A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [5]
“I expect you came to ask me to marry you.”
I nearly fell off the back of the cab.
“Holmes! What do you… How can you…” I sputtered to a halt. In front of me, the speaking vent in the roof of the cab was rising, and in a moment I could see two sets of eyes, dimly illuminated by the carriage lights and a passing streetlamp. One set was topped by a bowler, the other by a frippery gobbet of flowers, and they passed over us like two pair of roving spotlights, apprehensively examining the two men who were carrying on this lunatic dialogue above their heads.
Holmes lifted his hat and gave them a genial smile. I waggled the brim of my own and gave what I felt to be a look of criminal idiocy, but was apparently only slightly disconcerting. They stared between the reins at us, mouths agape.
“Sumfing Oi can do fer you, sir?” Holmes asked politely, his voice sliding down towards the Cockney.
“You can explain the meaning of this extraordinary conversation which my wife and myself have been forced to overhear.” He looked like a schoolmaster, though his nose was dark with broken capillaries.
“Conversation? Oh yes, sorry, Oi’s‘pose it sounded sumfing mad.” Holmes laughed. “Amatoor dramatics, sir. There’s a club of us, rehearses parts whenever we come across one another. It’s an Ibsen play. Do you know it?” The heads shook in unison, and the two looked at each other. “Fine stuff, but taken out of context, like, it sounds summat potty. Sorry we disturbed you.” The eyes studied us dubiously for another long moment, then looked again at each other, and the hats sank slowly back into the cab. Holmes began to laugh convulsively in complete silence, and reluctantly I joined him. Some minutes later, he wiped his face with his filthy gloves, snapped the horse back to its trot, and took up a completely different topic.
“So, Russell, this gentleman and his lovely wife are going to number seventeen Gladstone Terrace. Kindly search your memory and tell me where it is to be found.” It was an examination, and out of habit, I reviewed my mental picture of the area.
“Another nine streets up, on the left.”
“Ten streets,” he corrected me. “You forgot Hallicombe Alley.”
“Sorry. This is getting far out for my knowledge of the map. I admit that one or two of the areas we’ve been through I’ve never seen before.”
“I should think not,” he said primly. Holmes tended to recall his Victorian attitudes and my gender at the oddest times—it always took me by surprise.
Holmes drew to a halt on a deserted side street and our passengers scurried for the shelter of their dark terrace house, not even waiting for the change from their coin. Holmes shouted a thanks at the closing door; his voice bounced off the disapproving bricks and scuttled off into the night.
“Jump down and get the rug, will you, Russell?”
When we were settled with the thing around our knees, he flicked the reins and the horse circled us back into the main road. We took a different route for our return to the stables, through streets even darker and dirtier than those we had come by. I was enjoying myself again, half-drowsing despite the continuous jolts, when Holmes spoke.
“So, Russell, what say you? Have you a question for me?”
It is difficult to pull away from a man when the two of you are compressed shoulder-to-shoulder and wrapped in a rug, but I managed.
“Come now, Russell, you are a great proponent of the emancipation of women; surely you can manage to carry out your intentions in this little matter.”
“Little?” I seized on the word, as he knew I would. “First you place the proposition in my mouth, and then you denigrate it. I don’t know why I even—” I bit back the words.
“Why you thought of it in the first place, is that what you were about to say?”
Before I could respond, a fast blur shooting out of a dark alley brought Holmes to his feet, nearly knocking me from my perch. A black shape was at the heels of the horse, snarling and snapping with a flash of white teeth as it