I returned to reading in the hope that the next lines would reveal the solution to this riddle.
But all I found was a flood of seemingly unrelated information. Richard Pankhurst had founded the National Society for the Support of Women’s Suffrage and had authored a bill that became the Act on Property of Married Women in 1882, giving wives absolute control over their property and profits.
He married Emmeline Goulden[20], an activist twenty years his junior, with whom he formed the Women’s Rights League. He belonged to the same political circle as George Bernard Shaw. Emmeline Goulden-Pankhurst, who after her husband’s death founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, a militant suffragette movement, was without a doubt the aunt who had raised Grace Pankhurst.
Now I was beginning to understand where Holmes was headed. He feared that under the influence of her aunt Grace would take up the violent methods of the suffragettes, which had been escalating in intensity for several years, and I dare say had made them a threat to the very fabric of society.
He certainly did not want Lady Alice to become embroiled in leftist radicalism, especially as she was torn away from her brother and was groping for something to give meaning to her life. Hence her interest in Grace. From the start Holmes had been interested Grace’s influence over Lady Darringford, not the other way around! How blind I had been to confuse it with love and to overlook his real feelings for Alice!
In a state of agitation I finished my glass of wine and discovered that in the course of my reading I had managed to drink the whole bottle. I still had a few pages to read and the feeling of guilt still had not left me.
I went to fetch another bottle and continued along the trail of Holmes’s thoughts. The dossier also contained files about the participation of the Pankhursts in the Bloody Sunday riot in Trafalgar Square on November 13, 1887.
I remembered it well.
The long period of crisis that began in 1873 and lasted almost until the end of the century created difficult social conditions in Britain and similar economic malaise in the Irish countryside. Falling food prices led to unemployment, which resulted in a great internal migration. Workers moved by the thousands to the cities, where they crippled the labour market, and devalued their working conditions and wages. As often happens in British politics, the problems in Ireland were also reflected in a number of domestic affairs. In November 1887 there were demonstrations by unemployed workers from London’s East End. Their daily conflicts with the police regularly made headlines.
Trafalgar was the symbolic place where the working class met the middle class from West End. This captured the attention of the small but growing socialist movement. The police and government attempts to put pressure on the demonstrators only served to energise the radical wing of the Liberal party and activists for free speech, who saw the square as a public space, necessary for public as well as political use.
To my understanding the closeness of British and Irish radicalism was also due to the fact that the working classes in English cities were often made up of a large number of native Irishmen. London as well as the industrial areas of northern England had a large number of Irish workers, concentrated in the East End, where they competed with other groups, such as the wave of Jews arriving from Eastern Europe. Among the recent arrivals the Irish and the Jews were the most beset by unemployment. And then there was the international dimension: the workers made common cause with the fate of the anarchists arrested after the Haymarket riots in Chicago the previous year. The hanging of four of them on November 11 indeed led to the demonstration, which turned into Bloody Sunday.
I could see it as clearly as though it were yesterday.
Some ten thousand people marched to Trafalgar Square from several directions, led by Elizabeth Reynolds, John Burns, Annie Besant and Robert Cunningham-Graham, the leaders of the Social-Democratic Federation. With them marched George Bernard Shaw, who made a speech.
Two thousand policemen and four hundred soldiers were on hand to suppress the demonstration. The skirmishes that broke out between them and the marchers, including women and children, led to the first acts of violence. Hundreds of workers were injured and at least three of them succumbed to their wounds. In the end there were even more dead and wounded. Two hundred people needed medical treatment; many others never made it to hospital, either out of fear of arrest or simply because they could not afford the fees. Most of the injuries were caused by the fists and truncheons of the police.
It was fortunate that more people did not lose their lives that day, as both the infantry and the cavalry were present. The soldiers who defended their positions with bayonets were not allowed to open fire and the cavalry were ordered to keep their sabres sheathed.
Bloody Sunday remained an important milestone in the modern history of the British and Irish left. It kick-started public interest in the social question, represented mainly by the appalling living conditions of the poor in the East End. But the murders of Jack the Ripper, which took place in the period shortly thereafter, distracted the press, which always focused on sex and violence, best of all in combination with each other.
At the bottom of the page Holmes had written two names followed by a question mark: Darringford and Bollinger.
Did it refer to Rupert or Alice Darringford?
My vision was starting to blur under the influence of the strong wine. My eyelids began to shut and I was no longer able to focus on the letters. I leaned my head back for a moment and involuntarily fell asleep, for all the world like the worst drunkard.
I awoke only the next day at daybreak.
The back of my neck ached and my spine was stiff from the night spent in the chair. My breath smelled of alcohol. The fire had long ago gone out, but someone had thrown a warm blanket over my legs.
Had my wife returned? Or had Holmes decided to take pity on me?
As though my thoughts had beckoned him, at that moment the detective stepped into the room.
I could not say, however, that his expression had become any more agreeable since our argument.
“Get up, Watson,” he said. “It is time to settle the score.”
X: Cosi fan tutte
Holmes sent me upstairs to get dressed and put myself in order. I felt as though I were preparing myself for the grave. Meanwhile he waited for me in the drawing room, dressed and ready to depart. I could only guess where he wanted to go so early in the morning. Perhaps to a pistol duel somewhere in the plains outside the city?
When I returned to the drawing room I noticed that the detective was clearing away the remains of my drunken night. He had taken away the bottle of wine and my glass, folded the blanket, picked up the scattered sheets of his dossier and cleaned the fireplace.
“That took you a while,” he complained, grasping me around the shoulder. “It is high time we get going. Soon it will be nine o’clock and ideally everything should be cleared up before noon. Let’s go, they are waiting for us.”
He led me out of the house to a carriage that was standing at the curb. To my surprise it contained Mycroft. Was he Holmes’s second? He greeted me sullenly and motioned me to sit next to him. The detective took the seat across from us and we set off.
Curiosity got the better of me.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
My friend turned from the window and sighed.
“As I already said: It is time to end this story.”
20
Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) was one of the founders of the Women’s Social and Political Union. Her name is connected with the fight for women’s rights in the period leading up to the First World War.