Title: A delicate test
Author: clarrie

This was the result of one of those, 'seemed like a good idea at the time' bets, the challenge being that I couldn't write a story which combined five books/tv programmes/films, chosen at random. Luckily, or rather because like attracts like I suppose, at least three of the fandoms chosen by my friends were ones in which I had an interest.
Part of the challenge was that it be written 'straight', and as such I was forbidden to use the genre clash for comic effect. But, in the end, it is all meant in fun, so please, read it in the spirit that it was written, and be gentle!

Disclaimer: Most of what you see is owned by, respectively, Joss Whedon, Fox, The WB, The estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins, Bram Stoker and Laurie R King.
This is a Sherlock Holmes, Buffy, Dracula, Upstairs Downstairs, Beekeeper crossover. There was a bet.

An illustrated version of this fic can be found at www.geocities.com/bakesale_bitca/deltest.html


The bulk of this story takes place in winter 1897, I've pushed the chronology of the Canon about a bit so that Holmes returned to Baker Street in early Spring 1897 and Mary Watson née Morstan died in late 1896.
In order to fit in with the predominately Victorian storyline the Upstairs/Downstairs clock has also gone back around ten/fifteen years.
To be honest though, I think that's the least of our worries don't you?*g*

London, 1921.


'Ronnie? Did you say that you'd be getting a cab back?'
Veronica Beaconsfield froze with her arm positioned to throw. 'Not for an hour or so.' The coconut shy made another penny profit. 'Meet me by the boat swings in about an hour and a half if you like, you don't have to stick with me.'
Having been so graciously emancipated I pulled my coat around me and trod, slightly bent being self-conscious about my height, into the enforced gaiety of the fair.
Thus begins this, the second week of my twenty-first year, a gawky, bespectacled Jewess with strawberry blond hair and too few friends, currently about to start the second term of my last year at Oxford and at the mercy of Ronnie Beaconsfield's attempts to 'cheer me up' and 'bring me out of myself' this visit to the travelling fair on the common being the latest, and hopefully, the last before our return to the dreaming spires.
'Winna goldfish! Git yerself a goldfish to take 'ome missy?' I murmured something about my landlady not allowing pets and pushed past. Continuing past popcorn and toffee apple stalls, stalls offering chances to try your strength or buy candyfloss, I trod despondently on through the mud.
It was outside a dowdy fortune teller's tent that I eventually came to a halt, ostensibly to adjust my stockings, dragged low as they were by a coating of mud.
I am not by my nature superstitious and indeed am usually inclined towards the sceptical, but there was something about a woman who would call herself Princess Iriana Von Ormstein in these anti-Teutonic times which plucked at the perverseness in my own nature and pulling my coats around me I stepped inside.
'Sixpence for a basic reading dear. Life, love or profits?' The pile of shawls and bangles hunched over her low table snapped suddenly upright and without further explanation sat stiff backed and beckoned. 'Come, daughter of the desert.'
The artifice in her accent and phrasing seemed oddly jarring even within the darkness of the tent. As I took my place across the table from her, and sat breathing in the heady, camouflaging stink of cheap perfume and incense, I saw that the assumption of her age that I had made at the doorway was vastly exaggerated. The women I had thought a crone was barely touching forty-five, and a smooth skinned high cheek-boned forty-five at that.
I sat, my eyes drawn inexplicably to the smooth crystal which sat on the table between us and which seemed, although full of imperfections, through some undetectable trickery to subtlety glow. She lay her hands flat upon the table, stared into the distance and began to speak.
'I am Princess Iriana Briony Von Ormstein, and it is my curse to know all. I know what has been and what is to come. I can tell the point at which what is to be separates from what might have been and read both paths. The minds of men, the spirits, the very stones themselves offer up their secrets to me.' She sighed mournfully. 'And it is my curse that I must listen.'
Her eyes grew sharp again as she caught my expression. ' And I see that Miss Russell does not believe I speak the truth. That she does not wish to hear any advice her parents or brother may have to impart and that she fears the future will be as dull to hear as it will be to experience.' She paused, although whether for thought or for (in my opinion totally unnecessary) dramatic effect, I do not know. After a moment in the silence I realised my jaw was hanging open and shut it sharply. She began to speak again. 'This does not matter, however, as her family are content to leave her be, I know myself to speak the truth and although her future is indeed as dull as would be expected from one as plain as she it is not this of which I intend to speak.'
I listened, entranced, as my glasses steamed up in the fug of the tent, barely registering the insult which and been flung at me as I waited for her to continue.
'I will speak instead of a tale witnessed by the stones of this city some twenty years ago, twenty years past. A tale of darkness and of light and of those who walk the tightrope path between the two.' With this unchallengable statement as introduction, She sat back in her chair and began...


'Look.' The shadows shifted in the alleyway, forming themselves, as the eyes grew used to the darkness, into the shape of a tall, slim man, bent low over the mud. Brushing the hem of his coat away from the filth of the streets he beckoned to his companion. 'Look. Do you see?'
Dust and dirt was brushed from his hands as he straightened his back.' The prints, boots, two sets. One small, high heeled, the other,' He sniffed tartly, 'Workmen's. Low quality.' He rubbed a clod of the remaining dirt between his fingertips as he thought on. 'Ha!' He snorted, pointing discretely at a doorway several yards away. 'I'll wager that our rats have unwillingly trapped themselves.'
'You think that the fiends responsible for the murders are in there?'
The taller man paused in a disgruntled stance. 'I know that they are. You have your revolver?'
Obediently the shorter man pointed his revolver at the building opposite.
'Be ready.' His companion took a deep breath. 'We know what they're capable of.'
Almost before his sentence had been completed, the night exploded into a blur of monochrome activity. Pale limbs highlighted white against the black clothing of the two combatants. Aghast, the shorter comrade saw the swish of skirts and overcome by panic and disgust fired, blindly into the air.
It, she, this grotesque distortion of a young woman, fought with the insane grace of a cornered animal, tearing into her opponent until he began to lose his footing and fall to the ground. 'Run.' He choked at his associate who stood, frozen and miraculously unnoticed by the virago. 'Run. RUN DAMN YOU.'
As he watched his friend fold, and collapse in a smooth motion to the ground, his blood running cold at the sights he had just witnessed and the bile of evolutionary cowardice already rising in his throat, John Watson MD turned tail and fled.