The pattern held with a depressing reliability. At the end of four hours, Holmes had drunk enough tea to bring him to sympathy with the Boston rebels, found the coffee no better, taken to refusing the offers of a “quick one” through concern for his liver, and come up with a mere handful of residents who had been present at the time of the quake. Five of them had remained in the city during the weeks that followed; three of those had fled the approaching flames as far as Golden Gate Park; the other two had lodged with friends in relatively undamaged houses in other parts of the city. The maids who opened the doors to him suggested that a visit in the morning might be more productive, and he reluctantly agreed, although Sunday was often a difficult time to interview persons of this class, for reasons different from those on a week-day.
Then, when the afternoon sun was going soft with the incoming fog, he met Miss Adderley.
Chapter Thirteen
Miss Hermione Adderley was ninety if she was a day, and might have admitted to ten years more if he’d been her doctor, or priest. She was well guarded by a butler who looked nearly as old, and a house-maid in her late forties who bore a striking resemblance to the butler. All three had spines as straight and unbending as one of the gleaming brass pokers arrayed beside the ten-foot-wide marble fireplace, and Holmes would never have got inside had he been mere trade. But the old lady, whose shoes had the unbent look of those whose owner spent most of her waking hours in one chair or another, was fiercely curious about the world outside her window, and before the fragile old man at the door could turn the visitor away, the maid was behind him, whispering in his ear.
Disapproval and suspicion stiffened every thread of the butler’s spotless black suit, but its wearer stood back, bowed Holmes in, and accepted hat, walking-stick, and overcoat, handing them over to the maid. He then picked up the gleaming silver tray from the polished teak table, held it out for Holmes’ card, and showed the visitor into the room to the left of the door-way. His gait as he went to take his mistress the card told Holmes that the man was a martyr to rheumatism, but he crossed the freshly waxed marble floor without event and was back in moments, murmuring that Holmes should come with him.
The old lady in the brocade chair was so tiny her head did not clear the chair’s oval back, and her creaseless shoes rested on a needlepoint hassock. Her hand in his felt like a bird’s foot, so delicate he was afraid to close his fingers lest he leave bruises. But her cornflower blue eyes were undimmed by age, her pure white hair soft but full, and the myriad wrinkles that made up her face seemed to quiver with interest.
“Mr Holmes,” she said in a high, thin voice, “from London. Pray have a seat so I don’t get a neck-cramp looking up at you. How do you find London these days?”
He settled onto a chair across the bay window from her, trying to arrange his knees so his legs didn’t rise up around his ears. “I left London in January, when a person would find it cold and dreary. I imagine that in April it is most pleasant.”
“And are the fogs as bad as ever they were?”
“So long as the town continues to heat its homes, there will be yellow fogs.”
“I have very fond memories of your ‘pea-soupers,’” the old woman confided. “We spent some months there when I was a young sprig of a thing, and I escaped the eyes of my governess under the blessing of just such a fog. I had a beau,” she explained, one eyelid lowering in a manner that would have been coquettish had it not also been self-mocking.
Holmes laughed aloud, and the old blue eyes danced. Tea was brought then, and as the maid poured and offered the sugar, she surreptitiously watched the visitor. Whatever she saw in him assuaged her suspicion; her spine relaxed and with it her tongue, so that before she left them, she raised an admonitory finger and said to Holmes, “Now you watch that she doesn’t get over-tired. And if she tells you she wants you to take her out dancing, she’s not allowed out on a Saturday night.”
“I hear, and obey,” Holmes said with a small bow of his head. When the door had closed again, Miss Adderley picked up her child-sized eggshell cup.
“Mimi has lived in this house her whole life. I think she forgets that I’m not actually her grandmother. Her mother worked in the kitchen, and Hymes—the butler—is the child’s grandfather. So, Mr Holmes, what brings you to San Francisco and to my door?”
Holmes assembled his words with care, aware that too long a story would tire his hostess cruelly, and too little would not satisfy her.
“I am acting on behalf of a woman whose family was here at the time of the earthquake and fire.”
“This would have been 1906?”
“Yes.”
“I ask because the city shakes and burns with regularity. I remember the 1865 quake vividly.”
“No, this was the recent one. Her parents have since died, but she wishes to know more details about the weeks following the fire. They had a house here in Pacific Heights, and I believe lived in a tent for some time.”
“As did a number of us, in Lafayette Park.”
“Ah. You were here, then?”
“I was. And Hymes, and Mimi, and the rest. We had a staff of, let me see, seven at the time. It was normally nine, but the footman and an upstairs maid had just eloped.”
“Did you by any chance spend some time in the park yourself?”
“Certainly. Best time of my life, those three weeks, an absolute lark. Other than the bathing facilities, but then, an old lady doesn’t need to be too fussy about her toilette. No, Hymes found a tent somewhere, the Army I think, and Mimi and three of the others moved in with me. Hymes stayed in the house, at first to fight any fire that might blow in, and later to discourage any looters. I told him not to be silly, that it didn’t do any of us any good if he saved the house only to have it fall down on his head, but he wouldn’t listen, nor would the other men. They buried the silver, in case of robbers—silly boys, they lost one of the spoons for the longest time, unearthing an entire flower bed before they came across it in the branches of a rose-bush—and took turns watching over the house and over me at the park. They enjoyed the adventure, too—we even had concerts while we were there, around a grand piano one of the families had pushed through the streets from the other side of Van Ness. Yes, everyone was quite restless for a while after we moved back inside.”
“So, you lived in the park for about three weeks?”
“Twenty-three days, I believe it was.”
“The people I’m interested in were named Russell. Charles was an American, would have been in his early thirties, tall, blond hair. His wife—”
“His wife’s name was Judith. English girl, Jewish I think. And weren’t there children?”
“Two.”
“A little girl, and a baby. Can’t remember if the baby was a boy or a girl.”
“A boy, in fact. And it’s the daughter who is now asking me to make the enquiries.”
“What sort of enquiries?”
“Details about her parents. As I said, they died, in a motor accident some years later. In particular, she would like to know about the period in which the family was living in a tent.”
He picked up his tea to cover the intensity of his interest, sipping the smoky brew from the paper-thin teacup, larger brother of the child-sized model on the saucer beside her. But he need not have worried; she was sitting, head bent, brows furrowed in concentration. After a moment she said, “Mr Holmes, would you be so good as to bring the sherry and two glasses from that cupboard over there?”
The sherry was dry and smelt of the Spanish sun, and under its influence, memory stirred. The tiny hand reached out for a silver bell and rang it. The door came open so quickly, it was evident that Mimi had been standing just outside it.
“Yes, Mum?”
“Dear, I need you to bring me the photograph album of the fire. You remember where it is?”
“Yes, Mum.” The door shut, and silence fell, the old woman occupied with her inner images. In minutes the maid returned with a large morocco-bou
nd album, laying a white cloth on the table before she set the book before her mistress. She adjusted the book slightly and stood back. “Would there be anything else, Mum?”
“No, thank you, Mimi.”
“Beg pardon, Mum, but Cook asks if you’ll be wanting dinner delayed?”
The question was nicely phrased, Holmes thought. It served to ask Miss Adderley if she was going to need another place laid without setting the question out in the open, while at the same time reminding Holmes that it was getting on to evening and he’d promised not to tire the elderly woman.
He was the one who answered. “You needn’t delay on my behalf,” he said. “I have an appointment before too long, and won’t be staying. If we haven’t finished our business by that time, perhaps I might impose on you for a second visit?”
The offer of a return pleased both women, the protective Mimi and the lonely Miss Adderley. Mimi sketched a curtsey and left them alone, the frail hand already lifting back the album cover.
She turned half a dozen pages until she came to a photograph of the city burning. It had been taken from a hill above the downtown, long shadows indicating that it was early morning. The buildings were crisp and clear, those closer to the camera revealing their missing cornices, shattered windows, and huge cracks running up the brick. The streets were adrift with brick and rubble, the mounds studded incongruously with chairs and wardrobes that had been carried so far, then abandoned. Men and women stood about, staring up at the cloud of angry smoke billowing grey against the lighter sky. To one side, a dead horse lay in the traces of its wagon, half buried by the collapsed wall of a building.
After a minute, she turned the page.
The next photograph was at once shocking and oddly reassuring. Again from a hilltop, again the fires raging in the background, but along the front of the picture, picnics were taking place. A group of young men, some of them hatless but all in ties and tidy suits, sat and lay back on their elbows on the grass around a cloth arranged with sandwich rolls and bottles of lemonade. In the centre of the photograph, with the smoke cloud huge and furious above them and the dapper young men glancing at them from the sides, stood a pair of young women—girls, really—dressed in their spring finery. Hats elaborate with feathers, new spring frocks, their postures shouting their awareness that the youths at their feet were of greater interest and importance than the city burning at their backs. It might have been an illustration of the careless self-obsession of the young, yet somehow it was not. For some reason, the posture of the young ladies and the ease of their admirers conveyed a sense of defiance in the face of catastrophe: One knew somehow that these young people were quite aware of the horrors creeping up on them, yet one suspected that they were merely biding their time until they might do something about it.
Reassuring, the assertion of young strength in the time of the city’s need.
Holmes found himself smiling, and she turned the next page, her fingers swiping back the tissue protector to reveal a refugee camp.
The profile of the hill on which the camp was laid was the familiar park a few streets away—Lafayette Park, little more than a grassy knoll with the incongruous house parked among the trees at the top, the whole of it two streets wide and two deep. In the first photo, the grass was a jumble of possessions—bedrolls and steamer trunks, strapped orange-crates and disassembled bed-steads. All the women wore the elaborate hats of the period, and most of the men were missing.
In the next picture in the sequence, a tent city had sprung up in front of the elaborate Victorian houses that faced the park. Here, the rising smoke was closer, possessions had been gathered into rough heaps, and a few canvas tents had been raised, the whiteness of their sides and the unbeaten grass around their bases clear signs that the photograph had been taken soon after they had been installed. The women were mostly bare-headed, and the men had returned, to stand about in their shirt-sleeves.
“The Army brought the tents over,” Miss Adderley said, “I believe from Fort Mason. At first there were soldiers to set them up, but then they were called off to guard the downtown from looters and we were left to our own resources. Fortunately, a number of old soldiers lived in the area, so we managed. This was our tent, here.” A gnarled finger touched a taut white peak near the house at the top of the hill, then continued down to the bottom to turn to the next page.
Now, the Lafayette Park tent city was well established, peopled by an affluent group of refugees, long-skirted women with the occasional hat, their prized bits of furniture and statuary bulging the sides of the tents—a sofa here, two candelabra on a packing-case table there. All the children wore shoes, and the men, though still not as numerous as the women, invariably wore waistcoats and bowler hats.
As the days went on, the tents began to sag, more men appeared, the children started to look more unkempt, and the women took on harried expressions. The grass turned to mud; sloppy tarpaulins draped possessions.
Then, five pages in, the small hand splayed across the page and Miss Adderley leant forward with a noise of satisfaction.
“Yes, I thought so. You see the figure in trousers there? If you look closely, you’ll see it’s a woman. That was Mrs Russell.” Holmes already had his magnifying-glass from his pocket and was bending over the page. “That lamp on the other end of the settee is quite bright, if you like,” she suggested.
He carried the album over to the lamp, resting the top edge of the book against the arm of the settee. He switched on the lamp, brought his glass into play, and Judith Russell looked back at him from over the years.
Her daughter’s hair, eyes, and height all came from the father’s side, but the tilt of the chin was instantly recognisable, and the tug of amusement at the corner of the mouth was exactly as Holmes had seen it a thousand times.
For the first time, Holmes felt a stab of regret, as a personal element entered the case: His wife’s mother was a person he’d like to have met.
He shook off the distracting thought, and shifted the glass to one side.
Only to find, on a chair at the woman’s side, feet dangling and a book in her lap, his wife as a small child. Her blonde hair was a bird’s-nest of curls, and she was as utterly oblivious to her surroundings as ever she was when similarly bent over one of her Hebrew texts. His glass lingered here even longer before he tore it away and moved on.
The only indications of a younger sibling were the small tin cup and spoon piled with the other plates and a silver rattle discarded atop a sack of flour, although the closed tent door suggested a sleeping child within. Some days had clearly passed since the first photograph of the tent city—the wear on the grass alone told him that—and in that time, standards had relaxed somewhat, yet paradoxically others had asserted themselves. Thus, hats and even skirts had given way to head-ties and the occasional trousers, and drying laundry peeped from the tie-ropes as the distance between park (with its water supply and living quarters) and home (where laundry might be decently hung to dry) grew ever more onerous; however, at the same time the demarcations between one family’s quarters and the next had become more formalised: chairs lined up along the agreed-to boundaries, facing inward to the informal court-yard before each tent; one such division had even been neatly drawn with a line of white pebbles. “Streets” had formed themselves between the ranks of outdoor “drawing rooms”; children played there, a woman with a bucket of water walked away from the camera, and a man approached.
Holmes’ interest quickened again, and he moved the glass over the distant figure. What came into focus was a tall, light-haired man with a moustache, eerily familiar despite his gender. His spectacles caught the light, his bowler hat blurred slightly as he returned it to his head, having raised it to the woman with the bucket. The photographer must have called his subjects to attention in some manner because several faces were raised towards the lens, including that of the man trudging up the hill.
The blond man’s twill trousers were spattered with dark stains and one knee look
ed in need of mending. On his upper body he wore only a shirt, the collar missing, sleeves rolled up his forearms to reveal a clean bandage on one wrist. He appeared to hold himself erect by will alone, and Holmes did not need to see his face to know that it wore the look of a soldier in the trenches, the gaze both interior and far away. This man ached with fatigue and with the things he had witnessed, longed to collapse into sleep for a day and a night, yet equally clearly he was only here temporarily, for his shoulders were braced against the labours to come.
Speaking over his shoulder, Holmes said, “I should like to borrow one of these photographs, if I may? I shall take care to return it undamaged.”
“Certainly,” the old woman replied.
Only then did Holmes stand upright, taking the album back to the table to allow her to turn the remaining pages, none of which proved of any interest to him. He turned back to the picture showing Judith Russell, eased it out of its mounts, and laid it before the old woman.
“That is Judith Russell. What can you tell me about her?”
“A very fine young woman, full of spirit. English, she was—you’d have expected her to be one of those who found the conditions trying, who burst into tears and wrung their hands uselessly at the merest nothing. I remember, one silly young thing found lice in her son’s hair a few days after the fire, and collapsed into utter hysterics. And it was Mrs Russell with her fancy accent who put the girl back together again, getting her calm, sending for the barber, helping her boil the child’s bedding. Most of the families left fairly quickly, as soon as they could find other arrangements and store their valuables. Others moved in as soon as the tents went vacant, of course—persons whose homes were in areas less prosperous than Pacific Heights.” She laughed suddenly, her eyes sparkling. “I remember when a bevy of ladies of the evening from the Tenderloin arrived and began to set up . . . Well, they were not made welcome by the local residents, and were sent on their way. A pity, really, they were much more cheerful than my neighbours by that point.”