Chapter 9: The Morphine Trap on Harley Street

The card arrived on Friday morning, tucked between a circular from a surgical instrument supplier and a brief note from his bank confirming a deposit he had not been expecting. It was a good card — thick cream stock, engraved rather than printed, the letters pressed into the surface with the quiet confidence of money that does not need to announce itself. The name read Mr. Cornelius Ashworth, and beneath it, in smaller type, an address in Harley Street. On the reverse, in a hand that matched neither the formality of the engraving nor the address, a single line: *Referred by Mrs. Honoria Farquhar, who speaks of you and of Mr. Holmes with the warmest regard.*

Watson set the card down and picked up his pen and did not write anything for a moment.

Mrs. Honoria Farquhar. He turned the name over in the way Holmes had taught him to turn names over — not reaching for associations, but waiting for them. She was a widow, seventy if she was a day, living in Kensington in a house full of Persian cats and first editions, and Holmes had recovered her late husband's missing correspondence in the winter of 1887 without billing her a penny because she had offered him a first folio Montaigne as payment and he had spent twenty minutes with it before returning it, reluctantly, on the grounds that accepting it would have been theft. Watson had written the case up. He had sent Mrs. Farquhar a copy.