Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free

boy
not much more than nine.
    In a lower voice, as if fearing that his
friends would hear his admission of fright, he added, “He was a bad
man, Mrs. W. I couldn’t see much of his face, but there was
somethin’ about him, about the way he moved, like he’d as soon hit
you as not… I seen men like that afore. The way he handled her,
like as if she as a dead cat, not a woman at all. And I dursn’t
laugh. I don’t know what he wanted with Mrs. Wolff, but for a
minute I was afeared…”
    He shook his head, not saying what he was
afraid he would see.
    “I’m glad she was all right. That all he
wanted was a look at her.” Then, “You won’t tell Mrs. Wolff it was
me as pinched ‘er box? It’s a crackerjack box.”
    “It is indeed, Ginger,” I said. “And you know
how badly she needs the money she’ll make selling it. It will make
her very happy to have it returned, for she put many hours’ work
into it, and it may make a difference between her having a little
coal to burn at night, or going cold. I’ll tell her I found it by
the dustbins behind the Fish and Ring.”
    “Narh!” protested Ginger indignantly. “Wot’d
you be doin’ by the Fish an’ Ring, Mrs. W.? Tell ‘er I found it,
an’ gave it to you.”
    Like Mr. Sherlock Holmes, Ginger had a
feeling for the likeliness of a story.
     
    *
     
    So troubled was I by this bizarre tale that
when the cab came for me, I went, not to Kensington, but to Baker
Street. As I gazed at the raveled blobs of yellow gaslights through
the thickening fog I could not say what it was about Ginger’s tale
that frightened me, for no harm to anyone had actually been done,
but frighten me it did. Martha must have seen it in my face when
she opened the door for me – either that, or simply the fact that I
seldom came calling unannounced by letter at that hour – because
she asked at once, “What is it?”
    I said, “Is Mr. Holmes in?”
    She shook her head, and repeated, “What’s
happened, dear? Your hands are frozen,” and led me back to the
kitchen for some tea. “Mr. Holmes is out,” she continued, as she
sat me down in the kitchen by the stove. My hands were indeed
frozen, and I had begun to cough. “He’s been coming and going at
odder and odder hours, slipping out through the kitchen as often as
not. He startled that pea-brained Alice nearly out of her shoes the
other night, creeping in dressed as the vilest old Chinese
scoundrel. I told him he was lucky I hadn’t set a dog on him.”
    But she smiled as she said it. In his tales,
John generally underrated Martha’s intelligence, even as he was
completely oblivious to her beauty, and to the fact that she was
barely a year older than myself. I don’t think he ever did realize
that the reason Mr. Holmes never looked at other women was because
Holmes and Martha had been lovers for years.
    “So you have no idea when he’ll be back?”
    “No. He didn’t come in last night…” Her face
clouded with the worry that she was able most of the time to push
aside. “I suspect someone has been watching the house – watching
his movements. So there is no telling.” She brought the honey pot
to the table to spoon some into my tea, and as she did so I moved
my bag aside. It tilted over, the shift in its position causing the
little Columbine doll to poke her head out over the rim. Martha
startled, nearly spilling the tea, and asked, “Where had you
that?”
    “Columbine?” I took her out of the bag and
set her against the sugar bowl, then looked up into Martha’s face.
“What is it?”
    She signed me to remain where I was and left
the kitchen; I heard her footsteps on the seventeen steps up to the
floor above. In a few moments she was back, carrying Columbine’s
twin sister. Round-faced, enigmatically smiling, silk-floss hair
braided in an elaborate chignon of the sort that had been popular
about ten years ago…
    “One of Mr. Holmes’s clients brought this
here this afternoon,” she said. “Her mother