The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle Page 6

  Chapter Eight

  It was coming on midnight when the creak and clatter of a growler broke the stillness of the night on Wimpole. Miss Doolittle and Mr. Eynsford-Hill were returning from their evening out. The cab settled to a stop. Freddy descended and handed Miss Doolittle out. The girl was still in warm spirits. She had thoroughly enjoyed the play, and seemed able to recite every line of it verbatim. Freddy’s contributions to the conversation consisted mostly of terse nods and stammered agreements. She took no notice. When they arrived at the door, she rewarded his tender attentions with a soulful kiss on the cheek before darting inside, to leave him forlorn in the porch. He turned back to his cab, the weight of the world upon his narrow shoulders. When he stepped up to get in, however, he was startled to find that someone had taken his place in the cab. He hesitated. A voice came to him from the shadows inside, in a low, confidential tone.

  “Mr. Eynsford-Hill, a word.”

  Freddy was not the type for conversations with mysterious strangers in cabs. He shrank back, only to find another man standing close behind him, with a hand planted firmly in the small of his back. “Get in the cab, please, Mr. Eynsford-Hill,” the second man said in a pleasant way that nevertheless sent a chill up Freddy’s spine.

  “Do you have to pop out of the shadows like that?” asked Freddy, his own voice unaccountably shrill. “It makes a fellow’s knees go wobbly.”

  “Our apologies. I think you’ll agree that discretion is necessary. Please step up,” said the man inside the cab. Seeing no choice in the matter, Freddy climbed up, stubbing his toe badly on the step. The second man pushed his way in behind him. Freddy was now squashed between his abductors. He looked from one to the other.

  “You again!” he gasped.

  The first gentleman called through the window: “Driver!” The cab jangled away down the lane.

  “Who the blazes are you fellows?” Freddy asked the second man. He had already recognized them as the American who had been introduced to him as Morello and his bulldog of a secretary, but the one no longer sounded American, and the other constantly behaved in decidedly un-secretary-like ways.

  “You’ve heard of Mr. Sherlock Holmes?” said the secretary.

  “The detective chappie? Magnifying glass and deerstalker cap and all that rot?”

  “I mean the real Sherlock Holmes.”

  “He really is real? That’s just what Liza said! Don’t tell me you’re him.”

  The first gentleman leaned forward out of the shadows. “No, Mr. Eynsford-Hill. His name is John Watson. I am Sherlock Holmes.”

  Freddy looked befuddled. “No. You’re that Morello fellow. The American gangster. Eliza told me you garroted one of your rivals with a fishing line.”

  “A necessary subterfuge. We’re concerned for the welfare of Miss Doolittle. I believe you are, as well.”

  “Well, of course I am. I mean, who wouldn’t be?”

  “You followed her today.”

  Freddy blushed.

  “You’ve followed her before?”

  “May have done,” Freddy mumbled.

  “Dr. Watson here described a man who intercepted Miss Doolittle’s cab today. A rather ugly customer. She may have gone to meet him expressly, or she may have been waylaid. Did you see him?”

  “Today? No. But I fancy I’ve seen him before. You could trawl the Thames with a butterfly net and not find a more loathsome little monster. But he holds some weird fascination for Eliza. It’s not the first time they’ve put their heads together.”

  “You’ve seen them together before?”

  “Three. No, four times. No, three.”

  “Always the same place?”

  “No, but always the same kind of place. Greasy little pubs in Soho or Limehouse. Nowhere a lady ought to be.”

  “What do they talk about?”

  “Couldn’t get close enough to hear, could I? They talk in little snatches of whispers, always on the move, as if they were planning another Gunpowder Plot. Once, though, I stumbled on him with another girl in one of those pubs he haunts. They were right upon me, almost in my drink. She didn’t bother keeping her voice down, not she! Screaming like a banshee, ‘What about Betsy! What about Betsy Chubb, you beast?’ Beating on his shirtfront like a drum.”

  “Who in heaven’s name is Betsy Chubb?” I asked.

  Freddy shrugged. “Not the foggiest idea. The girl was a common drab, with a shiner under one eye. But that was the one time I’ve seen him look scared.”

  Holmes laid an arm on Freddy’s shoulder. “Do you know the man’s name?”

  “The woman in the pub called him Ned.”

  Holmes stared dreamily at the park rolling by in the gaslight. The elms guarding the Serpentine looked ready to surrender their leaves in the first chill rain. “Heed my advice, Mr. Eynsford-Hill. Keep your distance from this man Ned. Don’t seek to confront him.”

  “What if he comes back to Wimpole Street?”

  “He’s been there?” Holmes’s voice clotted with tension.

  “Well, not to leave his card. I saw him once. On the roof. Staring into Liza’s window. At first I thought it was only a cat on the ledge. It moved like a cat, though it was really far too large to be any kind of a cat, unless a panther got loose from the zoo. But then he turned and looked down at me. I’ve never seen such a scalding look. Turned my knees to jelly, and before I could move or raise the alarm, he was off across the rooftops faster than—well, faster than a cat.”

  Holmes asked no more questions, but seemed to relapse into a brown study. At length he roused himself and leaned out the window of the cab. “We’ll get out here, driver!” he called. “Mr. Eynsford-Hill, I must ask you on your solemn word of honor not to reveal anything you have learned tonight to Miss Doolittle, or indeed to anyone. Only your silence can ensure her safety.”

  “Oh, well—solemn word!” Freddy started. The cab lurched to a halt. Holmes gave one last nod to Freddy as if to impress upon him the seriousness of the situation. Then we both stepped down.

  “But where are we?” Freddy asked doubtfully, peering out. A fog had risen up off the pavement and got itself tangled in the lower branches of the trees. The gas lamps along the road were islands of light in the mist. The rattle of carriages was extinguished as if they had all been swallowed by a monster of the deep.

  “Earl’s Court, right? You’re halfway home,” Holmes replied.

  “How did you know— ?”

  “You’ve got fresh grave-soil on the bottom of your boots. Go and get some rest. Come, Watson, let us stretch our legs a bit.” He signaled to the driver. The horse snorted and stepped off, carrying young Mr. Eynsford-Hill to a night of uneasy sleep.

  Some things never change, no matter how the years unfurl. Only Holmes would have deemed a walk through the streets of London in the heart of a midnight fog to be a pleasant outing. We put our best foot forward. Age had taken a step from both of us, but I was no more willing to admit it than he.

  “We seem to be piling mystery upon mystery, Holmes,” I said as we walked north along the boulevard.

  “Indeed. This mention of the woman Betsy Chubb troubles me.”

  “You know her?”

  “My dear Watson, do you no longer follow the crime news? Betsy Chubb was a Whitechapel prostitute. A mere girl of sixteen. Mild as a kitten. Last year she brutally slaughtered two young women in the house they lived in together. Then she smothered her own infant daughter with a pillow.”

  “Sweet heaven! What did she do it for?”

  “At her trial she claimed to have no memory whatever of the act.”

  “That was all her defense?”

  “She’s to be hanged at Holloway at the New Year.”

  The fog wrapped around the lampposts like a winding sheet. The branches of the trees creaked like a gallows at midnight. It should have been the most solemn of moments. Yet all I could think to myself was, He does read the crime news still!

  We continued home in companionable silence.


  Chapter Nine

  Over the next few days a brown fog seemed to settle over our quest to discover the secret of Eliza Doolittle. We were like the little match girl, striking a little light time after time, only to see each one extinguished in a moment. Holmes dragged the hours, watching every move Higgins and the girl made, waiting for one of them to make a false move, to reveal the whereabouts of the real Eliza Doolittle, if indeed she existed. Higgins watched Holmes just as closely, hoping to trip him up, make him reveal his true identity as the secret agent of some comic-opera principality. And all these maneuvers and countermaneuvers went on under the veil of daily speech lessons. Higgins rousted Holmes at seven every morning. Shirking was not tolerated. “I have placed myself under the whip of a cruel taskmaster,” Holmes complained to me jokingly.

  “Still I don’t imagine there’s much hope of your English improving, Mr. Morello,” said I.

  “Not a snowball’s chance in hell, paisan,” he answered drily.

  It fell to me, then, to do the legwork, to try to find someone who knew Eliza Doolittle before she came to Wimpole Street. Holmes insisted the girl must have relations, friends, enemies, acquaintances, someone who could shed light on the real Eliza. So out into the world I was thrust. It was not a role entirely strange to me, but my past forays in the world of practical sleuthing had not been crowned with success. I envied Holmes his snug little corner in the laboratory and his sham lessons, and I suspected it was the detective work he really was shirking; he still seemed less than wholly committed to our cause. Howbeit, over the course of the next few days I became as familiar with the stalls of Covent Garden and the rookeries of Lisson Grove as a body might aspire to.

  The market at Covent Garden is a giant bellows of humanity before dawn ever breaks, so I was out upon the pavement before daylight each morning with little more than a cup of cocoa to warm my insides, making my way among the vans and lorries, the ziggurats of crates and casks and baskets, the mountains of cabbages and turnips, the ankle-deep morass of straw and cabbage leaves and broken haybands, all in the chill morning air before the sun has committed himself. The costermongers whose barrows foam out of the market buy and sell from dark till dark, crying their wares, chattering volubly and endlessly about nothing at all, but become close-mouthed as turtles if they think you’re trying to pump them for information—which I most certainly was. In the course of loosening the tongues of these curb-side sphinxes I wound up purchasing enough groceries for a week, and enough flowers to furnish a dozen funerals. My housekeeper in Queen Anne Street must have thought me mad when they were all delivered to her.

  Pickering had been unable to tell us much about Miss Doolittle’s antecedents. She was supposed to have been reared in Lisson Grove, and to have lodged most recently in a place called Angel Court near Drury Lane, an address that proved as difficult to find as the Seven Cities of Gold. When he and Higgins had first come across her, she was selling violets from a basket outside St. Paul’s. The theatres had just let out, and the porch was crowded with people trying to get out of the rain. She had seemed familiar with everyone, and everyone with her. So ubiquitous a figure should be remembered by many. I assumed I would have no trouble finding a dozen or so who knew her well enough to describe her looks. I was woefully mistaken. I did stumble upon a knot of flower sellers in Oxford Street who knew the name of Eliza Doolittle, and assured me that she would be along any time with her basket. They seemed unaware that the girl had abandoned her trade months ago, and became quarrelsome when I told them so. There were some former associates of her father, Irish navvies playing thimblerig in an alley behind Toynbee Hall, who were aware of the change in Eliza’s fortunes, but they could recall little of her looks, save that she was “about so high, but taller wi’ boots on,” or “dirtier about ’er face than ’er hands,” or even “fairer than she appears,” whatever that might mean. Still others would stick out their chins and glower at me, muttering about “peelers” under their breaths. They evidently believed I intended to bring the law down like a lightning-stroke on Eliza if only I could lay hands upon her. A few of the Irish women who sell basketry claimed to know her, too. They called her unlucky, or “cursed by the fairies,” which I could make nothing of. On one point these women agreed, and that was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the girl impressed her beholders. It seemed to me I had heard such talk before, but I could not remember when.

  Inevitably it was the cryptic comments that interested Holmes most when I returned that first evening, footsore, to Wimpole Street, in time for the last dregs of tea. In my absence, the house had sorted itself into a picture of surprising domesticity. Higgins and the colonel were huddled on the sofa with their heads together, going over scholarly journals and debating some obscure points in the argot of their field. Eliza hovered over Holmes in the phonics corner, demonstrating the proper use of various apparatus. Of these there were a profusion: among them I recognized a row of tiny organ-pipes, an assortment of tuning forks in varying sizes, a chemical harmonicon, a laryngoscope, a metronome, and a phonograph machine with a supply of wax cylinders for recording sounds. There were more items littered about that I could not put a name to. On a shelf behind the desk was a life-size relief of the human head in plaster of Paris, with the vocal organs depicted in section. There was also a bust of some ancient Greek with an exasperated look whom I did not recognize, but I was informed later that it was Demosthenes the Orator, whom Higgins seemed to regard as the patron saint of phonics.

  The phonograph’s horn was mute. The sound flowed instead through wires into two cups yoked over the ears. Higgins called these “earphones.” Every time I tried to speak, Holmes would raise a finger, remove the cups, and say, “Run that by me one more time, bud.”

  The apparatus appeared to work, at least to a degree; at random intervals Holmes would burst forth with a stream of vowels that made him sound like a flock of congested geese. Every time he did so, Eliza would turn away in silent laughter, while Higgins, sitting across the room, would shut his eyes and give a shiver of opprobrium. The professor had apparently vowed not to let his new student take his ease until some scant sign of progress was forthcoming. Holmes nursed his tea and chatted with us between flocks of vowels. I had not seen him so animated in many a year.

  “Here, have a listen yourself, Guido.”

  “Hill,” I said primly, remembering my alias for once.

  “Okay, have a listen, Guido Hill.” He seemed a bit carried away with his American affectations. He clamped the cups over my ears. They were far from comfortable. But I heard no honking geese sounds as I had expected. Instead, there was the voice of a girl, attempting to pronounce tongue twisters with the most awful cockney accent I had ever heard. I didn’t recognize the girl’s voice, though I felt I should. I gave Holmes a questioning look. He let his gaze flicker toward Miss Doolittle for an instant. His meaning was clear. So I was listening to the original, untutored Eliza? Could it really be the same girl, I wondered? If only voices left prints as fingers do, our case would have been solved then and there.

  “Barton, you Englishers got the world beat with this afternoon tea racket,” Holmes said glibly. “Them little sandwiches would starve a canary, but the sugar biscuits and cream are better than cannoli.” He continued in the same vein for the next quarter of an hour, larding his conversation with as many Americanisms as possible—meant, I think, to amuse Eliza and confound Higgins at the same time. He seemed as amused with his own performance as we were. If Higgins could indeed pick out the accents of Sussex squiry, he must have owned the most sensitive ears in all of Christendom. As the coup de grace, Holmes treated us to a dozen refrains of “I saw Susie sitting in a shoe shine shop. Where she sits, she shines, and where she shines, she sits,” which in Brooklynese sounded like “I sawr Sooz settin’ nuh shooshoyne shap.”

  Higgins threw his papers in the air. “Good God, man, have you no ear whatsoever? Shoe. Shine. Shop. Shoe. Shine. Shop! Do you even know what one is?”<
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  “I spent most of my childhood between the pool hall and the shooshoyne shap. From the scuff of your shoes, I bet you ain’t never been inside one in your life, Henry,” Holmes answered with a lazy grin. “Should I take another crack at it?” Miss Doolittle turned her back to us, but her shoulders were heaving with laughter. Pickering buried his face in a book.

  “No, you shall not take another crack at it, Giorgio! You shall cease this assault upon mine ears. You shall go up to bed and dream not of ships or chips or chaps, but of shops replete with shined shoes! And tomorrow you shall sell seashells by the seashore. Here endeth the lesson!”

  “Well, I do have a little business to see to. Barton?” We both rose and bade goodnight to the company. We retreated to Holmes’s room to discuss the situation as it stood. Holmes ranged full length upon the bed, kicking off his boots, while I took the wicker chair in the corner. I took out the notebook and pen, in case we might be disturbed by the household staff. We lit our pipes and smoked in silence for a while.

  “This system of the professor’s is truly admirable,” Holmes said at length. “I can place a man by a confluence of clues: the weather of his complexion, the wear of his hands, the state of his dress, or the tobacco he smokes. But these are outward signs, which may be shed or disguised by a truly clever man. Higgins knows him by his voice, which he cannot alter.”

  “But you have altered your voice,” I pointed out.

  “And well he knows it. It’s only a matter of time till he sees through me entirely.”

  “Then our object is folly.”

  “Folly? Within a week, I should be speechifying like William Gillette, were that my object. In a fortnight I shall have learned the entirety of the Higgins method.”

  “But what about the attic of the mind and not filling it up with extraneous lumber?” I was referring to a metaphor Holmes had used early in our acquaintance to justify his peculiarly specialized knowledge of the world.