Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [12]
“Does it, indeed?” Holmes had crossed the room to the most recent of his scrapbooks, and the newspapers piled on top of it, sorting through the headlines of the past week with swift sureness, as if he knew exactly what he sought, which indeed he did. “I thought this sounded familiar,” he remarked in a moment, and extricated the York Evening Star from three-quarters of the way down the stack. “Robert Lewensham, Viscount Mure — h’rm — heir to the Earl of Wylcourt — born 1885 — police are seeking gypsies — believed to have vanished on the Yorkshire fells three miles from the village of Kethmure — bird-watching — blue jacket, blue cap — A shocking paucity of detail.” He plucked out another newspaper, handed it to me, got another for himself.
I’d worked with John enough to know what Holmes sought, and located the follow-on article without trouble. “They add little,” I ventured, after scanning the columns. “They do say, Bobbie disappeared on the ninth—” I looked at the date of the paper in my hands, then turned, shocked, to Holmes. “Is the paper you have the day before this one?”
Holmes nodded, regarding me again with that questing speculation in his eyes. “So the papers — and presumably, the police — didn’t learn of it until the twelfth. Either the boy’s guardians are singularly neglectful, or they had some reason to believe him safely elsewhere for two days. This last time, did Bobbie say he’d been visiting anywhere?”
“Bobbie never visits anywhere,” replied Peter promptly. “He goes to school in the city, and when he’s at his home he’s alone.” For the first time since I’d known him, Peter’s voice had a note of real distress in it, of concern, not that he, Peter, was being accused of kidnapping children from the real world, but that his friend was somewhere in trouble. And that his friend lived the sort of life that he, Peter, had all his existence fled.
When he’s at home he’s alone. There was a dismal world of Mrs. Cleggery in those six words.
“Most interesting.” Holmes pulled another scrap-book from the overflowing shelves. “Do the fairies often get lost on the fells?”
Peter nodded. “Mostly they find their way back at dawn. Ten Stars’s cousin Cloverberry’s just a little fairy, though, barely more than a bud, and you know how fairies are. Ow—!” he added, because Ten Stars, who was sitting on Holmes’ desk blotter, indignantly threw a collar-button at him. “I met him when I was looking for Cloverberry.”
“And is this place near a ring of stones?” From between the pages of the scrap-book Holmes extracted one of his vast collection of Ordnance Survey maps, and spread it on the desk. Craning to look over his shoulder, I saw Wylcourt Hall marked, and the village of Kethmure.
“In the middle of one,” affirmed Peter. He couldn’t keep out of his voice the awed surprise of one who sees magic done. A small circle within two miles of Wylcourt Hall was labeled, Stone Circle — Fairies’ Dance.
“And the boy’s father has hired wizards to find him. Well, well.” From the bottom drawer of his desk — the locked one where he keeps certain poisons and lists of names — Holmes brought out a thick, much-dog-eared notebook with a scribbled paper label on it, SPIRITUALISTS — THEOSOPHISTS. Prior to his journey to Tibet, Mr. Holmes had compiled a catalog of known frauds and fake adepts in matters occult, the way he compiled catalogs of every other sort of criminal and confidence trickster he heard of: details cross-referenced in his mind.
Yet he had returned from those years of travel with a different outlook than he had taken out of England with him. And he had never, even when I first met him, been a close-minded man. I knew — not from John, to whom he never mentioned it, but from Martha Hudson — that Holmes had continued his catalog with the names given him by his various contacts in that portion of knowledge that lies along the boundary between the world we know and the