Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free Page B

which, as you say,
Queenie does. Then any provisions her father made for her control
of her property would be voided, and her husband would become
conservator. I may be wrong, and Julietta Thorne may in fact be mad
as a hatter, but living apart from her husband may be the only way
she could think of to preserve her liberty until her daughter comes
of age. Hark!”
    For we both hard now the muffled leaden click
of a woman’s step on the pavement. Peering hard through the gloom I
saw nothing, save the blurry smear of the public house lights. Then
a shadow passed them, stooped and small, hurrying.
    I sprang down the steps from the sheltering
doorway, quickened my stride to meet her. I coughed again, and the
little figure stopped, but I could see now that it was Queenie. I
called out, “Julietta,” and she turned her head sharply, startled,
and started to flee—
    And before her, out of the fog, loomed
suddenly the dark shape that I knew was Lionel Thorne.
    “Julietta, run!” I shouted, but Thorne was
too quick for her. He reached her in a stride, caught her arm,
spilling her basket of dolls on the pavement, and in the gaslight
from the pub I saw the flash of steel in his hand. I was running,
too, by this time, and threw myself on the man, shoving against him
with all my strength.
    He staggered, stumbled off the curb. He lost
his grip on the woman and grabbed me instead. I saw the flash of
his knife and dodged, felt the steel tangle in my cloak and grate
on my corset stays. Then the next second Martha was on him,
dragging at his knife hand, and an instant after that the old woman
across the street, suddenly six feet tall and shedding shawl,
bonnet, and identity in a welter of old rags, landed Mr. Thorne
such a blow on the chin with doubled-up fist that Mr. Thorne’s feet
left the pavement, and only connected with it again after the back
of his head did. I heard Mr. Holmes’s unmistakable light voice cry,
“Martha!”
    “I’m all right…”
    Then Holmes was on his knees beside me on the
pavement – I had no recollection of falling, but I was sitting on
the wet flagstones trying to get my breath, with Thorne’s knife
beside me, glittering evilly in the greasy light. “My dear Mrs.
Watson, are you all right?”
    I managed to nod – I actually felt quite
dizzy – and he felt my hands and my face.
    “Is she all right?” asked Queenie’s voice –
Mrs. Thorne’s voice – and I blinked at Holmes, with the long gray
wig of the evil Covent Garden market-woman hanging in unraveled
mare’s tails about his fae and the breath rolling in steam from his
lips. Around us men were shouting as they came out of the pub.
    “Look at this ‘ere pigsticker, then!”
    “By God, it’s Jolly Jack at ‘is tricks again,
I bet!”
    “You all right, mum?” (This to Holmes) “This
lady all right?”
    “This man tried to stab me,” I said, keeping
my vice steady with an effort, and pointing to Mr. Thorne, still
unconscious in the muck of the road. I unfurled the side of my
cloak to show the horrible rent. “Me, and this lady…”
    But Julietta Thorne was gone.
     
    *
     
    It wasn’t until after the Court of Assizes
had remanded her husband to custody – upon my testimony and that of
Tzivia Wolff, Gordon “Ginger” Robinson, and two or three other
peripatetic hawkers of dolls – that Julietta Thorne came to the
Settlement House, and asked me to take her to Baker Street to meet
Mr. Holmes.
    “Of course I was mad,” she said, quite
calmly, once we were seated in Mr. Holmes’s cozy sitting room:
myself, Mr. Holmes, John (who had been spending the evening with
his friend while I was at the Settlement House) and Martha. “What
other word would you use of a girl who insisted upon marrying a man
whom everyone – including her dying father – recognized as a
fortune hunter, selfish, calculating, brutal, and cold? My father
begged me to wait, did everything in his power to get me to swear
on the Testament that I would not marry