"I fancy I do, yes." He turned in response to a shout from the door of the scullery. "Here he is now. Shall we hear his report or will you speak now?"
"Does Miss Evelyn know what you are doing?"
"She has gone out with a shooting party," said Holmes. "We are quite alone, except for the undertaker's boy."
"Wilberforce," she said with a dismissive sigh. "He hasn't the sense to grasp what to gossip about, so that's safe. Let the doctor tell you what he makes of it."
Watson reached them then, rolling down his sleeves, his forearms still damp from washing up after the procedure. "Well, it's done, Holmes," he said. "Shall I tell you in private?"
Holmes shook his head. "Miss Rountree here is a midwife and local herbalist. I rather fancy that makes her a colleague of yours. In any case, she has always known what you have just been at pains to discover. Do tell us, Watson. Of what did Christabel Ambry die?"
Watson reddened. "Cancer, right enough," he said gruffly. "Testicular cancer."
"You must have been surprised."
"I've heard of such cases," said Watson. "They are mercifully rare. It is a defect in the development of the foetus before birth, apparently. When I opened up the abdomen, I found that the deceased had the… er… the reproductive organs of a male. The testes, which had become cancerous, were inside the abdomen, and there was no womb. The deceased's vagina, only a few inches long, ended at nothing. I must conclude that the patient was-technically-male."
"An Ambry changeling," said Holmes.
"But how did you know, Holmes?"
"It was only a guess, but I knew, you see, that orchis is the Greek word for testis, and I was still thinking about the changeling story. It was an old country attempt to describe a real occurrence, is it not so, madam?"
Grisel Rountree nodded. "We midwives never knew what their insides were like, of course, but the thing about the Ambry changelings is that they were barren. Always. Oh, they might marry, right enough, especially to an outsider who didn't know the story about the Ambrys, but there was never a child born to one of them. Some of them were good wives, and some were bad, and more than a few died young, like Christabel Ambry, rest her soul-but there was never an Ambry changeling that bore a child. That could be curse enough to a landed family with the property entailed, don't you reckon?"
"Indeed," said Holmes." And the doctor knew of this?"
"He did not," said Grisel Rountree. "None of us were like to tell him-no business of his, anyhow. And when Miss Christabel came to see me, she said she might be going up to London to the clinic. 'But I'll not be airing the family linen for Dr. Dacre, Grisel,' she says to me. 'Not with Evelyn engaged to his brother.' Miss Christabel put off going to a doctor for the longest time, afraid he'd find out too much as it was."
"And Miss Evelyn stated that she never consults physicians."
Watson gasped. "Holmes! You don't suppose that Evelyn Ambry is… is… well, a man?"
"I suppose so, in the strictest sense of the definition, but the salient thing here, Watson, is that Evelyn Ambry cannot bear children. Since she is engaged to the possessor of an entailed estate, that is surely a matter of concern. I fear that when Dr. James Dacre discovered the truth of the matter, he conveyed his concerns to Evelyn Ambry-probably at the funeral. They arranged to meet that night to discuss the matter… "
"Why did he not tell his brother straight away?"
"Out of some concern for the feelings of both parties, I should think," said Holmes. "Far better to allow the lady-let us call her a lady still; it is too confusing to do otherwise-to allow the lady to end it on some pretext."
Grisel Rountree nodded. "He mistook his… person," she said. "Miss Evelyn was not one to give up anything without a fight. I'll warrant she took that weapon with her in case the worse came to the worst."
"Not a maiden," murmured Watson. "Well, that is true enough, I fear. But the scandal will be ruinous! Not just the murder, but the cause… Poor Sir Henry! What happens now?"
From the downs above the Old Hall the sound of a single shot rang out, echoing in the clear summer air.
"It has already happened," said Grisel Rountree, turning to go. "It's best if I see to the laying out myself."
"Now there's a thing," said Sherlock Holmes.
The Adventure of the Dorset Street Lodger by Michael Moorcock
Michael Moorcock is best known for his genre-redefining swords-and-sorcery series featuring the albino anti-hero Elric of Melniboné. Books featuring Elric include Stormbringer, The Bane of the Black Sword, and The Weird of the White Wolf, among many others. Other prominent works include the Eternal Champion series, the Warrior of Mars series, the Jerry Cornelius series, and the Hawkmoon series. Moorcock is a winner of numerous awards, including several career awards, such as being named a SFWA Grand Master and being inducted into the SF Hall of Fame, as well as being honored with the World Fantasy and Stoker life-time achievement awards.
Say you've just learned that a wealthy relative you didn't even know existed recently passed away and has left to you, his or her only living descendant, a stately property. In fact, this doesn't happen very often, but you wouldn't know it judging from literature, particularly Victorian literature, where it sometimes seems as if eighty percent of the population is blessed with wealthy, generous, childless, and heretofore unknown relatives. Or maybe blessed isn't exactly the word, because properties that come to us in this manner seem to always be mixed up with business such as ghosts or witchcraft or ancient feuds. And how is it that so many people are so ignorant of their own familial relations to begin with? Perhaps back in Victorian times families were so huge that it was easier to misplace a few relatives here and there. Our next tale is another in which a man is contacted by a wealthy relative he never knew existed. In this case though, our contactee is a wealthy man himself, and isn't looking for any free houses to come his way simply by dint of a few fortuitous chromosomes. No, there are no haunted houses here, but plenty of trouble nonetheless.
It was one of those singularly hot Septembers, when the whole of London seemed to wilt from over-exposure to the sun, like some vast Arctic sea-beast foundering upon a tropical beach and doomed to die of unnatural exposure. Where Rome or even Paris might have shimmered and lazed, London merely gasped.
Our windows wide open to the noisy staleness of the air and our blinds drawn against the glaring light, we lay in a kind of torpor, Holmes stretched upon the sofa while I dozed in my easy chair and recalled my years in India, when such heat had been normal and our accommodation rather better equipped to cope with it. I had been looking forward to some fly fishing in the Yorkshire Dales but meanwhile, a patient of mine began to experience a difficult and potentially dangerous confinement so I could not in conscience go far from London. However, we had both planned to be elsewhere at this time and had confused the estimable Mrs. Hudson, who had expected Holmes himself to be gone.
Languidly, Holmes dropped to the floor the note he had been reading. There was a hint of irritation in his voice when he spoke.
"It seems, Watson, that we are about to be evicted from our quarters. I had hoped this would not happen while you were staying."
My friend's fondness for the dramatic statement was familiar to me, so I hardly blinked when I asked: "Evicted, Holmes?" I understood that his rent was, as usual, paid in advance for the year.
"Temporarily only, Watson. You will recall that we had both intended to be absent from London at about this time, until circumstances dictated otherwise. On that initial understanding, Mrs. Hudson commissioned Messrs Peach, Peach, Peach and Praisegod to refurbish and decorate 221B. This is our notice. They begin work next week and would be obliged if we would vacate the premises since minor structural work is involved. We are to be homeless for a fortnight, old friend. We must find new accommodations, Watson, but they must not be too far from here. You have your delicate patient and I have my work. I must have access to my files and my microscope."