The House at Baker Street Read online

  They sat in their rooms and smoked and talked into the night, and I sat in the kitchen and listened to them through the air vent and there we all were. Sherlock Holmes, John Watson and Martha Hudson. Three lost souls who had found each other.

  Now that you know how I met Mr Holmes and Dr Watson, we can move on to my story. Well, the story of Mary and me. Mary Watson, the wife of Dr John Watson, and I sat quietly at the huge wooden table in the bright basement kitchen of 221b Baker Street.

  The kitchen is my domain, my office, my refuge. Let me tell you all about it. This place is important. This place is my home. If you open the black-painted door of 221b Baker Street, you find yourself in a dark, panelled entrance hall. There is a table to the right, highly polished, and with a brass bowl on it. Facing you, on the left, are carpeted stairs up to the rest of the house. On the right is a short hallway, leading down four steps to my kitchen. Whenever I think of home, I think of that kitchen.

  It had a black door, which was rarely closed. This door led directly into the kitchen, and on the other side of the room was a half-glassed door, leading out to a humble back yard. Beside the back door was my pride and joy, a large gas cooking range, which kept the kitchen hot even on the coldest days. There was a chair in front of this, comfy and worn, with a rag rug rolled up in the corner to be laid out in the evenings. To the left of this range was a smaller door leading to the scullery, pantry and various other offices of the house. Past that, against the wall, was a large pine dresser, stocked with shining copper pans and pink and white plates. They were not for Mr Holmes’ use, of course. He got plain white china after he started using my plates for chemical experiments and shooting practice. Opposite them, across the linoleum printed to look like red tiles (oh, the joys of an easy-to-clean floor of linoleum!), was a row of cupboards, and a worktop with a cool marble slab where I made pastry. The kitchen swept all the way through to the window and door at the front of the house, where I could see everyone go past. In the centre of the room was a huge oak table, scrubbed white with use, covered in scars and burns. This kitchen was my home, and I spent the happiest times of my life there.

  So now, can you see it, my kitchen? The place where I belong, and where I felt like I belonged. This is where it all began. John’s stories begin upstairs, and mine, downstairs. On this day, I was not alone. Mary Watson had come to visit me, and was sitting at one end of that table. She had come into John’s life in the adventure he called The Sign of Four. John loved her, Mr Holmes tolerated her and I was very fond of her. The personification of beauty of the time was a full-figured brunette, with dimples, but Mary didn’t fit the fashion at all. She was slender, and tall, almost as tall as John. She had a firm chin, and a straight nose, and an intense blue gaze. She had masses of curly golden hair that firmly refused to stay in place, always falling out of its pins. She preferred, like Princess Alix, to dress in simple blouses and skirts, with barely a bustle, and usually wore a simple straw hat, often pushed impatiently to the back of her head. She had a mobile face that expressed every emotion she felt and every thought she had. She laughed easily, and she was clever. She loved John to distraction. She had been subdued, quiet and correct, a good governess, when he met her. Now she was free, and she glowed with a bubble of happiness inside her.

  I can still see her, so very clearly, after all these years, as if she still sat opposite me, smiling mischievously.

  Beside her, I am small, middle-aged. I have brown hair, turning silver, and brown eyes, and am, to be fair, plumper than her. You cannot tell what I am thinking from my face. My complexion, once peaches and cream, has become a greyish-white in the dirt of London. My hair is always neatly done up in a bun, my clothes are demure and plain, I am the model of a tidy, calm housekeeper. I am not made to be noticed, and to be noticed is not my place. My hands are cook’s hands – always covered in tiny scars and burns from the oven and the knives. I am proud of that, and I need nothing more.

  There, can you see us? Sitting in my kitchen on this day, when it all began, sipping our cups of tea, eating slices of my home-made Dundee cake and eavesdropping on Sherlock Holmes’ latest visitor through the air vent.

  Ah yes, the air vent.

  Now, you must understand, British builders don’t really understand air vents. They put them in all sorts of odd places, from room to room, hidden away in corners, linked up to pipes that lead nowhere. Strictly speaking, an air vent should never have linked the kitchen and the first-floor drawing room, allowing the smell of cooking to drift into the house. But what with bad planning, and alterations and other quirks, one air vent in 221b, high on the wall of Mr Holmes’ drawing room (which was also his consulting room, dining room, shooting gallery and chemical laboratory) led directly into the kitchen, between two cupboards, above the marble top where I made my pastries.

  I had only realized this when, one evening, long before Mr Holmes moved in, I had heard singing as I rolled out a batch of scones. I dismissed the idea as the first signs of insanity until I understood I was listening to the young man in the rooms above me, singing rather vulgar music-hall songs to himself, and the sound was carrying through that vent.

  I usually kept the vent closed, but since Mr Holmes had taken the rooms, I found myself opening it more and more, sitting at the kitchen table and listening. It was wrong. It was eavesdropping. It was dishonest. It was against all the rules of being a good housekeeper. I profess myself completely shocked at my own lack of discretion and privacy. I told myself so every time I opened the vent.

  However, if you are completely honest, if you had the opportunity to open a vent and listen to Sherlock Holmes talk, would not you do so?

  Of course you would, and that is why you read these stories.

  That day Mr Holmes had a new visitor. I had shown her up myself as Billy, our page-boy, was running errands at the time, and had taken careful note of the new client. She was a shy young woman, small and pale, trembling with nerves. Her hazel, washed-out eyes kept glancing quickly behind her, as if she were afraid of being watched. I had shown her up to his room, and then hurried down to the kitchen to find that Mary had already opened the air vent. We settled down to listen. What could such a nervous little mouse want of the Great Detective?

  Unfortunately, Mr Holmes was not in one of his kindly moods, and Dr Watson had gone out on an urgent call. Mr Holmes professed to despise women (not as much as he insisted he did, I am certain). He called them weak, over-emotional, hysterical and guilty of dragging a man’s attention away from cool logic.

  However, some women he did, against his disposition, like. Those women tended to be strong, intelligent and independent. Shrinking violets only annoyed him – and no violet ever shrank more than this poor woman. He asked her what was wrong and she whispered ‘blackmail?’ in just such a questioning manner. But she would not say who was blackmailing her, over what, what the demands were or even her name. To every question she just offered an almost inaudible ‘I cannot tell you’.

  Mr Holmes always demanded complete openness from his clients and, in the mood he was in, he had no inclination to be kind. He sent her away with a cursory, ‘If you will not speak, I cannot help you. Good day.’

  I ran out into the hall to see her descending the stairs slowly, all meek and quivering.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea, dear?’ I asked her. And with that, she burst into tears.

  Mary and I got her seated in the kitchen with cake and a hot, sweet cup of tea. Eventually the sobbing subsided.

  ‘I don’t know why I came; I daren’t tell him,’ she said, in a voice barely above a whisper to us. ‘I daren’t. What if he approaches my husband? I cannot have him . . . he cannot know . . .’ And she burst into tears once again.

  ‘My dear,’ I said gently, ‘what exactly is it that you have done?’

  ‘That’s just it!’ she cried, with that queer hiccupping cough people get when they’ve cried all they can cry. ‘I’ve done nothing!’

  ‘Then how can someone blackmail
you?’ I asked.

  ‘He lies!’ she cried, so loud I thought Mr Holmes might hear her. I had no intention of sending her back to him; he had been heartless at best and cruel at worst, and I was angry with him. He deserved to lose this client; perhaps then he’d be better behaved to the next weeping woman. I shushed her. ‘He tells such lies, such disgusting lies!’

  ‘If he lies, why would your husband believe this blackmailer?’ Mary asked.

  ‘My husband firmly believes there is no smoke without fire,’ the woman said, clutching and re-clutching her gloves. ‘He says a woman’s reputation is a price above rubies, and is her most precious possession, and that nothing should stain it, not even rumours.’

  Mary and I glanced at each other. So he was one of those husbands! I’d wager his own soul was far from spotless.

  ‘Last year we heard the most disturbing tales about two women of our acquaintance. Nothing was actually proven, nothing spoken out loud, but there were whispers,’ she continued. ‘He said I wasn’t allowed to see them any more. I argued – I know a woman should not argue with her husband, but I liked them. I could talk to them. I said there was no proof, but he said the rumours were proof enough. He said that a woman who behaved decently would not have a chance to have a reputation stained like that. He said even lies had a basis in truth, and . . .’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘And they must have done something, or else how would the rumours start?’ Mary finished for her. ‘More than one woman has been destroyed by that spurious argument.’ I could tell Mary was very angry, but she kept quiet as the woman continued to talk.

  ‘He might believe me at first,’ she told us. ‘That they were all lies, and so on. But he would look at me, and wonder, and after a while, if the rumours spread . . .’

  ‘He’d start to believe,’ Mary finished. ‘And even if he did not, other people would, enough for your reputation to be sullied in the world, and that would be the end for both of you. Our society is beyond cruel, especially to women.’

  ‘He could not stand it. And that was what the letter said, the letter that first . . . that I . . .’ the woman whispered. She could not even bring herself to say the words.

  ‘Do you have the letter?’ Mary asked, holding out her hand. The woman obediently drew from her reticule a folded sheet of paper, which she handed to Mary, who opened it, and read it aloud.

  ‘My dear Laura,’ Mary read and then paused, looking up at our visitor. ‘Laura is your name?’

  ‘Yes. Laura Shirley,’ she said, very quietly. Well, we had got further than Mr Holmes! Mary continued to read the letter out loud.

  ‘My dear Laura, I am aware of the following stories about you. You have a choice. Either do as I ask, or I shall repeat the stories to everyone you know. Such pretty stories too. Let us begin.’

  Mary stopped, read ahead and then said, ‘There follows a stream of vileness that I will not repeat.’ She tilted the paper this way and that, studying it carefully.

  ‘He asks for nothing,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Not yet,’ Mrs Shirley said softly. ‘I have received three letters. The third said the next one would contain a request.’

  ‘May I see that letter?’ Mary asked.

  ‘I burnt it. I burnt the other one, too. Please understand, my husband reads my letters. It is only good fortune that those letters arrived on days he was away on business.’

  ‘Good fortune or good planning,’ Mary remarked. ‘Did you burn all the envelopes too?’

  ‘Yes,’ Laura said miserably. ‘I could not bear to have those things in my house.’

  Mary had stood up, and she held the letter up to the light streaming through the kitchen window.

  ‘Thick paper, fairly decent quality,’ she remarked. ‘Water-mark is a common brand. Handwriting is not particularly distinctive. It is basically that taught in any good school, all individuality gone. The ink is watered down. The pen is blunt and badly cut – see how it catches the paper? This isn’t someone’s personal paper, or he’d be aware of that particular fault with that particular pen on this paper. I say this was written in a gentleman’s club – not one of the more exclusive ones, they have their own headed paper.’ Mary turned to see me staring at her. She smiled. ‘Well, I haven’t listened to John’s tales of Sherlock’s methods without learning something, you know!’

  Mary sat down at the table and placed her hand on Laura’s arm.

  ‘You must bring the next letter directly to us,’ Mary said.

  ‘Don’t open it,’ I said quickly. I didn’t want this trembling little creature to read whatever foul request this man had made. Besides, there might be a clue in the way it was sealed. ‘Just bring it here.’

  ‘You’re going to help me?’ Laura said, looking from one to the other of us in amazement. ‘You’re really going to help me?’

  Mary and I looked at each other. It seemed we had both made the decision independently, and had come to the same conclusion.

  ‘Of course we’re going to help you,’ Mary said quickly. ‘How could we not?’

  Mrs Shirley left soon afterwards, much cheered. Well, she had stopped crying at least. She still drooped. I occupied myself clearing the tea things, as I listened to Mary escort her to the front door, reassuring her all the way, before she came back to the kitchen.

  ‘Mary . . .’ I said slowly. I was unsure we could do what we had promised. Mary did not need me to voice my concerns – she knew them.

  ‘We can help,’ Mary said firmly, as she put the washed cups away in the cupboard. ‘We’ve learnt a lot ourselves, merely from sitting down here listening to John and Sherlock. We can do this.’

  It always amazed me how she called him Sherlock, even to his face, whilst he always called her Mrs Watson.

  ‘But, Mary . . .’

  ‘And we’re women. She trusts us, and she could not trust Sherlock,’ Mary insisted. ‘That’s to our advantage in investigating too. No one suspects women. Most men think we’re harmless, mindless little fools. No one will blink an eyelid if Laura Shirley acquires two new female friends whereas if Sherlock suddenly appeared in her life, everyone would be very suspicious, including that holier-than-thou husband of hers.’

  ‘Yes, but Mary . . .’

  ‘I won’t leave her lost and alone. I won’t!’ she insisted, slamming the cupboard door, then looking guilty at the noise she had made.

  ‘I agree!’ I said quickly, trying to leap in. ‘We’re going to help her, I agree. I just wanted to say – we’re not going to tell Mr Holmes, are we?’

  ‘No, we damned well won’t!’ Mary cried. She glanced at the vent to make sure it was shut. Then in a lower voice, she said, ‘No. He turned her away. He wasn’t kind. She came to us and we helped. It’s our case now.’

  ‘Good,’ I said, wiping down the table. ‘I must admit, I do like the idea of doing something to help, instead of just sitting here, listening to those poor souls’ problems and then Mr Holmes saving them, whilst I make tea. But, Mary, will you tell John?’

  ‘John?’ she asked, sitting down at the kitchen table. She obviously hadn’t thought about John. She stared at the table a moment, then said, ‘I will not tell John. If he asks, I shall say I’m helping a friend. And maybe when it’s over I’ll tell him. To be fair, there are some cases he and Sherlock have worked on that he refuses to tell me about. So, just helping a friend; no more than that. And,’ she looked up at me, ‘that’s all it really is, isn’t it?’

  I nodded in agreement as I wrung out the cloth and draped it over the oven door to dry. This would be something we would do ourselves, with no interference or ‘help’ from the men upstairs. Our case, our turn to shine, our turn to feel we were achieving something worthwhile. On an impulse, I took two glasses from the cupboard and put them on the table. Then I went into the pantry and took a bottle out from the back.

  ‘Mr Holmes is not the only one who can appreciate fine wine,’ I said, putting it in front of Mary.

  ‘This is more than wine, this is
champagne! Proper champagne!’ Mary said, awed and laughing at the same time.

  ‘That is what one drinks when one is celebrating, is it not?’ I asked, carefully extracting the cork.

  ‘You are full of surprises,’ Mary said. ‘But can I point out it’s only four o’clock in the afternoon?’

  ‘I wish to drink a toast, and tea won’t do,’ I said firmly, as I carefully poured the champagne. I held my bubbling, fizzing, golden glass of champagne up to Mary.

  ‘And the toast is: Mary Watson and Mrs Hudson – detectives,’ I cried giddily. Mary laughed, stood up and raised her glass in return.

  ‘Mrs Hudson and Mary Watson – detectives!’

  Later, much later, once the Watsons had left for the day and I had sobered up somewhat – I had forgotten champagne made me quite so light-headed – I took Mr Holmes’ tea up to him, with the evening post, which included a postcard sent from the Isle of Uffa. One arrived each year since 1887, with no message but ‘all well’, and signed Grice Paterson. I did hope he wouldn’t have to go back there. It had not been comfortable, or safe for him. The sun was setting, one of those glorious deep red sunsets that make London rosy and glowing, as if the old city was new and clean and bright. Mr Holmes stood by the window, hands clasped behind his back. He watched not the sunset, but the comings and goings in the street below. I thought he was looking for Dr Watson, so I told him the doctor had gone home.

  ‘I wasn’t looking for Dr Watson,’ he said. ‘I thought she’d come back,’ he murmured.

  ‘Who?’ I asked, as I laid the white cloth over the table and set out his tea things, in precisely the correct place, as he liked it.

  ‘Mrs Hudson, the woman who just came to see me . . . ’

  ‘She left in tears,’ I said, perhaps more sharply than I had intended. He must have caught the tenor of my voice, because he turned to face me in surprise.