Twelve-year-old Sarah glowered at me. Her seven-year-old brother edged behind her fearfully. Mrs Hudson set the kettle down forcefully on the hob.
"Of course I do. And no, Mr Holmes is not aware that they are here."
"But he's actually working on the case. How could you-"
She cut me off. Chin raised, grey hair quivering, she turned on me with a porridge spoon in her hand. "Now don't you go accusing me of being a traitor, Mary Russell, not until you know what I know."
We faced off across the kitchen table, the stout, aging Scots housekeeper and the lanky Oxford undergraduate, until I realized simultaneously that whatever she was cooking smelled superb, and that perhaps I ought indeed to know what she knew. A truce was called, and we sat down at the table to break bread together.
It took a long time for the various threads of the story to trickle out, narrated by Mrs Hudson (telling how, in Holmes' absence, she could nap in the afternoons so as to sit up night after night until the door had finally been opened by the thief) and by Sarah Oberdorfer (who coolly recited how she had schemed and prepared, with map and warm clothes and enough money to get them started, and only seemed troubled at the telling of how she had been forced to take to a life of crime), with the occasional contribution by young Louis (who thought the whole thing a great lark, from the adventure of hiding among the baggage in the train from London to the thrill of wandering the Downs, unsupervised, in the moonlight). It took longer still for the entire thing to become clear in my mind. Until midnight, in fact, when the two children, who had from the beginning been sleeping days and active at night to help prevent discovery, were stretched out on the carpet in front of the fire in the next room, colouring pictures.
"Just to make sure I have this all straight," I said to Mrs Hudson, feeling rather tired, "let me go over it again. First, they say they were not kidnapped, they fled under their own power, from their uncle James Oberdorfer, because they believed he was trying to kill them in order to inherit his late brother's, their father's, property."
"You can see Sarah believes it."
I sighed. "Oh yes, I admit she does. Nobody would run away from a comfortable house, hide in a baggage car, and live in a cave for three weeks on stolen food if she didn't believe it. And yes, I admit that there seems to have been a very odd series of accidents." Mrs Hudson's own investigative machinery, though not as smooth as that of her employer, was both robust and labyrinthine: she had found through the servant sister of another landlady who had a friend who-and so forth.
There was a great deal of money involved, with factories not only here and in France, but also in Germany, where the war seemed on the verge of coming to its bloody end. These were two very wealthy orphans, with no family left but one uncle. An uncle who, according to below-the-stairs rumour collected by Mrs Hudson's network of informants, exhibited a smarmy, shallow affection to his charges. I put my head into my hands.
It all rested on Sarah. A different child I might have dismissed as being prone to imaginative stories, but those steady brown eyes of hers, daring me to disbelieve-I could see why Mrs Hudson, by no means an easy mark for a sad story, had taken them under her wing.
"And you say the footman witnessed the near-drowning?" I said without looking up.
"If he hadn't happened upon them they'd have been lost, he said. And the maid who ate some of the special pudding their uncle brought them was indeed very ill."
"But there's no proof."
"No." She wasn't making this any easier for me. We both knew that Holmes, with his attitudes towards children, and particularly girl children, would hand these two back to their uncle. Oh, he would issue the man a stern warning that he, Holmes, would in the future take a close personal interest in the safety of the Oberdorfer heirs, but after all, accidents were unpredictable things, particularly if Oberdorfer chose to return to the chaos of war-ravaged Germany. If he decided the inheritance was worth the risk, and took care that no proof was available…
No proof here either, one way or the other, and this was one case I could not discuss with Holmes.
"And you were planning on sending them to your cousin in Wiltshire?"
"It's a nice healthy farm near a good school, and who would question two more children orphaned by zeppelin bombs?"
"But only until Sarah is sixteen?"
"Three years and a bit. She'd be a young lady then-not legally of course, but lawyers would listen to her."
I was only eighteen myself, and could well believe that authorities who would dismiss a twelve-year-old's wild accusations would prick their ears at a self-contained sixteen-year-old. Why, even Holmes…
"All right, Mrs Hudson, you win. I'll help you get them to Wiltshire."
I was not there when Holmes returned a week later, drained and irritable at his failure to enlighten Scotland Yard. Mrs Hudson said nothing, just served him his dinner and his newspapers and went about her business. She said nothing then, and she said nothing later that evening when Holmes, who had carried his collection of papers to the basket chair in front of the fire and prepared to settle in, leapt wildly to his feet, bent over to dig among the cushions for a moment, then turned in accusation to his housekeeper with the gnawed stub of a coloured pencil in his outstretched palm.
She never did say anything, not even three years later when the young heir and his older sister (her hair piled carefully on top of her head, wearing a grown woman's hat and a dress a bit too old for her slim young frame) miraculously materialized in a solicitor's office in London, creating a stir in three countries. However, several times over the years, whenever Holmes was making some particularly irksome demand on her patience, I saw this most long-suffering of landladies take a deep breath, focus on something far away, and nod briefly, before going on her placid way with a tiny, satisfied smile on her face.
The Singular Habits of Wasps by Geoffrey A. Landis
Geoffrey A. Landis is the author of the books Mars Crossing and Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities. He is also the author of more than eighty short stories, which have appeared in venues such as Analog, Asimov's, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and has been reprinted frequently in best-of-the-year volumes. He is the winner of the Nebula, Hugo (twice), and Locus awards for his fiction, and a Rhysling Award for SF poetry. In addition to his science fiction writing, Landis works for the NASA John Glenn Research Center, where he was part of the Mars Pathfinder rover team and the Mars Exploration Rover science team.
The character Sherlock Holmes was largely based on Dr. Joseph Bell, with whom Conan Doyle studied at medical school. Bell was renowned for making diagnoses on the basis of simple observation, and also for drawing seemingly inexplicable deductions about a patient-for example, that he had been walking earlier in a particular area of the city-based on minute details, such as the color of clay on the person's shoes. Bell was instrumental in the development of forensic science, and local law enforcement often consulted with him to help them crack tough cases, including the case of Jack the Ripper. Bell sent police a sealed envelope containing the name of the individual he believed to be responsible, and after that the murders stopped. Jack the Ripper was the world's first celebrity serial killer. He preyed on prostitutes in the Whitechapel district of London and is perhaps still the most famous of all such killers, despite having slain only a handful of victims. His fame can most likely be attributed to his evocative sobriquet and to the enduring mystery surrounding his identity and motive. Our next story presents a chilling and unexpected explanation for the Ripper's grisly crimes.