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for five years – for he
knew my impulsiveness well, and knew that in a very few years my
obsession would pass and I would no more consider wedding Lionel
Thorne than I would consider throwing myself off London Bridge. But
I would not wait.”
    She shook her head. She did not look so very
unlike Mrs. Wolff, being roughly the same height, and like her a
brunette. Not until I attended the Court of Assizes did I realize
that all the women whom Lionel Thorne had accosted and drugged bore
at least that superficial resemblance to one another. Six years of
hardship and poverty had taken their toll on Julietta Thorne, as
they take it upon all women who must struggle to make their living.
But I could see that she had once been quite a handsome girl.
    “Within a few years I knew better,” she
continued. “My dear father, thank God, if he could not dissuade me,
at least tied up the money and the property so that Lionel could
not touch it, this being some years before passage of the Married
Women’s Property Act. This – and what he called my ‘ungenerosity’
to his little whims and wants concerning railroad shares and slum
property – was what quickly brought out the beast in my husband. It
was my money, to invest and to manage and to save as I pleased.
Rather than seek out a profession of his own – he had been a member
of the Life Guards when we wed, but sold his commission almost at
once – he plotted ceaselessly how to gain the use of my property,
after having wasted his own in quite foolish speculations that
always failed, he said, through someone else’s fault and
malice.
    “Within a few years of the marriage I better
knew the man I had wed. And as the years went by, my disgust and
regret turned first to suspicion, then to fear. I remained with him
to protect our daughter as long as I could, but when I found in his
desk correspondence with various doctors concerning an effort to
have me declared mad – and Lionel made conservator of the property
– I knew I must flee.”
    “I confess that I have not had much time to
observe you, Madam,” said John diffidently, from where he sat
beside me on the settee. “Yet what little experience I have had
with the mad inclines me to question whether such a judgment could
be implemented.”
    “You see me now, Doctor,” smiled Mrs. Thorne.
“Had you seen me in the years immediately following my dear
father’s death, when I went from Spiritualist to Spiritualist
seeking contact with him, seeking absolution and advice – when I
spent hours and days locked in my room, making doll after doll as a
way of removing my mind from the ruin I had wrought of my life –
you might have said otherwise. Even in this country it is easy
enough for a husband to have his wife declared a lunatic,
particularly if she happens to believe – as I do – that the dead
continue to take an active interest in those they loved in
life.”
    “And so you fled,” said Holmes. There was no
trace left of the evil-looking gray-haired market woman who had
stared at me so sharply in Covent Garden – no wonder he had stared,
seeing me, of all people, speaking to the woman he had gone to
observe as a possible candidate for the missing Mrs. Thorne. Had he
been home that day when Miss Viola Thorne brought to his rooms the
doll her mother had made, it would have been he and not I who first
made the connection between Julietta Thorne and Queenie the
Dollmaker.
    But perhaps, not having heard some of the
tales going around the Settlement House about the Friendly
Gentleman, he would have delayed in seeking her out.
    Mrs. Thorne nodded. “Among the Spiritualists
I had met people who would help me, though they had no idea who I
was. And after I came to dwell in Whitechapel I came to know a few
seafaring men willing to carry letters abroad, to post them from
Europe to make it seem that I had left the country. I could not
have kept an eye on the estates through the newspapers, had I
actually gone abroad. And it was