The Oriental Portrait Artist in London

[Victorian Era] [Sherlock Holmes] [Classic Literature] [Slice of Life]

In 1880, an Oriental portrait artist moved into 221A Baker Street in London.

She could turn bones into faces and restore features that had vanished. Scotland Yard called it “magic,” but she insisted it was simply science.

She also made strange Oriental dishes and shared them with her neighbors and the homeless children on the street corner. The scent of her flowers always overpowered the smell of turpentine.

At first, Sherlock Holmes thought she was a puzzle, a puzzle full of contradictions. Too beautiful, too clever, too kind. It made no sense.

So he began to observe her. He watched her deduce everything about a murderer from a scrap of silk, soothe a distraught mother with a bowl of osmanthus porridge, and rush into a burning building despite her heart condition, all to save a child she had never met.

By the end of his observations, he had developed a terrible habit: listening for sounds from next door every morning. If he didn’t hear her making tea, he grew restless.

Until one night, she collapsed in the snow, covered in blood.

As Holmes lifted her into his arms, his mind went blank. All logic, all deduction, all that damned reason, gone.

Only one thought remained: She must not die.

Later, he wrote in his laboratory notebook: “Experimental conclusion: Shen Nange’s existence is the only variable capable of making me stop thinking. And I have no desire to cure this ‘malfunction.’”

She asked him, “Mr. Holmes, what’s wrong?”