. He listened intently to the story of my attack.

  “Watson, you’re dealing with a muddleheaded fool!”

  “He seemed exceptionally clearheaded to me,” I answered drily.

  “Oh, not our friend the German, but this old fool of a detective. I misjudged the swiftness of his retaliation. It nearly led to your death, and that is my fault entirely.”

  I shrugged off that aspect of the matter. Courage grows as peril recedes. There was something else that bothered me.

  “He accused you of—he said that you and Miss Doolittle had been . . . well, he said you had been wooing her.”

  “Of course I have.”

  His answer took me aback. “Well . . . do you think it seemly?”

  “My dear Watson, there are only two women in this house who can tell me anything at all about Miss Doolittle’s past, real or imagined— Mrs. Pearce and Miss Doolittle herself. Miss Doolittle likes older men and is especially attracted to the criminal type, perhaps as a result of her upbringing. She admires brutality. She believes I am ‘on the lam,’ as they say in American gangster parlance, a notion which she finds particularly romantic. Mrs. Pearce, on the other hand, is convinced I mean to murder the household in their beds. I have been hoping you might throw your lackadaisical courtship of the woman into high gear. We must acquire data by any means possible.”

  I erupted in anger. “One does not bandy with a lady’s affections!”

  “Watson! How many housemaids and governesses and widows have I courted over the years, even betrothed myself to, merely to place myself in the confidences of these women, to learn the secrets which could aid me in my work? And all of them eager to give themselves up to Holmes the constable, or Holmes the navvy, Holmes the sailor or candlestick maker for the mere hope of attention from a man who exists almost entirely in their imaginations? Show me a woman with both feet on the ground, with heart and mind devoted to hearth and home, never listening for the knock at the door that presages her abduction by a gypsy prince or a shepherd out of Arcady! And you wonder at my contempt for the fair sex.”

  “Then tell me what you’ve learned by wooing Eliza Doolittle?”

  “That she is not a lady! She may be a princess, for princesses do not abide by the suffocating rules of middle-class ladies. She may be a Covent Garden flower girl or an actress, or a scarlet woman, but she is no lady. Ladies do not flirt and they do not take carriage rides with Americans of doubtful reputation. Ladies do not do anything but simper or bleat like sheep. And because Eliza is not a lady and therefore is unafraid to speak her mind and exert her will, we
have hope of learning what she is.”

  I retreated into a stubborn silence. I did not want to believe that Holmes was doing wrong. But I did believe it. Had I indeed entertained the idea of courting Mrs. Pearce? It was ludicrous. Two people in the twilight of life, disporting themselves like fond youngsters. And yet, looking back, I confess to the impulse, though I had buried it before it even became a full-fledged notion. But Holmes’s blistering diatribe was beyond the pale.

  “Forgive me, Watson. I know you for a man of tender feeling, who has always been careful where he disposes his affections. But I have seen women in the madhouse with all the manner of a bishop’s wife or a princess of the blood, who would cut your throat with a paring knife if once you turned your back on them. Indeed, I—”

  But here he fell silent, no doubt realizing that further argument could only harm his case with me. He let it stew for a bit. “Did you learn anything else from the German?” he asked at last.

  I shook my head sulkily, reluctant to revisit the memory. Then it came to me, sharp and piercing. “He’s challenged Freddy to a duel.”

  “Freddy?” Holmes looked at me, incredulous.

  “Yes. The fellow is intent on murdering any man Eliza might look favorably upon. Freddy gets a duel because he is a gentleman. You get a dagger between the shoulder blades because you’re a schweinhund of an American.”

  Holmes cackled. “But this is excellent news!”

  “Are you mad? This is one of those German paukanten who revel in blood. How will Freddy being murdered help solve our case?”

  “Of course, one hopes that nothing will happen to young Freddy. But a gentleman doesn’t issue a challenge to a duel under an assumed name. Freddy will be able to tell us the German’s true identity.”

  Miss Doolittle did not appear at breakfast the next day, nor lunch, nor tea. Higgins swore at the servants. He swore at the glazier, who had come to repair the window. He swore at the tea, and spilled it in his lap. When she didn’t come down for tea, he threatened to break her door down, or even worse, send for Dr. Guest. Pickering steered him away from these thoughts calmly and assiduously. He asked Mrs. Pearce—Mrs. Pearce herself, not any of the maids—to take a tray up to Eliza. Eliza thanked her through the door, but did not let her in. Mrs. Pearce left the tray outside.