Another Case for Speedwell & Friere: The Cripleside "Robot"

Lodgings

Dr Germander Speedwell, 122a Ephesia Walk, 28th October

In answer to the questions you doubtless have of how Ms Friere and I came to be lodging in London in the Year of Our Lord 1899 – and indeed how our very unusual adventures began – I'm afraid I am not at liberty to say.

    In addition, it is my opinion (as my father frequently commented), that a chap's personal life is his own private kingdom: a manse to be guarded at all costs with the strictest palisades of decency and prudence – and as such I will not be addressing the matter one iota.

     At any rate, the speculation generated by our current (and might I add, somewhat unorthodox) working relationship – indeed, why I should be residing under the same roof as such a striking and self-assured woman as Ms Ravenna Friere – is utterly irrelevant to the narrative in hand, and, as I'm sure the rational reader will appreciate, I shall try to confine myself to cold hard fact. It is therefore best that I cut straight to the heart of the troubling matters to which we were drawn, and here our story begins.

    Late Victorian London, as I'm sure you can well imagine, is a tangling place, as grim and fetid as it is bright and cosmopolitan: what one of my more youthful interns would no-doubt describe as a proper mashup - a riotous blend of sash windows and gas lamps, a montage of cobble alleys and hansoms and ... cheaply generated electricity – but that, as I shall come too shortly, is another matter entirely.

    At any rate, Ms Friere and I found ourselves at the crux of this strange Jeckyl and Hyde London, offered lodgings in a first floor suite overlooking a haberdashers, on a road which lies in what can only be described as the marches between these two worlds – the bright lights and well-heeled eateries of the city's heart lying barely a quarter of an hours walk to the east; the endless river-side warrens sprawling out to the west, where shifty fellows, who can best be described as rough coves, lurk around the darker corners and ladies whose morals it is best not to contemplate, prowl.

    Thus, while Ms Friere recuperated her strength and prepared herself for whatever troublesome event had drawn her to this particular year, we found it best to occupy our time putting our particular skills to good use: I with my knowledge of historical conundrums and taste for the arcane, Ms Friere with her other-worldly intuition, and what one can only say, singular gifts. So, in way of distracting the general reader from the issue of how my unexpected and somewhat extended sabbatical in late Victorian England began, I shall begin with one of our earliest and most notorious cases:

The Cripleside "Robot"

It was a damp September afternoon, where the fog seemed to hang like ghostly washing above the glistening cobbles, and Ms Friere was stood admiring herself via means of the selfie mode of her mobile phone's camera.

    I paused in the doorway to the sitting room, watching as she tilted her head from side to side, adjusting first the small bonnet pinned atop her piled black hair - like a clipper cresting a liquorice wave - and then the high collar of her blouse, affixed with a garnet brooch.

     'Most fetching.' I said distractedly, stepping in from my study to flop in the nearest chair. Ms Friere replied with an inclination of her eyebrows, before busying herself with shrugging on a cropped grey jacket which matched her long and fashionable skirt perfectly.

     'It is starchy.' She said in her brusque, unreadable tone. 'Yet the lines are clean enough.'

     Clean, I thought to myself wryly. She looked as eye-catching as ever, the very embodiment of athletic female perfection, and doubtless a sea of heads would turn when next we strode abroad in London's hydrogen-lit streets.