A Letter of Mary mr-3

by Laurie R. King

  We took our glasses and walked over the hills to the sea, and when we returned to the cottage, Holmes asked her if she wanted to see the beehives. She said yes, so he found her a bee hat and gloves and overalls, things he himself rarely used. She was at first nervous, then determined, and finally fascinated as he opened a hive and showed her the levels of occupation, the queen's quarters, the neat texture of the honeycombs, the logical, ruthless social structure of the colony. She asked numerous intelligent questions, and she seemed both relieved and reluctant to see the internal workings disappear again behind their wooden walls.

  "Had a nasty experience with bees one time," she said abruptly, and pulled off the voluminous hat. "Lived in the country. My sister and I were close then, played lots of games. One was to leave coded messages, in the Greek alphabet sometimes, or little treasures— bits of food— inside this abandoned cistern. Must've been mediaeval," she reflected. "Storing root crops. We called it 'Apocalypse,' had to lift the cover off, you see? Happy times. Golden summers. One day, my sister hid a chocolate bar in Apocalypse, went back for it the next day, and a swarm of bees had moved in. Both of us badly stung, terrified. Apocalypse filled in. Seemed like the closing of paradise."

  "They were probably wasps," commented Holmes.

  "Do you think so? Good heavens, you may be right. Just think, all those years of hating bees, dispelled in an afternoon. Didn't know you were an alienist, Mr Holmes, among your other skills." She chuckled.

  We made our way back to the terrace, where I served a substantial tea while she entertained us with stories of the bureaucrats in Cairo during the war.

  Finally, she stood up to go. She paused at the car and looked over the front of the cottage.

  "I can't think when I've enjoyed an afternoon more." She sighed.

  "If you have another free day before you go, it would be a great pleasure to have you again," I suggested.

  "Oh, won't be possible, I'm afraid." Her eyes were hidden again behind the black glasses, but her smile seemed somewhat wistful.

  The drive into town was slowed by the number of farm vehicles about on a summer afternoon, but I had allowed plenty of time, and we talked easily about books and the uncluttered and unrecoverable pleasures of life as an Oxford undergraduate. Then she abruptly changed the topic.

  "I like your Mr Holmes. Very like Ned Lawrence, d'you know? Both of 'em positively quivering with passion, always under iron control, both stuffed full of ability and common sense and that backwards approach to a problem that marks a true genius, and at the same time this incongruous tendency to mystify, a compulsion almost to obfuscate and to conceal themselves behind an air of myth and mystery. Ned's extravagances," she added thoughtfully, "are almost certainly due to his small stature and the domination of his mother and will bring him to a sticky end. He'll never have the hands of your man, though."

  I was quite floored by this tumble of insight and information so placidly given, and I could only pluck feebly at the last phrase.

  "Hands?" Was this some idiosyncratic equine reference to Holmes' height?

  "Um. He has the most striking hands I've ever seen on a man. The first thing I noticed about him, back in Palestine. Strong, but more than that. Elegant. Nervous. No, not nervous exactly; acutely sensitive. Aristocratic working-class hands." She grimaced and waved away this uncharacteristic search among the nuances of adjectives. "Remember the Chinese ball?"

  "The Chinese— oh yes, the ivory puzzle." I did remember it, a carved ball of ivory so old, it was nearly yellow. It could only be opened by precise pressure at three different points simultaneously. She had handed the ball to Holmes, and he had held it lightly in the palm of his left hand, occasionally caressing it with the fingertips of the other. (Holmes, unlike myself, is right-handed.) The conversation had gone on; Holmes had talked with great animation about his travels in Tibet and the amazing feats of physical control he had witnessed amongst the lamas, and his tour through Mecca, while he occasionally reached down to touch the ball. The magician's apprentice knows to watch the hands, though, and I was gratified to witness the gentle arrangement of thumb and two fingers that loosed the lock and sent the ball's treasure, a lustrous black pearl, rolling gently into the palm of his hand.

  "So clever, those hands. It took me six months to figure out that ball, and he did it in twenty minutes. Oh, are we here, then?" She sounded disappointed. "Thank you for the afternoon, and do enjoy Mariam. I'll be interested to know what you think of her. Did I give you my address in Jerusalem? No? Oh, dash it, here comes the train. Where are those cards— in here somewhere." She thrust at me two handfuls of motley papers— a couple of handbills, some typescript, letters, sweet wrappers, telegram flimsies, notes scribbled on the corners of newspapers— as well as three journals, a book, and two glasses cases (one empty), before she emerged with a bent white cardboard rectangle. I poured the papers back into her bag, took the card, and helped her up into the carriage.

  "Good-bye, my dear Miss Russell. Come see me again in Palestine!" She seemed on the edge of saying something else, but the whistle blew, the moment passed, and she contented herself with leaning forward and kissing my cheek. I stepped down from the train, and she was gone.

  On the way home, I was in time to be greeted by a neighbour's dairy herd being brought down the narrow lane for the night. I took the car out of gear to wait and looked down at my hands. Competent, practical hands, with large knuckles, square nails, rough cuticles, ink stains, and a dusting of freckles. The two outer fingers of the weaker right hand were slightly twisted, a thin white scar almost invisible at their base, near the palm, one remnant of the automobile accident that had taken the lives of my parents and my brother and had left me with a multitude of scars, visible and otherwise, following weeks in the hospital, further weeks in hypnotic psychotherapy, and years in the grip of guilt-inspired nightmares. The hands on the steering wheel were those of a student who farmed during the holidays, ordinary hands that could hold a pen or a hay fork with equal facility.

  Holmes' hands, however, were indeed extraordinary. Disembodied, they could as easily have belonged to an artist or surgeon, or a pianist. Or even a successful safe cracksman. As a young man, he had some considerable talent as a boxer, though the thought of putting those hands to such a use made me cringe. Fencing, yes— the nicks and cuts he had picked up left only scars— but to use those sensitive instruments as a means of pummelling another human being into insensibility seemed to me like using a Waterford vase to crack nuts. However, Holmes was never one to believe that any part of himself could be damaged by misuse, which only goes to show that even the most intelligent of men is capable of considerable feeblemindedness.

  At any rate, his hands had survived unbroken. As Miss Ruskin had seen, his hands were direct extensions of his mind, the long, inquisitive fingers meandering about over surfaces, lightly touching a shelf or a shoe, until without apparent interference from his brain, they arrived at the key clue, the crux of the investigation. His bony hands were the outer manifestation of his inner self, whether they were probing a lock, tamping shreds of tobacco into his pipe, coaxing a complex theme from his Stradivarius, handling the reins of a fractious horse, or performing a delicate experiment in the laboratory. I had only to look at them to know the state of his mind, how an investigation or experiment was proceeding, and how he thought it might turn out. A person's life is betrayed by the hands, in the calluses and marks and twists of skin and bone. The life of Sherlock Holmes lay in his long, strong, sensitive hands. It was a life that was dear to me.

  I looked up, to find the road clear of all but a few gently steaming cowpats, and the farmer's small son staring curiously at me over the gate. I put the car into gear and drove home.

  FOUR

  delta

  For such a short and apparently uneventful episode, the visit of this passionate amateur archaeologist left behind it a disconcerting emptiness. It took a deliberate and conscious effort to return to our normal work, I to my books, H
olmes into a laboratory that emitted a variety of odours late into the night, most of them sulpherous, all of them foul. I indulged myself in an hour of deciphering Mariam's letter before returning to the manly declarations of the prophet Isaiah, waved vaguely at Mrs Hudson's greeting and later at her "Good night, Mary," and worked until my vision failed around midnight. I closed my books and found myself looking at the box. Whose hands had so lovingly formed that zebra? I wondered. What Italian craftsman, so far from an obviously well-known and beloved African landscape, had carved this piece of perfection? I rested my eyes on it until they started to droop, then picked up the box and held it while I went through the house, checking the windows and doors. I then climbed the stairs.

  Holmes did not look up from his workbench, just grunted when I mentioned the hour. I went down the hallway to the bath. He had not appeared when I returned. I put the box on the bedside table and turned off the lamp, then stood for some minutes in the wash of silver light from the moon, three days from full, and watched the ghostly Downs tumble in frozen motion to the sea. I left the curtains drawn back and took myself solitary to bed, and as I lay back onto the pillow, I realised that Holmes had not read the newspapers for at least three days.

  The observation sounds trivial, a minor disturbance on the surface of our lives, but it was no less ominous than a stream's roil that, to the experienced eye, shouts of the great boulder below. Marriage attunes a person to nuances in behaviour, the small vital signs that signal a person's well-being. With Holmes, one of those indicators was his approach to the London papers.

  In his earlier life, the daily papers had been absolutely essential to his work. Dr Watson's accounts are as littered with references to the papers as their sitting room was with the actual product, and without the facts and speculations of the reporters and the personal messages of the agony columns, Holmes would have been deprived of a sense as important as touch or smell.

  Now, however, his newspaper habits varied a great deal, depending on whether the case he was on concerned the politics of France, the movements of the art world, or the inner financial doings of the City. Or, indeed, if there was a case at all. He regularly drove the local newsagent to distraction, and vice versa. For weeks on end, Holmes was content with a single edition of one of the London papers, and the Sussex Express for Mrs Hudson. When he was on a case, however, he insisted on nothing less than every edition of every paper, as soon as it could reach him, and for days the normal serenity of our isolated home would be broken by the nearly continuous arrivals and departures of the newsagent's boy, a compulsively garrulous lad with skin like a battlefield and a wall-piercing adenoidal voice.

  During one of my absences the previous spring, Holmes had inexplicably changed from one of the more lurid popular papers to The Times, which to my mind has always been eminently suited to morning tea and a discreet scattering of toast crumbs. However, The Times is a morning paper, and it has to travel from London to Eastbourne, from that town to our village, and thence to us. It never reached us much before noon, and often considerably later, if the pimply-faced bicyclist had a puncture or encountered a friend.

  If Holmes was at home when the newspaper arrived, he would react in one of two ways, which I had come to watch carefully, as a bellwether of his inner mind. Some days, he would spot the boy coming down the lane and rush down the stairs to snatch it out of whatever hand happened to carry it through the door, hurl himself into the frayed basket chair in front of the fireplace, and bury his head in it, moaning and exclaiming for the better part of an hour. Other days, he would ignore it entirely. It would lie, folded and reproachful, on the table next to the front door. He would pass it by without a glance, drop letters to be posted on top of it, pull a pair of gloves from the drawer beneath it, until eventually, that evening or even the following morning, he would retrieve it, glance through it in a desultory fashion, and discard it in disgust.

  Those were the days I dreaded, the days when he was deliberately resisting the pull of London and all it had been to him. He was also unfailingly polite and sweet-tempered on those days— always a signal of great danger. An unread paper meant an unsettled mind, and to this day the sight of a fresh, folded newspaper on a polished surface brings a twinge of apprehension. And for three days, he had only glanced at his newspaper over breakfast.

  I lay awake and looked at the box on the table beside the bed, seeing the indistinct sparkle of the moon reflected off the blue eyes of a diminutive monkey perched on a miniature wall, and I felt, frankly, peeved at the intrusion of yet another concern into an already-full schedule.

  Holmes had little love for the, as he saw it, irrational pseudodiscipline of theology. He judged it a tragic waste of my mental energies, described it as a more debilitating addiction than cocaine, and bemoaned his inability to wean me from it. I ignored him as best I could, accepted this as the one area of serious mutual incomprehension, and only occasionally wondered if I had chosen it largely to maintain my identity against the tide of Holmes' forceful personality.

  Twice since our marriage, cases had come up that demanded my attention as well as his. I had only recently realised that it was not past him to invent something of the sort in order to remove me from academia's clutches. Not this one, of course; it was too elaborate even for his devious mind. He would, however, take full advantage of it, now that an edge had been driven under my single-mindedness, to prise me from my work. A walk along the cliffs was not apt to be the only interruption Dorothy Ruskin's letter brought.

  I stared unseeing at the tiny blur of blue light and slid gently into sleep. Oddly enough, my dreams were pleasant.

  * * *

  The next day, Thursday, The Times arrived at one o'clock in the afternoon. It still lay folded when I turned off the lights and went upstairs, and it had not moved when I came back through the house on Friday for an early cup of tea. Two hours later, Holmes came down for breakfast and picked it up absently as he passed. So it was that nearly forty hours had elapsed between the time I saw Miss Ruskin off on the train and the time Holmes gave a cry of surprise and sat up straight over the paper, his cup of tea forgotten in one hand. I looked up from the decapitation of my own egg and saw him staring at the page.

  "What is it? Holmes?" I stood up and went to see what had caught his attention so dramatically. It was a police notice, a small leaded box, inserted awkwardly into a middle page, no doubt just as the paper was going to press.

  IDENTITY SOUGHT OF

  LONDON ACCIDENT VICTIM

  Police are asking for the assistance of any person who might identify a woman killed in a traffic accident late yesterday evening. The victim was an elderly woman with deeply bronzed skin and blue eyes, wearing brown pantaloons and coat, a white blouse, and heavy, laced boots. If any reader thinks he may know the identity of this person, he is asked please to contact his local police station.

  I sat down heavily next to Holmes.

  "No. Oh surely not. Dear God. What night would that have been? Wednesday? She had a dinner engagement at nine o'clock."

  In answer, Holmes put his cup absently into his toast and went to the telephone. After much waiting and shouting over the bad connexion, he established that the woman had not yet been identified. The voice at the other end squawked at him as he hung up the earpiece. I took my eyes from Miss Ruskin's wooden box, which inexplicably seemed to have followed me downstairs, and got to my feet, feeling very cold. My voice seemed to come from elsewhere.

  "Shall we drive into Town, then?" I asked him. "Or wait for the noon train?"

  "Go get the car out, Russell. I'll put a few things together and talk with Mrs Hudson."

  I went and changed into clothes suitable for London, and fifteen minutes later I sat in front of the cottage in the running car. Holmes came around the side of the house, scraping something from the back of his hand with a fingernail, and climbed in. We drove to London in a car filled with heavy silence.

  FIVE

  epsilon

  It was
she. She looked, as the dead always do, unreal, and she lay absurdly small and grey on the cold table in the morgue. Her face was relatively undamaged, though the side of her head was a horribly wrong shape, and the faint remnant of a grimace was the only sign that this waxy tanned stuff had once been animated. The rest of her body lay misshapen under the drape, and when Holmes lifted it to examine her injuries, I turned away and studied a row of tools and machines whose purpose I did not want to know, and I listened to him asking his questions while I determinedly ignored my roiling stomach.

  "An automobile. She fell down in front of it, then?"

  "Yes, sir. Tripped over something and fell right into the street. As you can see, she had cataracts, so her night vision must've been bad. The PC was at the other end of his beat, didn't get there until he heard the screams of one of the witnesses. There were two, a young couple on their way home about twelve-fifteen Thursday morning. They were none too sober, though, and couldn't remember much other than the lady falling and the car squealing off. No registration number, a big black saloon car they said, but then they also said that they saw an old beggar on the street corner, which is hardly likely at that hour, on a quiet street, is it?" The young policeman's laugh rang out against the hard walls, and I fled to the WC down the hall.