221B Boys
A heart attack had taken Mycroft as he sat in his chair at the Diogenes Club. Holmes showed no signs of mourning at the inquest, the services, or the graveside. His posture had been rigid, his face impassive, his manner dignified. Holmes held himself under such tight control because he feared strong emotion, but his feelings would demand expression at some point. The only person who had known him since childhood was gone—did not the loss affect him?
Now, Holmes calmly sorted his correspondence-- condolences penned on elegant stationery from highly esteemed personages in one stack; in another pile went plainer notes of sympathy from his many London acquaintances. Suddenly he froze. With a soft cry, Holmes buried his face in his hands. I rushed to his side to find him weeping, his iron defenses shattered like glass. I put my hand on his shoulder--at last his pent-up grief would find relief.
The letter he had been reading was on very cheap paper. It read:
"Sorry yur brother died. Anything we can do, just say the werd. No charge. Wiggins."
Holmes had placed it in the wrong pile. Surely there was nothing more common than three lines of illiterate writing, followed by the signatures, some laboriously printed, some merely a scrawled "X", of a dozen street boys?