“Very well, thank you,” said Mary. So Mrs. Hudson and Mrs. Poole went out for tea and shopping! Mary would have liked to be a fly on that wall so she could overhear their conversations. She wondered what they said to each other about the Baker Street and Park Terrace households. “We went to Vienna and Budapest. It was—well, it was an adventure.”
“I’ve never been to Europe myself,” said Mrs. Hudson, “although I traveled with my husband when he was in Her Majesty’s army. We were in Lahore for a while, and then he was posted to Goa. Ah, we were so young! It’s easier to travel when you’re young, I think. You don’t mind the inconveniences so much.”
Mr. Holmes’s residence at 221B looked exactly the way it had the last time Mary had seen it. Books lay scattered over every surface. There was the long table with its scientific instruments, the camera on its tripod sporting a top hat, the shelves of glass jars containing—she scanned them quickly—yes, mostly ears, and she thought back to the monograph Mr. Holmes had been dictating the last time she had seen him. It had focused on the distinctive characteristics of ears and their use in criminal investigation.
“What are we looking for?” asked Diana.
“I’m not sure. Any indication of where Mr. Holmes might be. If he’s on a case, he may have left notes of some sort. He usually makes notes to himself. I’ll start with the desk. Justine, could you start—well, honestly, any place is as good as another. And Diana, could you stay out of the way for a while? Maybe you can sit on the sofa—oh, it’s covered with books. Well, find a place anyway.”
Mary sat down at the rolltop desk, which was spilling over with papers. That was where she usually worked as Mr. Holmes’s assistant, although she had kept it so much neater! However, the papers she could find were simply notes for his monograph and some of her typescripts. At one point she called Diana over to unlock the hidden drawer.
“Easy peasy,” said Diana, putting a thin metal tool of some sort back into a compact leather case filled with similar tools. “See? You want me out of the way until you don’t. What would you do without me?”
“Where did you get that case?” asked Mary, sliding open the drawer.
“It’s the one Irene gave me. Why?”
“I’ve just never seen it before, that’s all. I mean, I’ve seen you pick locks, but I’ve never seen the instruments all together like that. Like some sort of nefarious manicure set!”
“You only see what I want you to see. Anyway, I usually only carry around what I need, but I didn’t know what would be needed this time, did I? Also, what does ‘nefarious’ mean?”
Mary sighed. If only Diana were less annoying! She could be so useful sometimes—and she never failed to point that out or let you forget it!
The hidden drawer held only the photograph of Irene Norton—Irene Adler, as she had been then—that Mr. Holmes had shown her before their European trip, and a stack of letters postmarked from Vienna with the Baker Street address written in violet ink. Those must be from Irene. Mary remembered what Dr. Watson had told her the day they had received Mina’s telegram, as they were hurrying back through Regent’s Park to the Jekyll residence: I believe she was the love of his life. And yet Irene herself had said that she and Sherlock were fundamentally incompatible. Would Mr. Holmes agree with her assessment? And did it even matter? Mary still did not know him as well as she would have liked, but she suspected that he would be perfectly capable of feeling an unrequited passion for many years, like one of those rivers that run deep underground, giving no evidence of its presence—but there nonetheless.
“Don’t misjudge Holmes,” Dr. Watson had once told her when she remarked on the imperturbable way he had approached a brutal murder. “He may seem like a thinking machine, but he is capable of great depth of feeling. When he learned that my wife was dead—that day he appeared again, like a magician’s trick, after his supposed death at Reichenbach Falls—you cannot imagine his kindness and compassion, Miss Jekyll. I assure you, there is more to him than what you see on the surface.” But would she ever see below that surface?
“I have found something.” Mary turned around to see Justine standing at the door to Dr. Watson’s room. “Come look.”
Unlike the parlor, Watson’s bedroom was as neat as a pin, with a narrow cot in one corner, a wardrobe and chest of drawers, and a desk under the window. Everything was folded and tucked away. A wool blanket at the foot of the bed and a pair of boots by the door waited for when their master might need them. Of course, he had once been a soldier. It made sense that he would keep his personal space tidy.
“Here, on the desk,” said Justine. She pointed to the leather blotter—one of the flat kind that covered the desk, rather than a handheld device. The sheet of blotting paper on top was relatively new—there were few marks. But close to one corner was what looked like a list of addresses. Watson’s handwriting was neat, and even backward, Mary could make them out.
“There’s a date on top,” she said. “September 21, a little more than a week ago. Thank goodness Dr. Watson is used to recording Mr. Holmes’s cases so meticulously. He must have written this just before he disappeared. Justine, would you mind copying these down? I’d like to look in Mr. Holmes’s room as well.”
Mr. Holmes’s room! It was so easy to say, but she put her hand on his door with some trepidation. She had never, of course, been in either of the bedrooms before. Dr. Watson’s was impersonal enough that she had felt no compunction in entering. But Sherlock’s room…
She was right to have worried. Everything in that room—the violin in the armchair by the window, the pipe on the bedside table, the slippers under the bed, their heels worn down, spoke of him. The room was a mess. An infernal mess, Mrs. Hudson would probably have called it.
It felt so strange searching through his personal possessions! Looking through the bedside table drawer and in the pockets of his waistcoats and suit jackets in the wardrobe, which was identical to the one in Dr. Watson’s room. She felt as though she were invading his privacy. Would he be angry with her when they met again? But first she had to make sure they would meet again, and that meant finding him. Which meant looking everywhere she could think of for clues as to where he might be.
Here, too, there was a desk, but it contained nothing enlightening. The blotting paper was crisscrossed with fragments of sentences, but none of them seemed to have any bearing on this case. On one corner of the desk was a sheaf of papers entitled Notes for Mary, but they had to do exclusively with ears. Was that, after all, what she meant to him? Was her value simply as a transcribing machine? Mary felt tired and despondent. Pull yourself together, my girl, she thought. It’s almost lunchtime, and you’re getting hungry, that’s all. There’s no time for thinking like that, not right now. Would they find anything at all useful in this mess?
At last, she found something that might be of use—a card in the pocket of his greatcoat, which had been tossed onto a chair. On it was engraved: MR. MYCROFT HOLMES, THE DIOGENES CLUB, and on the back in Mr. Holmes’s handwriting—she had seen it so often that she could pick it out from a hundred others, as she could pick his face out of a crowd—was written: 10 a.m. urgent. Dr. Watson had mentioned that just before Mr. Holmes’s disappearance, he had gone to meet his brother Mycroft. Urgent—that sounded as though he had been summoned for some reason.