A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [69]
He was, of course, annoyed at his wild-goose chase after a pen that had fallen into the folds of a notebook, and he drove me in silence to Isabella's boardinghouse.
I climbed the stairs to my cheerless room and closed the door gratefully behind me. I shrugged off my damp coat and was arranging it over a chair and considering the effort of asking for a measure of coal to make a fire, when I heard a gentle knock. Billy stood there, holding out to me a wad of what looked like used butcher's paper that had been rolled, flattened, and folded.
"Letter for you, from a gentleman."
"A letter? Not a telegram?" I was astonished— I had received exactly five letters from Holmes in the eight years I had known him. (Holmes' chief method of distance communication was through brief telegrams, preferably so cryptic as to be unintelligible. One such had contained a deliberate misspelling that was corrected along the way by some conscientious telegraphist, thus rendering the message totally meaningless.)
"Not for you. A couple for me to send for him— one to Inspector Lestrade about a Jason Rogers, another for Mr Mycroft Holmes, something about sending a brown suit to be cleaned."
Which could mean, I realised, some prearranged code— All is known, must fly— or could mean merely that the brown suit wanted cleaning. I took the wad of paper apprehensively. "I'm glad he finally surfaced, if briefly. You saw him, then?"
"I did, for two minutes as he changed trains. He told me to say he was sorry he couldn't come tonight but that he'd see you tomorrow night."
"I'll believe that when I see him. How did he look?"
Billy hesitated, his worn face searching for words. He had begun life on the hardest of London streets, employed and fostered by Holmes, and though he was quick, he was not an educated man. He finally settled for: "Not himself, if you know what I mean. Of course, he was wearin' them old things and hadn't shaved, but he looked tired, too, and stiff. Not all an act."
"Hardly surprising. I hope he gets a proper bed tonight. Thank you for this." I held up the flattened scroll.
"He said you might want me to take it to someone else later. If you do, I'll be home." He jerked his thumb to indicate the room across the hall. I thanked him again and closed the door, put hat and gloves and shoes in their places, and poured myself a small brandy, which I took with the letter to the chair next to the window. I raised my eyebrows at his first paragraph.
My dear Russell,
I write this hurriedly on, as you will no doubt have noted, a train car whose underpinnings have seen better days. The information it contains may be of use to you, but the presentation of that information is of value to me: I find myself in the singularly vexing position of possessing a series of facts which, as you know, I habitually review aloud and put into order, even if my audience is no more responsive than Watson often was. However, you are off on your own track, Watson is in America somewhere, and I haven't time to wait about for Mycroft or Lestrade. Hence the letter. I should prefer to have the patterns reflected either by your perception or Watson's lack thereof; however, a stub of lead pencil and this unsavoury length of butcher's paper will have to suffice. (From the expressions on the faces of my compartment mates, none of them has ever before witnessed the miraculous generation of the written word. I shall attempt not to be distracted.)
First to the information: I successfully ingratiated myself into the employ of Mrs Rogers by the approach