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"Excuse me, sir? Sir? Are you the gardener here?"
My hands clenched in their thick leather gloves, threatening the dahlias for a moment. My teeth locked together behind a polite rictus and I turned my groan into a grunt as I levered myself upright. "I do the gardening here, Miss. Yes." I made my voice a little feebler and hobbled a bit more.
As I'd suspected from that bright, eager voice, it was a young woman, not yet in her twenties. Pert, perky and pretty. Impossibly bright and fresh. "Oh that's splendid. Can you please answer a question or two for me?"
She was polite. There was that. "Depends on the questions, doesn't it?"
She laughed. It was a nice laugh, not a simpering giggle or a braying hyaena. "I suppose it does! What I wished to ask you was is this the cottage that belongs to Mr. Sherlock Holmes late of London?"
And there it was. No notebook in hand nor pencil tucked behind the ear so she wasn't a journalist; that also precluded her from being an autograph hound. I didn't recognise her from any of the village fetes so she wasn't related to people here. Summer visitors staying with inhabitants or at the town's sole bed-and-breakfast were told that the two old men in Hyacinth Lodge valued their privacy, and the bees did a good job of enforcing that anyway. That narrowed down the probabilities considerably.
I feigned surprise. "Is there a reason you are looking for Mr. Sherlock Holmes?" There was just a possibility that she might be a grandchild of Lestrade or some other tie to the past.
"Oh, I'm just such an admirer of his, have been ever since I started reading his stories."
A fan. Annoying but harmless. That didn't seem so –
"And I've heard he's living a bachelor life here, and I could never stop thinking about that poor lonely man all by himself with no proper company!"
Target sighted, Major.
I froze my face into the genial smile I'd put on and let her prattle. Yes yes, that poor lonely (wealthy) old bachelor, with no one to share his life (and fortune) now that that silly fat old Watson of his ran off to marry his fourth (fifth, you sham "admirer," the fictional Watson had just wed his fifth) wife. I could hear what she was truly saying.
I could hardly fault young women for courting older men – May-December romances had become commonplace after the war had wiped out so many men of marrying age in England. Many greybeards in town had much younger wives. But there was a difference between looking for a lonely widower and setting one's sights on a notorious and notoriously solitary man.
As I always did with these particular visitors, I briefly toyed with the idea of turning the sparkles in her eyes into a stare of horror by telling this sweet summer child exactly what that lonely bachelor and his gardener did to each other behind closed doors in a single bed. And as always, since I did not wish to expire in gaol, I stayed silent.
"…and we'll have two – no, three children together!" She halted, reddened. "Er, that is, if he accepts my proposal."
I made an amused laugh. "Ambitious! But I seem to recall that Sherlock Holmes shunned the company of women in those stories."
"Oh, those were those stuffy old-fashioned women from back then. He'll like me."
My last qualm vanished.
I turned and pointed to the twisted pine in front of the cottage. "See that cord hanging from the branch? That's his bell-pull. Eccentric fellow. But a word of advice, Miss. He likes to be alone. I strongly advise you to leave him be. He dislikes visitors so much, that rope might as well be a spring-loaded trap that will fling you right back to the train station."
She laughed at my joke; she really had a nice laugh. "Silly old man! You don't know Sherlock Holmes very well, do you?" She strode toward the thin cord hanging from the bent pine.
I shrugged and settled down on my gardening-kneeler again.
The branch rustled with no sound of a door-bell.
With a great WHOOOFFFFF the entire tree straightened up instantly.
A high-pitched noise like a fly squealed overhead, getting fainter and fainter, in the direction of Seaford.
"Warned you," I muttered, and turned my attention to the snapdragons.
"John?" My beekeeper. "I heard your door-snare go off. Another girl?"
I shook my head. "I'm getting too old for this."