So, yet another chapter.

You guys have been very quiet recently... I hope you still like my scribble, and I would really appreciate some feedback in that regard, to know whether something needs to be changed or where I can improve myself. As I have said, I myself, wasn't very happy with the outcome of the last case, and, as I have my hands full at the moment, I am rather slow with posting this one, but it would be nice if you could let me know what you think so far.

Love

Nic

Methinks the lady absent – Part 3

Sherlock:

"Well," Harriet stammered, looking confused, but behind this confusion, I could see her mind working hard and we had just climbed out of the train and onto the platform, when she turned and answered my question, much as I had expected: "If she changed her appearance, Miss Jenkins might not have recognised her."

"That, my love, is undoubtedly true, but it would have left her with the possibility of recognition, after all, Miss Jenkins is no dunderhead, is she now?"

With a slightly crestfallen expression, Harriet shrugged her shoulders, before she began arguing her theory: "But if she dressed up as a man, wearing a false beard?"

I laughed and pulled her closer, steering towards one of the bored looking porters. My theory was a quite different one, and I was determined to find out, whether it was accurate, or whether my wife, after all, had a point.

"Good day," I greeted the morose-looking man leaning against his cart, clay pipe between his lips, seemingly hoping not to be approached.

Consequently, his reply was very short of being rude.

"Yeah?" he remarked, without bothering to remove his pipe from between his lips.

Pulling out a Shilling, from my pocket, I played with, raising my eyebrow challengingly, and, as I had suspected, suddenly had all the porter's undivided attention I desired.

"I have a question," I began vaguely.

"Well, if I can answer it, I would be happy to oblige."

Of course, he was...

"You have not coincidentally helped a young man with his trunk?"

"I have helped many people with their luggage."

"Yes, of course, you did, but this man was rather special, I would say, or rather his trunk was. It was about this size..." I specified, showing with my hands the relative size I assumed the portmanteau must have had, which was roughly four to five feet in length and slightly more than two feet in width and hight. "And it was very light."

"Oh, that one!" he cried out, chuckling now. "Yes, there was such a man and it was I who helped him get that thing on the train. Normally the company insists for such kind of luggage to be handed in at the cloakroom, but this train is never very full and he had a first class ticket and you know how it is with such kind of people, they don't pile up in there anyway and stick to themselves."

I nodded understandingly and it was clear that the man now expected to be handed the money, but I had yet another question before I was willing to part with the gleaming silvery disc.

"And since you seem to be able to remember this man so very well, I am sure you have no trouble to describe him to me, have you?"

The porter immediately knitted his brows and put the pipe back between his lips his eyes assuming a vacant expression, and I could hardly shake the feeling he was kind of involuntarily imitating me, for from my wife's expression I was sure that when I was thinking things over, I looked much the same, or at least not completely dissimilar.

"Well," he eventually began, "he was about your lady's hight, fairly stoutly built, but not chubby, if you know what I mean?"

"Athletic?"

"Yes, that. He wore a brown tweed suit and a grey bowler hat, his overcoat had the same colour. His face I cannot remember, but he had no beard and I think his hair was black."

Admittedly I had hoped for more, but even though I inquired after scars, a prominent nose and the eye-colour, it was in vain. At last, I gave him the shilling and asked from which platform the train to London would leave. Harriet stared at me with an expression of incredulity.

"Sherlock, you cannot be serious! This is what we came here for to inquire?!"

"Yes, my dear."

My wife, usually patience herself, was short of losing her temper.

"You are joking!"

"By no means, Hattie. I know it seems extreme, but consider, how else would we have acquired this actually very vital information. Admittedly, even as we have left London, I was pretty certain what to find, but I needed to ascertain my theory and that is what we have come here for."

"You think she was put into a trunk?" at last Harriet understood what I was on about.

"Not put in a trunk, she climbed into it herself."

"Phew, as hard to believe as it is, it oddly enough makes perfect sense, Mr Holmes."

"I know, Mrs Holmes. Ah, and there now is our train, come quickly. And now I have yet another question for you, my dear."

The look she cast in my direction was decidedly wary and made me grin, till we both ended up chuckling, almost stumbling as we boarded the train.

"So?" my wife asked when we finally had managed to find an empty compartment and had once more settled.

"You never told me, how it is that you are so well versed in picking locks."

"Oh, that! It's a long story..."

"We have more than an hour till we are back in London, and if you start right now..."

"Sherlock!" she exclaimed, shaking her head, laughing. "Alright, then let me begin my tale of how I have come to be so proficient at picking locks. It actually started in my childhood, and it was Cedric, of all people, who first introduced me to the idea, when we got a new cook. You must know that the one we had before Mrs Smithers was a really kind and lovely woman and had always some treats at hand, for all the children who would venture into her kitchen – not just Cedric and I. But then Smithers came and the kitchen turned into a dragon's lair. No more treats, no hot chocolate when we came in from a rainy day, nothing. In short, someone needed to take action, and so we began practising picking locks. My father's desk drawer, the linen closet, nothing was safe from us."

"How old were you?" I could not help asking, as Harriet was eight years younger than her brother.

"About six or seven."

"And Cedric really took you along?"

"Yes, well, you know younger siblings can be quite determined... - and annoying."

"Mycroft would certainly agree with that statement."

"No doubt," she grinned. "But anyway, we had just perfected our newly found skill, when our mother got rid of Smithers again after she had thrown a hot pan at one of the scullery maids, and the poor girl had suffered second-degree burns from it. For some years after that, I had no reason to do any more lock-picking, till I started to study medicine."

Now her features assumed an annoyed expression, and I was quite sure of what would now follow, and sure enough:

"As the only woman among a good thirty-odd young men, I was made constant fun of, as you can imagine. Honestly, while I think that women could easily study at any university and probably should, I think my brother's suggestion in establishing colleges for ladies to be a fairly good one. It is daunting to suddenly find oneself among a bunch of ruthless young men who delight in bawdy pranks and as a minority one ultimately tends to end up on the receiving end. I found it rather irritating, that there sat a group of men who wanted to be doctors, and who still would behave so juvenile as to sneak living spiders onto one's hat or put a severed, half-rotten human hand into one's reticule. One of the most common pranks that were played on me was to steal my books and lock them into the poison cabinet, of which, of course, I had no key."

I stared at her aghast. As yet she had never much told me about her time as a student and as a man, my memories of that time of my life were rather fond ones. - Well, there had been ups and downs as with everything, but all in all, it had been an enjoyable experience. But what Harriet now told me, was appalling. Not only were most of the pranks fairly disgusting, no, had she been caught opening the poison cabinet without permission, she could have easily been expelled. No wonder she was so quick with it.

I had originally sat opposite of her, but now changed seats to sit next to her, pulling her close and kissing her forehead, feeling ever so much prouder to be allowed to call this exceptional creature my wife.

xxx

We arrived at Baker Street by late afternoon. The sky began to turn gloomy, and the usual London drizzle loomed ominously in the air, which already was moist and chilly. A cup of tea was more than welcome, and a sandwich as well. Miss Jenkins would arrive in about three hours and so we had all the time in the world to take care of our creature comforts as well as a couple of more inquiries. - Or so I thought, for there in our sitting room two men waited. One well known to us, the other a man in his late forties or early fifties, with the dominant mien of a peer of the realm.

Inspector Hopkins face lit up when we stepped into the room, while the other man's grew ever so much darker.

"Ah, there you are, at last, Mr Holmes, Mrs Holmes," Stanley Hopkins greeted us jovially before introducing us to our illustrious client. "This is Lord Bentham, who has come to the Yard this afternoon to ask for our help, and as his case seems to be a rather delicate and urgent one, I suggested we'd come here."

Both Harriet and I stared at the two men aghast. Until now, I had been almost completely untroubled by the disappearance of the man's daughter. She was all but grown up, with only months before she would be of age, and from the evidence it had been clear that she herself, had been the driving force in her own disappearance, and with what Miss Jenkins had disclosed to us, I had as yet been unsure, whether his Lordship needed to be informed at this point or whether it was not better to persuade the lady first to let go of her scheme. But with him here now, the case had suddenly taken a more sinister turn it seemed, the tension was almost palpable, and both Harriet and I sat down, fairly shaken. Something unexpected must have happened – unless, of course, the young teacher had informed Lord Bentham after all, despite my assurance that it might be better to not doing so and instead to first finding the lady and try and bring her back to her senses.

Lord Bentham, with some reluctance, cleared his throat before he began speaking, his voice full of suppressed emotion: "Mr Holmes, my daughter has been abducted. This afternoon, I received this with the post, and I have every reason to believe that she has fallen into the hands of one of the foulest of young man this country has ever produced."

Well, though I was not very keen on the reaction, this was as good a time as any to own up to my initial error of judgement.

"I have to confess, Lord Bentham, that your daughter's companion came here this morning with almost exactly the same tale."

"What?!" he cried out, jumping out of his chair in well-justified anger. "Why was I not informed of this? All I was told was, that there has been a delay and that I was not to expect Penny today."

He could not have declared his affection for his daughter any better than he had done just now in using her pet name.

"Yes, that is accurate. I will tell you exactly what I have found out till now, and then we see, what we can do with this information."

His rage barely suppressed, the agonised man sat back down, though his fingers drummed restlessly on the tabletop showing his impatience.

I began to tell both the inspector and Lord Bentham what Miss Jenkins had told me, showed him the evidence and ended with my conclusions. A heavy silence followed until, at last, Lord Bentham began to laugh an almost hysterical laugh, shaking his head in despair.

"Yes, that sounds exactly like my pig-headed daughter. She is besotted with this man, ever since she has met him at the rowing regatta at Cambridge last summer. I tried to reason with her, tried to talk her out of it, for, believe me, I made inquiries about this man and what came to light was anything but reassuring. She would have none of it, and at long last, I sent her back to school to bring her back to her senses. Which apparently did not work either. He has got her now, Mr Holmes, but that is hardly your fault. It is all my daughter's own doing. She had always been such a good girl, and now she would even blackmail me."

"I presume you have threatened to disinherit her, should she marry this man?"

"Of course I did. I was absolutely certain that all this man was after, was my daughter's dowry and inheritance, and nothing more and from today on, I am certain, for I got this."

He handed me an envelope, which contained yet another ransom note, though this time, there was little doubt, that it was a legitimate one.

A.N.: I have actually two questions for you: 1. Would you like another story set during Holmes' hiatus, for even though it might take me several months or even a year to get to it, I could start with a bit of research, in case you are interested? For admittedly I know pretty much zero about Tibet and certainly not in that era.

And 2. Would you like to read about a teenage Sherlock? I have nothing planned as yet and it, too, will be a while but was thinking that perhaps eventually I should close the gap between Holmes' adult life and his childhood, for I think I will continue 'The apple thief' until Sherlock is about 12 and then close that series ( Meaning it'll be a long way off still, for I usually have four adventures for each year and currently he is seven, well almost eight - you do the maths...).