"Why on earth did you bring that?" I asked, pointing to the gun. Holmes returned his attention to me from Miss Smith, whose peculiar method of lighting her cigar (it involved, among other things, striking the match on her thumbnail) he had been observing closely.
"For the same reason, my dear fellow, that you brought home that guitar yesterday. I hope to jog her memory with it."
Miss Smith blew smoke out her nostrils and smiled at him with gratitude and the liveliest interest. In spite of my efforts at nonchalance, my reaction to the unaesthetic sight of a woman smoking cigars in my study must have shown in my face. "I fear I shock the good doctor," she remarked. She did not sound worried about the prospect. "But not you, Mr. Holmes?"
"I deduced it; I expected it," shrugged the detective. "But pray turn your attention to the revolver."
She put down her smoke and picked up the gun pensively, then expertly checked the empty chambers. She turned to raise her arm and aim at the wall, squinting to sight down the barrel. "Bang," she said, her finger squeezing the trigger and the hammer clicking. She lowered the gun and shook her head.
"I must have handled guns before. It seems familiar in a distant sort of way. But where? When?" The inward frown returned.
"Perhaps if you actually fired it?" my friend suggested.
"Holmes," I remonstrated cautiously, "this is not Baker Street."
"Set your fears at rest, Doctor, I am not suggesting indoor revolver practice. An absorbent target set up in your back garden would do nicely."
A few minutes later found us arranging boards against the garden wall. The rains and fogs of the past few days had been swept away by a new wind in the night, and replaced with a fresh sunshine which created a welcome, if humid, warmth. By placing our makeshift target in the far corner and taking up our stand diagonally opposite, a respectable firing distance was achieved.
Holmes drew a packet of revolver bullets from his pocket and handed it to Miss Smith. She loaded with the due precautions to safety she had observed before, then stood staring down at the ground for a few moments. She turned in abrupt decision, raised the revolver, and fired six shots one after the other into the foot-wide circle Holmes had drawn upon the board. An extraordinary change came over her face as she fired. Her eyes narrowed, her chin came up, her mouth compressed itself into a thin white line, her nostrils dilated. As suddenly as she had begun, she stopped, dropped the gun, and turned away from us, hunched and tense. Holmes raised his eyebrows at me by way of comment and went to her, placing his hand gently upon her shoulder.
"Miss Smith. Cordelia. What did you remember just now?"
She shook her head without looking at him. "Nothing," she whispered, her hands twisting in the fabric of her skirt.
"Come, now. You are a worse liar than Watson." She looked at him sideways. "It was just a bad dream. That's all." "Are you trying to convince me or yourself?" asked Holmes quietly. She snorted a short, unhappy laugh. "A little of both, I guess." "You are shaking. Come, sit down upon this bench in the sunlight, and try to believe we are your friends. Can you believe that?"
She shrugged helplessly. "Maybe. Maybe I do not wish to lose my friends."
"Ah, I assure you, we are inured to shock," Holmes said. She glanced in my direction. "Well, perhaps not wholly," admitted my friend in soothing tones. "But the good Dr. Watson, as I have reason to know, does not always require his friends to meet his approval before giving them his loyalty."
"Yes," she agreed in a small voice. "You may be right. If he were my friend, I should not fear for my back, no matter how ambiguous..." She broke off, digging into the dirt with the toe of her shoe, as if to bury her confusion. "I don't want to remember any more. Let's go in."
"Let me help you," said Holmes. Then, after a silence, "Whom do you remember shooting?"
She gazed at him unhappily, as if to read his mood.
"A man," she replied at last, unwillingly. "A murderer."
"An American? Was it a long time ago?"
She nodded.
"Whom had he murdered?"
"I can't remember. I really can't."
"Did he die when you shot him?"
"He must have. I put six bullets through his chest and head."
"Was he shooting at you at the time?"
"Yes. Yes, at me and at someone else. I can't remember who."
"Someone important to you?"
"Yes." She turned her face away. It had gone stony.
"That's enough for now," my friend reassured her. "I would not distress you for random amusement. But your memory, you know, is still buried in your brain. Not lost."
"Can we not let the dead stay buried?" she murmured, only half to herself. "Exhumation is such a grisly business."
Holmes studied her profile thoughtfully a moment.
"You know, I too once murdered a man," he remarked. She turned her face to him. "I threw him into a chasm, bodily. He screamed all the way down. I assure you, it is never far from my thoughts."
She gave a little nod. "You understand, then. I was not sure. Was he a murderer too?"
"Yes, among other things."
At this point, I had to go assist the maid to disperse from my front door the neighbors, police constable, butcher's boy, and neighbors' servants who had gathered there in response to the shots fired a short time back in my garden on a respectable London morning. I returned to find Holmes assisting a somewhat more composed Miss Smith into her coat.
"With your permission, Watson, we shall be off to Baker Street. Do you wish to come along?"
"Yes, but I have professional demands this morning that preclude it." I eyed him with misgiving. "You will be careful, won't you, Holmes?"
"My dear fellow, we're only going to run some chemical tests," he reassured me cheerfully. "I shall bring your patient back safe and sound before dinner. Or send you a note," he added as an afterthought, as he shepherded his charge out my door.
***
I passed by the Baker Street rooms quite late that warm afternoon upon my way home from an unexpected call, and noticing the windows open, suggesting their tenant was in residence, I stopped up for a word with Holmes. The familiar door at the top of the stairs stood propped open, and the slight cross-ventilation so provided served to move the reeking clouds within, compounded of equal parts of tobacco smoke and chemical fumes, gently out the windows, thus creating an atmosphere within only slightly too poisonous for human habitation. To my surprise I found that Holmes was not the only inhabitant; my erstwhile resident patient was sitting in the chemical corner, sleeves rolled up and hair, which had started the day clipped in a kind of wad on the back of her head, escaping to drift in damp untidy strands about her face. Indeed, she looked quite at home amongst the clutter, which seemed worse than usual due not only to the chemical debris but also to the large number of reference books pulled out of the shelves and scattered around in random disarray. She sat smoking and sipping tea, perfectly oblivious to the mess, in the center of which sat Holmes himself with his clay pipe, cross-legged upon the floor, leafing through one of his commonplace books.
"Ah, Watson, come in," he invited, looking up at the sound of my step. "We are having a very productive afternoon."
"And evening, too," I observed. "It's past seven."
"That late? So it is."
"So what has the afternoon produced?" I enquired, settling into my old chair and lighting my own pipe by way of olfactory self-defense against the acrid fog.
"Two cables, one to Boston and one to New York. Miss Smith has almost certainly obtained her scientific education, and probably a bachelor's degree in chemistry, from Tufts University in Boston. Her theory is fair, although it is not her strong point. It is her bench work that is outstanding; she has a butterfly's touch with a burette; you should see it, Watson. We have pulled up a number of memories from her college days in the course of a few little titrations; apparently it was a pleasant period in her life."