Page 74 of A Study in Scarlet Women
Her voice was hard.
Inspector Treadles rose and inclined his head. “Thank you, my lady. That will be all.”
“Breathe in,” Mrs. Watson ordered.
Charlotte sucked in hard. Mrs. Watson yanked on the laces of her corset. On Sherlock Holmes’s supposed sickbed lay a tangle of scarlet and gold silk, the blouse, skirt, and scarf of theghagra cholithat she had just taken off. With Mrs. Watson tying the corset laces, Charlotte stepped into her petticoats and peeked at the street below from behind the curtain.
She had been followed from the Holmes house to 18 Upper Baker Street, she was fairly certain of that. But now there was no one—and no carriages—loitering below.
The doorbell rang just as she finished dressing. Charlotte put the pile ofghagra choliinto an armoire and took a seat in the parlor; Mrs. Watson went down to open the door for Mrs. Marbleton.
Her inquiry had been one of the earliest Sherlock Holmes responded to.
Dear Mr. Holmes,
I am concerned for my husband.
Mr. Marbleton writes twice a day when he is away. If he feels postal services are too slow, he cables in addition. And anytime circumstances permit, he telephones, in spite of my protest that it is hardly the thing to do for the lady of the house to stand in a passageway and shout her more tender sentiments for all to hear.
I have not heard from him in thirty-six hours. Instead, a strange letter bearing no return address has come. I cannot puzzle out what it is trying to tell me: The sentences make sense, but why would anyone think that I have the remotest interest in animal husbandry?
The letter is typed, on plain paper. I enclose a replica I have made of this letter in the hope that you may be able to advise me.
Yours,
Mrs. C. B. Marbleton
Charlotte had written back immediately.
Dear Mrs. Marbleton,
I am very sorry to hear about your husband. Although I cannot ascertain his whereabouts, I can tell you something of the note you received.
The text, while coherent, has no significance. However, by examining the punctuation—namely the hyphens and the full stops—it emerges that the letter contains a message in Morse code.
Decoded, it says Call for me at general.
Should you have further need of my service, you are welcome to call upon 18 Upper Baker Street at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon.
Your servant,
Sherlock Holmes
And now Mrs. Marbleton had arrived, a woman who had been without news of her husband for more than seventy-two hours, when she normally heard from him several times a day when he was away.
She was pale and tense, but otherwise willowy and handsome, a woman in her forties, her visiting dress of an elegant simplicity that Livia would have much lauded. Pleasantries were exchanged. Charlotte gave the by now standard speech concerning her “brother” in the next room. Mrs. Marbleton, with hands clutched tightly together in her lap, tendered her best wishes for Mr. Holmes’s health.
Charlotte let the silence that followed linger for a few seconds before she asked the by now also standard question, “Would you like to know for certain that Sherlock’s powers of observation and deduction are very much intact?”
“I was at the General Post Office this morning and retrieved a letter meant for me. I have been plentifully assured of Mr. Holmes’s mental acuity,” said Mrs. Marbleton, already holding out the letter. “Would he mind taking a look at this new one?”
This letter was not typed. Instead it was pasted with individual letters—letters cut out from books, rather than newspapers, judging by the thickness of the paper. The text praised the material and workmanship of boots cobbled by a Signor Castellani of Regent Street.
“I already asked around,” said Mrs. Marbleton. “There is no establishment by that name or owned by anyone of that name. I checked for the hyphen-and-full-stop code from the previous letter, which didn’t appear to be the case. I also tried using the crossbarson the t’s and the dots on the i’s, to see whether it was a variation on a theme—that doesn’t appear to be the case either.”
She’d spoken in a near monotone, as if regurgitating facts that had nothing to do with herself. But Charlotte heard the quaver in her voice, the fear and anguish.
She made the usual pilgrimage to “Sherlock’s” bedroom. Mrs. Watson, seated inside, looked almost as tormented as their client. Had news of Surgeon-Major Watson’s death reached her in a state of unsuspecting naivety, or had she been dreading that terrible confirmation for days on end?
