This is a story I have told no one. I had intended it to live and die in my memory; But I am willing to share it with you, my oldest offspring.
I am an old dog now. I sleep most of the day in the warm patch by Mr. Sherman's stove, among the stuffed owls and the jars of things that used to be alive and are not anymore, and nobody expects much of me except to move out of the way when the cat comes through. But there was a year, not so very long ago as it feels to me though I am told it was the better part of a decade, when I was the most useful nose in London. This is the one case that was entirely my own from beginning to end. No other dog to share the credit. No one to say afterward that I had merely followed where a cleverer creature led.
You will have heard of me if you have heard the story of the treasure chest and the man with one leg, the one they call Small, though I never smelled a name on him, only creosote and old rope and a fear that came off him in waves once we were close. I found him. Mr. Holmes has a way of telling stories that leaves a good deal of the actual work sitting quietly in the corner while he takes the bow. I have never held it against him. He always remembered to bring me a bit of meat afterward, and a dog forgives a great deal for that.
This is not that story. That one has been told, and told well enough, by the doctor who writes things down. This is the other one, the one nobody wrote down at all, because it happened three years later and involved no treasure and no murder and nothing very grand. Only a lost thing, a frightened young woman, and a trail that very nearly beat me, which had never happened before and has not happened since.
It began on an evening in late autumn, the kind that smells of wet leaves and coal smoke and the sourness of the river when the tide is low. Mr. Sherman came into the back room where I was lying and said, in the voice he used when Mr. Holmes had sent word, "Up you get, Toby, there's work." I had long since understood the speech of the human firstly, by watching their repetitive gesticulations alongside close observation of their voices; but my most valuable asset is my nose.
I knew the smell of Mr. Holmes's messenger boys by then. They always carried a faint trace of him about their clothes, tobacco and chemicals and something sharper underneath that I never had a word for and still don't. I have come to think it was simply the smell of a mind working very fast in a small space. I was on my feet and at the door before Mr. Sherman had finished pulling on his coat.
We went by cab, which I have never liked, the floor of it shaking under my paws so that a dog feels he is standing on nothing at all, and came at last to a house in a quiet square I did not know, tall and dark fronted, with black railings that still held the cold of the day in them when I pressed my nose against the bars.
The one called Mr. Holmes was waiting on the step. I remembered him at once, the shape of him and the way he stood very still, his head tipped slightly as though he were listening to something none of the rest of us could hear. More often, in my experience, he was thinking rather than listening. Beside him stood Dr. Watson, whom I liked better on the whole, since he spoke to me directly instead of over my head to Mr. Sherman, and a young woman I had not met, who smelled of fear and lavender water in about equal parts; and who kept twisting a handkerchief in her hands the whole time we stood there.
"Toby," Mr. Holmes said, eyeing me from his lofty stance. "we have a piece of work for you tonight that I think will interest you rather than an ordinary chase. Something has been taken from this house, and taken by someone who did not come in through any door."
Understanding the words, I wagged my tail. There was a smell about that house that this whole story is built on, and I do not think a human nose could ever have managed it. Underneath the ordinary smells, coal smoke and lamp oil and the dust of a house with many books in it, ran a thread of something foreign, sweetish and heavy, the kind of smell that clings to cloth rather than skin. I know now, because Dr. Watson explained it afterward to Mr. Sherman while I lay under the table, that it was a French scent called something I could never pronounce even if a dog's mouth were built for pronouncing things, worn by only one person in that house, and that person was not the young woman with the lavender water.
They took me up to a bedroom on the second floor, where a wooden box, empty now, sat open on a dressing table. Here the sweetish smell was so strong it very nearly hurt, the way a bright light hurts an eye that has been in the dark too long. I put my nose to the box and to the sill of the window beside it, which stood open a crack though the night was cold, and found the same thread running along the sill and down, impossibly it seemed to me at first, along the outside wall itself, where the ivy grew thick enough that a determined climber might use it as a ladder.