Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free Page A

made it, her mother who
disappeared six years ago…”
    “Mrs. Thorne? John told me.” I set the two
dolls side by side on the table. The older twin’s clothes were
brighter, the laces new and the beads and buttons more expensive,
but the same hand had beyond any shadow of doubt wrought both. We
looked at each other, baffled and shaken. It was Martha who
said,
    “He’s looking for her.”
    “Her husband?” Into my mind sprang the image
of a big bespectacled man ‘with a beard like a holly bush,’ bending
over a helpless woman in an alley, holding a candle to her
face.
    He was a bad man , Ginger had said. Like he’d as soon hit you as not. I was afraid …
    Martha jerked the bell to summon Billy from
his room in the basement, and went to get her cloak.
    We did not have as complete a case as Mr.
Holmes might have required, to leap into a cab and take action –
but both of us knew that something unwholesome and dangerous was
going on.
    As the cab rattled through the pitch-dark
streets in choking fog, I related to Martha what Ginger had told
me. “It sounds as if Mr. Thorne has been roving the streets in
disguise for weeks, approaching any woman selling dolls – and
goodness knows there are many – to get a close look at her. Though
how he’d know his wife was selling dolls about the East End, and
why she would be doing such a thing… Unless she really is insane,
as he claims.”
    “Mr. Holmes guessed she was still in London,”
said Martha. “How, I do not know. It may be Thorne who has been
following him, or trying to. His efforts to come and go in secret
began soon after Mr. Thorne first came with Miss Thorne to ‘help
with the case.’”
    “Or it could be Thorne’s confederate,” I
said. And I told her about the hook-nosed market woman who had
watched me so closely when I spoke to Queenie at Covent Garden that
afternoon. “If she saw me speaking with Queenie – and Mr. Thorne
could easily have seen me here, that day I came to visit – his
confederate will have told him of it.”
    The jarvey shook his head over leaving us in
Marigold Walk, which is one of those dreary, narrow alleys leading
away from the docks, where the houses lean against one another like
the wounded of some endless war and the shadows seem to eat the
feeble glim of the gaslights. But we could not be sure when Queenie
would return. A public house on the corner spilled ochre blotches
of glare on the wet pavement, and though Martha and I agreed that
at last resort, we would take refuge there, we both resolved to
wait in the dark doorway of Queenie’s dirty lodging for a time. Not
even the usual complement of drunken sailors, ragpickers, coal
heavers, and costers roved the chilly streets; only one old woman
staggered along the opposite pavement, singing of Anne Boleyn’s
ghost in a thin, scratchy wail. It was past eleven, and only the
occasional wet clop of hooves from the Dock Road, and the dim
musical clank of rigging blocks in the docks themselves, carried to
us through the murk.
    I coughed, and drew my cloak more rightly
around me. John would never let me hear the end of it, if I came
down sick again from this. “Mrs. Thorne has been missing for six
years now,” I said after a time. “Why would her husband only begin
to seek her now?”
    “He made inquiries for her in Europe before
this,” returned Martha quietly. “But her daughter was fifteen when
Julietta Thorne fled…”
    I shivered, remembering my one fleet glimpse
of Lionel Thorne’s harsh face. I remembered, too, the fear in
Ginger’s eyes when he spoke of the bearded man bending over the
unconscious woman in the alley. “Do you think she is in fact
insane, as he says?”
    “When a man says a woman is insane,” said
Martha, her soft alto voice dry, “what he often means is that she
will not do as he bids. It is fatally easy for a husband to have a
wife declared insane on no other word than his own, particularly if
she has any other eccentricity of manner,