Victorian Villainy by Michael Kurland Page A

that woman came back. She went out with the walking stick and came back without it.”
    “I missed that,” Holmes said.
    “It’s easier to tell than to observe,” I told him.
    “I had made up my mind about what I was going to find before I went to look,” he said. “The deductive process suffers from preconceptions.”
    “It’s a matter of eliminating the impossible,” I told him. “Then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
    “I shall remember that,” he said. “I still cannot fathom that Lucy was that jealous of Andrea.”
    “She was, but not in the way you imagine,” I told him.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Do you remember that I suggested that you notice Lucinda’s ears?”
    “Yes.” Holmes looked puzzled. “They looked like—ears.”
    “Their shape was quite distinctive, and quite different from those of Andrea. The basic shape of the ear seems to be constant within a family. This was a reasonable indication that Andrea and Lucinda were not really sisters.”
    “Not really sisters? Then they were—what?”
    “They were lovers,” I told him. “There are women who fall in love with other women, just as there are men who fall in love with other men. The ancient Greeks thought it quite normal.”
    “Lovers?”
    “Andrea preferred women to men, and Lucinda was her, ah, mate.”
    “But—Professor Maples is her husband.”
    “I assume it was truly a marriage of convenience. If you look at the bedrooms it is clear that Andrea and Lucy usually shared a bedroom—Lucy’s—as they both have quantities of clothing in it. And I would assume that Professor Maples and Mr. Crisboy have a similar arrangement.”
    “You think the professor and Crisboy—but they....”
    “A German professor named Ulrichs has coined a word for such unions; he calls them homo-sexual. In some societies they are accepted, and in some they are condemned. We live in the latter.”
    “Holmes sat down in the straight-back chair. “That is so,” he said. “So you think they derived this method of keeping their relationships concealed?”
    “I imagine the marriage, if there was a marriage, and Andrea’s adopting Lucy as her ‘sister’ was established well before the menage moved here. It was the ideal solution, each protecting the other from the scorn of society and the sting of the laws against sodomy and such behavior.”
    “But Andrea went to the cottage to have, ah, intimate relations with Faulting.”
    “She liked to flirt, you must have observed that. And she obviously wasn’t picky as to which gender she flirted with, or with which gender she, let us say, consummated her flirting. There are women like that, many of them it seems unusually attractive and, ah, compelling. Augustus Caesar’s daughter Julia seems to have been one of them, according to Suetonius. Andrea found Faulting attractive, and was determined to have him. My guess is that she and Lucy had words about it, but Andrea went to meet Faulting anyway, while Lucy remained in her room and worked herself into a jealous rage. She didn’t intend to kill Andrea; that’s shown by the fact that she didn’t open the sword cane, although she must have known about it.”
    Holmes was silent for a minute, and I could see some powerful emotion growing within him. “You had this all figured out,” he said, turning to me, his words tight and controlled.
    “Much of it,” I admitted. “But don’t berate yourself for missing it. I was familiar with the idea of homo-sexuality through my reading, and several acquaintances of mine have told me of such relationships. I had the knowledge and you didn’t.”
    But I had misjudged the direction of Holmes’ thoughts. The fury in him suddenly exploded. “You could have stopped this,” he screamed. “You let it happen!”
    I backed away to avoid either of us doing something we would later regret. “I knew nothing of Andrea’s tryst,” I told him, “nor Lucinda’s fury.”
    Holmes took a