The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [91]
ventually it ran its course. I got somewhat shakily to my feet, curiosity coming to the fore. The Storage Room was one of Holmes’ bolt-holes, his handful of small, almost inaccessible hide-aways in unlikely places across London, from Whitechapel to White-hall. Watson had mentioned them in several of his stories, and Holmes had made passing reference to one or another of them in con-versations with me, but I had never actually been inside one.
It was, I found, little more than its name implied, a windowless, stuffy, oddly shaped room providing the most basic necessities of life and a remarkably elaborate amount of equipment for changing identi-ties. Three metal dressmaker’s racks bulging with clothes took up a quarter of the floor space, and an enormous dressing table littered with tubes, pencils, and pots and overhung by a wall-sized mirror sur-rounded by small electrical light bulbs took up another quarter. The kitchen consisted of a stained hand-basin, a minuscule geyser, a gas ring, and two pots. There was one chair, at the desk, a piece that looked to my half-educated eyes like a particularly beautiful Chippen-dale that had spent part of its recent life as a painter’s stool, judging from the varicoloured splashes across the seat and back. The only other furniture was a long sofa, taking up more than its quarter of the room and looking as if it had been hauled up from beneath a bridge somewhere, and a garish Chinese screen behind the “kitchen.” Behind the screen, as I might have suspected, was a water closet, gleaming new and, I soon discovered, remarkably silent.
As I nosed about I began to shed my numerous layers of disguise. The outer clothing I folded neatly to return to Watson, the mummy layers I shoved, plaster and all, into a bin of what I took to be rags be-hind the sofa, and the make-up joined the stains in the hand-basin. My own shirt was hopelessly stuck together by the tape that Holmes had strapped on to change the set of my shoulders, but after a bit of rummaging about in the clothes racks (where I found an evening suit and tweed plus-fours cheek-by-jowl with a linen chasuble, the brocade tunic and trousers of a maharajah, and a stunning scarlet evening dress) I came up with a comfortable embroidered cotton dressing gown and put it on in lieu of the shirt, which followed the mummy strips into the bin.
In the kitchen I found a canister of tea leaves, a pot, and some tins of milk, so I made tea, poured myself a cup (superb bone china, no saucer) and carried it to the dressing table. As I sipped it and sat pok-ing through the objects in and on the table, I was struck by the ex-traordinary fact of the room’s existence. What kind of a man would keep an entire drawer full of moustaches and beards? I thought. Or a shelf of wigs—a bushy redhead, a slicked-down black hairpiece, a woman’s blonde curls—arranged on stands to resemble eerily a row of heads on pikes? Could Holmes actually, honestly consider wearing that evening gown, high-necked though it was? Or the—was it a sari? How many normal men had hair ribbons trailing from their chest of drawers, a collection of well-padded female undergarments, three pair of false eyelashes, two dozen old-school and club ties, and a macabre cigar box filled with sets of false teeth? And even if one overlooked the reason for its existence, how did he manage it? How had he brought that sofa up here without inviting comment, and the mirror? Granted, it was a large and busy building, but did no one notice the occasional unexpected noise from a supply room, the sound of run-ning water at night, the comings and goings of odd characters—some of them very odd indeed? What did Holmes do if, I wondered, while disguised as one of his more unsavoury characters, he were accosted and explanation of his presence demanded of him? The possibilities for comedy of the burlesque variety were greatly appealing, and several vignettes worthy of the lower classes of stage went through my mind. And, my mind continued, who had plumbed in the sink and