—
The house renovations were fast—suspiciously fast, particularly when one considered the work-men’s preference for night-time deliveries in anonymous carts as they supplied tiles from mixed sources, paint of various shades, and furniture that did not quite match. On the twenty-third of December, Mrs Clara Hudson and her young houseboy, Billy, moved into their near-empty ground-floor rooms, that Billy might have his first, tiny, honest-to-goodness Christmas tree. Four days later, furniture began to arrive. Three weeks after that, Mr Holmes brought home a potential house-mate for 221B, a nervy, limping medical man recently out of the Army who twitched at every shout and crash from the street outside. Dr Watson seemed expressly designed to be Holmes’ exact opposite: tidy, Spartan, and (once his nerves calmed somewhat) interested in his fellow man.
And his fellow woman.
The first thing “Mrs Hudson” did upon meeting him was to glare at Billy, forcing him to slip the doctor’s watch back into its pocket. The second was to drop into the pace and posture of a woman a decade or more older, lest Dr Watson’s appreciative eye come to rest on his new landlady.
And from thenceforth, a landlady she was. Clara Hudson settled into the twenty-four-hour-a-day stage-play with deep misgivings, fearing the closing-in of walls, but in fact, the walls proved generous, and opportunities for escape—temporary and sanctioned escape—came surprisingly often. For her…what was Mr Holmes, anyway? Tenant? Employer? Gaoler? At any rate, his romantic plans to become a detective did in fact come to fruition, and he did indeed work beyond the limitations imposed on the official police. His associates were often members of the criminal underworld, while his clients were as apt to be unconcerned with legality as the detective was.
As Acts went, this one kept her interest.
Clara Hudson never doubted that righteousness was required of her and transgressions would be instantly catastrophic. Nonetheless, as time went by, Mr Holmes relaxed his standards just a little. She was granted brief holidays from virtue (“The seaside” was what they called a trip to Paris; “Mrs Turner” was both a friend and occasional stand-in, as well as a code for Monte Carlo). Even in Baker Street, her special skills found occasional employment: when Mr Holmes needed a woman to provide surveillance or to follow someone on the streets—or into places men were forbidden—he called upon her. She also supervised Billy’s army of street urchins that Mr Holmes called his “Irregulars.”
The others—police, clients, even Dr Watson—knew none of this. As far as they were concerned, Mrs Hudson was the landlady, ready with the tea tray and a substantial breakfast at any hour, her stately tread climbing at night past her tenants’ door to the spotless rooms where pigeons had once reigned. In the same way, Billy was the page, whose inappropriate friendship with young street Arabs distressed Mrs Hudson down to the bones. She spoke with her mother’s native accent, she put on weight, she watched her hair go grey.
And deep in the back of a bedroom drawer, nestled into a threadbare little bag that had once been rich with beads, lay a small, ivory-handled ladies’ revolver and its box of tiny bullets.
Clara Hudson, née Clarissa, occasionally reflected on the number of sharp turns her life had taken. Born ten thousand miles from her father. A transportee before she could walk. At her mother’s death, first a surrogate parent, then junior partner in a firm of confidence thieves. Two triumphant Seasons; a foolish love; an arrangement with a crime baron; a finger on a trigger. Then: Baker Street.
Two other sharp turns remained to her. The first came when the Queen died and Sherlock Holmes retired from London. Not that he retired from work: merely, he left Baker Street for rural Sussex.
To her own astonishment, his landlady decided to accompany him.
Once, long ago, during the strange and lonely pair of years when Mr Holmes was presumed dead in the Reichenbach Falls, Billy—a strapping young lad of eighteen by then, and off to University—had come by to read aloud with her in front of the fire, to help obscure the creaking of the empty house.
Dickens had always been a favourite with them. That night it was Great Expectations. Billy was reading—his schooling was more solid than hers, his reading smooth—and had come to the following passage:
Put the case, Pip, that passion and the terror of death had a little shaken the woman’s intellects, and that when she was set at liberty, she was scared out of the ways of the world and went to him to be sheltered. Put the case that he took her in, and that he kept down the old wild violent nature, whenever he saw an inkling of its breaking out, by asserting his power over her in the old way.
The words sent a chill down her spine, of truth and recognition. She went to him to be sheltered…
Clarissa Hudson—Clara, now, that dull and dependable name—had hated the grey-eyed young man who took hold of her freedom. For him and his damnable honesty, she had given up her son, taken sharp scissors to her own wings, exchanged her silks for a landlady’s drab, allowed her hair to go grey and unadorned. Her world had shrunk to the supervision of housemaids and the carrying of tea trays. More than once, she had eyed the tin of rat poison, wondering…
And yet, under that iron control, she came to feel strangely free. Clara Hudson acted a lie from the time her feet hit the floorboards in the morning to the moment she blew out her bed-side candle or turned out the electric lamp, but that lie grew increasingly comfortable. A rôle more real, more her, than the flirtatious girl at the billiards table ever was. Her few attempts at inhabiting the stage had failed because her partners rang false: here, under the Baker Street roof, every person played his part without lapse.
Well, that was not entirely true: Billy, at first, had chafed and questioned. But Billy was young. When all around him held up their sides, when even she failed to respond to his suggestions of independent fund-raising trips through the city streets or his queries about Mr Bishop, the boy’s memories faded. In any event, school rooms and Mr Holmes’ band of Irregulars soon took the place of his former excitements.
As for “Mrs Hudson,” the old part of her (that old wild violent nature) withered as its sustenance was withheld. At the same time, the new camaraderie, the partnership she found with Mr Holmes and the good doctor—a man who came to share a flat and ended up sharing a life—poured nourishment on a long-forgotten side of Clarissa Hudson.
The process was slow, and uneven, but inexorable. Ten years and four months after pressing the Baker Street key into her hand, her gaoler vanished down the Reichenbach Falls. All the world mourned him. Strangers wore black armbands. The now-married Dr Watson eulogised Holmes as “the best and wisest man” he had ever known.
A week after the death was reported, Billy came to see her, and asked what she intended to do. She knew what he was asking.
“Ah, lad, I’ll stay on here for the present. Mr Holmes’ brother wants the rooms kept. A sort of memorial.”
“He’ll pay?” Billy asked in surprise.
“Apparently so.”
“Funny, he didn’t strike me as the soft-hearted type.”
“His way of grieving, I suppose.”
“If you say so. But will that give you…enough?”
“To live on? Certainly,” she answered firmly. It was not the money that she would miss, it was the excitement. But the thought of returning to a life of Cheats after the years of enforced rectitude proved not as enticing as she would have expected. Maybe she was just getting old, but she had come to like feeling a part of something larger than herself. It was satisfying to use her skills in the service of Mr Holmes and his clients. Mad as it sounded, she enjoyed doing good. And if it came right down to it, she could not imagine betraying Mr Holmes’ trust.
In any event, she wasn’t convinced he was dead.
If her tenant’s brother had permitted her to let out the now-empty rooms in a normal fashion, she might have believed. But Mycroft Holmes was one of the most powerful, unreadable, and frankly terrifying men she had ever encountered: the polar opposite of sentimental.
r /> So she kept her peace, and kept the rooms, and she and Billy remained (doing, if truth be told, the occasional Job for a few of Mr Holmes’ older clients). When Mr Holmes dropped out of a blue sky one April day in 1894, she managed not to clobber him with some household implement, or to faint dead. She did permit herself a course of hysterics.
He even thanked her the next day for crawling about the floor in Baker Street, adjusting the position of his wax bust, set up to tempt an assassin’s bullet. (She was not well pleased when Billy’s replacement, a wise little urchin also called Billy, was called upon to perform the same function in the course of a different case. Holmes, somewhat belatedly, was made to question the wisdom of permitting a child to stick his head into danger.)
A new century began, an old Queen died, and something of the heart went out of London. Mr Holmes’ announcement that he would retire to Sussex, there to pursue the philosophical occupation of beekeeping, brought about a second course of hysterics, this one as much laughter as astonishment. This most London of gentlemen—moreover, a gentleman who was only forty-two years of age—wandering about the sheep-clotted South Downs with silk hat and ebony cane?
However, he was both adamant and close-mouthed when it came to any explanation, and again, she wondered: Did London have too many eyes, perhaps, for the work he had begun to do for his older brother? Was the anonymity of the city working against him, making a train journey to London the price to pay for the security of open countryside?
He never said, not in so many words. And he made it quite clear that he meant what he’d told her all those years before: 221 Baker Street belonged to her, to do with as she liked.
In the end, what she liked was to sell what remained of the lease. She closed the house and sold most of the furniture. Half her profits went to William Mudd, thirty now and with a family and investigation business of his own. Clara Hudson dropped her key through the Baker Street mail slot and turned her back on twenty-two years, exchanging a landlady’s authority and independence for the rôle of housekeeper.
The things she did for this man never ceased to amaze her.
On the even rails of rural Sussex, her life ran for the next twelve years. Her grey hair edged towards white, her step grew stately in fact. In 1914, the Kaiser’s war that had been so long a-building finally broke out.
When 1915 turned on her calendar, not even the sound of guns across the Channel made her anticipate much more excitement in her own life. She would turn fifty-nine in May. The previous year had brought what felt like a final grand adventure in a long and tumultuous life, when she had acted an aged servant to a German spy with such finesse, even Dr Watson had failed to recognise her. With that, she was satisfied. Apart from the occasional disruptions that Mr Holmes would bring, she was content that her life would now drift softly towards its final stages.
That was before she met Mary Russell, and her life took one more abrupt turn.
—
April 8, 1915. Mr Holmes had been in a dreary state for weeks—months—and his housekeeper practically shoved him out of the door that morning into the fresh spring air. “Bees,” she’d ordered. “Go look to your bees.”
To her astonishment, he had.
To her dismay, he did not come back. Hours went by. The sun crept lower, the clock slowed, every tick marking an eternity. She cleaned and scrubbed and tried not to think about how morose the man had been of late, how black his moods, how heavily he had been maltreating his body by starving it and drugging it.
The wave of relief that washed over her on hearing his hand on the latch made her dizzy. The jolt of surprise at seeing his companion made her change.
“Mrs Hudson,” he declared loudly, before even he had cleared the kitchen door, “I’ve brought one of our neighbours home for tea. I trust you have something to put before her?”
Into her kitchen stepped a child, a girl of no more than fifteen years, thin and tall and peculiarly dressed in a man’s hand-me-downs. Her hair was a rich blonde colour beside his grey, her eyes blue instead of his steel, but were one to judge only by posture, the set of the head, and the gaze of the person within, the two might have been blood relations.
To her own astonishment, Mrs Hudson responded as she had not done in years: an Act rose up to claim her, strengthening her vestigial Scots accent, hunching her shoulders into those of a woman well accustomed to a scrub-brush, squinting slightly as if she’d left her glasses somewhere…
Miss Mary Russell walked into their lives, and made them both young again.
Mary Russell, whose blood lay drying across the freshly polished boards of Mrs Hudson’s floor.
Chief Inspector Lestrade walked into the kitchen and held out the knife with the dried blood on it. “Mrs Hudson, are you certain this is Miss Russell’s?”
“Chief Inspector, I told you: it looks like hers, but I do not know that sort of weapon intimately enough to tell one from another. And with the blood…”
“Yes. But when you say—”
Mrs Hudson stood up sharply and began to clatter the delicate cups onto the tray. “Enough. I can say no more until Mr Holmes comes.”
“Why won’t you help me?” he demanded.
“I have helped you, as much as I may without consulting Mr Holmes.”
“Mrs Hudson! There’s a young woman gone, perhaps dead, and you—”
She slammed a cup against the table and it shattered in all directions. “You think I don’t know that? You think I saw the floor and thought, Oh, mercy me, someone has dropped a bottle of preserves?”
Lestrade hastened to retreat before the old woman’s climbing voice broke into sobs. “No, no, I understand, he’s your boss. But he’s not here, is he, and…Mrs Hudson? What have you—oh dear, watch out for—”
He snatched up a tea-towel to catch the blood welling from her finger. She wrapped the wound, then began to gather the porcelain shards.
“I’ll get those,” he said. “Please. Do you have a plaster?”
Without answering, she turned and left the kitchen. As she hunted through the little medical kit for the scissors, she could hear the sounds of porcelain shards dropping into the bin.
When she came back, eyes dry and gauze snugly wrapped around the offending finger (plasters being a bit newfangled for the Holmes household), a different sound drew her attention.
“What is—oh dear Lord, no!” Mrs Hudson bolted towards the sloshing noise in disbelief, to find one of Lestrade’s constables with a bucket, wiping bloody footsteps off the sitting-room floor. Fear and heartache took welcome relief in fury as she stormed across the room to snatch the rag from his hand. “What are you doing?”
The man scrambled to his feet. “I thought—he said…”
She whirled on Lestrade. “Did you order this?”
He eyed the dripping cloth. “I didn’t want—”
“Sir, I—” said the constable.
Mrs Hudson overrode them both. “Did you order this man to clean up the evidence, Chief Inspector? Or did the fool come up with that idea on his own?”
“Mrs Hudson, we have our evidence.” His voice was that of a man well experienced with soothing irrational old women. “We have many photographs.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Take your men and leave.” She looked down at the mess on the floor: all those footprints, all that evidence that Mr Holmes would have flung himself on like a dog on a scent, reduced to a smear. She had not wept at seeing the blood on the floor, but the thought of having failed him brought her near to collapse.
Lestrade nodded at the constable, who went in search of a dry cloth for his hands.
“Mrs Hudson, you really must—”
“Chief Inspector, are you going to arrest me?”
“What?”
“Your father would have,” she said bitterly.
“I think my father would have had more sense than that,” he protested.
“Then you don’t think I…did this?” she demanded, her voice breaking at the last word.
“Of course not!”
“Then go. Please.”
“Mrs Hudson, I need to ask—”
“Sir, I have told you what I know: I came home, I saw this, I telephoned to the police. When Patrick and I left for market this morning, I expected no visitors. So far as I know, neither did Mary. I thought she would be here working when I returned. Your associates have been here for hours and found nothing. Shouldn’t you be out asking the neighbours what they saw?”
“The local men are doing just that. But—Mrs Hudson, what is it you’re not telling me?”
“Oh, Chief Inspector. There are so many things I cannot tell you.”
The small man’s pinched features took on an expression of mingled dread and outrage. “Oh, no. This isn’t something to do with Mr Mycroft Holmes, is it? State secrets and the rest?”
She raised startled eyes. “How on earth should I know that?”
“Well, if it’s not those kinds of secrets you’re keeping, then what?”
“The kind Mr Sherlock Holmes will need to give you himself. Now, please, may I be alone for a while?”
Chief Inspector Lestrade, hauled down from London over the disappearance and possible murder of the wife of Sherlock Holmes, stared at the old lady. The perfect image of the housekeeper, with her trim white hair and her work-worn hands, innocence shouting out from those dark eyes. He might as well arrest Queen Mary.
Lestrade gave up, and grabbed his hat from the rack. “You ring me as soon as Holmes gets here,” he ordered.
“After he and I have spoken,” she corrected.
No point in protesting: the woman had too long a history in the life of Sherlock Holmes to be pushed around. But as he yanked open the front door, her voice came, oddly hesitant. “Sir, once Mr Holmes has seen…You are finished with the room, aren’t you? I can clean, after…”