Laurie R. King

Week Twelve of Fifteen Weeks of Bees, and over at Myspace, Russell and Holmes are being pursued by a pack of importunate American Sherlockians, who chased the duo from their Sussex home to Oxford.

12.
You need to remember, this was 1992, and the number of people who knew that Sherlock Holmes had a wife was relatively small. No doubt our pursuing Sherlockians thought I was a housekeeper, or a nurse—they were standing watch at the gate, and began to bay wildly when first I set foot out of the house. I feigned great age—not difficult to do, at my age—and hobbled to the car, my back bent in apparent arthritis and a large straw hat pulled down, not so much to hide my features as to explain why I didn’t notice ten jumping figures at the gate. I got the door open with my ancient hands, bent slowly—slowly, to retrieve some small object from the door pocket, and then inadequately closed the door and crept back to the house.
Thus, before dawn the next morning, the three who had been set to watch overnight from their hire car recognized the hatted figure behind the wheel of the motor that pulled out of the gate, and hastened to follow—it being too dark to see that the person at the wheel was a foot shorter and seventy years younger. Nor did they notice that the young man closing the gate was in fact the old woman they thought they were following.
Whistling, I went to finish my coffee and leave the house, on what promised to be a perfectly lovely May-Day morn.