Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free PDF Page B

return of Jack the Ripper, or to some
other criminal of that ilk. Unless they are particularly heinous,
or attended by some sensational circumstance, few spend much time
investigating the deaths of the poor.”
    “He stopped me that very evening in the
Commercial Road, and had I not been warned by my dear Mrs. W. –
Mrs. Watson, that is,” she amended hastily, “I don’t know but what
I might have gone with him for a drink. For in that great beard and
those spectacles I did not recognize him, and he kept his voice low
and husky, and his words short. He knew he had little time. Our
daughter turns twenty-one this month, and he must have guessed –
seeing how she spoke against him in the court today – that his
chance of controlling any portion of the family money would be done
when she reached her majority.”
    “The importance of Miss Thorne’s impending
birthday did not escape me,” said Holmes. “What did you intend to
do, when she came of age?”
    “I intended to die,” said Julietta Thorne,
quite calmly. “Oh, not actually die,” she added, when both I and
John cried out in horror. “I had made my will, leaving everything
to Viola absolutely and without reference to her father. I planned
to stage-manage an ‘accident’ in Brussels or Hamburg, with some of
my seafaring friends, with sufficient proof that Julietta Thorne
was no more. Only in that way could I be sure of freeing myself,
and my poor child, from the scoundrel I married. It broke my heart
to know that I could never see my child again…”
    Her voice wavered, and she forced a smile. “I
saw her at the Assizes today,” she said. “I was in the courtroom –
Did she not look beautiful, as she stood up and told her own tale
of the wrongs she witnessed that he did to me, the abuses she
herself had endured at his hands? There is a girl who will never
know her mother’s foolish belief in a man’s lies.”
    She broke off, and pressed her hands to her
lips, her dark eyes flooding with tears. “My poor Viola,” she
whispered. “What she must have gone through, after I fled –
thinking that I would leave her, merely to save myself from
unpleasantness. Now that Lionel is where he cannot get at me, I
shall institute divorce proceedings, which I am sure will be
granted given his attempt at murdering poor Mrs. Watson…”
    She held out her hand to me, and clasped my
fingers in her strong, work-roughened grip. “But I fear that I
shall never be able to look my daughter in the face again.”
    While Mrs. Thorne had been speaking, I saw
Mr. Holmes turn his head, listening to sounds in the street.
Listening myself, I heard a cab outside, and Martha’s
sister-in-law, Jenny Turner, opening the street door. Moments later
the parlor door opened to reveal the tall slim dark-haired girl I
had glimpsed only once on the doorstep. Mrs. Thorne gave a little
cry, but her daughter only crossed the room in a stride or two, and
took her mother in her arms.
    As the two women held each other close John
put a gentle arm around my waist, and led me from the room.

 
     
     
    About the Author
     
     
    Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of
the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror,
mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy,
romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in
Southern California, she attended the University of California,
Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux,
France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger,
and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her
work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don
Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the
well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written
another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara
Hamilton.
    A lifelong fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes stories, over