Chapter 8
Once and for all,” the Librarian said in exasperated tones, “I do not need you coming along.”
“Mr. Holmes has agreed to pitch in.” He was still inside, rummaging for his coat; he’d be flying out the door in a deerstalker any moment.
If the real Sherlock Holmes (could you call him the real Holmes?) even wore a deerstalker—I wasn’t sure if that was just a movie affectation or actually came from the books.
“I feel quite certain that the aid of one of literature’s greatest detectives renders your assistance superfluous, Miss Watson,” the Librarian finished crisply.
“And I cannot have you putting yourself in danger. Conan Doyle’s London can be a dangerous place, and you are not used to navigating your way around book worlds. ”
I appreciated the concern, really, I did, but I was damned if I was getting left behind with Mrs. Hudson, the crumpets, and the cat while the Librarian went off on a search party with Sherlock goddamn Holmes.
“You’re operating out of your comfort zone here,” I cajoled.
“Centuries you’ve worked in the Astral Library with only one attack on the place—you said it shouldn’t be able to happen again, but now you’ve got a red card, a potential invader, and a Patron missing? ”
She glowered from under her enormous bird-decked hat. “And how exactly are you planning to help with that?”
“I’ve worked in a library before. I was a page at the BPL, so why can’t I be your page? Assist you with whatever—”
“I have never required the services of a Page. You will stay behind while I—” she began, but I pointed at her muff, where she’d buried the red card with Sarah’s name.
“You’ve got a problem, and now you want us to split up? Have you never seen a horror movie? You know what happens when the characters split up: they get picked off.”
“And I imagine you’re seeing yourself as the heroine in this scenario?” The Librarian winged a devastating eyebrow upward.
“No, I see myself as a survivor. I have no problem being the sidekick rather than the heroine, or maybe the plucky comic relief, but I want to get out alive and that means sticking with you. My name is even Watson, for God’s sake.
Let me be your Watson and let’s Study in Scarlet this bitch.
” Behind me I could hear the door of 221B Baker Street rattle, and rushed to finish before Sherlock Holmes joined in and made me entirely superfluous.
“Just—please don’t split us up. Please don’t leave me sitting here in a fictional kitchen like a kid sitting in detention. I need to help.”
I stood there, heart thumping. Please, please, please . . .
Looking dour, the Librarian opened up her tablet. Tapped on it for a moment. It beeped; she turned it around. “Sign there to accept provisional status as a Page.”
I scrawled with one fingertip, feeling giddy. “Does this mean I get automatic costume changes too?”
“It does not.” The Librarian looked up as Sherlock Holmes came flying down the steps in a slightly decrepit frock coat. “Extraneous library privileges are strictly limited—Ah, Mr. Holmes. Where do you recommend we begin?”
“A head start of sixteen minutes would give an approximate radius of one mile, possibly a mile and a half given a very brisk pace, which would seem to be indicated by Miss Hudson’s haste in departure,” the great detective said, clapping a battered top hat to his head.
No deerstalker. Should have known the movies would get it wrong.
“Allow me to alert my Irregulars; they can be counted on to pass along any sightings.”
“The game’s afoot!” I couldn’t help crying out, earning a swat from the Librarian and a quizzical glance from Sherlock Holmes. “You say it a lot,” I couldn’t resist telling him.
“You confound me, Miss Watson, which proves you are no relation of the good doctor, as he never confounds me. But as puzzles go, you shall have to wait for another day,” he said, and whirled into motion down Baker Street, the Librarian at his elbow.
“Elementary,” I replied with a little salute and fell into step behind them, trying to keep my moiré hem out of the mud, not quite able to keep a smile off my face.
Sure, we had a Patron missing and a mysterious enemy, and maybe I was only the comic sidekick in this story so far.
But I was still off on an adventure. I was on a case with Sherlock Holmes. Who was I going to meet next?
Well. I wasn’t expecting her.
I saw her walking by the river, east of London Bridge.
Not Sarah—we hadn’t seen hide nor hair of our elusive Patron yet, after a methodical search through the British Museum (her favorite haunt, according to Mrs. Hudson) and Hyde Park (her habitual walk, according to Holmes).
No, it was someone very different who wandered into my view.
Our little trio had paused in one of the seedier sections of Conan Doyle’s London: the high wharves lining the north side of the river.
A grimy street urchin darted into our path and accosted Holmes in a Cockney patois that lost me at the third word.
Apparently even accelerated linguistic osmosis or whatever it was threw up its magical hands at Cockney rhyming slang.
I let my gaze drift over the pageantry of the wharves in all their grimy colorful bustle, thinking that this world might be dirty and sinister and odorous, but it was growing on me.
Maybe all book worlds had the same crackle of potential, of plot, of things about to happen . . .
And that was when I saw her. A medium-tall woman with a smooth knot of brown hair the same shade as mine, hatless like me, walking along the street in a blue bustle gown with her head bent over a book, walking and reading at the same time but somehow not bumping into anyone.
The same way I’d learned to do at age six. She’d taught me to do that.
My mom.
And here she was.
I didn’t stop to think. I didn’t pause to remember the Librarian telling me Patrons didn’t inhabit the same world even if they chose the same book—that this was Sarah’s book world and therefore couldn’t be my mother’s.
The rules were already suspended, weren’t they?
The rules had changed when someone came after Sarah in what should have been her sanctuary, and I’d just seen my mother for the first time since I was eight years old, and I didn’t stop for anything.
I just cried “Mom—” at the top of my lungs and bolted toward the wharves.
“Miss Watson—” I heard Sherlock Holmes call behind me, and more distantly the Librarian’s exasperated “Oh, for gods’ sake,” but I never looked back. I plunged into the crowd after my mother.
“What’s the rush, luv?” a porter leered as I bumped past him, heart jackhammering away somewhere in the vicinity of my tonsils.
She was there, she was right there ahead of me, and I’d been right all along in my suspicions: my mother hadn’t abandoned me for a tech bro in LA, she’d escaped into a book.
And I wanted to know why she hadn’t come back for me, but she’d have a reason, surely she would—
“Mom!”
But that meandering figure in blue ahead of me never looked up.
I plunged into a crowd of drunken dockworkers, shoving my way through them with elbows jabbing, hearing a variety of Cockney insults fly at my back, clutching my handbag tighter when I felt the tug of acquisitive, pickpocketing fingers.
“Mom!”
But when I pushed my way past the last of the dockworkers and skidded to a halt, nearly falling under a passing hackney and startling its tired horse, I’d lost her. No figure in blue, no brown head bent over a book.
No. No, I was not losing her now. I plunged into a narrow alley on my right, the first place she might have turned off the main thoroughfare.
Something slippery and rotted squashed underfoot, and the alley’s stench—coal, sewage, manure, overlaid by something acrid and sweetish—crawled up my nose like a living thing.
Hand over my mouth, I ventured to the grimy window of the gin shop at my left and peered in.
No sign of her, or at the slop shop on its other side.
But there—a set of bowed and buckling stairs leading downward to a black gap like a cave, and at the bottom a flash of blue.
I plunged down in pursuit, throwing my moiré skirts over one arm to keep from tripping.
“Mom—” Because wasn’t it just like her to wander accidentally into the seediest part of town because she had her nose in a book?
I began to cough as I came into a long low room choked with sweetish brown smoke, terraced with sagging wooden bunks on all sides like the steerage compartment of a ship.
“Help you, missy?” a skinny old man leered, lurching up from a dully glowing brazier.
“Come for a trip to dreamland?” If I wasn’t mistaken, I’d just wandered into the opium den from The Man with the Twisted Lip.
I didn’t see even my feckless mother lingering in a place like this, but I ventured one more step inside, craning my gaze through the fetid smoke, past the languid groping hand of a man on a pallet clearly lost in poppy-fueled dreams—but the spot of blue I’d been pursuing turned around, and I saw a bleary-eyed washerwoman in a blue skirt handing over a few coins with eager trembling hands, and getting a pipe in return.
Not my mother. My heart sank down into my shoes.
“Excuse me—” I took a step back, swallowing my disappointment, but the skinny old man had a fierce hold on my arm and refused to let go.
“Just a puff,” he whispered, waving a gummy ball of something brown and sticky under my nose. “Just a puff, missy—”
“No, thank you,” I tried to say, yanking at his grip, but those gaunt fingers bit into my arm like a python, and a hulking bruiser in a tattered waistcoat was pressing up on my other side with a feverish gleam in his eye.