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charleygirlTitle: Jack In The Green 1/?
Author: charleygirl
Rating: G
Words: 2350
Characters involved: Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson, Mrs Hudson
Genre: Mystery, Drama
Disclaimer: These characters, while out of copyright, were created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and do not belong to me.
Summary: Following The Hand of Seth. Holmes and Watson pay a visit to Oxfordshire and are asked to investigate a mystery in the village of Hope Barton...
JACK IN THE GREEN
CHAPTER ONE
Jack In The Green, Jack In The Green,
And we’ll all dance each Springtime,
With Jack in the Green
- Martin Graebe, performed by Magpie Lane
April 1897
“A bill…another bill…a request from a ten year old boy for help finding his missing rabbit…a telegram from Mycroft…has nothing of any interest occurred over the last six weeks?”
“Evidently the criminal classes ceased their activity while we were away,” I replied a little breathlessly, dropping the valises I had carried up our seventeen stairs onto the hearthrug. Sherlock Holmes had not waited for me - once the cabbie had been paid off he hurried up to the sitting room and was causing a storm of correspondence from the neat pile Mrs Hudson mad made on his desk.
Envelopes fluttered onto the carpet. “London has no imagination. Not one prospective client of any worth.”
“That could be due to my instructing Mrs Hudson to let it be known that you were out of town,” I admitted.
He looked up and fixed me with a glare. “Really, Watson! How am I to keep my little practise afloat if you discourage people from consulting me?”
I picked up my own bags to take them to my room. Holmes did not seem inclined to do the same, and so I left his luggage where it was. It would probably be there for days, causing a hazard for the unwary. “We have had this conversation before, Holmes: no work until I say so. You agreed, remember?”
“I seem to recall that I had little choice in the matter,” he grumbled, and returned his attention to the post.
It did not take me long to unpack my things. By the time I returned to the sitting room, Holmes had given in to the exhaustion I knew he must be feeling after the long train journey from Cornwall. His long form was stretched upon the sofa, surrounded by discarded envelopes. It had taken him barely ten minutes to reduce our unnaturally tidy quarters to their usual state of disarray. He was in truth much improved by our stay in the West Country, and I was delighted to see him taking an interest in events once more. Naturally he still tired easily – it would take some more time for his abused body to learn how to entirely do without its previous dependency upon the cocaine he had used for almost as long as I had known him – but he was almost back to his old acerbic self.
“There was a letter for you amongst the post,” he said after a few minutes of companionable silence in which I settled down with a newspaper. His thin arm shot out towards me, an envelope held between two fingers.
“A letter? Not a bill?” I asked in surprise.
“Not unless your tailor has begun dictating his invoices to a woman,” he replied with a smirk. He closed his eyes, feigning disinterest, as I read the missive. When I had finished, he asked casually, “Something important?”
“I have been invited up to Oxfordshire for a few days,” I said, rereading the few lines to check that I did not have the wording wrong. “My cousin Molly has asked me to stay for the weekend, and has been kind enough to include yourself in her invitation.”
“Oxfordshire. Yes, I did observe the postmark. Banbury, was it not?”
“Indeed. The village of Hope Barton. Charming spot, from the little I recall of my previous visit.”
“Wait a moment,” Holmes objected. “I was under the impression that you had no relatives living. You have never mentioned a cousin before.”
“Just as you did not mention that you had a brother for the first few years of our acquaintance?” I countered. When he gave me a withering look, I relented. “Molly is a second cousin on my mother’s side. I have not seen her in a long time.”
“You intend to accept the invitation, then?”
“Well, I have hopes that in Oxfordshire we will not be troubled by African poisons and vengeful lion hunters. Do you not agree?”
“Watson, we have only just returned from a holiday. Why should you wish to take another so soon?” Holmes asked with that inability to understand the normal human need for leisure and enjoyment that is uniquely his.
“Because a relative of whom I am fond has invited me. And because you are not yet well enough to return to the rigors of work,” I told him.
He glared at me, and lay back, turning his eyes to the ceiling. “You have become an incredible bully of late, Watson.”
I had to laugh at that. “As if you would allow me to be!”
“You have taken entirely too much advantage over the past two months. I will not allow it to continue.”
“I do apologise for my overbearing efforts to look after your health when you had absolutely no interest in it,” I retorted. Now I was certain that he was back to his old self. Fortunately I was spared any further comment on the subject by a light tap on the door followed by the appearance of Mrs Hudson. She had been out when we returned and had only just received the news from the maid of all work downstairs.
“Welcome home, Doctor, Mr Holmes. It is good to see you back,” said the good lady. She ran a knowing eye over my friend, and added, “You are looking better, Mr Holmes.”
“Watson would have it that such an improvement is due entirely to his doctoring, though I reserve the right to disagree,” Holmes replied. “No clients, Mrs Hudson? I had expected them to be beating down the door.”
“Good heavens, no, sir. I would not have known what to do with them if they had been.”
“I doubt that word will have gone round in the last half hour to announce your return, Holmes,” I said.
He gave a derisive snort, evidently disgusted at the thought that London had gone on quite well with its daily life in his absence.
“Did you have a pleasant holiday, Doctor?” Mrs Hudson asked, well used by now to the moods of her principal lodger.
“Yes, thank you, Mrs Hudson. It would have been more relaxing without the Tregennis murder in the middle of it, but you know how Mr Holmes loves a challenge.”
“Oh, dear me, were you involved with all that, Mr Holmes? I read of it in the papers – ‘The Cornish Horror’ they called it. A dreadful business.”
“It enlivened a rather dull few weeks,” Holmes said contrarily, deciding to forget the interest he had found in researching the (to my mind exceedingly dull) origins of the Cornish language, or the evenings spent poking around archaeological sites with the garrulous Reverend Roundhay.
“Well, only you would say that, Mr Holmes,” Mrs Hudson responded. “Did either of you eat on the journey?”
“A little,” I said. “I am famished, though. Would something be out of the question, Mrs Hudson?”
She smiled. “I’ll see what I can find. Anything for you, Mr Holmes?”
I could see Holmes forming the word ‘no’ on his lips, and fixed him with a disapproving stare. With a gusty sigh and a roll of his eyes, he said, “Whatever you are bringing for Watson will be quite acceptable, thank you, Mrs Hudson.”
“Very good, sir.” Our landlady departed, closing the door quietly behind her.
“You will be the death of me, Watson,” Holmes declared when she had gone. “Sea air, exercise and food! My body will not stand it.”
“It seems to me that your body is positively relishing it after the infernal abstinence you habitually insist upon,” I said. “You ascended the stairs far quicker than I when we returned.”
“An irrelevant observation. You know perfectly well that your old wound is troubling you again.”
I decided to withdraw from the fray, knowing I would never win the argument. In one of these moods he could be quite impossible.
Presently Mrs Hudson returned with a very welcome repast of some game pie, sliced ham, new bread and cheese. I persuaded Holmes to join me at the table and began to gratefully tuck in, not realising until now how hungry I actually was. He watched me in some amusement, picking at the food on his plate and showing more interest in the letter from Molly, which I had relinquished to him.
“If you wish for information you have only to ask,” I said as he examined the envelope. “There is no need to deduce.”
“There is every need,” he retorted, reaching behind him for his magnifying glass. “I have to reassure myself that my faculties have not deteriorated over the past few weeks.”
I knew exactly to what he was referring. He needed to make sure that his abilities had not been irreparably damaged by his abuse of the cocaine. He had made mistakes, even as recently as the business with the Devil’s Foot, and wanted to prove to himself that those actions had been due to the evil influence of the drug. I wished to believe that it had been so just as much as he – the thought that his remarkable talents might be gone forever was one I could not bear to entertain. Despite the incident with the lamp and the poison a few weeks ago that could have cost us both our lives, the Cornish case had proved to a certain extent that the effect would not be permanent, but only time would tell for sure.
“A lady in early middle age, respectable, right-handed…fond of lavender water,” Holmes remarked, sniffing the envelope. He held the letter up to the light, inspecting the watermark in the paper. “Good quality stationery. An educated lady, though not a bluestocking, I think – her frivolous side is indicated by the flourishes she adds to her letters. She needs to replace her pen – it has dripped three times and she had not bothered to start afresh. That leads me to suppose that she dashed the letter off in a hurry, and not on a blotter – there are specks of vegetation which cling to the reverse of the paper. She had been arranging flowers shortly before the letter was written.”
“Your powers of observation continue to amaze me, Holmes,” I said, knowing that while I no longer needed to voice the fact his confidence would benefit from my doing so. Molly was indeed in her early forties, respectable and had a penchant for lavender water that had obviously not waned in twenty years. That she had had an excellent education from her father, a schoolmaster in Gloucester, and there was a girlish side to her nature I could also have told him, but the more obscure details I will admit that I had failed to mark.
Holmes gave me one of those swift smiles of his. “That is very gratifying, my dear fellow, but such things are mere trifles.”
“You always say that there is nothing so important as the observation of trifles,” I reminded him.
“Indeed. We have a question, however: why should your cousin Mrs Foster have written a note to invite you to stay in so cavalier a fashion? One would imagine she had been planning the invitation for some time beforehand.”
I took back the letter and examined it afresh. “Molly always was impulsive.”
“And then we have the final line: ‘Please entreat Mr Sherlock Holmes to accompany you’. Not invite or request, but ‘entreat’. The lady must be very keen to meet me.”
“Now that you bring it to my attention, it does seem odd,” I admitted.
“Your cousin has no doubt been aware of our acquaintance for some years and has not issued the invitation until now.” Holmes raised his eyebrows. “Why?”
I met his gaze, and saw the spark of excitement in his eyes. His previous lethargy had dissipated in an instant. “You sense a mystery?”
“Do you not?” he asked, head cocked to one side like an expectant terrier. When I shook my head, he clapped a hand on my shoulder with an exclamation of delight. “Wire your cousin and tell her that we would be pleased to accept her invitation. My lungs will just have to cope with breathing more country air.”
Secretly overjoyed that he had agreed to the trip, I glanced at the date on my paper. “We will be in time for the May Day celebrations.”
“I am sure they need not inconvenience us overmuch,” came the reply as he leapt up from the table and began to ferret amongst his files for local information on Hope Barton. Books and journals went flying in all directions; a Bradshaw came sailing past my left ear to crash into the doorframe at the exact same moment that Mrs Hudson entered to clear the table.
Typically the good woman took no notice of the whirlwind in the corner of the room, and busied herself with her tray, removing the plates. “Mr Holmes has a case already, I see,” she observed.
“Not quite,” I said, only to be interrupted by my friend announcing that we would be leaving for Oxfordshire the day after tomorrow.
“That will leave us time to call upon Mycroft and discover the reason for his telegram,” he told me, filling his pipe with tobacco from the Persian slipper.
“I haven’t seen a Maying in years,” I remarked a little later when we were comfortably ensconced on either side of the fireplace. “A maypole, Morris dancers, the May Queen…Holmes?” He did not appear to be listening to me, his head buried in his newspaper.
For the rest of the evening he said very little. Once he sent Mrs Hudson to the telegraph office with an urgent message, but for the remainder of the time he sat curled in his armchair, lost in thought.
It was not until the following morning that we learned of the disappearance of the man Ibrahim Namin from police custody and the collapse of the case against him.
TBC
Author: charleygirl
Rating: G
Words: 2350
Characters involved: Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson, Mrs Hudson
Genre: Mystery, Drama
Disclaimer: These characters, while out of copyright, were created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and do not belong to me.
Summary: Following The Hand of Seth. Holmes and Watson pay a visit to Oxfordshire and are asked to investigate a mystery in the village of Hope Barton...
JACK IN THE GREEN
CHAPTER ONE
Jack In The Green, Jack In The Green,
And we’ll all dance each Springtime,
With Jack in the Green
- Martin Graebe, performed by Magpie Lane
April 1897
“A bill…another bill…a request from a ten year old boy for help finding his missing rabbit…a telegram from Mycroft…has nothing of any interest occurred over the last six weeks?”
“Evidently the criminal classes ceased their activity while we were away,” I replied a little breathlessly, dropping the valises I had carried up our seventeen stairs onto the hearthrug. Sherlock Holmes had not waited for me - once the cabbie had been paid off he hurried up to the sitting room and was causing a storm of correspondence from the neat pile Mrs Hudson mad made on his desk.
Envelopes fluttered onto the carpet. “London has no imagination. Not one prospective client of any worth.”
“That could be due to my instructing Mrs Hudson to let it be known that you were out of town,” I admitted.
He looked up and fixed me with a glare. “Really, Watson! How am I to keep my little practise afloat if you discourage people from consulting me?”
I picked up my own bags to take them to my room. Holmes did not seem inclined to do the same, and so I left his luggage where it was. It would probably be there for days, causing a hazard for the unwary. “We have had this conversation before, Holmes: no work until I say so. You agreed, remember?”
“I seem to recall that I had little choice in the matter,” he grumbled, and returned his attention to the post.
It did not take me long to unpack my things. By the time I returned to the sitting room, Holmes had given in to the exhaustion I knew he must be feeling after the long train journey from Cornwall. His long form was stretched upon the sofa, surrounded by discarded envelopes. It had taken him barely ten minutes to reduce our unnaturally tidy quarters to their usual state of disarray. He was in truth much improved by our stay in the West Country, and I was delighted to see him taking an interest in events once more. Naturally he still tired easily – it would take some more time for his abused body to learn how to entirely do without its previous dependency upon the cocaine he had used for almost as long as I had known him – but he was almost back to his old acerbic self.
“There was a letter for you amongst the post,” he said after a few minutes of companionable silence in which I settled down with a newspaper. His thin arm shot out towards me, an envelope held between two fingers.
“A letter? Not a bill?” I asked in surprise.
“Not unless your tailor has begun dictating his invoices to a woman,” he replied with a smirk. He closed his eyes, feigning disinterest, as I read the missive. When I had finished, he asked casually, “Something important?”
“I have been invited up to Oxfordshire for a few days,” I said, rereading the few lines to check that I did not have the wording wrong. “My cousin Molly has asked me to stay for the weekend, and has been kind enough to include yourself in her invitation.”
“Oxfordshire. Yes, I did observe the postmark. Banbury, was it not?”
“Indeed. The village of Hope Barton. Charming spot, from the little I recall of my previous visit.”
“Wait a moment,” Holmes objected. “I was under the impression that you had no relatives living. You have never mentioned a cousin before.”
“Just as you did not mention that you had a brother for the first few years of our acquaintance?” I countered. When he gave me a withering look, I relented. “Molly is a second cousin on my mother’s side. I have not seen her in a long time.”
“You intend to accept the invitation, then?”
“Well, I have hopes that in Oxfordshire we will not be troubled by African poisons and vengeful lion hunters. Do you not agree?”
“Watson, we have only just returned from a holiday. Why should you wish to take another so soon?” Holmes asked with that inability to understand the normal human need for leisure and enjoyment that is uniquely his.
“Because a relative of whom I am fond has invited me. And because you are not yet well enough to return to the rigors of work,” I told him.
He glared at me, and lay back, turning his eyes to the ceiling. “You have become an incredible bully of late, Watson.”
I had to laugh at that. “As if you would allow me to be!”
“You have taken entirely too much advantage over the past two months. I will not allow it to continue.”
“I do apologise for my overbearing efforts to look after your health when you had absolutely no interest in it,” I retorted. Now I was certain that he was back to his old self. Fortunately I was spared any further comment on the subject by a light tap on the door followed by the appearance of Mrs Hudson. She had been out when we returned and had only just received the news from the maid of all work downstairs.
“Welcome home, Doctor, Mr Holmes. It is good to see you back,” said the good lady. She ran a knowing eye over my friend, and added, “You are looking better, Mr Holmes.”
“Watson would have it that such an improvement is due entirely to his doctoring, though I reserve the right to disagree,” Holmes replied. “No clients, Mrs Hudson? I had expected them to be beating down the door.”
“Good heavens, no, sir. I would not have known what to do with them if they had been.”
“I doubt that word will have gone round in the last half hour to announce your return, Holmes,” I said.
He gave a derisive snort, evidently disgusted at the thought that London had gone on quite well with its daily life in his absence.
“Did you have a pleasant holiday, Doctor?” Mrs Hudson asked, well used by now to the moods of her principal lodger.
“Yes, thank you, Mrs Hudson. It would have been more relaxing without the Tregennis murder in the middle of it, but you know how Mr Holmes loves a challenge.”
“Oh, dear me, were you involved with all that, Mr Holmes? I read of it in the papers – ‘The Cornish Horror’ they called it. A dreadful business.”
“It enlivened a rather dull few weeks,” Holmes said contrarily, deciding to forget the interest he had found in researching the (to my mind exceedingly dull) origins of the Cornish language, or the evenings spent poking around archaeological sites with the garrulous Reverend Roundhay.
“Well, only you would say that, Mr Holmes,” Mrs Hudson responded. “Did either of you eat on the journey?”
“A little,” I said. “I am famished, though. Would something be out of the question, Mrs Hudson?”
She smiled. “I’ll see what I can find. Anything for you, Mr Holmes?”
I could see Holmes forming the word ‘no’ on his lips, and fixed him with a disapproving stare. With a gusty sigh and a roll of his eyes, he said, “Whatever you are bringing for Watson will be quite acceptable, thank you, Mrs Hudson.”
“Very good, sir.” Our landlady departed, closing the door quietly behind her.
“You will be the death of me, Watson,” Holmes declared when she had gone. “Sea air, exercise and food! My body will not stand it.”
“It seems to me that your body is positively relishing it after the infernal abstinence you habitually insist upon,” I said. “You ascended the stairs far quicker than I when we returned.”
“An irrelevant observation. You know perfectly well that your old wound is troubling you again.”
I decided to withdraw from the fray, knowing I would never win the argument. In one of these moods he could be quite impossible.
Presently Mrs Hudson returned with a very welcome repast of some game pie, sliced ham, new bread and cheese. I persuaded Holmes to join me at the table and began to gratefully tuck in, not realising until now how hungry I actually was. He watched me in some amusement, picking at the food on his plate and showing more interest in the letter from Molly, which I had relinquished to him.
“If you wish for information you have only to ask,” I said as he examined the envelope. “There is no need to deduce.”
“There is every need,” he retorted, reaching behind him for his magnifying glass. “I have to reassure myself that my faculties have not deteriorated over the past few weeks.”
I knew exactly to what he was referring. He needed to make sure that his abilities had not been irreparably damaged by his abuse of the cocaine. He had made mistakes, even as recently as the business with the Devil’s Foot, and wanted to prove to himself that those actions had been due to the evil influence of the drug. I wished to believe that it had been so just as much as he – the thought that his remarkable talents might be gone forever was one I could not bear to entertain. Despite the incident with the lamp and the poison a few weeks ago that could have cost us both our lives, the Cornish case had proved to a certain extent that the effect would not be permanent, but only time would tell for sure.
“A lady in early middle age, respectable, right-handed…fond of lavender water,” Holmes remarked, sniffing the envelope. He held the letter up to the light, inspecting the watermark in the paper. “Good quality stationery. An educated lady, though not a bluestocking, I think – her frivolous side is indicated by the flourishes she adds to her letters. She needs to replace her pen – it has dripped three times and she had not bothered to start afresh. That leads me to suppose that she dashed the letter off in a hurry, and not on a blotter – there are specks of vegetation which cling to the reverse of the paper. She had been arranging flowers shortly before the letter was written.”
“Your powers of observation continue to amaze me, Holmes,” I said, knowing that while I no longer needed to voice the fact his confidence would benefit from my doing so. Molly was indeed in her early forties, respectable and had a penchant for lavender water that had obviously not waned in twenty years. That she had had an excellent education from her father, a schoolmaster in Gloucester, and there was a girlish side to her nature I could also have told him, but the more obscure details I will admit that I had failed to mark.
Holmes gave me one of those swift smiles of his. “That is very gratifying, my dear fellow, but such things are mere trifles.”
“You always say that there is nothing so important as the observation of trifles,” I reminded him.
“Indeed. We have a question, however: why should your cousin Mrs Foster have written a note to invite you to stay in so cavalier a fashion? One would imagine she had been planning the invitation for some time beforehand.”
I took back the letter and examined it afresh. “Molly always was impulsive.”
“And then we have the final line: ‘Please entreat Mr Sherlock Holmes to accompany you’. Not invite or request, but ‘entreat’. The lady must be very keen to meet me.”
“Now that you bring it to my attention, it does seem odd,” I admitted.
“Your cousin has no doubt been aware of our acquaintance for some years and has not issued the invitation until now.” Holmes raised his eyebrows. “Why?”
I met his gaze, and saw the spark of excitement in his eyes. His previous lethargy had dissipated in an instant. “You sense a mystery?”
“Do you not?” he asked, head cocked to one side like an expectant terrier. When I shook my head, he clapped a hand on my shoulder with an exclamation of delight. “Wire your cousin and tell her that we would be pleased to accept her invitation. My lungs will just have to cope with breathing more country air.”
Secretly overjoyed that he had agreed to the trip, I glanced at the date on my paper. “We will be in time for the May Day celebrations.”
“I am sure they need not inconvenience us overmuch,” came the reply as he leapt up from the table and began to ferret amongst his files for local information on Hope Barton. Books and journals went flying in all directions; a Bradshaw came sailing past my left ear to crash into the doorframe at the exact same moment that Mrs Hudson entered to clear the table.
Typically the good woman took no notice of the whirlwind in the corner of the room, and busied herself with her tray, removing the plates. “Mr Holmes has a case already, I see,” she observed.
“Not quite,” I said, only to be interrupted by my friend announcing that we would be leaving for Oxfordshire the day after tomorrow.
“That will leave us time to call upon Mycroft and discover the reason for his telegram,” he told me, filling his pipe with tobacco from the Persian slipper.
“I haven’t seen a Maying in years,” I remarked a little later when we were comfortably ensconced on either side of the fireplace. “A maypole, Morris dancers, the May Queen…Holmes?” He did not appear to be listening to me, his head buried in his newspaper.
For the rest of the evening he said very little. Once he sent Mrs Hudson to the telegraph office with an urgent message, but for the remainder of the time he sat curled in his armchair, lost in thought.
It was not until the following morning that we learned of the disappearance of the man Ibrahim Namin from police custody and the collapse of the case against him.
TBC
