The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(110)
Miss Kitty Winter, bedecked appropriately enough in black dress and veil, with her vibrant fire-red hair held back and hidden in black lace and a large black umbrella held up against the sun, did not cry or openly lament, but merely stood with a dour expression that might have been carved from stone. I noticed that the rest of the Midnight Watch, none of them vampires and all of them men in Holmes’s employ, did not attempt to converse with Miss Winter, though I had the impression that it was respect, deference and not a little fear that held the men back, rather than any intended slight. She stood alone and her stiff-backed stance did not invite approach. Even Holmes and I, when we offered our condolences, received only the barest of nods. In our relatively short acquaintance, I had seen Kitty Winter suffer great loss with Somersby, Shinwell Johnson, and even Baron Adelbert Gruner, for all that he had been a mortal enemy to her before that. The poets and religious texts have said that every life is encompassed round with death, but while this may be true for every man, woman and child, it is more true for some than for others.
She came to us under the shade of an enormous elm after the clergy had finished saying their words and the caretakers had started working. The constant scrape of shovels biting into the earth were a backdrop to our conversation.
“The Midnight Watch is needed more than ever,” she said without greeting or preamble. “I’m more determined to see it through than ever now, in case you’re wondering. Might be the only thing that’s worth doing anymore. I’ll be keeping watch over the graves long after you are dead and buried, Mr Sherlock Holmes. See if I don’t.”
“Thank you, Miss Winter,” Holmes said simply, “and… I am very sorry. Somersby was a good man.”
“He was,” Miss Winter said. “Thank you.” She turned to me. “I know your own wife passed some months ago, though I won’t pretend to know the details. I can see in your eyes that her being gone weighs on you just as my losses weigh on me. I never offered my condolences before, but I’ll offer them now.”
“Thank you, Miss Winter,” I said. “I am very sorry for your loss, too.”
“We’ll have more in common every passing year, won’t we?” she said. Her gaze slid momentarily to Holmes and I could see she was thinking about how our lives, hers and mine, would very likely stretch for years after all our companions, such as Sherlock Holmes, had long since passed.
“Yes,” I said to her, “it is very likely that we shall.”
She nodded in stark satisfaction. “Well, gentlemen, if you need me, you know where I’ll be.” She swept her gaze around, taking in the cemetery along with the worn granite gravestones and monuments and those interred beneath, then shouldered her black umbrella and left us.
“I believe that we had best return to Baker Street,” Holmes said. “I have many letters of interest to view and, I suspect, you have your own literary work ahead of you. At least the next few weeks, if not months, are not likely to be dull.” He spoke casually, but I could see the gleam in his eye that told me his mind was already cataloguing his next steps.
“It seems,” I said, “very unlikely.”