“Women’s complaints, but I have just the thing.” He utters a characteristic burst of laughter as he waves a sealed vial of a mud-colored liquid in the air.
“The Telegraph is here for you. Spot of interesting news that I’m sure you will want to read, about the Crystal Palace … uh … incident.”
He picks up the paper and hands it to the boy with a wink.
“I saw the article,” remarks Sherlock softly, smiling back.
“You did?” Bell looks disappointed. “Oh … well …” he glances up and down the front page, “there are … uh … other things of the sort you enjoy here …” His eyes rest on something farther down the front page. “Oh, yes,” he says. “Here’s one.” He points to the story and holds it up for Sherlock to see. “The Brixton Gang. They’ve struck again; killed someone this time as well.”
The apothecary picks up his huge plaid medical handbag, as big as a portmanteau, and struggles through the narrow laboratory entrance, into the shop’s front room, over to the door, and opens it. Noises rush in from the street.
“Keep an eye on things, my page,” he barks. The thick wooden door closes with a bang.
The noises are shut out and the old man disappears into the day, off to sit on that bench in Soho Square. There is silence.
But Sigerson Bell’s plight isn’t on Sherlock’s mind now. Something else has lit it up.
The notorious gang is from Brixton … and so is The Swallow!
A CONFESSION
With a stiff straw broom in hand, Sherlock heads for the front window and those cobwebs, thinking. He doesn’t have the stomach to deceive Bell again, and has decided that he should stay in and truly clean up the shop. But his mind is on The Swallow.
The borough of Brixton lies between Lambeth, where the young acrobat spent his criminal days, and Sydenham, where the Crystal Palace rules. It isn’t particularly large but has been growing of late. Though many of its inhabitants are middle-class suburban folk, there is also an increasing underclass of criminals. London’s reigning gang comes from there … and so does The Swallow. Do these two facts go together? And if so, what do they have to do with the fall of Monsieur Mercure?
The bell above the front door tinkles before Sherlock can even reach the window, and a man enters. Or at least, his nose does.
“I’m feeling poorly,” says the nose.
“You may come in, sir.”
Despite the strangeness of this entrance and the rancid smell that is filling the room, Sherlock is pleased. Bell has been averaging perhaps two visitors a week lately, and what they pay him for his poisons has been barely enough to feed them. Perhaps the boy can make a sale. He would sell something to the devil today, if he had to, to help the old man.
The nose, hair billowing out each nostril, looks one way, then another, and finally enters, leading a very thin man with a very small cranium and receding forehead inside. He glances furtively around, and then motions to three others, who follow. They look remarkably alike, all dressed in wet, smelly clothes, black from head to foot, matted hair clinging to their skulls. Sherlock immediately recognizes the dress and attitude of four toshers, who find their living in the sewers and always work in groups so they won’t get lost. They search the subterranean arteries of London for prizes, wary of being spotted through the gratings on the streets by pedestrians in the upper world, and of rats, who live in gangs in the underworld, their poisonous bites fatal. A Londoner has to be vigilant indeed to ever see a tosher. Once or twice, Sherlock thought he glimpsed their shadows through a sewer hole, but toshers always darken their lanterns when they near the light.
“Fortune shone upon me today, young man,” says the one with the prominent proboscis. “And when we comes up, we is here on this street, and we sees your shop. Have you leeches, sire? Or arsenic?”
“We have both, sir.”
“Well, sire, I promised me wife that if I ever found a treasure like this here half-crown, that I would buy her some arsenic, so as to make her cheeks pink.” He looks around the room for thieves and then holds out his hand to reveal a silver coin nestled deep in his filthy hand, while the others lean forward to look. “And I also says to meself, I says, Lazarus, get yourself some leeches, sir, and suck the bad blood from your veins.”
“He’s been feelin’ poorly,” another tosher squeaks, to remind Sherlock.
“I recall.”
“What would you be chargin’ for a pinch of arsenic and a bottle of leeches?”
Sigerson Bell doesn’t believe in using leeches to suck “bad blood” from the veins of the ill. It is a medieval practice that does more harm than good. But the apothecary does have a bottle of those slimy little devils, swimming in green liquid back in the lab. He only uses them for experimentation. Women, mostly well-to-do ladies, do indeed take poisonous arsenic, sometimes too much of it, to give an alluring glow to their cheeks. But Bell frowns on that too. This is not a sale the old man would make.
“Two shillings,” says Sherlock.
Lazarus hands over the half-crown. The boy opens the strongbox behind the counter. There are eight coppers inside. He returns six to the tosher. Moments later, the men slip smiling from the shop with a bottle of leeches and a pinch of arsenic in hand, sliding through the doorway like wafer-thin creatures of the underworld. Sherlock watches them through the window. They look suspiciously up and down the street, pull off a sewer grating, and vanish.
Not long after, as the boy lies awkwardly in the shop window, sweeping the cobwebs away, he turns toward the street and cries out.
A huge face is staring back at him, inches away through the glass. It has black eyes and black eyebrows. Lord Redhorns.
“A message for Mr. Bell,” he shouts through the thick window. “Four days. Tell him, that boy. Four days!” Redhorns stomps off down the street, the crowds parting in front of him like the Red Sea did for Moses.
By mid-afternoon, Sherlock has both the front room and the chemical laboratory cleaned up like never before. But he is restless. He can hardly wait for the apothecary to return, and not just because he has polished the half-crown and set it on the examining table for Bell to see, but because he desperately wants to be free to do something about the Mercure case. What, he isn’t sure.
He keeps hearing Redhorns’ threat.
Four days.
This business about The Swallow’s upbringing is tantalizing. But in the end, is it helpful? It just doesn’t make sense to him that the young acrobat is involved in the murder. If he is, why didn’t he let me fall from the trapeze perch? And what could the Brixton Gang possibly have to do with all of this?
Pacing and frustrated, he carefully plucks some books from the precarious stacks and tries to read. Usually these are his moments of greatest joy: with a Charles Dickens novel, a new tract by Darwin, a Richard Francis Burton tale of a far-off land, or the latest Mrs. Henry Wood sensation in his hands. A favorite lately has been Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help, which puts forth a new belief that Englishmen of any class can achieve nearly anything: it simply takes imagination and especially, hard work. Sherlock loves drifting off into other worlds to feed his mind with information.
But he can’t concentrate today.
He makes tea and picks up the Telegraph again. He’d only glanced at it in the morning. His eyes fall on “DOINGS AT THE PALACE,” on the entertainment pages. This is a short column by a society sort containing a series of single lines about ongoing attractions, upcoming sensations, and statistics. He learns that a balloonist will attempt a leap in something called a parachute over the archery grounds on Wednesday next, that the wonder named Professor Inferno will set himself on fire in an “incendiary” return engagement in the central transept, the four-hundred-year-old Californian sequoia tree in the tropical area needs seventeen imperial gallons of water a day … and that the writer has heard whispers that money is missing from the Palace vault.