The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle Read online

  “So a simple case of addiction is at the source of all our mysteries? It seems an unsatisfying answer somehow.”

  “Because it’s not the answer, Watson. Not the whole answer.”

  “Then what is the answer?”

  “We still have not arrived there. But I am certain the girl was not telling me everything. She was holding back, holding back something terrible. How did she ever fall under the eye of this man?”

  “Didn’t she tell us? She and the Kelly girl were childhood friends.”

  “Nancy Kelly came here from Ireland when she was thirteen.”

  “Have I got it muddled? She must have meant one of the other girls.” I handed Holmes a cup of tea. He gulped the hot stuff down as though his throat were forged of iron.

  “Susan Wallace was raised in Manchester,” he answered. “Chubb is from Surrey, which might as well be the steppes of Russia to Lisson Grove.”

  “Then who grew up with Eliza?”

  Sherlock Holmes did not answer at first. His eyes were opaque, his body still as a statue. Then a shudder went through his whole frame: “My God, Watson, what a fool I’ve been!”

  “Holmes, what is it?” I cried. His face was pale as death, terrible to behold.

  “Doolittle, Watson. We’ve got to get to Alfred Doolittle!” He slammed his teacup down, sloshing Oolong all over the cloth.

  The urgency of his utterance was like a steam hammer. I accepted it without murmur.

  We were throwing on our coats. “He won’t be in Scotland still, I’m sure,” I ventured. “Perhaps he’s returned to London?”

  We pounded down the stairs to the street. “We’ll get a wire to Wiggins. Have him shake the trees in the man’s old haunts,” Holmes said.

  I whistled up a cab. Holmes’s mind was still racing. “He’s a public lecturer. He must have some sort of booking agency.” He put his foot on the floorboard of the cab, wavered for a moment, then shouted “Langham Hotel, driver!” as I scrambled in beside him.

  Holmes had once had connections in the theatre world, but the Langham hardly seemed the place to find a booking agent. Still, when Holmes had his quarry’s scent in his nostrils, it was folly gainsaying him.

  As soon as we arrived at the hotel, Holmes advanced like Hannibal’s legions across the empty lobby. The denizens of the beau monde were not yet abroad. Having gained the ramparts of the reception desk, he waved for a clerk like a conqueror ready to give terms. “Mr. William Gillette, please,” he intoned.

  The clerk pinned him with a supercilious stare that plainly said a guest like Mr. Gillette was not at home to riffraff off the street. But his actual words were more diplomatic. “Who may I say is asking for him?”

  “Sherlock Holmes.”

  The clerk was dubious. Perhaps he was among those who thought Holmes had met his end at the Reichenbach Falls. Perhaps he had never heard of Sherlock Holmes at all; he was young enough. But the frost of Holmes’s gaze chilled him to such a degree that he picked up the house phone and made the connection.

  It was the briefest of conversations. Gillette’s voice carried through the earpiece wonderfully, as though he were hitting the third balcony. He was not gentle with the clerk. What kind of nincompoop would make Mr. Sherlock Holmes wait like a peddler on the stoop? he roared. Scant seconds later we were in the lift, ascending toward Gillette’s floor.

  He must have been asleep when we called; theatre folk do not rise with the chickens. But he was already making his toilet and ordering breakfast for three when we were ushered in to see him. His valet was laying out his clothes. He greeted us as warmly as if we were bosom friends rather than mere acquaintances. In his dressing gown, stripped of the fore-and-aft cap and meerschaum pipe, I decided he did indeed resemble Holmes.

  Holmes laid out the problem quickly. Gillette responded with equal celerity. In moments he was on the line to his own agent in London, who promised to track down Doolittle’s handlers posthaste. He begged the grace of an hour. Reasonable enough—still Sherlock Holmes bridled at the delay, pacing the floor like a lion in his cage. He sent his wire to Wiggins, and ordered up the morning papers. He stood still barely long enough to scan the headlines.

  “There’s been nothing in the papers yet. Pray God we are not too late,” he said, more to himself than us. Of course he had not yet vouchsafed the slightest hint as to why he wanted Doolittle, nor why it was so all-fired urgent. I had not asked, knowing him to be close as an oyster when events were building to a head in one of his cases. Was Doolittle somehow involved in the persecution of his daughter? Were he and Hyde confederates? From my own observations I would have said that few men knew or cared less about Eliza Doolittle than her father. Further, I would have said he was not the kind of man to expend the effort to harm anyone, much less his own daughter. If he were indeed involved in a conspiracy, he was just as likely entirely unaware of the fact.

  I had hoped that Gillette would ask all those questions I was reluctant to broach myself. But the actor seemed perfectly happy to follow Holmes’s instructions without question. The whys and wherefores seemed of complete indifference to him, so long as he could be included in the hunting party. Or worse—and I could not shake the impression—as if he were able to divine all Holmes’s purposes without being told, as if he had cut a backdoor key to the detective’s ratiocination. The idea was infuriating. I did my best to tamp down my jealousy, petty as it was. I cannot claim complete success.

  When breakfast arrived, Gillette served us himself. Holmes of course ate next to nothing. He was deep into his second bowl of shag by that time. Our hour’s wait had stretched to two hours. We were all ready to jump.

  The phone rang. I choked on a kipper. Holmes pounded my back as Gillette strained to hear over the noise. He hung up the receiver just as I recovered myself. We both turned to him, barely daring to breathe.

  “He’s giving a lecture this evening in Birmingham.”

  Holmes knocked the ash from his pipe. “When does the next train leave Euston, Watson?”

  There was a time when I would have been able to answer without hesitation, but now I was tongue-tied. “The concierge can tell us,” said Gillette, coming to my relief. “Just give me a moment to dress.”

  I believe Holmes and I raised eyebrows in unison.

  “Yes indeedy, gentlemen,” said the actor, grinning. “When Sherlock Holmes comes to me with the game afoot, you think I’m not going to join in the chase? You said you were in my debt, Mr. Holmes. Well, I’m calling in that debt.”

  “What about your performance tonight?” I asked.

  “My understudy has dreamed of this day.”

  Thus I found myself on the Birmingham train, sitting across from not one but two Sherlock Holmeses, both sporting a restless, distracted gleam in their eyes, both keyed to the highest note. The very sight of them like that unnerved me. I spent the bulk of the journey trying to read my novel, which had serendipitously been waiting in my coat pocket since my Scottish odyssey.

  We were delayed at Oxford for what seemed an eternity. An RFC aeroplane had crashed near Wolvercote that morning, killing both airmen, we were told, and the whole of Oxfordshire had risen up to see the wreckage. No excuse for the delay, Holmes snapped at the conductor. He vowed to write a scathing letter to the president of the line. We arrived at Birmingham New Street station almost an hour late; I had not advanced a page into the lost world of Professor Challenger.

  Doolittle’s agent had apprised us that the gentleman was scheduled to give his lecture at six that evening in the lecture theatre at the university. It was the very stroke of six when we came tearing off the train. Thus we set our sights on Old Joe, the handsome old bell tower that lords it over the grounds of the university, and indeed the entire city. We arrived at Aston-Webb Hall at six fifteen, to find the theatre bursting at the seams and the crowd in an uproar. Mr. Doolittle had not begun his lecture. No one could tell us when he would begin. The students were certain that Mr. Doolittle was being denied the podium. He wa
s, after all, a well-known socialist agitator. The Birmingham city fathers, steeped in capitalist orthodoxy, grown fat on the strawberries and cream of capitalist benefice, frowned upon agitators of any stripe, and socialist agitators in particular. The students, for their part, enjoyed being agitated more than anything.

  It took us some time to find someone in authority who could tell us what was actually going on, only to find out that no one had the slightest idea what was going on. We found the university provost engaged in heated conversation with a professor of English literature in an alcove outside the theatre. The provost was responsible for the welfare of the hall; the sounds of students clapping and stamping their feet upon wooden planks filled him with fear. The professor had invited the distinguished Mr. Doolittle to speak. All either one was certain of was that Doolittle had never arrived at the venue. The professor suggested the possibility that his speaker had been waylaid by individuals unknown to anyone with the possible exception of the provost. The provost offered to beat the professor to a pulp unless he retracted his invidious accusations. One of the college stewards had been sent to Doolittle’s hotel, to ascertain whether the man had ever arrived in Birmingham at all.

  Finally a nugget of useful information! “What hotel is Mr. Doolittle supposed to be staying at?” asked Holmes.

  Queen’s Hotel, we were informed, and Holmes beat such a hasty exit that we were fairly spun around in his wake. Queen’s Hotel, of course, is actually incorporated with the New Street train station. You can practically step off the train and find yourself in the main lobby. So it was back along the exact route we had come, and Holmes grumbling under his breath about the slowness of Midlands coachmen. We were nearly out of breath when we fetched up at the front desk to find out what room Doolittle was in. Then we bolted for the lift.

  The lift, of course, was out of service. We mounted the stairs, two and three at a time, my heart pounding in my chest. (And did I not hear, from the bottom of the stair, the clerk cry out behind us?— As you value your life or reason, keep away from the fourth floor! To this day I’ll swear I did.) We arrived at the fourth-floor landing and heard the din.

  There were four men standing in the hall, all shouting Doolittle’s name, all hammering on his door to be let in, though they could barely be heard over the thundering from inside the room, and the bloodcurdling screams of a female in distress. The four men, we learned in short order, were the hotel manager, the hotel detective, the lift operator, and the college steward sent to collect Mr. Doolittle.

  “Why do you wait upon the threshold?” Holmes asked the manager. “Surely you have a key!”

  The key, alas, had been mislaid, the manager divulged after much hemming and hawing. The chambermaid might have taken it home in her apron, lamented the house detective. A silly woman. A very, very silly woman.

  Gillette strode forward. “Then stand back, you pikers!” he cried. “There’s a lady in danger of her life!” The actor rammed his shoulder against the door. The door quivered, but held. He stormed it again; the lock splintered, the door flew open, Gillette’s momentum carried him into the room. We would have lost one of the foremost thespians of the age had I not fortunately been in place to pull him back as the axe just missed grazing his skull.

  There she stood, in bedraggled pink silk with a scarlet bow at the waist, bosom heaving, ostrich-plume hat dangling from her curls, fire-axe in her arms. Fanny Pritchard would have appeared comical save that in her eyes was madness and murder. She swung the axe again, and this time it was I who narrowly missed being unseamed from the nave to the chops.

  Then Sherlock Holmes took charge of the fray, snatching up a chair by the door and advancing on the girl with it like a circus lion-tamer. Her face clouded with confusion, but she took a game hack at the chair and sent one of the legs splintering across the room. Holmes drove her to the wall, pinning her between the chair-legs so she couldn’t swing the axe. She screamed like a wildcat, and flung the chair back with that inhuman strength granted by Guest’s unholy drugs.

  But she had dropped the axe. The hotel detective dove for it, displaying the kind of pluck one rarely sees in hotel detectives. He got a kick in the head for his pains that must have had him seeing stars, but the rest of us were able to rush the girl. In the end it took four men to subdue her. Then, when she saw she was bested, she went limp, and fainted dead away.

  We all seven stood, breathing heavily, staring at one another, a brotherhood that had fallen down the rabbit hole and found our way back to daylight.

  “Where’s Mr. Doolittle?” asked the college steward.

  Holmes pointed. In the corner stood a wardrobe, of walnut or some other dark wood. The doors were scored and smashed in from the strokes of the axe. From within emanated a mewling like a kitten’s. Gillette went to the wardrobe and wrestled the doors open. Alfred P. Doolittle lay huddled at the bottom of the wardrobe, his hands covering his eyes. He was shaking all over like a meringue.

  “You’re safe now, Mr. Doolittle,” said Gillette, holding out a helping hand. Doolittle looked out from between his fingers at the man standing over him.

  “Sherlock Holmes!” he gasped. “I been saved by Sherlock Holmes!”

  It hadn’t been Susan Wallace who had come to Eliza with a warning, then, or Betsy Chubb or Nancy Kelly. It was her childhood friend, Fanny Pritchard, who must have met the Kelly girl when they had both “trod the boards.” She had probably met Gabriel Guest there, too, lurking backstage, and caught his eye. Fanny Pritchard, the fourth girl. She would never again be the merry, thoughtless lass I had met in Edinburgh. But thanks to Sherlock Holmes, at least she would never be hanged for murder.

  Most of this was simply conjecture at the time. Fanny hadn’t merely fainted: she had retreated into catatonia. Whatever solid information she might provide on the good doctor and the hellish drugs he prescribed was locked within her brain. There would be no questioning her for weeks to come.

  Alfred Doolittle never made it to the university that night. He canceled his tour then and there and returned home to the sheltering arms of his wedded wife. Whether he has ever strayed forth again, I cannot say.

  We returned to London that night as well. Gillette was exhilarated by his half-day excursion into real-world detecting. I’m told that his performances for the remainder of his London run were extraordinary. But for myself and Holmes, the satisfaction of preventing another murder was thin gruel so long as Edward Hyde remained at large. Freed of Henry Higgins’s yoke, Holmes combed the streets of London, looking for Hyde. He had the help of Newcomen and the Yard, Von Stetten and his bravos, and the remnants of the Irregulars. Yet the days passed, and we came no nearer our quarry.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Freddy Eynsford-Hill was laid to rest the following Saturday. There was a very moving service at St. Paul’s, followed by an interment at Highgate. Miss Doolittle and Mrs. Higgins were in attendance, having just been freed from prison, in spite of Holmes’s efforts to keep them incarcerated for at least one more day.

  Sherlock Holmes and I were not in attendance.

  Professor Higgins had not wanted to go, either, and said so, loudly, to anyone who would listen. But no one would; between his mother and Colonel Pickering, he was chivvied and cossetted and finally forced to go. Part of that persuasion was that the entire household staff was given the morning off to attend the funeral. Freddy had been popular with all of them. If Higgins didn’t want to go, his mother warned, he could sit home alone and ring the bell, but no one would answer his summons.

  The house on Wimpole Street was therefore deserted—except for Sherlock Holmes and myself. We had let ourselves in quietly by the kitchen door with a purloined key mere moments after the last servant had left. Pickering had made a desultory search of Eliza’s room and found nothing, but Holmes was sure the girl had not told the truth when she said there was no more of the formula hidden in the house. The empty house presented the ideal opportunity for us to make a thorough search without fear of distur
bance. Even the constable who had shadowed the house since the morning of Freddy’s death had gone to the funeral.

  We ascended to Eliza’s room. Pickering had searched there and found nothing, but his scruples made him a less than ideal detective. I felt a qualm about going through the girl’s private things in her absence, but Holmes was convinced that there was another cache of Guest’s formula hidden there somewhere, and finding it was a matter of life and death. He had no scruples about throwing open cupboards and rummaging through drawers. And yet we found nothing.

  “Nothing here,” I reported, going through the drawers of her vanity. “Not even face paints. Our Miss Doolittle is a natural beauty.”

  Holmes continued searching for a minute. Then he stopped cold and looked at me. “No powder? No rouge?” I shook my head.

  “This wardrobe.” Holmes riffled through the clothes. “Barely half full. And the drawers. Where are her gowns, Watson? Where are her shoes?”

  It seemed to me there were plenty of clothes in the wardrobe, but ladies’ dress habit is hardly my area of expertise. “Perhaps Pickering took her some dresses when he visited her in gaol,” I suggested.

  “Pickering went to see her?”

  “Every day. Poor fellow felt so guilty.”

  “Of course!” Holmes cried to himself. He flew from the room and ran downstairs to Pickering’s quarters. I followed dutifully. When I caught up, the wardrobe was already open, the drawers pulled out, even the window stood open to the elements. Holmes was waving a dog-eared Bradshaw’s guide to steam navigation, and nearly struck me in the face with it. “Never let me tell you Pickering is anything but a cunning old fox,” he said.

  “Did you think he had flown away?” I asked jokingly, pointing to the open window.