Irene is unconvinced but doesn’t resist. She looks back and forth between the two tall boys. The three of them standing in this triangle are a lonely trio, each desperate for friendship, but caught up in life’s circumstances. Irene knows that gentleness can solve all this. Her eyes plead with Sherlock’s, but he steels himself and looks away.
She takes Malefactor by the hand. Holmes steps forward and almost cries out. But he stops himself and stands still.
“Thank you for being so kind,” Irene says to the young dark knight, but her eyes are watering.
“This gentleman,” spits Sherlock, pointing a stiff, accusing finger at Malefactor and backing away from the others while nearing the entrance to the street, “was just telling me about his sense of honor.”
Malefactor bows.
“He said I wouldn’t understand it. I wonder if you would, Miss Doyle?”
She gently removes her hand from Malefactor’s and says nothing.
“I have one question for him before I leave,” adds Sherlock, taking a few more steps toward the street, still warily facing the ruffians. “I want to ask this, straight out. Did you have me trailed last night, and will you have me trailed again?”
Malefactor looks from Irene to Sherlock. Then he regards his enemy with a deathly stare.
“Such things are mysteries,” he says coldly.
Sherlock turns to leave.
“You know what they say about playing with fire, Master Holmes,” adds Malefactor. He reaches out and takes one of Miss Doyle’s gloved hands and kisses it. She can’t resist a smile.
Sherlock walks away. No one follows. They wouldn’t dare chase him in Irene’s presence. He wishes he could go back, wrench her from that devil’s grasp and escort her safely home. But he can’t. He has bigger fish to fry … in Rotherhithe.
BELL’S SOLUTION
Sherlock Holmes doesn’t know how he will do it. He walks back to Denmark Street puzzling over his problem. He’s gained no assurance that Malefactor isn’t plotting against him and doesn’t know if others are onto him either. How can he get from here to those crumbling Rotherhithe warehouses without being detected and trailed? And then there’s the potentially more dangerous problem of how he will confirm that the Brixton Gang is actually in one of those buildings. But he must take one difficulty at a time.
He enters the apothecary’s shop.
“Attack!” Bell screams from the lab. Sherlock rushes through the reception room to see the stooped alchemist and a well-dressed woman in a respectable, mauve bonnet, facing one of the skeletons that hangs on a nail in the lab. The woman is approaching it stealthily. She lifts her dress slightly and gives the bone-man a tap with her foot. Bell sighs.
“With all due respect, Mrs. Hawkins, that would not do much harm to a wood fairy. No, no, no. I want you to attack this villain. Look at the way he leers at us! Observe.”
He takes up his walking stick, pivots, and turns upon another skeleton. With his feet splayed in a wide stance, somehow perfectly balanced despite his crooked frame, he wields the stick like a sword, confronting an enemy. He thrusts it forward, parrying first and then smacking the skeleton with an alarming blow as he shouts an equally alarming oriental word at the top of his lungs.
“ KI-AI!”
Then he closes in on his target, releases the stick, allowing it to clatter on the floor, and seizes the skeleton in a complicated grip. From that position he sweeps one of his legs forward to knock his skinny combatant to the floor. He takes the boney fiend down hard, with an elbow dug into its neck. In an instant, he springs back to his feet and turns to Mrs. Hawkins.
“Now, I want to see that sort of evil attitude in your combat, though you shall do it as you are attired, sans the walking stick. A lady would not be carrying one, would she? I have taught you the technical skill, the maneuver, but I want to see attitude! You must identify his tender regions and strike them without mercy! ATTACK!”
The lady lifts up her dress to a shocking height, almost to knee level, feints one way with one foot and then drives the other deep into the skeleton’s crotch. Her opponent’s entire hipbone shatters and it falls into a heap on the floor.
“Excellent, Mrs. Hawkins! Tender regions be gone!”
But the smile on her face doesn’t last long. As she turns, she spots a tall, dark-haired boy watching from the lab doorway. Her face turns crimson as she drops her dress.
“Sherlock!” exclaims Bell. “May I introduce Mrs. Hawkins.”
“I … I was assaulted in Soho Square,” she explains, “or nearly so. This kind old gentleman came to my rescue. He … knocked the man unconscious.”
“Merely doing what anyone would do.” “He is teaching me how to defend myself.” The boy has seen the alchemist hard at this sort of endeavor before, but never with a pupil. It is the defensive art of something Bell calls Bellitsu, which he has often invited Sherlock to learn. The boy-apprentice has always politely declined, but lately has been wondering if he should at least give it a try. Feeling the Grimsby-inflicted bruises on his face (which he can’t hide as he stands there), he thinks of how helpful it might be to become the master of such an art. “I once knew a customer, boils I believe he had,” the apothecary explained the first time this subject surfaced, “who spent two decades working as an engineer in the oriental country of Japan. There he learned the ancient Far Eastern secrets of fighting, grappling, and striking – martial arts – more specifically jujutsu and judo. Always interested in physical activity and called upon to visit patients in neighborhoods of less than salubrious variety, I was intrigued. Once he was well, I asked him to teach me his secrets. We spent many days in a local gymnasium beating the stuffing out of each other. It was grand! To these two Japanese arts, I melded the Swiss craft of stick-fighting and England’s own gentlemanly sport of pugilism to create the alloy I call … Bellitsu! It is adaptable to any situation: the use of the cane or umbrella at just beyond arms’ length, boxing in slightly nearer, and the oriental arts for combat at close quarters!”
Mrs. Hawkins reaches into the thick folds of her mauve-colored dress and takes out her coin purse. She snaps it open.
“No, no,” says Bell, holding up a hand.
“But I must pay you.”
“No, you must not. It was my pleasure, especially should what you have learned from your humble servant allow you to defend yourself with vigor some future day on the streets of this fair city.”
“Sir,” says Sherlock, “perhaps you should let …”
“Your face!” exclaims the old man, really looking at the boy for the first time.
Bell quickly and kindly ushers the woman from the shop, still refusing the money, and scurries back into the lab.
The old man gapes at the boy, then starts pacing, looking back at him from time to time. “You must reveal all to me!” he shouts, his stringy white hair flying and his spectacles almost falling off that bulbous red-tip at the end of his nose, as he shakes his head. “You are most evidently in growing danger!”
“I have another problem,” confesses Sherlock. There is no one he can speak to who is wiser than this old man. If anyone can come to Sherlock’s aid, he can. “I need your help.”
A smile spreads across Bell’s face.
“We shall concoct a solution!” he cries, then pauses. “Always minding what I said about having the Force with you. We shall plan nothing reckless!”
The apothecary listens carefully as Sherlock explains his situation. Then he drops dramatically into a flea-bitten old armchair in which he likes to ponder medical problems. His head sinks down onto his chest and his eyes appear to roll up into his head. But within minutes he has sprung to his feet again.