"I'm your landlady, dear, not your housekeeper."
When she thought about it though, she was neither.
A landlady, in her mind, would be less concerned for her lodgers well being. Minimum contact sustained, except when there was a problem (like bullet holes in the wall) with the flat. It didn't matter what was going on, as long as the rent was paid and there wasn't anything illegal happening. She certainly wasn't like that.
Housekeeper certainly didn't fit. No, not one bit. She worried, and maybe she fussed once in a while or straightened up when it really bothered her, but she wasn't paid to clean, so she didn't. She hated things in a Sherlock's usual state of dismay, papers and experiments littering every available surface. But really, if she did it for him, how would he ever learn?
If anything, she was more of a… motherly figure, almost. After her husband had gotten his death sentence (and thank God for that little miracle) she didn't re-marry. One was quite enough. And with her husband, she didn't have children. She had nieces and nephews' and so on and so forth, but she didn't have that bond. It simply wasn't the same.
Then Sherlock came along.
He was sixteen at the time, recently graduated from high school and going into college. Studying criminology. He had a small internship with the local police. Proved it was Mr. Hudson on the killings of five young women. They'd had an unhappy marriage. Always had, but neither of them could get a divorce. He'd been a cheater, they both knew it. His death sentence was a silver lining of sorts. For her, not for him.
And then, several years later, Sherlock had arrived back on her doorstep. They'd kept in touch, but it still surprised her to see how much he'd grown. He was taller. She'd told him he'd hit six feet back then, and she was right.
Then there was John. Oh, she'd like John right off the bat. She lied when she said he was the sitting down type. She was good with that kind of thing. She could read his need for action and danger from the cane alone. She was no Sherlock Holmes, but there was something. Something about that cane that just screamed it.
Soon enough, they were her boys in a way. Not that they knew that.
They were just like brothers. Fighting sometimes, but more often than not joined at the hip. Sherlock was jealous of how John's attention became divided by him, work, and Sarah, like the pesky younger sibling role he played. John was worried about him constantly. The lack of sleep, the lack of food, the amount of nicotine patches used for cases. And Mrs. Hudson was the mother, dealing with them and keeping the peace.
No, she really wasn't their housekeeper.