Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(94)

“Are you lost?” she had asked him.

“Nope,” he had replied and kept walking.

If a single American man in ordinary clothes in a country lane could set the heart of Delia Grant fluttering and stay in her dreams for weeks afterwards, she could not imagine what a soubrette from the Bowery might do when seen across the footlights by a Perthshire architect far from home.

Neither could she easily imagine what a soubrette from the Bowery might wear. The thought of her clothes, just sitting there in the attics at Benachally, called to Miss Grant with a siren song. Clothes to make a judge grant a divorce, she thought. Clothes in which to dance a hoochie-coochie.



“I’ve come to sort those trunks in your attics, Lorna,” she said casually, sweeping into the Benachally kitchen the next afternoon. Lorna exchanged a glance with the cook, who shrugged. “There might be some very interesting . . .” Thankfully, the door to the passageway closed behind her before she was forced to finish this sentence, and she went on her way.

They were easily found. Most of the attics were still empty, only a year or so after Master Donald had moved in; swept and bare, they echoed her footsteps back to her, but in one corner, under the eaves, at the farthest point from the stairs, the humped shapes of two steamer trunks lay waiting.

“She was no pixie,” Miss Grant said to herself, presently. The first trunk held hatboxes, shoe bags, and glove cases and, when she tried one of the hats on, what was supposed to be a flirty little concoction in the pillbox style fell down around her ears and looked like nothing so much as Bo-Peep’s bonnet. The gloves—red satin, black lace, kid dyed a shade of pink unknown to both nature and fashion—were as large as pruning gauntlets. And when it came to the shoes, Miss Grant began to pity poor Zita and wonder if perhaps she was a comedy act and not a glamour girl after all.

For the shoes were quite simply enormous. They were beautifully made, hand-stitched, with fine leather soles, and even the silver tips of the high heels glittered with lacquer, but all the hand-stitching in the world could not change the fact that Zita had feet like loaves.

Hard upon that thought, though, came another. If she was as large as it seemed and if her dresses were the same quality as her incidentals then there would be plenty of cloth to make it worth unpicking them.

Feeling the thrill of the chase—for she loved a bargain—and relishing the prospect of having a frock admired and saying very airily, “It’s American, of course—New York,” Miss Grant turned to the second trunk and began rummaging.

The dress she held up did not disappoint her. It was amethyst silk, true silk, generous across the back, even if the waist was as waspish as the fashions of the day had demanded, and from the length of it Za-Za-Zita must have been almost six feet tall. It seemed to be decent cloth, too, from the weight as she held it high. Eagerly, she turned the seam to look at the finish. She rubbed the material between her fingers and found herself frowning.

“Hmph,” she said. “Flimsy. Weight’s in the lining.” Miss Grant had not been above helping a cheap dress hang better with a sturdy lining, in her younger days.

And yet, when she subjected the lining to the same scrutiny, it appeared to be finest lawn. The weight, she now saw, was all in the bodice and such a weight, so oddly placed, that her fanciful mind immediately leapt to jewels. Jewels, or banknotes, or shares in a goldmine, stitched in and left there.

The explanation, of course, was far more humdrum. Za-Za-Zita had not been blessed with womanly lines. Her bodice was heavy because into it she had sewn a pair of little pockets stuffed with . . . Miss Grant palpated one of them and tried to determine what that odd yet familiar substance might be . . . sawdust! There were bags of sawdust sewn in behind the boning of this amethyst dress. And the emerald satin gown underneath it in the trunk, and the pink and yellow bombazine frock which was surely the partner of the pillbox. Miss Grant laid it aside and reached for the next one, but her fingers touched paper instead of cloth. Paper rolled into a scroll and tied with a ribbon.

She took it over to the little sky-light window to read it there.

There was something written on the outside of the scroll in a pretty, feminine hand. Miss Grant squinted at it in the dying light.

“Dearest Edward, you are free. With my undying gratitude for your chivalry, Z.”

What could it be? Miss Grant asked herself. Divorce papers? A suicide note? An annulment? How could Zita simply set her husband free? Carefully, she pulled on one end of the bow and let the loosened ribbon drop to the floor.

It was not a letter, she saw as she unrolled the crackling paper. Not legal papers. It was something much, much more exciting. Something so exotic and undreamed of that Miss Grant could scarcely believe it was real. She had seen them in the pictures but she had never imagined she would hold one in her hands.

It was a WANTED poster. A drawing of a scowling face with $100 REWARD printed in red ink underneath. Miss Grant’s heart thrilled at the sight of those penetrating eyes as it had seldom thrilled in all her years.

“This must be the jewel thief she was in with,” she said to herself. And then she grew very still as an idea rolled towards her and washed over her, head to toe, unstoppable.

She had seldom thrilled at the sight of a stranger’s face, but not never. Once before she had seen those eyes, when they were smiling. And the hair had been clean and soft and had looked like raven’s feathers on a milk-white brow. It was him. It was her American stranger. She had watched him walking away down the lane, into his future, leaving his past behind, and leaving Edward Coulter his freedom—if he had only looked in this trunk and seen it there.