A Study in Lavender: Queering Sherlock Holmes Read online

  “Have you found something?” I asked.

  “Indeed I have. I found Bill Chapman.” Holmes rose and dragged his chair over to mine. “You see this article? It’s from February of 1835. Titled ‘Extraordinary Case – A Man-Woman.’ It is the proceedings of a complaint against Bill Chapman for being ‘a common cheat and impostor.’ An inspector ‘stated that although the thing before them, that called itself Bill Chapman, was attired in man’s apparel, he had ascertained that it was a woman.’”

  “But what on earth has that to do with Alice Braddon’s kidnapping?”

  “It is suggestive, don’t you think?”

  “I can’t imagine why. You are sure this is what the ransom note meant?”

  Holmes shrugged. “Well, perhaps not. You will agree that it is singular.”

  “That is a word I might use, yes.”

  Holmes closed the book with a snap. “It’s too late to start tonight, but if you would be so good as to check our Bradshaw, Watson, we’ll be on the first train to Chelmsford in the morning.”

  We stepped off the train the next morning, and I was grateful to breathe in the clear country air. The school was reportedly situated on the edge of town, but Holmes insisted on first visiting the local inns to procure our rooms for the night; he seemed certain that our investigations would last more than one day. I stood silently by while Holmes rejected four of the offered lodgings after a lengthy perusal of each. I knew he had his reasons but I confess I was in the dark as to what they might be. He finally accepted the fifth and we had our bags brought up to our room. The manager’s boy had been putting on his coat to run to the telegraph office, and Holmes sent word down to catch him if he had not yet gone. He had, but Holmes said he had an important wire to send and he was content to wait until the boy returned. After several minutes of pacing around our room, Holmes went down to the manager and asked that he send tea up with the boy when he arrived.

  It was three-quarters of an hour later when there was a soft knock at our door and the boy entered with a full tray. “Your tea, sirs,” he said. “And Mr Hardy said you needed a telegram taken to the station?”

  “Yes,” Holmes said, “It’s right here on the table. Let me just –” As he reached across the tea tray, Holmes knocked over one of the empty cups and it tumbled to the floor and shattered. The boy bent to pick up the pieces while Holmes, looking chagrined, offered his apologies. Then he said, to my confusion, “Incidentally, I’ve spilled lamp oil on my coat. Would you take it down to the manager’s wife and ask her to wash it with lemon juice?”

  “It’s turpentine mixed with fuller’s earth that will take out lamp oil, sir, not lemon juice,” the boy said distractedly, still searching for slivers of china. Suddenly he froze, and Holmes bent and twitched off his cap. Long dark hair fell around his face, and as he backed up, I realized with astonishment that this was no boy – it was a young woman.

  “Miss Alice Braddon, I expect?” Holmes said, with no surprise whatever. “I’m Sherlock Holmes, and this is my friend and associate Dr Watson.” She stood up slowly, clutching the hat to her chest.

  “How did you find me?” she breathed.

  “It was a fairly simple series of inferences,” Holmes said. “The town where you go to school is the only place you would logically go – it is the only place where you would know your way. Searching the local inns for one which employed a messenger boy was the hardest part.”

  “But – my clothes –”

  “If I may say so, Miss Braddon, you succumbed a little to arrogance when you included Bill Chapman in the ransom note. I admit I did not recall the reference at first, but it was only a matter of locating the article. I would of course have looked for a woman dressed as a man after that hint. When I saw you button your coat downstairs, I noticed that you reached for the side with the buttonholes first – the side where, on a woman’s coat, the buttons would be. I needed only to devise a question to which only a woman would know the answer, and find the time to ask you.” Holmes motioned to a chair. “Please, sit down. You did disguise your handwriting admirably. Only an expert could have seen through it.”

  I took my own seat as Holmes motioned for me to do, trying to keep up with the facts as they merged together at what I felt was bewildering speed. Miss Braddon’s round face was smeared with soot – I could not be blamed for mistaking her for a boy – but a rebellious courage shone through her fear.

  “Are you going to send for my parents?” she asked.

  “I would appreciate an explanation first,” Holmes said. “I understand that you wrote the ransom note and left through the window, after smashing the glass and apparently consuming a pomegranate.” Miss Braddon blushed deep red at this. “What I would like to know is why.”

  The young lady’s face did not lessen in colour, but she straightened up with admirable dignity. “My mother and father have made an arrangement for me with a gentleman from Manchester. There is a person that I love very much, with whom, I have been informed, I shall have no further contact after my marriage. I could not accept that.”

  “You must have expected your parents to pay the ransom. What did you plan to do after that?”

  “They could not possibly get the money together so quickly,” she said. She lifted her chin defiantly. “I was going to send another letter tomorrow reporting that the kidnapper had run out of patience and killed me. I would run away and hide in another town, and the police would never find my body. Once they gave up, I could join the one I love and we could live together somewhere far away.”

  I felt cold wash over me, followed by a wave of sickness, and I barely noticed Holmes lean forward. He said something, but I didn’t hear, and I fear I interrupted him when I pushed myself up out of my chair.

  “Oh, my dear young lady, you mustn’t,” I said. My voice sounded desperate in my ears, and from Miss Braddon’s expression, I had startled her considerably. “Please, you mustn’t,” I repeated. “You have no idea what it would do to him to believe you dead, even for a little while.” She looked at me with an uncomprehending pity in her eyes, and I felt as if something tight in my chest – something that had been tight so long I had ceased to notice it – was beginning to unravel. A movement from Holmes caught my attention, a brief tapping of his fingers on the arm of his chair, and when I caught his eyes he met mine for only a fraction of a second before turning back to Miss Braddon. I sat back down slowly and made an effort to rein my voice in. “There must be some alternative,” I said gently to her, “some compromise that will allow you to be together without this deception.”

  The blush was beginning to recede from Miss Braddon’s face, and while she still appeared defensive, she also seemed less certain. “I will not speak with my parents. They cannot understand.”

  “Give us another day, Miss Braddon,” Holmes said suddenly. “Wait before sending the second note. If you will permit me to give you some advice once I complete my investigation, I believe we can help you.”

  “And you won’t tell my mother and father that I’m here? Or the manager that I’m not a boy?”

  “I give you my word.”

  She nodded, then twisted her hair up and replaced the cap. “All right. I agree. But I must go. Mr Hardy will miss me downstairs.” Miss Braddon stood up, looking significantly less like a boy to me than she had, and giving us a wary glance, hurried from the room. I heard Holmes strike a match and draw on a cigarette, and when I looked, he was at the window with his back to me.

  “Something is missing,” he said under his breath.

  I exhaled. “I’m going out.” Holmes gave a vague flick of his hand but no other indication that he’d heard.

  Behind the inn there was a sloping field and at the bottom a lake edged opposite by brush. I walked along the near shore, where a path had been cleared and laid with gravel, and tried to calm the sick feeling within me. I was startled by the strength of my distress. Miss Braddon’s plan had obviously been nothing but the whim of a desperate girl, and yet it ha
d the power to call up something within me I hardly dared to name.

  I heard footsteps crunch on the path and glanced up to see Holmes striding toward me. I confess I was surprised that he even bothered, and shame at my outburst compelled me to speak first.

  “I’m sorry I forgot myself to Miss Braddon, Holmes –” I began.

  “This case has upset you,” he said shortly. “I shouldn’t have brought you along.”

  My temper flared, and I was grateful for the reprieve. “I’m quite capable of looking after myself, thank you.” In earlier days, I would have suppressed my anger, but what reason had I now? Despite the efforts of ten years’ friendship, Holmes’s return had driven deep the knowledge that I had lost his trust completely – if indeed I ever had it – and no protestations of mine could convince him of my worthiness. Alice Braddon had not thought about the consequences of allowing her lover to believe she was dead; one would think that the world’s foremost private consulting detective would have more sense than a seventeen-year-old girl, but in matters of the heart, I had no doubt that even she was his superior.

  “Nevertheless,” he said, “I suspected Miss Braddon might have planned to fake her own death. Perhaps I ought to have told you.”

  “I haven’t expected you to tell me much of anything lately, Holmes. I do know your taste for dramatic revelations.” That earned a reaction from him, at least – a stiffening of the face, no more, but a small victory all the same.

  “We will not let her go through with this,” he said. He flicked his eyes up to mine for a brief moment, then his gaze swept across the lake. “It is not a decision to be made lightly.”

  “I should say not.” Silence fell between us, and I felt that, in spite of all his deductive genius, an explanation for my upset might be necessary. “Holmes,” I said, “I did not mean to react so intensely to Miss Braddon’s plan. The fact is that I truly did not know what to do with myself when you were gone, and whoever this person she loves may be, we must spare him that. I had thought I had a better sense of who I am, but it seems I was wrong. And then, when Mary died…”

  He turned slightly back, and I heard an unfamiliar subdued note in his words. “Then it was even worse.”

  “No, Holmes!” His jaw clenched at the sharpness in my voice, but a horror of misleading him drove me on. “Losing her was not half so hard as losing you! I suppose in some ways that did make it worse. My own wife! And now that you’re back, now that you’ve returned to me, and she hasn’t – she can’t – do you see, if I’d been given the choice between the two of you, I would have it no other way! And the guilt plagues me worse than ever.”

  “Watson.”

  I could not make myself stop, no matter what discomfort it brought him. “And even now, when I’m living the impossible, as if this is some dream I’m still terrified I’ll wake from, after weeks of knowing it’s reality – even now, you do not trust me. I suppose it’s what I deserve for preferring your company over Mary’s, but I had hoped –”

  “Watson,” he repeated, and took me by the shoulders. His expression stopped my breath in my lungs, and I thought incongruously that he had not held me this hard even when I fainted upon first seeing him again. “Verner is my cousin.”

  All of my thoughts abruptly collided in confusion. “What?”

  “Verner. He is my cousin. Well, technically he is my great-uncle’s grandson by marriage, but it’s easier to call him my cousin.”

  I waited for my brain to catch up with this latest leap. “Your –” Verner, the man to whom I’d sold my practice at such an extraordinarily high price only a few weeks ago, freeing me to return. “Your cousin?”

  “Yes,” Holmes said, and I felt his grip loosen. He dropped his hands and said, with a little shrug that almost seemed uncertain, if indeed Sherlock Holmes has ever felt uncertain: “I knew no one else who was interested in medicine. In fact, I didn’t know he was until I made enquiries… I had always thought he was a poet.”

  “A poet?” I repeated, and dimly wondered if this revelation had rendered me incapable of anything but echoing.

  “Ye –” And in the middle of that word, the light came into Holmes’s eyes that I will forever associate with genius. He smiled with unabashed triumph. “The poetry, Watson. The last detail. Miss Braddon’s lover, for whose feelings you were so concerned, is no dashing young gentleman. It is her teacher. It is a woman.” He swung around back toward the inn, and I had no choice but to follow, bewildered. “I should have thought of it the moment I saw the books on her desk, and certainly when I discovered the Bill Chapman connection. I have been blind indeed. But then it is quite out of the ordinary.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, jogging to catch up with his long-legged strides. “What poetry?”

  “Sappho,” said Holmes. “I trust you are familiar with her?”

  “Of course,” said I. The ancient Greek poet of Lesbos, a patron of love between women. I had a hard time seeing the point, anxious as I was to continue our conversation, but then something occurred to me. “If the Braddons knew, Holmes, that could be a motive behind the marriage.”

  “Another motive besides money, you mean,” Holmes said, and smiled again at my confusion. “Surely you noticed that Mrs Braddon took off her glove before shaking our hands. So meticulous a lady would never have done so if her gloves had been new. The rug beneath the window in her daughter’s room was also nearly threadbare, and the pattern matched that of the sitting room curtains. The Braddons clearly have need of making the most of their furnishings and cannot redecorate entire rooms at once.”

  We hailed a cab once we got up to the street and arrived at the school in less than a half hour. Although the students were home on holiday, we were informed that the teachers stayed in their lodgings year-round, and we were promptly shown to Miss Henderson’s rooms.

  The young lady who opened the door was fresh-faced, fair-haired, and willowy. When we introduced ourselves, she appeared to recognize our names, and what our presence implied showed clearly on her face. She invited us in with a graciousness tempered by anxiety.

  “We have found Alice Braddon alive,” Holmes said, the moment we were inside her sitting room and away from anyone who could possibly overhear. Miss Henderson sighed with relief, and when she smiled I realized just how distressed she had been – the difference was striking.

  “Have you apprehended her kidnapper?”

  “Miss Henderson,” Holmes said, “I will be frank with you, but please understand that you will be one of four people who know the truth – Watson, myself, and Alice Braddon are the others. Miss Braddon was never kidnapped. She wrote the ransom note, disguised herself as a boy, and came to Chelmsford with the intention of fabricating a story that she’d been murdered. She planned, as far as I can tell, to come to you once things had blown over and presumably live with you.”

  Throughout this explanation, I watched Miss Henderson’s expression change from disbelief to resigned determination. While she seemed shocked at first, I read in her eyes that such rash measures were not outside the realm of possibility for Miss Braddon.

  “You have not told her parents?” she asked.

  “No. I had the feeling that another person figured heavily into the equation: the person Miss Braddon referenced as the one she loved. I wanted to speak to this person before proceeding. Am I wrong to conclude that the person she loves is you?”

  Miss Henderson looked away, but I saw no shame in her face – only, again, resignation. “You are not wrong,” she said. Then, twisting her hands in her lap, she smiled ruefully and went on: “I should not be surprised, and I should not have been as worried as I was. Alice was forever talking about how easy things would be for her if she ran away and lived with me. I never dreamed she was serious. I suggested that she could come here to teach; we could be together that way. But then her parents arranged for her to marry…and there was nothing more I could do.” There was such a sad, patient acceptance in her voice and manner that I found my
self hurting on her behalf.

  “We believe the marriage is what moved her to act when she did,” Holmes said. Miss Henderson shook her head.

  “That isn’t all of it. We have known about her marriage for some time. I had the unfortunate news last week that my position here has been eliminated; attendance is down and they have no need for three teachers of writing. I am the least experienced, and I have displeased the headmaster with my choice of curriculum in the past. I am to leave for Spain in a month to take a position at my uncle’s boarding school.”

  “I see,” Holmes said softly. “Her motivation was even stronger, then.” He leaned back in his chair, his fingers pressed against his mouth and his brow furrowed. He sat that way for several minutes while I attempted to find some words of comfort for Miss Henderson and failed miserably. Finally, Holmes stood and began to pace back and forth between us. “What I am about to suggest is unconventional to say the least, but I cannot see any other road to a happy outcome. If you were to take Miss Braddon with you to Spain, would there be a position for her at this school you mention?”

  “I suppose so, yes,” Miss Henderson said, taken aback. A new light of hope kindled in her eyes.

  “I believe I can convince her not to send the planned letter to her parents informing them of her ‘death.’ If she goes with you to Spain, could you persuade her to write to them of her safety in a few months?”

  “Yes, I believe I could.”

  “Then that is what you shall do.” Holmes picked up his hat and moved toward the door, and I rose to follow him.

  “Mr Holmes, how can I possibly thank you –”