The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle Read online

  “But you saw the doctor again?”

  She perked up again. “He took a real shine to me, right from the start. Said I had a quality. Gimme money of my own. Not sixpence, but pound notes.”

  “Did he . . . bring you into his home?”

  “Not he. Set me up in my own digs, proper as a queen. A bit lonely that, but ever so genteel. Course, he drew the line at gentleman callers. Then when he saw how fearsome lonely I got whenever he was away, he got me the crib at the Gaiety.”

  “Did Edward Hyde never visit you?”

  “Oh, you know Neddie? That was different. He was Dr. Henry’s man, or his pal, I was never sure. Thick as thieves. He used to bring me medicines from the doctor. Not that he didn’t take no liberties on occasion. What’s a girl to do?”

  “What sort of medicines?”

  “Pick-me-ups. Mother’s milk they were, better than gin. Lit you up inside and out. Wish I had one now,” she concluded morosely.

  “Did Dr. Henry light out on you, too?”

  “Dropped me for the landlady’s daughter. Conniving little tart!”

  Holmes looked deep into her eyes. “Why did you kill Jaggers and Shaw, Nancy?”

  Her eyes went opaque, and her mouth set in a rictus. It was as if her spirit had fled, leaving only a wax shell.

  “Nancy?” He touched the palm of her hand, where a white welt stood up.

  “That wasn’t me, copper. That was somebody else.” She said it mechanically.

  Holmes went on, inexorable. “You were found all three sitting at the kitchen table. The men had each been stabbed five or six times.”

  “It wasn’t me. It was some bad girl.” Her whole body shook. “Not me.”

  “The bloody knife was in your hands.”

  “Not me. Not me! Not me!” She was shrieking it now. She leapt to her feet, grappling with Holmes, clawing at his face. “Not me!”

  The door banged open and the wardress strode in. She caught hold of Nancy’s wrists and forced her back on her bed with far more strength than I’d credited her. After a bit of struggle, Nancy gave up and went limp, her eyes rolling back in her head. The wardress laid her across the bed.

  “I’d ask you gentlemen to go now. Her nerves are overtaxed, I’m afraid.” Her voice was matter-of-fact. Perhaps this was how all interviews with Miss Kelly ended.

  Holmes and I put on our hats and went to the door. Then Holmes turned back. “Nancy. What was Dr. Henry’s last name?”

  Nancy made no response, if indeed she heard him at all. The wardress gave him a pointed look. We tilted our hats to her.

  “Jekyll.”

  It was the wardress who had spoken. She looked as if the name had just come to her. “She talks about him all the time. Dr. Henry Jekyll. But he doesn’t visit. No one does.”

  “Henry Jekyll! Alive, Holmes!” Our footsteps drummed down the long corridor as another wardress led us out. “Should we alert Scotland Yard? Get hold of Inspector Newcomen?”

  “Not yet, Watson. Not yet, I think.” He seemed preoccupied with some private thought.

  “An odious woman!” muttered Holmes, once the wardress had seen us off at the gate.

  “Nancy Kelly? You thought so?”

  “You found her sympathetic?”

  “Far from it. But the woman is mad. She should be in a lunatic asylum, not a prison.”

  “Half the women in asylums would be better off to put their heads in a hangman’s knot and cease upon the midnight with no pain.”

  “Holmes! Can you really be so unfeeling?” We could still hear a few women singing in the courtyard. High and thin and lonely it sounded now.

  “Believe me, Watson, if you could delve the hearts of those women, many of them would welcome death with open arms.”

  “Have you been spending your retirement years visiting lunatics, then?” I sneered.

  “My God, man, why do you think I retired?” he exploded.

  His vehemence shook me. I had somehow touched a nerve on a man who was celebrated for having none. We stood staring at each other.

  “I asked,” I said quietly. “You know I asked over and over, begged you to tell me, and I was always met with the silence of the Sphinx.”

  He nodded. “It was wrong of me.” The dam had broken. “Come, let us walk,” he said. We pushed through the fog as though we charged the Valley of Death, my companion holding his fire until he had gathered his thoughts. When he was ready, he began:

  “You recall the case of Amelia Ascher?”

  I cast my memory back. “The Saffron Hill baby farmer.”

  “So-called. It was never conclusively proven that she was in possession of her faculties when she committed those crimes. The older woman, Barnett, exercised undue influence upon her judgment.”

  “She was found guilty but insane.” I did not add that she was found so mostly on the evidence provided by one Sherlock Holmes. “That was in 1902, I think.”

  “She was committed to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. Where, I may add, she was considered a model patient.”

  “You . . . followed her progress?”

  “Oh, no. I consigned her to the files and gave her no more thought. Until the fire.”

  The image rose to mind. The Colney Hatch fire was notorious in the annals of official disgrace. In 1903, early on a February morning, a fire broke out in the women’s annex, a “temporary” shelter built of timber. Fed by gale force winds, the fire swept through the building, taking the lives of over fifty women. Six hundred lunatics escaped and had to be rounded up by the constabulary.

  “Was Miss Ascher one of the victims?” I asked.

  “The prison authorities were unable to answer that question with any confidence. Many of the bodies were burned beyond hope of recognition. Some few of the escapees were never found. Ascher may have been among those. Certainly she would not have been caught up in the panic in the first few minutes of the blaze.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  “Because she set the fire herself. That was the one fact I was able to establish beyond the shadow of a doubt. No one else among the patients had access to the tallow.”

  “Holmes, surely you don’t hold yourself responsible for this woman’s actions.”

  He halted, holding up a hand. The worst was to come. “Wait. Please. I have spoken to you of my mother, have I not?”

  “You’ve told me what you remembered. She died when you were very young, I think.”

  “I remember her voice. She used to sing about the house.”

  I nodded, affecting sympathy. I could not fathom this sudden shift to personal reminiscences.

  “Mycroft claimed not to remember her voice. Mycroft remembered less than I did, somehow, though he was seven years my elder. My father never spoke of her at all.”

  “Yes, but what has this got to do with—?”

  “There was a list. Of course. A list of the patients who were missing. The list shrunk day by day as the runaways were collected, until it stood at fifty-two. Fifty-two helpless madwomen who had burned to death like moths in a candle flame.”

  He seemed to lose heart. He gestured helplessly, like a mute. There was something he wanted me to understand, but he could not say it. He wanted me to divine it from the tenor of his silence. The air was full of ghosts. The waiting was unbearable.

  “One name on the list was that of a woman named Louise Vernet.”

  “Vernet?” Tread lightly, John Watson. “Don’t you have relations by that name?”

  “Louise Vernet was my mother’s maiden name. My mother, I had been told, died in 1857. The same year this woman was admitted to the asylum.”

  It all rushed in upon me. “Oh, but Holmes, you must be mistaken! It’s some devilish coincidence!”

  He shook his head. “Mycroft admitted it to me when confronted. Without reserve. Indeed, without sentiment. My father had my mother committed to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in the year 1857, after she made an attack upon Mycroft with an oyster knife. She believed
he was trying to strangle me in my crib, she said. She continued in that place for forty-six years until Amelia Ascher set fire to a barrel of tallow in the annex pantry. Forgive me, Watson, but I do feel the weight of responsibility belongs upon my shoulders.”

  “You could not have known—”

  “I knew she was alive! I knew it and never let my knowledge come to the surface. Mycroft said he was surprised I hadn’t divined it years earlier.”

  I tried to find the words, words of comfort, words to dispel the horror, words to carry us backward from that awful moment in time. But there were no words adequate to the moment. It was vain to argue that Amelia Ascher and Louise Vernet no more represented their sex than James Moriarty or Tiger Moran represented ours. The point was trivial. Sherlock Holmes had cornered his villain, judged him, and passed sentence.

  The moment passed. Though it lasted an eternity, the moment passed. We plodded on through the fog.

  The break we had been waiting for came on the fourth night ofEliza’s illness. The weather broke, at least, as a cold rain beat down steadily upon the roof and filled the gutters. Freddy had been taken inside by Mrs. Pearce to dry himself by the kitchen fire. Dinner was a mirthless exercise. We could hear Eliza prowling about her room, muttering to herself in low tones that sounded almost like growling. The sound was so pitiful that I prepared a toddy to soothe her throat and brought it to her door of mine own accord. Alas, when I knocked, she growled at me to let her be.

  Eventually sleep must have taken her, or exhaustion. No more noise came from her room. Soon enough weariness and heartache took all the rest of us to our beds. Even Freddy snored in a chair in the entrance hall, his head propped upon a cushion.

  It was on toward three in the morning when I woke to a tap on the shoulder and the whisper of my name in my ear. Holmes was crouching by my bedside with a lit taper, a finger to his lips. He was fully dressed; perhaps he had never been to bed. I rose swiftly, threw on my own clothes, and retrieved my revolver from my bag. Robert slept on, untroubled. I followed Holmes down to the next floor, where his room stood next to Eliza’s. Pressing my ear to the door, I could clearly make out two voices, speaking in furious whispers. I recognized Eliza’s voice, though it was hoarsened by illness, but there was also a man’s voice, a voice that might have been the bark of a mastiff or the howl of an ape.

  Holmes raised his hand to signal action, but as he did so, there came a storm of footsteps on the landing, and Freddy’s voice crying, “Liza! Liza! Liza!” Freddy steamed past us full tilt, nearly cracking his skull as he tried to run through a locked door. There was a roar from within and a scream, then the thump of a body hitting the floor. Holmes and I charged the door in unison. It shuddered once, twice, and then the lock gave way. We rushed into the room and saw first the window standing open, the curtains dancing with the night wind, and next the figure of Eliza Doolittle huddled on the floor, dead or unconscious. I knelt at her side and took her wrist to determine which. Freddy entered, fluttering spastically, and joined Holmes, who was gazing out the window.

  “It’s him, Mr. Holmes,” Freddy cried, pointing to the street. “Look! It’s Ned!” He would have climbed out the window after the intruder, but Holmes held him back. For my part, I had ascertained that Eliza still lived, though she was unconscious and her breathing was shallow. I caught her up and laid her on the bed. She moaned. Her flesh was grey and a scent rose off her like mildew.

  Freddy broke free of Holmes’s grasp and threw himself out the hall door, determined to swoop down upon his hated rival.

  “Don’t go alone, Freddy!” Holmes cried, but his warning fell on deaf ears. Freddy was already thundering down the stairs. Holmes turned up the gaslight by the bed. His eyes swept the room. He stooped to pick something up from the floor.

  “How is the girl, Watson?”

  “She’ll live.”

  “Then come.”

  At this point the room began to fill up with housemaids, all wakened by the noise, with Higgins and Pickering and policemen and any neighbor who lived within five streets, so far as I could tell. Mrs. Pearce was among them, shouting orders and chivvying them about. Holmes and I plowed our way through the crowd in the hall and on the stairs and got free of the house. The rain had ended, but the air was wet and chill, and the fog hung about our shoulders. Freddy had disappeared down the street, but we could still hear him yelling like a madman, splashing through the gutters.

  “He’ll catch him!” I said.

  “Pray God he does not!” Holmes rejoined.

  We ran toward the sound of Freddy’s voice. Up Wimpole, across Queen Anne into Wellbeck, doubling back through a mews, across a courtyard, and out onto Henrietta Street and Cavendish Square, and still we had not caught up with them; indeed, we were losing ground. This was where age caught up with us. We were hardly decrepit old men, but we could not match the pace of Freddy or his indefatigable quarry. Their trail was easy enough to follow, however, even had I not had the world’s greatest detective by my side. There were broken hedges and overturned dustbins and yowling cats, aggrieved by the passage of men through their nocturnal haunts. But we could no longer hear any footfalls but our own. We stopped to catch our breath. The air was leaden and silent, foreboding. Then we heard the sound of a police whistle, sharp and piercing, just down the street. We ran toward it.

  We debouched into Regent Circus. The first thing we saw was a police constable, doubled over, vomiting in the street. Then we saw the body.

  We crouched over it. There was no question that life had quit this ruin. It was as if it had been run over by an omnibus. Every major bone in the body was broken. The skull was shattered like a china teacup. There was the shank of a hazelwood walking stick, snapped off near the top, lying nearby. I picked it up and handed it to Holmes. He examined it closely, and passed it to the constable, who had recovered himself.

  “You know this poor wight, sir?” the constable asked Holmes.

  How many corpses had Sherlock Holmes and I examined together over the years? I had learned long ago to look upon them as a set of facts, an evidentiary exhibit, rather than the shell from which a living soul had fled. But the sight of this poor foolish child, whose heart had beat for nothing more than love, made my eyes sting.

  Holmes stood up, grim-faced. “Send someone to 27A Wimpole Street. Inform the household that Mr. Eynsford-Hill is dead,” he told the constable. He looked to me then, pointing to a set of bloody footprints that tracked down the street. “We’ll need Toby.”

  The game was afoot.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Toby, of course, had long since joined his lop-eared dewlapped ancestors in the next life. Rather amazingly, Mr. Sherman, ‘s owner, was still rattling along this mortal coil, still stuffing animals, still manning the shop in Pinchin Lane. We hung on his bell till we heard the window on the second floor being wrenched open above us.

  “Stand back, Watson,” said Holmes, pulling me aside. Glad I was that he did so; the first thing that came out of the window was a bucket of dirty water, which splashed to the pavement at our feet. The second thing was Sherman’s head in a nightcap. “Go away!” he yelled. “I’ll have the law on you!”

  Holmes stepped forward into the light. “Mr. Sherman! We have need of your aid!”

  “What? By heaven, is that Mr. Sherlock Holmes? And Dr. Watson with him, or I’m a beggar!” The window banged shut, and in a very few minutes, the door was opened to us. In the light of a spitting taper there was little visible but a host of eyes—the glass eyes of the birds and beasts Mr. Sherman made his living stuffing, and the glimmering eyes of the menagerie he shared his shop with, dogs and cats and birds and beasts, a molting parrot and a one-eyed badger and a mother weasel with her litter of newborns.

  Sherman was delighted to see his old friend Holmes, but he seemed even happier to see me. He pumped my hand till I thought he’d dislocate my shoulder. “Oh, yes, yes, Doctor, I owe it all to you! After you wrote that glowing recommendation of Toby in The S
trand, my business was made! Everyone wanted to hire out the old fellow, to find everything from lost earrings to lost husbands.”

  Toby’s talents had been featured in my account of the Sholto family and the rajah’s treasure. It was the case that had brought me together with my dear Mary. This was what Sherman meant by my “recommendation.”

  “You’ll be wanting Bert, then? Toby went to his reward ten years ago. There was a notice in the Times.” Toby had been a tracker nonpareil, but Sherman swore that Toby’s grandson, a young hound named Prince Albert, “Bert to his friends,” was nearly his match. We were introduced to Bert. Toby had been an ugly mix of spaniel and lurcher. Bert had inherited the ugly, along with his grandsire’s friendly disposition and, we hoped, his nose. We returned to the scene of the murder with the dog on a lead, urging the hansom driver to put on his best speed.

  When we returned, the police had removed the body, but there was still blood in the street and a crowd of gawkers. A callow young detective-inspector was in charge of the scene, a little, sharp, dark, ferret-faced man. He seemed eager to detain us both for questioning, till he was made to understand that the elderly fellow with the mournful-looking mongrel on his leash was the legendary Sherlock Holmes, working under cover. Once Holmes had explained the presence of Bert, whining on the lead, he was an eager enlistee.

  “I’ll keep your secret, Mr. Holmes,” said the inspector, “as long as it doesn’t impede my investigation. But who is this fellow anyway?”

  “His name, I believe, is Edward Hyde.”

  The name meant nothing to the young man. “And what was his beef against this Mr. Eynsford-Hill?”

  “He was in Hyde’s way.”

  “That’s a pretty picture you paint of the man, Mr. Holmes.”

  A figure swallowed up in an astrakhan coat stepped out of the crowd. “May I join you, Herr Holmes?”