“Russell, I—”
I interrupted him with a desperate rush of words.
“If you’re going to reassure me that it wasn’t my fault and say that I mustn’t feel guilty about it, Holmes, I’d rather you left, because that really would finish us off, truly it would.”
“No, Russ, I wasn’t about to say that. Give me some credit, I beg you. Of course you killed them. It was not murder, or even manslaughter, but you are certainly guilty of provoking a fatal accident. That will remain on your hands.”
I could not believe what I was hearing. I took my arm away and looked at him then, and saw in his face a mirror image of the pain I could feel on my own, only in his case the rawness of it was smoothed over, soothed by wisdom and years.
“I was merely going to say that I hope you realise that guilt is a poor foundation for a life, without other motivations beside it.”
His gentle words shook me, like an earthquake, like the tremor I had felt as the gout of flame came bubbling up over the cliff. I felt myself falling into a chasm that yawned up within me, and all that held me was a pair of calm grey eyes. Gradually the trembling stopped, the earth subsided, the chasm fell in on itself and closed, and the eyes saw it all, and understood. My guilt, the secret that had gnawed at me day and night for four years, was in the open now, recognised and acknowledged, and no longer would it be swept away to grow malignantly in the dark. My guilt had been admitted. I had been convicted, had done my penance, and had been given absolution and told to move on; the healing process could begin. For the first time, the very first time since I had awakened surrounded by white coats and the smell of the hospital, a sob tore into my chest. I saw it on the face of the man opposite me, and I closed my eyes, and I wept.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING we resumed our rôles, all signs of the night’s revelations banished. It was bearable now, because that night and each successive night after the lights were turned out I would hear two taps at the door, and Holmes would enter, stay for a few minutes, and leave. We spoke of quiet things, mostly concerning my studies. Twice I lit a candle and read to him from the little Hebrew Bible I had bought in the old bazaar in Jerusalem. Once, after a particularly bitter day of verbal duels and bloodletting, he sat and stroked my hair until I fell asleep. These moments made sanity possible. From the time I rose in the morning until I turned off my light, Holmes was my enemy, and the ship rang with our fury, and the men retreated from the ice that spread from us. At night, however, for a few minutes, battle was suspended and, like the British and German soldiers exchanging cigarettes and carols across No-Man’s-Land during the undeclared Christmas truce of 1914, we could put away the battle and fraternise, two weary and seasoned veterans.
I grew in strength and pride and, while the weather held, spent hours on the deck reading, turning darker yet, my hair almost bleached white. Holmes, on the other hand, drew in. His scathing attacks began to reveal an undertone of bewilderment and pain, an emotional reaction that his pride would not allow him to show to the world. He rarely left his cabin, where the lights burnt at all hours. His plates were returned untouched, and he smoked vast quantities of his filthy black shag tobacco. When the supplies ran low, he resumed the habit of cigarettes, which he had left some years before. He drank heavily, never showing the slightest sign of its effect, and I suspected he would have returned to his cocaine had he been able to get it. He looked ghastly, with a strange yellow tinge beneath his tan, his eyes bloodshot and rimmed in red, his normally thin frame on the edge of emaciation. One night I objected.
“Holmes, there’s not much point in this elaborate farce if you kill yourself before she has a chance. Or are you trying to save her the trouble?”
“It is not as bad as it looks, Russell, I assure you.”
“You look jaundiced, Holmes, which means your liver is failing, and your eyes tell me you haven’t slept in several days.” I was startled to feel my bunk shaking, and then realised that he was laughing softly.
“So the old man has a few tricks left, does he? Russell, I discovered a large quantity of spices in the ship’s hold and liberated a few of the yellower ones. Also, various irritants rubbed in the eyes cause temporary discomfort but lasting external effect. I assure you, I am doing myself no harm.”
“But you have not eaten in days, and you’re drinking far too heavily.”
“The alcohol that disappears in my cabin ends up largely in the drains, with certain quantities used on breath and clothing. As for the food, I promise you that I shall allow Mrs. Hudson to feed me when she returns. When I step off the boat, Russell, every eye must know that here stands a beaten man, who cares not if he lives or dies. There would be no other reason for me to return openly.”
“Very well. I just want your assurance that you will care for yourself in my absence. I will not have anything damage you, even your own hand.”
“For the sake of the partnership, Russell?” The smile in his voice reassured me more than his words.
“Precisely.”
“I promise. I shall, if you wish, promise to wash out my socks at night, too.”
“That will not be necessary, Holmes. Mrs. Hudson will do that for you.”
WE CAME HOME to London on a grey, heavy morning, both of us burnt by the sun and scorched by the fires of conflicts honest and contrived. I stood alone on the deck and watched the city approach, feeling the palpable unease of the captain and men as they worked behind me and belowdecks. Familiar forms stood on the dock as we approached. I could see Watson looking anxiously for Holmes, and Inspector Lestrade standing next to him, equally curious at the detective’s absence. Mycroft stood to one side, his face a closed book. They called to me as we pulled in, but I did not answer. When the gangway was let down I seized my bags before one of the men could do so, walked firmly across with my eyes down on the boards, and pushed past the men standing on the dock, to the obvious amazement of two of them. Watson held out his hand and Lestrade called.
“Miss Russell.”
“Mary? Wait, Mary, what’s wrong?”
I turned to them coldly, not looking at Mycroft.
“Yes?”
“Where are you going? Is something wrong? Where is Holmes?”
A movement on the deck above caught my eye, and I looked up into Holmes’ eyes. He looked dreadful. His grey irises stared out like holes in two blood-filled pools. His yellowed skin sagged over his bones, and he was poorly shaven, this normally fastidious individual. His tie was straight, but the collar of his shirt was slightly rumpled, and his jacket was unbuttoned. I squelched any urge to pity or uncertainty and summoned up every drop of the scorn I had spent the last days in distilling, filling my face, my stance, my mind with it, so that when I spoke, acid dripped from my words.
“There he is, gentlemen, the great Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Savior of nations, the mind of the century, God’s gift to humanity. Gentlemen, I leave you to him.”
Our eyes met in a brief flash, and I saw in them both approval and apprehension, and a farewell. I turned on my heel and stalked away down the wharf. Watson must have started after me, because I heard Holmes’ sharp, high-pitched, and infuriating drawl stop my friend and uncle dead in his tracks.
“Let her go, Watson, she’ll have none of us. She’s off to make her mark on the world, can’t you see?” His voice sharpened further into a querulous cry that must have carried to the other side of the river. “And God help any man who gets in her way!”
With these searing words on my coattails I rounded the corner and set off to find a cab. It was the last I was to see of him for two months.
15
Separation Trial
She is alone in the world, in the midst of an awakening spring.
BACK AT OXFORD, I threw myself furiously into my studies. I had missed nearly a month, and although the Oxford program is not dependent on classes and attendance at lectures, one’s absence is noted and strongly disapproved. My maths tutor was away, illness of some kind, and I was secretly grateful not
to have that pressure. The woman who tutored Greek was also away, vanished into maternity over the Christmas holidays. By dint of working flat out for three weeks I managed to redeem myself in the eyes of my remaining supervisors and felt that I had caught up to my own satisfaction as well.
I changed that spring. For one thing, I no longer wore trousers and boots, but filled my wardrobe with expensive, austere skirts and dresses. I had, as I feared, alienated Ronnie Beaconsfield, and lacked the energy to regain her friendship, but instead made an effort to make contact with the other girls in my year. I found I enjoyed it, although after a few hours their talk made me impatient for my solitude. I took long walks through the streets and the desolate winter hills around Oxford. I took to attending church, particularly Evensong at the cathedral, just to sit and listen. Once I went to a concert with a quiet young man from my patristics lecture. The music was Mozart, and well played, but halfway through, the shining genius and the pain of it made it impossible to breathe, and I left. The young man did not ask me again.
My written work changed, too. It became even more precise, less tolerant of other, softer viewpoints, more ruthlessly logical: “Brilliant and hard, like a diamond” was a remark from one reader, not altogether approving.
I drove myself. I ate less, worked invariably into the early hours of morning, drank brandy now to help me sleep. I laughed when a librarian at the Bodleian suggested, only half joking, that I might move into the stacks, but my laughter was a polite, brittle noise. I became, in other words, more like Holmes than the man himself: brilliant, driven to a point of obsession, careless of myself, mindless of others, but without the passion and the deep-down, inbred love for the good in humanity that was the basis of his entire career. He loved the humanity that could not understand or fully accept him; I, in the midst of the same human race, became a thinking machine.
Holmes himself, on his farm in the south downs, was retreating from the world into softness and bewilderment. Mrs. Hudson cut short her expedition to the Antipodes and returned home in late February. Her first letter to me was brief and shocked at the state she had found Holmes in. Subsequent letters neither accused nor begged, but pained me even more deeply when she simply stated that Holmes had not been out of bed one day, or that he was talking about selling his hives. Lestrade had set guards on the cottage at all times. (He had tried to do the same for me, but I had baited him and eluded them and finally he withdrew. I did not believe any of Lestrade’s men could guard me better than I could myself, and as time went on I was more surely convinced that the rules of the game had indeed been changed, and that I was not yet in danger. Besides, I found their constant presence unbearable.)
Watson wrote too, long tentative letters, mostly about Holmes’ health and mind. He came to see me once in Oxford. I took him for a long walk so I might not have to sit and face him, and the cold and my coolness sent him limping away with his bodyguard.
It was a long, bitter winter after the warmth of Palestine. I read my Hebrew Bible, and I thought about Holofernes and the road to Jerusalem.
In early March I received a telegram from Holmes, his preferred method of communication. It said simply:
ARE YOU COMING DOWN
BETWEEN TERMS QUERY
HOLMES
I read it openly at Mr. Thomas’s busy front desk and allowed a short twist of irritation to show on my face before I turned to go upstairs. The next day I sent him a return question.
SHOULD I QUERY
RUSSELL
The following day his response lay in my pigeonhole.
PLEASE DO MRS HUDSON
WOULD ALSO BE GLAD
HOLMES
Mine in return, sent two days later, confirmed that I would come.
The next free day I went to London to see the executors of my parents’ will, to lay before them the proposal that I be given sufficient advance from my inheritance, now less than two years away, to purchase a motorcar. The partner who handled my parents’ estate hemmed and hawed and made several private telephone calls, and to no great surprise of mine he approved. I went down the next day to the Morris Oxford garage and paid for it, as well as arranging lessons. I was soon mobile.
It was at this time, two weeks before the end of term, that I first became aware that I was being watched. I was highly preoccupied, and often read a book while walking, so it is possible that they had been present before and I hadn’t noticed them. The first time I saw the man, I was outside my lodgings and realised suddenly that I had forgotten a book. I doubled back quickly to get it, and out of the corner of my eye noticed a man stoop down suddenly to tie his shoe. It wasn’t until I had my key in the door that it hit me: He had been wearing laceless shoes. After that I was more attentive, and found that a woman and another man alternated with the first. All were reasonably good at disguises, particularly the woman, and I should certainly not have been able to pick out the nun with no scuffs on her toes or the man walking the bulldog as being the same person had I not spent time under Holmes’ tutelage.
I had only one problem. If I had truly cut myself off from Holmes, I would not hide my annoyance at being spied on. However, I hesitated to bring the thing into the open before consulting him. This was the first time anyone had come sniffing around the bait at my end, and I was loath to frighten them off. Would the adversary believe that I was not seeing them? They were far from obvious, but still—
I decided to continue as before, and became even more absentminded until one day as I had my Greek Testament in front of my nose, I walked into a lightpost on the High Street. I found myself sitting stupefied on the ground while people exclaimed over the blood on my face and a young woman held out my shattered spectacles. I came home from the surgery with a large plaster on my forehead, and I had to wear my spare spectacles for two days while the others were repaired. As I would probably not have recognised Mycroft Holmes himself standing in front of me with the old ones on, it settled temporarily the problem of whether or not I ought to notice my followers. The doctor who stitched me up suggested mildly that I keep my mind off aorist passive verbs while I was walking, and I had to agree. As an actress I was a good changeling.
When my new glasses came I found my tail still behind me. I decided that I would drive to Sussex rather than take the train, and made prior—public—arrangements with the garage around the corner where I kept my new car, telling them that I would be leaving the next morning for my trip home. I wanted to be certain that I was followed, for I was on their mistress’s trail every bit as much as they were on mine.
They used five cars on the journey, which proved the money behind them. I wrote down the numbers from their plates when I could read them, which was in three cases, and noted carefully the cars and all their drivers. (I doubt that the doctor would have considered the exercise less distracting than aorist passives, but I avoided all accidents and do not think I was the cause of anyone else’s.) When I took lunch in a pub before reaching Guildford, the young couple kissing in the front of the roadster pulled out of the parking area three cars behind me. When I stopped for tea on the road to Eastbourne, the old man who had replaced the couple twenty miles earlier drove past, but the woman in the old Morris, who was walking a (familiar?) bulldog behind the inn, was soon behind me on the road. Her lights drove on past only when I turned into my own road a few miles from Eastbourne. I breathed a sigh of relief that they hadn’t lost me. I wanted them here, to witness my innocent behaviour and report it to their boss.
My aunt was—well, she was herself. In the morning I saw that the farm was looking well, thanks to Patrick. He accompanied me on a tour. We greeted the cows, discussed the state of the barn’s roof, examined the new foal that his huge plough mare Vicky had recently borne, and touched upon the possibility of investing in a tractor, which other farms in the area had turned to. I hung over the stable door and watched the beautiful dun colt, with his stubby black tail flapping furiously, nuzzling at his mother in the warm, straw-strewn barn, and knew that I was see
ing the end of an era. I said as much to Patrick, but he only grunted, as if to say that he was not about to get sentimental about a horse. He didn’t fool me.
It was the first time in well over a month that I’d worn trousers and waterproof boots, and they felt good. I invited Patrick up to the house for tea, but he, having no great love for my aunt, suggested his own little house instead.
The tea was hot, strong, and sweet, necessary for a cold spring morning. We talked about bills and building, and then suddenly he said, “There was some men in the village, asking about you.” Not much went unnoticed in a village. These were obviously city people we were dealing with, but then I had assumed that.
“Yes? When was that?”
“Three, four week ago.”
“What did they ask?”
“Just about you, where you was from, that kind of thing. And about Mr. Holmes, wanting to know if you was seeing much of him. They asked Tillie, down the inn, you know?” He and Tillie had been seeing each other for some time now, I noted. “She didn’t realise they was askin’ ’til later, though, ’cause it was just a conversation, you see. Wasn’t until she found they’d asked the same questions down the post office that she put the two together, like.”
“Interesting. Thanks for telling me.”
“None of my business, but why aren’t you seeing him anymore? It seems to have hit him bad.”
I looked at his honest face and told him what would have been the truth, had I been telling the truth.
“You know that race horse of Tom Warner’s that he’s so proud of, wants to start a stud farm with?”
“Yes, it’s a fine runner.”
The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4 Page 29
