Chapter Eight

The Bookseller of Baker Street

Author's Notes: Thank you to Hermione Holmes and Susana. Thanks to everyone for keeping up with this story, even though it took me much longer than anticipated to finish. My goal was to write this final chapter for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's birthday, but I didn't have time, so his birthday week will have to do.

No one seemed to recall seeing the elderly gentleman who disembarked at Waterloo Station having boarded the train from Dover in the first place, but then no one much remarked his existence at all. Indeed, why would anyone pay heed to an old man with white hair, unwieldy baggage and a twitchy, mincing air? He was one of hundreds – why, there was one on any given train, and this one had taken his allotted place on this particular train, fumbling with his bags, heedless of the shy concern of the other ubiquitous train passenger type, the young-woman-away-from-home.

Had anyone bothered to follow the elderly man further (and no one did), they would have observed some very untypical behaviour, however. For directly upon collecting his baggage from the porter, the man hailed a cart with the broad-shouldered confidence of a man of 40 at the height of his powers. While the cart laden with luggage waited for him, he dictated several telegrams at the post office with a strong voice quite out of keeping with his fragile appearance.

But it was to be expected that these actions passed unnoticed in the anonymous crowds of the train station, which shifted like desert dunes, and the old man's cart moved out into the streets of London, forgotten before it could be remembered. It rolled in the sunlight that licked the coal-smeared traces of winter off the house fronts and pavements and nudged the trees sticky with spring leaves and cherry blossoms. The thoroughfares it took bustled with traffic, and it eventually came to a stop outside a tall grey-brick Georgian townhouse with a "To Let" sign partially obscuring its number plaque – 220 Baker Street. It was here that the elderly man was let off.

Two ragged youths, detaching themselves from the iron railings they had been leaning against helped to carry the trunks and crates down the stairs into the cellar of the house. They seemed eager, and greeted the elderly man with an unusual respect. A portly man with a slippery gaze emerged from the front door, producing brass keys from his waistcoat pocket in return for a banknote, which he snatched up with the only type of eagerness he seemed capable of. The transaction finished, he disappeared without a backward glance into a neighbouring shopfront: perhaps it was a tobacconists, or perhaps it was the purveyors of household glass and crystal – it seemed unimportant to note. And then the cart, now empty, drove off again, and the youths sauntered away, their steps a little lighter with half-crowns in their pockets. The elderly gentleman couldn't be seen behind the dark empty windows of the rented house.

But at five o'clock precisely, he emerged again, squinting in the dusk light, pursing his upper lip in a peculiar way. His hands, clad in fingerless black mittens, clutched a stack of books tied with a length of twine. He had the appearance of an itinerant bookseller, and his first cal was to the house directly across the street. Moving with the crab-like gait characteristic of one bent with rheumatism, he opened the iron gate, stepped down the stairs, and rang at the tradesmen's entrance below the front door of 221.

Perhaps the housekeeper who answered the door required extended instruction from the latest edition of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, for the bookseller emerged over an hour later, with the air of one who had been well-fed, and did not continue his calls down the street. He returned across the street several times after that, each time with some mysterious package that did not leave again with him at the conclusion of his visits.

This, however odd, did not attract attention. But the appearance of a distinctive aquiline profile, backlit in the first-floor windows of 221 that week caused quite a sensation in London's meeting places of iniquity and vice. Luckily for the inconspicuous bookseller, no one observed his own matching profile, smoking an evening pipe in the house across the street.