Prologue ("The Makings of a Family")
He observed them, at least in the beginning, from afar. From afar first, and then up close.
Up close, as they went from being just a conglomeration of five London street urchins, all under the age of sixteen, and became arguably the most elite branch of the Scotland Yard detective force, in all but name, and a family, in all but blood.
Well, that wasn't quite true, that in the beginning they'd been nothing but a group of ragtag orphans. Even from the start they had been so much more than that. There were thousands of street kids in London—certainly hundreds in just a two-mile radius—and yet Holmes had handpicked the five of them. There was good reason for it, too. Even among the poorest of the poor in the slums of London, those five stood out.
The idea to create a team of elite children first struck Holmes many years before the first case the kids were eventually involved in. Children, particularly the bright ones, Holmes knew, had a way of seeing things adults missed, making simple what adults found complex. They had a way, too, of sneaking, of skulking in the shadows with their ears pricked, of seeing and examining and reporting. And so it seemed like a natural thing to create a team of children.
As soon as he had decided to move forward with that idea, he had narrowed it down quickly to twenty of the street urchins. Holmes had chosen the twenty quickly, and kept his eye on them. Those first children had been selected purely on aptitude, with little regard for character. Only their abilities went into consideration; and what abilities they were! Each of the twenty had remarkable skill in some department or another, be it memory, pickpocketing, sneaking, running, analytics, evasion, or one of dozens of others.
But as soon as it became time to evaluate the children's characters and situations and not just their raw abilities, it became clear that, for one reason or another, several of them were not fit for the job. There was the girl with asthma and the boy with the gimp leg. There was the girl who the street beggars knew too well, and the boy who actually had a home to return to at the end of the night, where he would be missed if he stayed out too late. The boy who was too gutsy, the girl who was too afraid, the boy who was too protective of his little brother: all unsuitable.
So the elimination game had begun. And slowly the numbers dwindled down from a score of children, to half that, to eight, then six, then five. And the five that remained at the end of the process had all been so exceptionally talented that Holmes never had any doubts about any of them.
There was the boy, first of all; the oldest of the group. With eyes as sharp as an eagle's and a memory that awed even Holmes, he had caught Holmes's eye from the beginning. Even before the detective moved onto Baker Street, when he still lived on Gloucester Place, he had noticed the boy. Ever since he was nine, the child had made it a pet project of his to learn as much about as many inhabitants of the city of London as he could. He could hide in the shadows well, too; and Holmes's eye always followed him, as he crouched down and listened and watched, and learned about the people that lived on the street, learned about their occupations, families, hobbies, strengths, weaknesses, grievances, failures, successes. Holmes watched as he had committed those facts to memory, and now had an internal file on the personal lives of almost five hundred Londoners to date.
The boy could see, and memorize, for sure. Holmes didn't think he could observe yet, or deduce, but they'd get there. His abilities had grown as he had aged, as well, and by the time he was thirteen, Holmes was confident he was an extremely promising young man.
So that had been Wiggins, who had been the elite among the elite. Holmes had been confident about him from the beginning.
Him, and the girl. The brown-haired girl. She hadn't been around when Wiggins was nine, but by the time he was eleven, the girl had completely assimilated into the city. Holmes had to be awed at how she did it. The transition was so gentle, so gradual, so well-done, that it impressed him.
She had light fingers, too. They called her Pockets, on the street. Her real name was Clarissa, but Holmes doubted anyone but himself, and her, knew it. She despised the name; of course she did. When you heard the name Clarissa, your mind didn't produce an image of a tomboy thirteen-year-old with pants cut off roughly below the knee and fingers lighter than air.
She was probably the most accomplished pickpocket on the street, of any age. She'd once swiped a gold wristwatch off of Sir Alexander Henderson, the First Baron Faringdon. That was by far her biggest prize, but she had stolen plenty more besides. She generally sold her winnings—if they could be called that—at a pawnshop, but never the same one. She alternated between dozens of different stores on opposite sides of the city, pulling the same routine. The girl was an extraordinarily talented young actress, and her go-to premise was that the item she was selling had been her dead grandmother's. With a lot of sniffling and some grief in her eyes, she could quickly get the pawnbrokers to be sympathetic, and drop any suspicion they might have had.
Pockets was one of two girls who eventually joined Holmes's team; the other was considerably younger. She had been just seven years old during the Jefferson Hope case, and she was the younger sister of another of Holmes's gang. Her name was Ash, and her brother's name was Tiny; one name was sarcasm, and one was not. Tiny had been five-foot-seven at age twelve.
Ash and Tiny had been on the verge of death when Holmes first spotted them. The detective had seen the boy, who had been ten at the time, flitting around and scrambling up drainpipes to search for tiny reservoirs of water. The detective had observed quietly as Tiny had filled an old bottle with about an inch of water, then disappeared back into the streets without taking so much as a sip.
His curiosity had been piqued, and he had followed the boy to a back alleyway, where he had seen her sister, on the verge of death. Holmes had set out a secretive test for them, while they were still unaware of his existence, and had been delighted to find that they had passed it with flying colors.
So there were four. The fifth was a smaller boy named Chen; eight when Watson first caught sight of him and "ten. Almost," as he put it, during the Hope case. Chen could run; that was the thing. Chen could take off like a wind and be two blocks away before you'd even had a chance to notice he was gone. And Chen was smart in a way that a lot of the street children weren't: He had a solid mechanical mind, a lust for knowledge about the way things worked, and a passion for inventing. Holmes didn't have much need for Self-Shining Shoes, as Chen called his latest prize (which, if the truth was to be told, didn't entirely work), but he was hopeful that the boy's logical and straightforward method of thinking could be applied, with practice, to detective work.
So yes; that had been Chen. And Ash and Tiny and Pockets, too. They were all indisputably elite, the best of the best.
But Wiggins was the best of the best of the best. Holmes had first spoken to him less than a month after moving into 221b Baker Street, and had subsequently given him about a month of private lessons in the morning concerning all manner of detective skills, before even reaching out to any of the other five. Wiggins could see and think perfectly fine, but he lacked one of the most valuable skills: how see how A, B, and C fit together, and not just that they existed. After a month of intensive mentoring, however, Wiggins had grown so much in that department that Holmes told him wryly that the lessons would have to stop, because then Wiggins's detective agency might start taking Holmes's customers.
After that, Holmes sent Wiggins out to recruit Pockets. Ash, Tiny, and Chen, he had spoken to himself. Pockets would be suspicious and wary, but would go with an unfamiliar street boy who approached her; the other three, not so much. Differing styles and personalities, to be sure; but Holmes had found that diversity, particularly diversity in terms of thinking and thought-processing, had not once been detrimental to a team. Nearly always, it was the exact opposite: entirely beneficial.
It had taken about two weeks for them to warm up to the concept of working together, as a team, but the shilling-every-two-days pay endeared them to the idea immediately, even if they didn't completely understand it. Holmes had known the pay would probably be the clincher, but he was delighted that all five of the children agreed.
At that point, Wiggins had been fourteen, Pockets had been thirteen, Tiny had been twelve, Chen had been nine, and Ash had been seven.
He gave them mundane assignments at first, working as a team and picking up little snippets of information from around the neighborhood. Tracking certain people and watching their every move; Pockets was exceptional at that, as was Ash, when she focused. Coupled with Wiggins's way of hanging onto every word and making connections based on the tiny bit that was dropped, in a few weeks, they put together a comprehensive database of hundreds of Londoners, a completely unique set from Wiggins's personal catalog. They discovered that Tiny and Chen could both draw well (Tiny excelled at sketches of living things, while Chen's speciality was sketching mechanical objects), and Holmes taught them all the basics of reading and writing.
Perhaps the most interesting exercise in those early days was when Holmes sent them out to spy on each other. He would generally give them their assignments privately, and would tell one child to watch a specific neighborhood or street, and tell the others to watch that child. The outcomes were always interesting in those games, and the children loved them. After that, they moved on to simulations, tracking and analyzing real Londoners who Holmes had spotted and deemed interesting for the children to follow.
As time passed, Holmes grew stricter with the bunch, though never really cold. They needed some sort of discipline if they were going to keep together and be useful, and he would demand professionalism and respect from all of them at all times. Still, though, he went out of his way to be kind to them, give them food if they were hungry, work with them all privately on their deductive skills. If they were living up to his expectations to be diligent and professional and hardworking, then they deserved the money and food so that they wouldn't starve to death.
It was September when Holmes had the first real use for them. A new case had popped up; later, Holmes would call it the Jefferson Hope case and Watson would call it A Study in Scarlet (he subsequently published a book under that title). The kids were all thrilled for their first "real" adventure—not to mention that their pay was doubled to a shilling a day.
It was during that case that they started to call themselves the Irregulars. Locally, the foot soldiers, and the policemen and the detectives too, were referred to as the city's Regulars. First their name for themselves was a joke, but then it became a true symbol of their identity. Holmes caught it out of the corner of his ear as he listened in on their conversation one day, and he had to admit it made him smile.
Ah, the Irregulars. The Baker Street Irregulars. They were all so wonderfully gifted in so very many ways. They always seemed to be having fun, whether it was during a case or not. In November Holmes witnessed the gradual transition from "friends" to "family", feeding each other, sharing water, making sure each of them had someplace warm to sleep at night. By December, they all hunkered down for bed together in what had been Ash's and Tiny's alleyway.
They were a group of detectives, yes. At their core, they were the Baker Street Irregulars, the most elite branch of the London crime-solving force. But they were more than that, too. They were siblings who would fight until the end of the earth to protect each other; and, Holmes was touched to note, to protect him too.
It was by Holmes's doing that they knew each other, yes. But it was by their own that they truly became a family.