“Mrs Hudson? Mrs Hudson! Where has the woman—”
“I’m just here, Mr Holmes, no need to bellow.”
“Ah, there you are. Have you had word from Russell? She said she’d be here this morning. This is Saturday, is it not? The experiment is only half finished.”
“She probably decided she couldn’t face the stench.”
“What was that? Don’t mutter, Mrs Hudson.”
“I said,” the housekeeper called from the bottom of the stairs, “no, I haven’t heard from her.”
“Very well, if she arrives, she will find me in the laboratory.”
Half an hour later, the telephone sounded. Mrs Hudson answered, and after a brief conversation, walked up the stairs to rap on the door. A stifled oath and a tinkle of broken glass joined the sulphurous miasma that trickled into the hallway. She made haste to speak at the closed door.
“That was Mary’s aunt ringing, to say the child’s under the weather and won’t be coming today.”
The housekeeper made it as far as the half-landing when the door came open. Yellow smoke billowed outward. “Don’t tell me she’s fallen yet again? We must buy the girl some proper footwear.”
“I gather she’s ill.”
“Ill? Russell?”
“Perhaps it was the idea of breathing the air in your laboratory.”
“Pardon? Mrs Hudson, you mustn’t mutter like that.”
This time, the housekeeper did not reply: She had spoken quite loudly enough for him to hear.
As she anticipated, her silence brought him out to the top of the stairs. But instead of a demand that she repeat her statement, or a query as to the symptoms of his apprentice, he frowned, and asked one of his favourite sort of questions, enigmatic and to all appearances trivial.
“Tell me, Mrs Hudson, would you consider naiveté a flaw in intelligence, or merely in experience?”
“Mr Holmes! Naiveté is in no sense a flaw. Innocence is a charming and fragile virtue. We should all be much better off if we could preserve it through life’s tribulations.”
His grey eyes looked at her without seeing her: a familiar sensation. “Hmm. Fragile. Yes.”
“Why do you ask? Are you calling me naïve? Or is this about Mary?”
But her employer merely retreated into the reeking laboratory.
Mrs Hudson shook her head and went to prop open the front door, in hopes the additional ventilation might save the upstairs wallpaper.
When Mary returned the next day, neither of the people in the house thought she looked at all well.
Mrs Hudson’s response was to cook for her.
Holmes’ interest took a more circuitous route.