Chapter Three

On Unlikely Alliances

I was stretched out on the prison bunk with my eyes closed, listening to the measured tread of officers and the scurrying of clerks on the floor above and trying desperately to remain calm.

I had tried to gain access to my rooms at Oxford last night, only to find that they were not longer my rooms. Or, if I was indeed in the time I thought I was in, they were not yet my rooms. The porter had given me an extremely suspicious look when I told him that I lived there and, after a disbelieving glance at my trousers, informed in soothing tones that he knew all the residents of this particular college on sight, so I must be mistaken. He added in less-friendly terms that he could call a constable to escort the young sir somewhere to have a nice lie-down. I demurred, claiming only to have become mildly lost and I could get myself home from here.

I set out down the street toward the train station without given a conscious thought to my direction. I badly wanted to run, although my more sensible half kept my pace to a quick walk. In any case, there was nothing to run from, and nowhere to run to. I came to the conclusion that this must either be a dream or a hallucination, ignoring the niggling little voice inside my head commenting that hallucinations tend to be rather more hallucinatory. They don't usually include newspaper litter and the organic residue of a hansom cab's passing.

I spent the night in the Oxford train station in the company of late night travellers, dozing on a wooden bench. It was difficult to perch on a workbench stool in a skirt, so I had changed into trousers, with my long blonde hair tucked underneath a cap. Masculine fashion had changed little over the years. The few women in the station were wearing the impossibly constricting dresses fashionable thirty years ago, and for the first time I found myself sympathizing with the cross-dressing Irene Norton née Adler.

It should be noted that I considered Holmes' past relationship with The Woman as just that, very firmly in the past. Admittedly, my position was a little biased, but I couldn't help but wonder what had caused her to treat Holmes as she had. But I couldn't blame her for wanting to escape the confines of the feminine role society had given her.

Adler aside, my masculine dress protected me from unwanted questions from the station employees, who saw only an exhausted traveller waiting for his train. Though the last train to London had already left, the Oxford station was busy all night long, with trains coming in as late as one in the morning and leaving as early as four o'clock. The first train to London left at five in the morning.

I had no money with me, so I smuggled myself aboard while the conductor was looking the other direction and avoided the ticket-taker by spending most of the journey in the WC. I was awake, yet I felt like I was dreaming, my body propelling itself towards Sussex with no conscious input from my brain. It was a curiously detached feeling.

By the time the train pulled into Victoria Station the morning rush was well underway. I moved in a daze, ignoring the jostling commuters and aiming for the southbound trains.

The Sussex train was puffing gently at platform five. This time I did not bother to check for watchers. I felt sure that no one would notice one more sleep-deprived commuter in the vast herd. I had my foot on the step and was preparing to hoist myself on board when a huge meaty hand came down on my shoulder.

"Do you have your ticket, sir?"

Of course I did not. If I had been more awake or less disoriented I might have talked my way out of it, but the conductor evidently found something suspicious in my behaviour, because he instantly summoned the station's constables. I could give no coherent account of myself and the constables, deciding that I was either drunk or drugged, took me in.

I should have anticipated the problems involved in being arrested, but I still felt as if I was sleepwalking. I might have saved the booking sergeant a world of embarrassment if I had told him I was a woman straight off, but I did not think of it until he began to frisk me for weapons, and by then it was far too late.

A police matron was fetched and the search resumed, but with a bit more tenderness than before. The police doctor was also called in and I was given a cursory examination (which consisted of taking my pulse and examining my pupils) and given a clean bill of health. I was given a plain brown skirt for modesty's sake and ushered into a cell that already contained two women of dubious virtue.

I must have looked terrible. The women, a girl far too young for the hard look in her eyes and a grizzled specimen with only half of her teeth left, sat me down on the room's only cot and forced a mug of stale water dipped from a bucket in the corner of the cell into my hand.

"What 'appened to you?" The girl asked flatly, and I shivered. I could have named any number of sins and this girl would not be surprised.

"I'd rather not talk about it." I said truthfully. The girl shrugged and let it go. The older woman nodded sagely and jumped to her own conclusions.

"Dun't worry yer 'ead about 'him, gel." She said, her thick Cockney accent made even more incomprehensible by her missing teeth. "It'll all turn out right in the end."

I could have laughed; I could have cried, but in the end I did neither. I looked over to the girl, who had seated herself with her back to the wall. She shrugged and rolled her eyes.

They were an odd pair, the cynical girl and the optimistic elder. I wondered if they had met before, or if their easy camaraderie stemmed from being members of the same profession.

We didn't speak, and frankly I wouldn't have known what to say. The constable came by perhaps an hour after my arrival to release the other two women, with a half-hearted admonition to mend their ways. The woman flirted with the constable all the way down the hall, and the girl shot me a curious look as she left.

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