Start with a sleuth, name of Sherlock Holmes, so he needs no introduction. More importantly, start with the Arch-Genius of detection being out-manouevred by a woman. That may be less expected. Miss Kitty Winter, found and introduced by Holmes's underworld nark, Shinwell Johnson.
'It seems that he had dived down into what was peculiarly his kingdom, and beside him on the settee was a brand which he had brought up in the shape of a slim, flame-like young woman with a pale, intense face, youthful, and yet so worn with sin and sorrow that one read the terrible years which had left their leprous mark upon her.
"This is Miss Kitty Winter," said Shinwell Johnson, waving his fat hand as an introduction. "What she don't know -well, there, she'll speak for herself."'
Speak for herself she does, and, what is more, acts independently in a shockingly active, acidic manner that takes Holmes unaware and leaves him more than a little thrilled. As he tells Watson,
'My time was limited by your knowledge of Chinese pottery. Therefore I gathered the girl up at the last moment. How could I guess what the little packet was that she carried so carefully under her cloak? I thought she had come altogether on my business, but it seems she had some of her own.'
Kitty Winter is described as flame to Violet de Merville's ice. Watson refers to her as the young lady, whilst to Holmes she is the girl. She breaks into his over cautious, under-planned honey-trap 'like a whirlwind.' Kitty's tormentor and eventual victim recognises her instantly - between his screams he rages '"It was that hell-cat, Kitty Winter!"'
The tale, "The Illustrious Client", in which Kitty Winter appears, and indeed disappears, opens The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
, a volume itself arriving late in the chronicled career of Sherlock Holmes. The case begins famously in the ennui of the Northumberland Avenue Turkish Bath's drying-room with two clever men wrapped in towels, and ends with an even cleverer man writhing on his own costly carpets, his face dissolving like a sponge. Watson explains how Holmes had imposed a safety-clause of twenty-two years silence before the tale could be published. Within this elaborate, fictional framework Conan Doyle has adroitly slid a card of time. 'Such extenuating circumstances came out in the trial that the sentence as will be remembered, was the lowest that was possible for such an offence.' So, having served her time and free at last of her tormentor and a brief spell in a women's prison, where has Kitty Winter gone? Where is she next to appear?
The violence of Kitty's revenge is so extreme it moves her into darker realms, which lie even deeper than Holmes and Watson's London. The Baron is most certainly a Bluebeard with all the obsessive propensities shown by John Fowles's The Collector
. 'I tell you, Mr Holmes, this man collects women, and takes a pride in his collection, as some men collect moths or butterflies.' Kitty knows the Baron, 'who ought to be down in a lower hell,' from the sharp end. Her full story, of that 'sin and sorrow', remains untold but it is sure and certain Kitty Winters are not easily lost. Akin to those feisty heroines of Angela Carter's retold Bluebeard stories, The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories
, Kitty has the nerve to survive and re-emerge.
still falls open at the Christmas Troyka ride. The young people in their fancy dress, laughing and calling to one another, spill out into the midnight frost and get into four sledges.
walls, has a range of cruelly tempting clothing. Moreover it caters with equal panache for men and women. Upstairs I found the Lady Eerie Gown, featuring a delicate and swishy fall of layered back petticoats. The generous Lady Eerie package includes gloves, undies, stockings, a jaunty angled hat and a choker. Chroma teamed this with a Miramode Dentelle shirt, not exactly for extra warmth, nor for modesty but because, well, black lace is Black Lace.
