Free The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes by Marvin Kaye Page B

received a short message. At any rate, the evening ended on a sour note when Sir Henry abruptly proclaimed that he had to be up early in the morning and would we all excuse him.
    And then in the middle of the night, that banging on my front door. It was Sir Henry, distraught, begging me to ask no questions, just bring my medical bag and follow him. He led me to a poor but respectable section of the city, up three flights of clean but rickety stairs to a tiny room almost bare except for a lady’s dresser and armoire, where a woman lay injured on the bed. “Sir Henry, what’s happened?” I demanded, but he was silent as I examined her.
    I could not tell if her face was bruised, for she turned away from me, concealing her profile with her hand. Nevertheless, I could see that she possessed great beauty by the pleasing curve of her neck and the lustre and softness of her hair, which I was forced to touch as I examined a superficial gash on the back of her head. Her skin was of a golden hue with an underlying blush. As I bent overher, almost awed by her beauty, she slipped off a silken robe and lay face down on the bed, sweeping aside her raven tresses so that I could see her well-formed back and shoulders. I gasped. I did not need Holmes to explain what the marks on her body told me.
    As a doctor I am not unfamiliar with the scars that some forms of depravity leave upon their devotees, yet never have I seen such marks on a woman’s body as I saw that night. The man who had whipped her took savage pleasure in her pain. A web of welts crisscrossed her shoulders and back with perfect symmetry. Her slender thighs were red and bruised. I saw instantly that this was not the first cruel beating she had endured, for her back and sides were covered with a light latticework of scars, faint and white with age. As I leaned closer to see the extent of her injuries by the pulsing illumination of the smoking lamp, I saw with a shudder of revulsion that her tormentor had inflicted deep scars on her buttocks in the shape of the letter
B
. Cattle in America are branded in just this way to signify ownership, and I had no doubt that the perpetrator of these horrors had done this unspeakable act to lay claim to his slave.
    While the Henry Baskerville that I’d known had always seemed the most sympathetic of men, I reflected now that I scarcely knew him. I glanced at him involuntarily and saw a short, dark-eyed man, sturdily built, even verging on corpulence. He had thick black eyebrows and a strong, pugnacious face. He seemed stricken with alarm and concern, yet at that moment the affection that I felt for him withered like a green shoot struck by an arctic wind. He had been raised in Canada, I remembered, far from England’s public schools. How had he become infected with so vicious a form of corruption?
    Barely able to look at him, I muttered that she should be taken to the hospital. It was the woman who emphatically said “No!” in a voice that was deep and musical, the sound of the vowel somehow exotic. Her face was still turned away from me, whether from shame or modesty I couldn’t tell, but she issued a series of sharp cries and moans as I tended to her wounds. I left her with a draught of laudanum in case her pain worsened.
    â€œFor God’s sake, Baskerville, what have you done?” I demanded of him when we were on the street again.
    â€œNothing, I swear!” he replied. “I merely found her here like this.”
    It was all I could do not to grab him by the collar and shake him. “Merely found her? You mean to tell me you just went out for a walk, wandered up here and found her by accident?”
    â€œShe sent a note saying she had something urgent to tell me, but—” He broke off, shaking his head. “Be my friend, ask no questions,” he pleaded.
    I advised him that if she were to show any signs of fever, he was to call on me so that she might be taken to Charing