The Adventure of the American Heiress

what if...

"Twenty years before, with Victoria on the throne, an alliance
such as Holmes and I forged - close, underchaperoned, and not even
rendered safe by the bonds of blood - would have been unthinkable."
Laurie R. King - The Beekeeper's Apprentice

April 1895

"Quiet, you stupid girl !" my aunt screeched, lashing out at me with her hand, unfortunately the one covered in gaudy rings.

I jumped back, barely missing the blow meant for my face. (Hadn't that diamond been my mother's?) Never had my horrible aunt's temper reached such an extent.

"Go away," she continued, her voice still dangerously high-pitched. "I don't want to see your miserable face for a long while. How dare you contest me!"

Although I was not afraid of what she would do if I remained, I left her sight with all the speed I could muster.

Alone in my cramped room, I decided that this was the last straw. My aunt's treatment of me for the last five months since I had arrived in England after my parents' deaths was below that of a slave. She acted as though I were an insect to be squished or a bacteria to be eradicated. Tomorrow I would go to London and see someone who could put a stop to my aunt's brutality. Hopefully, this person would also get rid of her as well.

After grabbing some stale biscuits for breakfast, I left my farmhouse in Sussex (indeed it was mine, my aunt merely lived with me) early in the morning, so that no one would see me and tell my aunt, who would no doubt try to stop me from going to London. With my entire allowance for the month, I barely had enough money to buy a ticket to Victoria Station and for another ticket to ride the Underground to my destination. When I emerged from the tunnels beneath the sprawling city, I saw the populace hurrying around either looking for shelter or using umbrellas.

Just my luck. I had to come to London on a day with pouring rain. Without, I must add, an umbrella.

Knowing that I was not far from my destination, I set off down the street, walking as fast as I could in my too-small shoes (the main reason of the argument with my aunt the night before; my feet, and the rest of my body, were growing at an alarming rate) . No one noticed me, as they all had their heads beneath hats or umbrellas, and nearly all were looking down at their feet. These city dwellers seemed to live in their own little worlds.

Every so often, I would glance up at the house numbers until I found the building I wanted. It was a fairly conventional white London house, not unlike the others around it. Even through its blatant normality, I could feel strange currents arising from the very walls of the building. Suddenly, I was filled with anxiety and had to force myself to ring the bell.

Scarcely a moment later, the door was opened by a middle-aged woman with greying hair who was wearing a demure black dress, reminding me of Queen Victoria, except this woman had a far kinder demeanor. She took one look at me and threw open the door, ushering me into the warm, dry house.

"Come in, child," she exclaimed, surprise in her slightly accented voice (I believed at the time that it could be from any of the northern counties, but found later that it was, in fact, Scotland). "You'll catch your death standing out in the street like that."

So I ended up in a perfectly clean hallway, dripping gallons of water onto the highly-polished floor. On one side of the hall, there was a passage to the rest of the house, from which I could smell fresh cooking. Beside this passage was a staircase to the upper floors.

"You'll be here to see Mr. Holmes, I suppose," she said, taking my hat and placing it on the hall rack to dry. "I show you up to where he receives visitors."

"Yes, I am," I managed to stammer as she led me up a set of stairs.

At the top, she opened a door to reveal a comfortable and very masculine sitting room, cluttered with artefacts of dubious and mysterious origin.

"I'm sorry to tell you that he isn't in right now, miss," continued the woman, whom I deduced to be the long-suffering Mrs. Hudson. "He left early this morning and hasn't yet returned, but I believe he should be back soon." She looked at my thin frame with an emotion bordering on pity. "Would you like some tea? I made some scones not an hour ago."

My stomach rumbled a reply before I had the chance. Tea by itself was nice, but scones along with it were a delight. "Indeed I would, madam," I replied. " It's kind of you to offer."

She nodded, her glance roaming to the pile of newspapers beside one of the chairs.

"A strange one, that Mr. Holmes is," she muttered, sounding as though it were an old argument with her better judgement as to why she had taken such an abnormal boarder. Then she turned back at me with a smile. "Hopefully, he'll be able to help you in some way, miss. I'll be right back with the tea."

She exited the room, leaving me a few moments to explore the lodgings of the great consulting detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. I had, of course, read all the stories published to date; even though it meant "borrowing" them from the housekeeper's grandson because my aunt wouldn't let me read such "un lady-like pieces of rot which couldn't even be called literature". But his Baker Street rooms showed far more than all of the stories put together ever could.

Everything in that room - from the Persian slipper hanging from the mantlepiece to the partially-hidden photograph of a bejewelled woman, presumably the infamous Irene Adler - revealed a man of focussed intellect and fierce passions who would go great lengths to get whatever he wanted. From what I saw in his sitting room within that short period of time, Sherlock Holmes was not a man to be crossed. Had he chosen to become a master thief, I daresay he could have stolen the necklace off the queen herself without anyone noticing. Had he become an actor, his greatest roles would have included Iago, Richard III, and Hamlet.

I stood by the mantlepiece, trying to make out the painting hanging on the wall above. It seemed to be a waterfall in a mountainous area. Perhaps it was that waterfall in Switzerland that the newspapers wrote of four years before - the place where Mr. Holmes supposedly had died, along with the villainous Professor Moriarty, by falling into an abyss.

Dr. Watson's stories were rather behind in that fact. I was extremely curious how he would treat Holmes' death when most everyone knew the man was alive and in London.

My reverie was interrupted by the rattling of tea things in the hall. Mrs. Hudson entered the room, humming to herself a cheerful tune.

"Here you are, miss," she said brightly. "The tea will warm you up right away."

I thanked her sincerely (after only stale biscuits and not much of a supper the night before, I was rather famished), having to force myself not to grab one of those heavenly-looking scones and gobble it down in seconds. While she poured me a cup of tea, I sat down in a well-worn chair beside the fireplace, which was heartily burning, in hope of drying off.

After straightening up some pillows on the sofa and flicking a feather duster at some of the bookshelves, she left with a smile at me as I bit into a scone. Alone once more with my thoughts, I looked around the room again. The violin (a Stradivarius, if I recalled properly) on the chair across from me was in pristine condition and obviously well cared for by its owner. A set of bookshelves behind the facing chair was filled with books of various types, from Crimes of Passion in 18th century Italy to The Thought of Goethe.

Setting down my teacup, I stood and walked over to a desk by the window. It was messily covered in sheafs of paper, which were in turn covered with neat, precise, handwriting. From the look of it, Mr. Holmes was at work on a monograph of some significance. But my eyes were distracted from the papers by the slightly open drawer beneath them.

Curiosity overtaking propriety, I silently and carefully pulled open the drawer. The inside was as cluttered as the rest of the desk, but the item on top caught my attention right away. After realizing what it was, I quickly shut the drawer and hurried back to the chair by the fireplace, shivering slightly, although not from the damp.

I had always thought the "seven-percent solution" was merely something from the stories that didn't apply to the man in real life. Perhaps it was naive of me to think in such a way (I was only seventeen), but never in my life had I met anyone who willingly took narcotics in order to keep themselves from getting bored. I could understand using morphine, or opium even, for pain, but to use cocaine as a diversion from the monotony of real life?

The temptation to leave this place suddenly increased. How could I trust a drug addict - as he most surely was from the looks of that hypodermic needle in its case beside a half-full container of a clear liquid that could only be that infamous dilution of cocaine - to solve my problem?

I was just in the act of putting on my not-to-neatly-mended cotton gloves when the door to the sitting room opened and a man entered. He was very tall, easily two or three inches above six feet, but that was all I could properly ascertain because he was most unusually dressed. Instead of the neat city suit I had expected, this man wore the clothes of the lowest of labourers: filthy grey trousers, an equally filthy blue jacket, a cap that looked as though it had been run over a number of times by carriages, and around his neck was a red bandanna that looked more than partially moth-eaten.

Upon seeing me, the man stopped in his tracks. His eyes flashed intelligence for a moment, then became bland. "Sorry, miss," he apologized with the accents of a dock-worker. "Didn't know anyone t'were 'ere."

If it hadn't been for that momentary flash of intelligence, I'd have never known it was the great detective standing before me. With a shy smile, I stood and played the part of an innocent girl in order to see his reaction.

"Oh, sir," I exclaimed. "I'm so sorry to have upset you in such as way. Do you know where Mr. Holmes is? I came here to see him, but the nice housekeeper told me he wasn't in..." I let the sentence trail off. Perhaps now he would give himself away.

The man, whom I believed to be Mr. Holmes in disguise, blinked, showing no emotion. "Indeed, miss, I've come 'here lookin' for 'im meself." He turned to leave the room. "Looks like I'll 'ave to come back termorrer then."

Before his form completely vanished, I stepped forward, trying to suppress a grin. "Really, Mr. Holmes, you would abandon a young lady in your rooms to wait while you go off to who-knows-
where? And there I was thinking that you were a gentleman."

With a start, he whipped around and stared at me, shock evident in his sharp-featured face. He seemed for the moment to be speechless, so I took advantage of his silence and continued.

"Your brilliant disguise cannot fool me, Mr. Holmes. You've probably used that same one hundreds of times, but how easily you dropped it the moment you came in that door. Perhaps in the future you should be more on your guard until you can be certain that no one will observe your strange actions."

By now, his mouth was open, making him look rather like a fish. "What did you say?"

I sighed, becoming bored with this conversation already. All I wanted was to tell him about my case, then run back home before my aunt noticed my absence.

"Your eyes, Mr. Holmes," I said with all the patience of a wet, tired, and still-hungry adolescent. "Before you spoke to me, they showed an intelligence that did not match the dock labourer disguise you're currently wearing. It did not take long to realize who you were, even if I've never seen you before other than in pictures, which can be misleading, from what I can see."

He looked at me, more closely this time, amusement in his grey eyes. Under such a gaze, I found myself blushing, mostly because I remembered how I must have appeared to him. Even before it had gotten soaked, my clothing was not of the best quality. The dress I wore had been let down three times, mended in a number of places, and was not very fashionable in colour or style. It was rather obvious that my shoes were too small and my complexion could not have been very pleasing to any eye, as it was freckled, tanned, and sickly all at once.

Never before in anyone's presence had I felt to self-conscious, yet in a single glance, this man have made me feel extremely out of place. It may have been merely his fame that made me feel that way, but perhaps it was his powers of deduction and observation that frightened me the most. If he could tell with one look that Dr. Watson had recently come from Afghanistan, then what would he see of me? Not even my aunt knew all the events surrounding my parents' death and I had vowed to tell no one of that horrible event. Nor would I unless in the direst of need.

"Is something the matter?" Mr. Holmes asked, his voice coming through my tormented thoughts. "You've gone quite pale. Should I fetch Mrs. Hudson for you, madam?"

I shook myself back into reality and looked into his worried face, which now bent over me. His eyes were a most peculiar shade of grey; they were not so much stone-like as stormy.

"No, no, I'm fine, really," I babbled incoherently. "It must be the weather."

"You have come a long way from Sussex to see me, have you not?"

Startled by this, I took a moment to reply. "Is it that obvious that I come from the country?"

"No, I merely saw the return ticket sticking out of your pocket."

At this, I could not help but laugh.

"And you, sir, have recently come from the St. Katherine docks in Wapping, if I do not mistake the smell of rotting fish and the stains of various Oriental spices on your jacket."

Now it was his turn to laugh, and he did so with much aplomb.

"Since you know who I am, madam, may I be so bold as to ask an introduction of yourself?"

I raised a sarcastic eyebrow at his use of overly formal language and gave up on understanding his reasons for using it with a mental shrug.

"I am Mary Russell," I said, offering my hand for a handshake.

He stared at my outstretched hand for a fraction of a second, then took it gently in his, raising it gallantly to his lips, which surprised me greatly. What did he think he was doing by kissing my hand? What about the cold, thinking machine I had been led to believe he was? I tried to pull back, but stopped myself, not wishing to be rude.

"A pleasure, Miss Russell," he said, his eyes dancing. "It is indeed a pleasure."