The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle Read online

  After dinner, with Higgins still stewing and Pickering still clucking, Holmes tapped me on the shoulder, pointing toward the door. We threw on our coats and hats and sought the tonic of the night air.

  “Are we stretching our legs again?” I asked.

  “Not this time, Watson. We don’t want to be late for our appointment with Wiggins.” He showed me a note that had been delivered by hand that afternoon. “Snaps ready—W.” The address mentioned was a place called Castor’s, a pub in Berwick Street. We flagged down a cab as soon as we could, and proceeded toward that address.

  When we arrived, however, we were immediately faced with a conundrum. Castor’s was not one pub but two, side by side; two of the same name, sharing the same building.

  “Wiggins might have mentioned this,” I said. “Shall we each try one door?”

  “That won’t be necessary, Watson. Wiggins will of course be waiting in the establishment on the right.”

  “How can you be certain?”

  “The Castor on the left has only two windows. The Castor on the right has three. Given a choice, a detective will always choose more windows.”

  Sherlock Holmes’s logic was unassailable. I followed him into the right Castor. It was a long narrow room with a long narrow bar, and casks of beer and porter and sherry piled against the opposite wall. The space between was so narrow, and so crowded, that we almost had to walk upon the casks. A slim figure detached itself from the shadows by the door and interposed itself between us.

  “Good evening, Mr. Wiggins. I pray we have not made you wait.”

  Wiggins screwed his eyes up at Sherlock Holmes in mild astonishment. “You came as yourself!”

  “Who else should I come as?”

  “I thought you’d be a one-eyed lascar, or a preacher with a limp, or an Irish infantry sergeant. You was always in disguise in the old days.”

  “I no longer have need of disguises. No one remembers me.”

  “Bollocks they don’t,” said Wiggins under his breath.

  “What did you think I’d come as?” I asked.

  “Never thought you’d come at all, Doctor. Come, there’s more room in the snuggery.”

  He led us back through the room, dodging table-corners and chair-legs as they attempted to snatch at us. The snuggery was no roomier than the front room, but it was less crowded, possibly due to the half-hearted scrapings of a fiddler in the corner of the room. We took a table by the fire. I could not help but stare at the fireplace.

  At once there was a presence leaning over me, hot upon my neck like dragon’s breath, and soft against my shoulder in a way that was most embarrassing. It was the waitress of the Castor Pub, and she was neither long nor narrow, leaning over the table with her bosom lodged upon my shoulder like a bindle.

  “What’s it to be, gents? We’ve a nice kind of a peppery stew with potatoes and mutton tonight.” Then she spied Wiggins. “Tommy Wiggins! Looks like you’re comin’ up in the world, old son.”

  “Cheers, Maud. A pint of your best bitter all round.”

  “Right you are. Put your troubles in old Tommy’s hands, have you gents? You couldn’t do better if you had the flying squad at your elbow.” Her bosom swished away and the side of my neck went quite cool as she turned to go. But by now my curiosity had got the better of me.

  “Maud?”

  “Yes, dearie, something else?”

  “The fireplace.” It was not a proper fireplace at all, unless fireplaces came in halves, like pints of beer. There was a perfectly good half a fireplace, with half a mantel, half a grate, half a screen, and half a fire. Only the poker and the firedogs were whole.

  “First time here, eh?” The bosom lodged itself once more upon my clavicle. “The Castorini brothers. Fought over a girl. Came to blows, they did. Nearly came to knives. So they went their separate ways instead of murderin’ each other. ‘Cept they both owned the pub, and neither one didn’t want to give it up. So they built a wall right down the middle of the place, right up to the hearthstone. They agreed to share the fireplace and the chimney.”

  Having enlightened her audience, the bosom rocked away again.

  “You have the photos, Wiggins?”

  “Indeed I do, Mr. Holmes, and I must say I think they’re some very fine work, given the adverse lighting conditions.” Wiggins opened his camera case and produced the very fine work, three photographs of Eliza taken through her bedroom window. I cannot vouch for their artistic quality, but they looked enough like Eliza to serve our purpose.

  “I’ll take these round to Covent Garden in the morning. We’ll try Drury Lane, and Lisson Grove, and Tottenham Court, and by Jupiter we’ll find someone who knows the girl as well as Dr. Watson knows you,” Wiggins said.

  “An admirable plan, Wiggins. Deduction is no substitute for legwork. There’s one other place I would wish you to make inquiries. Colney Hatch.”

  Wiggins whistled. “Colney Hatch! You think she’s a nutter?”

  “Her behavior is certainly erratic enough to qualify. I’ve already had her name circulated at all the lunatic asylums, to no avail. But there’s no reason to believe that Eliza Doolittle is her real name, is there?”

  I had to object. “Miss Doolittle may be subject to wide vacillations of mood, but I would hardly call her a candidate for the asylum, Holmes.”

  “I value your medical opinion, Doctor, but you have not the experience with the female lunatic that I have. They are fiercely cunning. Mild as a lamb one moment, poisonous as an adder the next. No mere man is so dangerous.”

  I felt Holmes was overstating his case, but there was no gainsaying him. He continued: “And Doctor, if you will, there’s someone I would like you to show this photograph, as well.”

  I sighed like a truant schoolboy. I had thought myself excused from canvassing the taverns. “Where must I go?” I asked.

  “Edinburgh.”

  “Edinburgh? Scotland?” I was incredulous. “Surely the girl’s never been further north than Golder’s Green.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, Watson, but tomorrow evening at eight o’clock, the Edinburgh Fabian Society will be hosting the celebrated moralist and lecturer Mr. Alfred P. Doolittle. Surely his opinion of those photos will be useful to us.”

  Eliza’s father! I had forgot his existence entirely. The illiterate dustman magically transformed into a man of letters by Higgins’s sorcery. I should have realized Holmes would track him down, whether among the braes and firths, or halfway around the globe.

  “Now then, gents, three pints, sixpence.” Maud slammed our glasses down on the table, somehow without spilling a drop. Holmes and Wiggins both looked at me. I fished a shilling from my pocket. She pinched it from my hand and made it disappear somewhere in the folds of the bosom. “You’re a right sport, you are,” she said, and tousled my hair. I’m afraid I blushed like a schoolboy.

  “Who got the girl at last, Maud?” Holmes asked, grinning.

  “Oh! A green-grocer from Lambeth.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The next morning found me on the platform at King’s Cross before ten, boarding the Flying Scotsman to Edinburgh. In that bright cold morning I could not help but feel like a schoolboy on his first journey to Rugby or Winchester. There is something about a great metropolitan train station that always lifts my spirits beyond themselves and toward the great empyrean. The chuff of the engines rises like a psalm, echo upon echo, to the vault; passengers and porters and well-wishers all moving with a definition of purpose only seen in monks at sacred hours. I am closer to the Creator at King’s Cross or Waterloo than at St. Paul’s or Westminster.

  The Scotsman is one of those rare trains that combine speed and comfort. I settled into my compartment, knowing that we would pull into Waverly in little more than eight hours. Had I been accompanied by Holmes, we would have spent the hours discussing the case, he dispensing just enough clues to leave me entirely befuddled. Any silences would have been the tense lacunae of waiting for more vatic utterance f
rom my friend. On this occasion, I had borrowed a book from Pickering. I was afraid he might offer me something to do with Urdu idioms or Tibetan prayer wheels, but he had surprised me with a new adventure novel, a bit of fluff having to do with a scientific expedition to South America that encounters a mob of prehistoric beasts. First London and then the countryside sped past my window as I delved deep into primeval jungles rife with pterodactyls and iguanodons. I may have nodded for a bit along the way. I woke thinking I should head to the dining car for lunch, but the conductor was already announcing our arrival at Waverly. I gathered up my things and made ready to deboard. I could see Castle Rock swing into view outside my window, with the ancient fortress louring down upon the granite denizens of the city.

  I checked into the station hotel and found a pub nearby that served a passable finnan haddie. The lecture was to take place at the university at eight. It crossed my mind that Mr. Alfred P. Doolittle, dustman turned lecturer, had made a transformation as radical as Eliza’s. Perhaps the diabolical Henry Higgins had done away with father as well as daughter and sent in substitutes for both. The alternative proposition, that anyone could change their God-given rank and station in life by a simple change of manner or wardrobe, was anathema to Sherlock Holmes’s method of order. If souls could change skins with such easy fluidity, then how could one judge a man by his outer habit? The design of society had once seemed unyielding and eternal, but the changes the new century had ushered in had undermined all our expectations. What use was it to recognize the telegrapher’s thumb or the coachman’s wrist in an age of telephones and automobiles?

  Doolittle’s speech was in a lecture hall at the Old College. Some fifty or sixty people were in attendance, mostly men, with a handful of ladies, all presumably dyed-in-the-wool Fabians. Most were dressed with the studied loucheness of the academic socialist. So there was one young woman who caught my eye immediately. She was dressed in peacock blue, with a trio of bedraggled feathers in her hat that might have been snatched right from the peacock’s tail. Her cheeks were rouged and her mouth was a crimson soup bowl. She spoke to no one and seemed to know no one, but sat breathing hard and watching the podium as if it might weigh anchor and slip away.

  A tremulous little fellow with white muttonchops and a tartan shawl took the podium. He cleared his throat portentously several times as the audience found their seats. The speaker he introduced seemed to be a member of every society of honor in Europe and an intimate of every great man of the past century. I began to wonder whether I had found my way to the right venue.

  Then Alfred Doolittle himself appeared. No porridge-eater, he. He was a man of about my age, above the average in height, with broad shoulders and the profile of a freighter hoving to port. His garments seemed meant to restrain rather than fit him, especially his waistcoat, which was of gold brocade with a threatening battery of brass buttons. The buttons were like rivets on an overstoked steam engine, ready to fly at any moment. When he commenced speaking, his voice was sonorous and full, as if his boiler had been stoked just prior to his entrance. When his voice reached its highest volume, the rivets trembled.

  As for the subject he spoke on, I can offer little report. Some socialist folderol about the needs of the undeserving poor, which I would be ashamed to repeat even if I remembered it. What drew my attention instead was the silent rapport between himself and the young woman in the peacock frock. He would often punctuate his speech with a nod, and the nod was to her, and at times a ribald wink accompanied it. Nor were his attentions unreciprocated, for as often as he would nod, she would nod back, and as often as he would wink, she would return the wink.

  Miss Peacock sat unaccompanied in the front row. I had been standing in the back, but I soon moved down to take a seat in the front myself, hoping for a better look at the girl. I stole several glances at her, but each time I chanced a look, she seemed to be stealing a look at me. She was obviously on her guard, which put me on my guard. An idea formed in my mind: a monumental, stupendous idea! Here was Alfred Doolittle, father of Eliza Doolittle, with a young woman in tow, a young woman who admired and respected him. The girl was barely twenty-one, square-shouldered and fleshy with red hands and red face—just as Pickering had once described her. There was no question in my mind that I was sitting three seats down from the real Eliza Doolittle.

  Just as the idea hit me, the girl bolted.

  She didn’t actually run, but she was up and across the room to the door as quickly as propriety would allow. Her hasty exit upset the speaker. For a moment he lost all sense of time or place and merely stared at her dumbfounded. Then she was out the door.

  followed. After all Holmes and I had been through, there was no way I could squander this opportunity and let the girl disappear again. Doolittle once again faltered as I passed by, and there were angry murmurs from the audience. I ignored them and made for the door.

  She was rustling down the hall as I came out. She glanced over her shoulder. Seeing me, she continued down the hall, tripping faster now, the peacock feathers dancing. I followed. She broke into a little trot.

  “Miss Doolittle!” I called.

  She ran. Not like a young lady, but like a scalded cat. I was so taken aback that for a moment I stood as I was, simply watching. Then she turned a corner and disappeared. I hurried after, reluctant somehow to run in the fusty wood-paneled corridors of academe. I turned the corner. She was nowhere in sight. The hall was lined with the doors of lecture rooms on either side, ending in a blank wall with a portrait of John Knox staring down at me censoriously. Eliza Doolittle was concealed behind one of those doors.

  I began trying each door one by one. Empty lecture rooms, deep in shadow. Empty. Empty. Empty. Locked. It could be no accident that there was one locked door. Quod erat demonstrandum.

  I put my shoulder to the door. It was solid oak. I worked the handle back and forth. It would not yield. I knocked on the door. “Miss Doolittle. Please! I need to talk with you! Open the door!” She made no answer. I waited. She would have to come out eventually.

  She did not come out. A janitor came down the hall with a dustbin in his hand. He drew a ring of keys from his pocket and opened the door. He set the dustbin inside and took a broom out. He gave me a sidelong look and continued on down the hall. I had miscalculated.

  But the game was not lost. Where the father was, there the daughter would be, sooner or later. Back to the lecture hall I sped, to face Mr. Doolittle.

  Mercifully, the lecture was ended, and the grim-faced attendees were filing out. Doolittle was sitting in a chair by the podium, counting the evening’s receipts. He was obviously no bookkeeper. The counting was a slow process, which required frequent consultation with a bottle of gin, which peeked out of his coat pocket. His waistcoat was unbuttoned. His fires were banked, his superstructure safe for the nonce.

  “Mr. Alfred P. Doolittle?”

  He barely glanced at me. “If you’re here to discuss the witherin’ away of the state, mate, I’m all fagged out for tonight. Try me another time.”

  “No, sir. My name is John Watson. You may have heard of me. I’m an associate of the renowned detective Sherlock Holmes. I demand to speak to your daughter.”

  The name of Holmes roused him. “Sherlock Holmes? Go on. Sherlock Holmes is dead!”

  “I assure you, he’s quite well. I spoke to him only this morning.”

  “Oh, no, I remember it well. Twenty years ago now it must be. We was all devastated to hear. Fell off a mountain in Switzerland, I think it was.”

  I realized what he was talking about. The Reichenbach Falls. Moriarty. “That was a mistake,” I said.

  “I certainly hope it weren’t done a-purpose.”

  “I mean the reports of his death were mistaken. He survived the all.”

  “Oh. Is that a fact?” he said grudgingly. “Well, I mighta been notified.” He consulted with the gin bottle. “What’s it to me or you if he’s alive or a walkin’ specter, anyway?”

  “Mr. Doolittle,
I demand to see your daughter immediately.”

  “My daughter? What, Eliza? You’re askin’ for a hard one, mate. Last I heard tell, Eliza’s in London still.”

  “I saw her here this very night.”

  “Gorblimey, you’re not serious! Why would Eliza drag herself all the way up to Scotland? She’s never been further north than Golder’s Green. Is she here to put the touch on me? He’s finally got rid of her, has he?”

  “Who’s got rid of her?”

  “Henry Higgins!”

  “What can you tell me of Professor Higgins?”

  “Look, Mr. Whitson, don’t you trust that devil. Look what he done to me. I’m on the run, I am. Every bloke I’ve touched for forty years is tryin’ to put the touch on me now.”

  “Just let me speak to your daughter, and I think we may discover Higgins’s intentions.”

  “I won’t stop you. I’m not one to interfere. You take care of Eliza, and I’ll take care of old Alfie.”

  At that moment, Eliza herself flounced in. Without a glance at me, she threw herself into her father’s lap, wrapped her arms about him, and kissed him hard upon the lips.

  “Oh, Alfie, I’ve had the most dreadful time!” she cried.

  “Don’t fret yourself, my dear.” His hands moved over her body in a most unpaternal way. I had made another error, this time a colossal one. I remembered that Doolittle had married recently. This young lady was not Miss, but Mrs. Doolittle.

  “There was this toff chasin’ me about the halls. He was ever so scarifyin’. I had to hide in the loo.”

  “Smart thinking.”

  She looked at me for the first time. She gave a little shriek. “That’s him, Alfie! That’s the fellow assaulted me.”