A Study in Sherlock

She closed the door, and at once she and the boy’s aunt—there was no father present—helped him upstairs to his room at the front of the house. Having removed his school uniform, they laid him out on the bed, washed him with warm water and carbolic soap, and daubed the livid rash with calamine lotion before sending for the doctor. The boy remembered little of this, though he could, when he was on the mend, remember trying to press the point that he thought someone had been shot on Margaret Street. His words served only to convince the women of the severity of his fever, and the dangers inherent in a bout of childhood measles, which, they thought, would never have come to pass had mother and son remained in America. This was the 1900s now, after all, and London seemed a backward place to an immigrant from across the Atlantic, even though there was family here to help. It was to be some days before the illness became a source of boredom for the boy and a slight nuisance for the mother and aunt.

“He’s on the mend, but I do wish he’d stop going on about hearing a gunshot on Margaret Street. The coster said he saw him collapse after the motorcar backfired and the horse shied, so of course it must have sounded like a shot from a gun to a sick boy.”

The aunt had returned from a walk to the shops, ready for the mother’s complaint. “This might feed his appetite for murder, Florence.” She placed a brown-paper-wrapped book on the table.

“The Boys’ Sherlock Holmes?” said the mother, her eyebrows raised just a little. “I’m not sure the masters at school would approve, and he has a mountain of prep to finish—he mustn’t slip behind, you know.”

“He’s a good pupil, so a little something light might be just what the doctor ordered—and I think the nurse trumps the teachers in the management of convalescence.”

“Hmmm,” said the boy’s mother. “I’ll take it up with his tea.”

Turning the pages proved to be a problem, given the white cotton gloves his mother insisted adorn his hands so that if he attempted to scratch the spots, which were becoming even more itchy and crusty as they dried out, he would not break the skin. The calamine lotion helped to a degree—already his mother had sent out the maid for two more bottles—and he’d been encouraged to take a hot bath with a copious amount of Epsom salts added to the water, but still he’d taken off the gloves in a moment of frustration and scratched his forehead so much it bled. He licked a gloved finger and fumbled the page until it turned.

Without doubt, the adventures of Sherlock Holmes offered some respite from the Elizabethan authors he’d been studying, though he enjoyed the rhythm of the more ancient English employed by Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, and Christopher Marlowe. He liked Sidney above all, having considered himself something of a poet; indeed the boy had made a vow to have his work published by the time he came of age. He could readily imagine himself lingering in an oak-lined study at Penshurst Place in Kent, where Sidney penned sweet rhyming letters to his love. It was said there was no more noble character than Sidney, in his day, and the boy thought that in itself was something to aspire to, for he wanted to be considered a noble Englishman. The endearing thing about Sidney was that he wrote about love, and the boy rather liked the idea of writing romantic verse; it appealed to him. He brought his attention back to Sherlock Holmes, though as thoughts danced and wove in his mind, he began thinking, again, about what he had seen and heard as he’d walked home from school with a raging fever. Was it his imagination? Had he really heard the altercation between the man and the woman—the lovers, as he now considered them to be? He suspected that, had Holmes been on the street, he would have uttered the words, “The game’s afoot!”

There’s a point, as sickness leaves but before a return to good health can be claimed, that a young male, in particular, will become bored and may resort to mischief to entertain himself in the long hours of convalescence. The discomfort of healing skin did not help matters for the boy, but the itch was now one of attention, of a desire for something more exciting in the day than his mother’s footfall on the stairs as she brought a tray with breakfast, luncheon, tea, or supper. She assumed he read, wrote, or slept when alone, and to a point this was true. But now he wanted to move his limbs. And he wanted to indulge his curiosity.