"I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance money." Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson in The Sign of Four.
Early 1902 - On the eve of Newgate Prison''s demolition, Watson spies Holmes leaving a public sale of the prison''s miscellany in the company of a beautiful stranger and in possession of an unusual trophy: the death mask of a woman who, more than twenty years earlier, had been executed for the murder of her three children. Holmes agrees to satisfy Watson''s curiosity about the memento by recounting the decades-old history of its subject.
Late December, 1878. A young Sherlock Holmes is living in a modest room at Montague Street, dividing his time between the lecture halls and the laboratories,
