Wiggins

Ellen Palmer Dorothy

Description

On New Year's Day 1891, Sherlock Holmes summons the limping street urchin, Wiggins, to Baker Street and decrees he must die at dawn. Wiggins, however, has other plans. To fulfil the dying wish of his mother, Irene Adler, he schemes with his two formidable American aunties to keep two important facts from the great detective: Mrs. Hudson is actually his Aunt Grizelda, and he is both Holmes' child and a girl pretending to be a boy. Through a series of mysterious letters Adler bequeathed to Wiggins, the dark backstory of her parents and all their long-kept family secrets unravel. To flee the mad King of Bohemia trying to claim Wiggins as his heir, Holmes and Wiggins begin their Great Hiatus. From Mycroft to Moriarty, from Dr. John H. Watson to the Baker Street Irregulars, from P.T. Barnum to Jumbo the Elephant, Wiggins learns little is what it seems. Slowly learning to trust each other, Holmes and Wiggins travel from London to Reichenbach Falls to New York City to a small farm in Canada which holds the secrets of their family history. Together, they correct the errors in Watson's tales, bond over Wiggins' disability, drop their masquerades, and deduce a father and daughter future.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 25 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781787057241
• Langue: English

Extrait

Wiggins: Son of Sherlock
Dorothy Ellen Palmer




Published in 2021 by
MX Publishing
www. mxpublishing.com
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2021 Dorothy Ellen Palmer
The right of Dorothy Ellen Palmer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.




To all my decades of Drama students who taught me to see
and observe The Great Improvisor,
and to the generations of little girls – my nine-year-old, limping, redheaded self, included –
who longed to slip their hand into his and go off adventuring
with Sherlock Holmes.




“There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”
- A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle



Our Red-Handed League
It was the coldest morning of my young life. It was the winter of my fifteenth year.
Inspired and abetted by the wily London snowstorm that so fittingly shrouded the debut of 1891, the great detective who was my father summoned me to breakfast with New Year’s first sun, where – before so much as a single bite of crumpet – he decreed my death at dawn.
“How are you? You have been lying in a Whitechapel gutter, I perceive.”
His first words were not a question, but an affirmation of instructions. I nodded and wished him, “a most deductive New Year,” a phrasing I had crafted with considerable cogitation hoping to please him.
Instead, he snorted, “Exposure can be deadly, Wiggins. Disrobe immediately!”
Breakfast nudity – now that was an odd request, even for my father. While we often dined in costume, all previous performances before an attentive audience of toast points had included pants. But that morning, ignoring both the irony of his request and the dismay it caused me, he vaulted from his chair to capture my beloved cap.
When an oblivious elbow dashed his morning pipe to the floor, glowing ash from reclaimed plugs and dotties singed the bearskin rug. Insensible to the notion that even guttersnipes are entitled to a privacy of their persons, he began my interrogation, whilst stripping the beggar-boy’s coat from my back.
“None observed your arrival, Wiggins? Neither your person, nor your footprints?”
I nodded.
“You journeyed to Baker Street circuitously, walking backwards in the snow?’
I nodded again.
“Having adhered to my methods, you can swear you were not followed?”
I could.
“You have put it about that you were unwell, suffering from cough and fever?”
I had.
“You have coughed convincingly in public places? I do not wish to know if you spit.”
I grinned. When I puffed my cheeks and mimed a well-aimed stream, he neatly pulled his boots beyond my improvised trajectory. An expert hand pretended his own quick handkerchief, whipped from breast pocket to wipe imaginary spittle from his toe. A sideways flick sent ersatz spittle back at my face. I ducked. When he applauded, I bowed. He then raised a stopping hand.
“Unlike this improvised tom-foolery, Wiggins, the play I debut this New Year’s morn is formidable and far-reaching. As its curtain rises with the sun, I must know with certainty that you have dressed the stage to the best of your amateur abilities.”
I watched the invisible handkerchief be returned, inch by inch, to his breast pocket. It was, as always, effortlessly perfect, exemplifying the theory and practice of his heralded monograph, The Science of Improvisation and the Detection of Belief :
“Everything, real or improvised, has a history. Like their human creators, improvisations have provenance. They neither materialize in the ether, nor return to it. Improvised objects must be seen by all to have a genesis, a physical birth, an identifiable on-going use and belonging, and a final resting place.”
Once the improvised hankie rested, Father’s nimble hands reached for my throat.
“My next question is of urgent import, Wiggins. Answer it exactly.”
I struggled, but could not prevent the unbuttoning of my collar.
“You were seen to fall asleep for three nights as instructed, in the appointed bend of your designated gutter, wearing the exact costume you are currently, if inefficiently, re-providing me?”
Beneath the threadbare shirt being tugged over my face, I emitted an affirmative grunt.
“Good! You shall die directly. Alone in a gutter, in rags. A cast off in cast offs. But, console yourself,” he added reaching for my left pant leg, “Your death ensures my resurrection.”
If I did not appear delighted, he did not appear to notice.
“In Act Two, the second demise will be mine.” Freeing my pants from my person, he began whipping them overhead, narrowly missing the green gasogene. “It’s a cracking plot, my boy! An international stage. A climax thrilling! In operatic finale, the vital moral of the story will be secured.”
He lowered his whip, lowered himself to his red leather chair, and began rolling my clothes into a ball. Sighting an old medical bag, he yanked it from its shelf. Contents dumped in a tinkling of glass, thankfully adding no vial of anything no-longer medicinal, but still flammable, to spots of bearskin still smoldering. In typical disregard for property not his own, he began feeding my only apparel to the bag’s chomping mouth. I kicked my beloved cap under the settee, a bare half beat ahead of the detective-turned-rag picker whirling back into my face.
“A certain scribbling physician will mourn me in his little magazine as he and the Empire grieve my loss. I dislike deceiving our good Dr. Watson, but must do so to ensure his safekeeping. You recall two years ago, in The Adventure of the Dying Detective, when I had to convince him I had a deadly virus? In that case and this, Watson’s grief must be credible and he could never credibly pretend it.” Holmes rolled his eyes, “I remind you of his face in any game of Whist.”
I returned his smile. The good doctor’s tell-tale flying eyebrows broadcast his every card.
“Watson’s current consort – number two or twenty, I can never tally the man’s amative accoutrements – will no doubt console him. Our longsuffering landlady is likewise safe. No one suspects her importance to me. At my insistence, Watson has portrayed her in his stories as merely a fussy flibbertigibbet. When I am gone, I imagine the fictitious Mrs. Hudson will withdraw into a hermitic self-consolation via the creation and consumption of sticky pudding. An addiction, I must add, of which she is much too fond for her corset’s liking.”
I smiled again as required. Equally on cue, Holmes pushed for the punchline.
“As we say in the theatre,” he rounded his shoulders and inflated his belly, instantly transforming his tall, svelte self into a portly silhouette, “Adipose… ruins the pose.”
Flipping a fleet smile in my direction, he added, “I shall relish this pose, then recompose.”
If you find this Sherlock excessive, Perplexed Reader, you have yet to meet the bodacious bedlam of the rest of my irregular family. If this Holmes is not the cerebral sleuth you expected, that is Watson’s creation. That good doctor shrunk all my father’s excesses to fit Victorian propriety. My Sherlock is of a more theatrical bent, if not a fully-smoked theatre ham.
Father closed Watson’s case. He raised a tensed leg to straddle his chair, narrowed his gaze to an aspect somehow both innerved and entirely still. As always, he commanded the room.
“When Moriarty comes for you, my dear boy – and make no mistake, he cannot not suffer me to live on in any capacity and so come for you he most certainly shall – unlike Mrs. Hudson, you can find no solace in the soporific over-ingestion of comestibles. Unlike Watson, you cannot find your missing manhood in an inkpot.” A well-buffed finger executed one smart tap to his nose. “So, my young apprentice, deduce the obvious: what must you do to protect yourself?”
Fisting his best gloves aloft like dark wings of a bird of prey, his talon-grey eyes targeted mine. But I kept silent. As my dear mother had often explained, all Holmes’ questions were reductively rhetorical; any answer by anyone else was incorrect by default of not being his. In the theatre of deduction – in truth, before any audience of any size either of my parents ever garnered – the first line, the best line, the punch line, and the last word must always be theirs.
“What is plainer than a child as plain as you, hidden in plain sight?”
I had no time to take offence at this slur of a riddle given how he solved it.
“A dead child.” A lean black finger stabbed the air. “Already buried. Flat in his grave!”
When my eyebrows flew, Father gave one sharp-bursting bark like a sleek, exultant hound.
“Hah! No one shall come looking for you, Wiggins, if they believe you dead. See it plain. I have made career and reputation from the simple precept that most people cannot see things for looking at them. Fewer still have the deductive capacity to outwit danger, to escape it true and in time. But you and I,