Associates of Sherlock Holmes - George Mann Page 0,5
Chinese with glossy queues teemed along the pavements, and intermingling with them loitered grizzled career seamen and leather-skinned stevedores making deliveries. Lestrade flipped up his coat collar against the chill breeze.
“Are we to communicate what we’re looking for through pantomime, or learn Mandarin?” he asked dourly.
Mr Holmes smirked, flipping open his notebook to reveal three Chinese characters. “I rather think the signature of the maker might be of greater immediate use.”
“Capital, my dear fellow!” Dr Watson approved, grinning.
“How the devil did you find that out?” I cried.
“It was a positive tour-de-force of inferential reasoning,” Mr Holmes drawled. “When I flipped the box on its side, I discovered the mark had been scratched very subtly into the base.”
Dr Watson had the decency to study a stray cur worrying at an oxtail as my face flamed, but Lestrade gave a low whistle.
“Oh, come, none of that.” Mortified as I felt, I was grateful that Sherlock Holmes sounded impatient rather than pitying. “Ut desint vires, tamen est laudana voluntas. You mistook the characters for more ill-use visited by the Thames – resolve to do better during your second case. Now. I’m acquainted with one or two nearby apothecaries in this warren, and I’d wager a fiver my friend Wi Cheun will do right by us. Do wait here, for the poor fellow suffers from a tremendous sensitivity to strange Englishmen.”
We watched his gleaming black hat bob away in the throng of men fully a foot shorter than he. Or I did, while Lestrade and Dr Watson complacently lit cigarettes under a mud-spattered gaslight, as if they had waited for Sherlock Holmes to consult Chinese apothecaries some dozens of times. Decades seemed to pass. I’ll be dashed if glaciers didn’t melt.
“I feel such a fool,” I confessed.
“That was nothing,” Lestrade scoffed.
“It wasn’t nothing. My father was a clergyman – I do have some Latin, enough for Ovid anyhow. I suppose it’s too much to hope he’ll forget about it?”
The men continued smoking. I forced my jaw not to clench in dismay.
“Never mind, Inspector,” Dr Watson offered along with a genuine smile. “If everyone were Sherlock Holmes –”
Lestrade mock-shuddered, and the doctor chuckled gamely.
“I say, if everyone were Sherlock Holmes –”
“Then my career would be ruined,” the man himself finished, fairly vibrating with energy as he materialised in our midst. “I’ve traced the box, and we’ve a brief trudge. I’ll tell you on the way that I dislike Wi Cheun’s account extremely for the hypothesis it suggests to my mind, and yet – well, we refuse to draw conclusions before the evidence is scrutinised. Quick march!”
We set off briskly towards the Limehouse basin and soon were crossing its dingy footbridge under the octagonal hydraulic tower, surrounded by the clatter, shouts, and bangs of the lifeboat manufactory. As we walked, Mr Holmes shared what he had learned.
Five years previous (according to Mr Holmes’s druggist acquaintance) the mark, which read “Wu Jinhai,” would have designated Wu Jinhai himself, an immigrant from the outskirts of Shanghai who had once made his living carving teak. Upon arriving in London, he discovered that he could procure a few shillings by foraging driftwood along the riverbank, creating landscapes and animal menageries and the like on the flotsam’s surface, and afterward staining the piece to a high sheen. In time, he earned enough not merely to buy wood and commence crafting boxes, for which there was a perennial demand, but to marry a beautiful young Chinese woman and set up both shop and household in Gold Street near to Shadwell Market.
“A single domestic canker blighted this idyllic scene,” Mr Holmes explained. “Wu Jinhai and his wife were childless, and no amount of visits to the local physicians could banish their infertility.”
So distraught were they over their lack of progeny that one day, when Mrs Wu was scattering wood chips and sawdust over the ice in the back alley and spied a pair of white children on the brink of starvation, she did not chase them away as most would have done with street arabs, especially those of another race – she invited them in for soup. The Wus did not lack for money, and she saw no harm in gaining a reputation for both status and generosity amongst all manner of neighbours.
“In Chinese society, benevolence is often a way to reach across social boundaries and forge acquaintances that would otherwise be impossible,” Mr Holmes continued. “In this case, however, there was a catch which manifested almost immediately.”