The Mary Russell Companion

by Laurie R. King

  [30] Holmes describes his home variously as a small farm (“His Last Bow”) and a villa (“The Lion’s Mane”) on the downs five miles from Eastbourne. In Victorian use, “villa” reflects its ancient Roman origins, that of a farming compound, hence means simply a country house rather than a grand architectural showcase.

  [31] Flint is a hard, smooth nodule of quartz, waxy-looking in various colors, found in chalk. It has a thin layer of rough white chalk on the outside.

  [32] Holmes the bibliophile seems to own books that are untraceable today.

  [33] First mentioned in “The Musgrave Ritual” and subsequently in “The Naval Treaty,” “The Empty House” and “The Illustrious Client.”

  [34] Holmes’s monograph upon the tracing of footsteps, first mentioned in Sign of the Four, included some remarks upon the uses of plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses. Tyre-marks form an important part of Holmes’s reasoning in “The Priory School,” though there is no mention there of a monograph on the subject.

  [35] Such hives, known since at least the days of Pliny, were easier to construct as glass became both larger and less expensive. Plans for observation hives are common beginning in the XVIIth century.

  [36] The English herbaceous (or perennial) border is a product of the Victorian age, lending sophistication to the traditional cottage garden by replacing the earlier useful plants with exotic imports and hybrids from all the corners of the Empire. The herbaceous border is labor-intensive, requiring constant trimming, replanting, and dividing.

  [37] This is certainly “brag and bounce” on the part of Holmes. The mere presence of the ink could have been caused by a careless gesture. Even if it was caused by writing right-to-left, there are other major languages the script of which is written R-T-L, as linguists have it: for example, Arabic, modern Aramaic, and Javanese. Holmes may well have noted other, more obvious indications of Ms. Russell's Jewish heritage (such as the wearing of a Mogen David necklace or charm) but failed to mention them in an effort to impress the young woman.

  It should be mentioned that Russell is something of a polyglot. In addition to Hebrew and the Latin she is clearly working on at the time of this story, during the course of her Memoirs she also admits to varying degrees of fluency in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Arabic (the modern spoken and the classical written) and Hindi. She reads both Koiné and classical Greek, as well as hieroglyphics and ancient Coptic, and has a smattering of Romany, Japanese, and half a dozen other tongues.

  [38] During Russell’s childhood, her family moved between San Francisco (her father’s chosen home) and London (where her mother’s family lived). Their times in San Francisco were: 1897-1899; 1901-1904; 1905-June, 1906 (two months after the great earthquake and fire, an episode described in Laurie R. King’s Locked Rooms); and 1912-1914, when a tragic accident left young Mary a solitary orphan.

  [39] Most notably, Holmes thoughtlessly laid bare the history of Dr. Watson’s family, in Sign of the Four. After making a series of deductions evidently painful to Watson, he apologized: “Viewing the matter as an abstract problem, I had forgotten how personal and painful a thing it might be to you.

  [40] Strictly speaking, honey wine is not the same as mead, since by definition a “wine” contains grapes and mead is simply fermented honey. Here, it is probable that the beverage is indeed a wine, not only due to Russell’s habitual exactitude, but also because a taste of mead often gives no hint of its honey origins.

  [41] Watson himself made this remark, in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” on March 20, 1888.

  [42] Leviticus 20:27, in the King James Version: “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death : they shall stone them with stones.”

  [43] When it comes to her aunt, Russell’s pride gets in the way of her comfort in more ways than one. Here, the aunt’s control of the finances could be relieved by an appeal to the lawyers.

  [44] Where Holmes’ funds come from is something of a puzzle, since he often worked long on cases with no monetary reward, and the occasional large payment (£1000 in “Scandal in Bohemia”; £6,000 in “Priory School”) would not go far to compensating for his expenses. This may indicate that when Holmes refers to his family as being “country squires”, they had a large estate.

  [45] In the Conan Doyle stories, Holmes takes a sympathetic and occasionally paternal view of the troubles of women. Both Holmes and Doyle were realists about the vulnerable position of women in modern society.

  One should also note here that although Russell believes the will is a “done deal,” in fact (as revealed in “Beekeeping for Beginners”) it is not.

  [46] In fact, Holmes’s age is not made explicit in any of Dr. Watson’s tales. In “His Last Bow,” which occurs in 1914, Holmes is said to have the appearance of a man of 60. However, he is disguised and could certainly have been only 54. If Holmes was born in 1861, as he states here, he would have been 20 years old when he first met Dr. Watson. It is difficult to pin down the exact date of his attendance at University, but it was probably about two years prior to the events of A Study in Scarlet. That Holmes went up to University as early as age 16 would surprise none of his biographers. See also Laurie R. King’s Sherlock Holmes for a discussion of Holmes’ age.

  [47] Although Sherlock Holmes and women do not seem a natural fit, Dr Watson speculated once or twice about Holmes having a relationship with the tender sex, such as the two Violets, Hunter and Smith (in “The Copper Beeches” and “The Solitary Cyclist”, respectively).

  [48] In “The Abbey Grange,” Holmes remarks to Watson, “I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a textbook which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume.” However, there is no mention of Holmes working on this as late as 1914 in “His Last Bow.”

  [49] Dr. Watson in the preface to The Case-Book, published in 1927, confirms that Holmes was “somewhat crippled by occasional attacks of rheumatism” during his retirement years.

  [50] As described in “His Last Bow”, which took place the previous summer but was not published until 1917.

  [51] No doubt Mrs. Hudson’s cats. Readers who persist in seeing this feline tussle as foreshadowing the sharp-clawed mating rituals of the two characters exhibit considerable imagination.

  [52] Holmes is evidently considering a relationship with Ms. Russell, although she later concludes (see footnote 58) that he was thinking only of a student-teacher arrangement. However, Holmes’s “omniscience” (with which he credits himself, according to Ms. Russell’s later remarks) may well have led him to foresee their more permanent relationship.

  [53] There is no previous record of this Continental gesture in the Canon, nor is it the usual salute that a man would give a young, unmarried woman. Indeed, as late as 1895, in “The Solitary Cyclist,” Holmes’s relationships with his female clients appears quite businesslike, and of course there is no record of any other female companionship. That he does so here (and never again) supports the theory that Holmes sensed at the very beginning the direction this relationship might take, once Russell had become an adult.

  [54] The final installment appeared in the May 1915 issue of The Strand.

  [55] See Leslie S. Klinger’s “What Do We Really Know About Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson?” Baker Street Journal, 54, No. 3 (Autumn 2004), 6-15. The article considers the problem of Watson’s obfuscation of names, places, and dates, and considers whether logic must not also lead to the conclusion that neither the descriptions of “Holmes” or “Watson” nor their names can be trusted.

  [56] The aunt’s son, Russell’s cousin, appears in “Beekeeping for Beginners,” however it is not certain whether his failure to be granted the London house means that he was no longer alive, or if some other reason made the other cousin a better choice for inheritance.

  [57] Reference is made to this Continental trip at the end of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, but the case on which they were engaged has yet to be published.


  [58] Maeterlinck.

  [59] That Russell’s “substitute father” later shifts into a very different form of friendship is not, as a reader once suggested, indication of something distasteful in the relationship. Russell writes here of her state of mind in those early days: young and wounded, she built a tight wall insulating herself from the unfamiliar. Holmes felt paternal to her in those young and (despite her protest) innocent days. As she grew, in confidence and maturity, it freed their longstanding relationship to mature as well.

  [60] Evidently the offspring of Hudson, a blackmailer who was a member of the crew of “The Gloria Scott”–see “The ‘Gloria Scott’” and note 71, below.

  [61] This may have been “baritsu,” more properly “bartitsu,” a system of self-defence utilized by Holmes (and mentioned in “The Empty House”) that was introduced from Japan into England by E. W. Barton-Wright in 1899.

  [62] This name for the Thames as it flows through Oxford is a lovely example of the punctilious hair-splitting beloved by genus Oxfordensis: the Latin for Thames was Thamesis, and may have referred to an earlier River Isis that joined the Thames near Dorchester. Old maps generally interrupt the flow of the Thames to permit the Isis to meanders through Oxford itself, then resume with the Thames. In a similar note of defiant pedantry, the central University clock, in the tower at Christchurch College, rings the scholars home with 101 beats at 9:00—except that, due to the city’s distance west of the precise Greenwich Meridian, 9:00 in Oxford is what the rest of the time zone calls 9:05.

  [63] One must bristle at this preconception of Ms. Russell’s. We know that it was not formed by the later portrayal of Dr. Watson by Nigel Bruce, in a series of films produced by Universal Pictures in the 1940's, and it is difficult to see what Canonical evidence there is for such “buffoonery.” In fact, Dr. Watson, while self-effacing to a fault in his published stories, is nonetheless obviously observant, highly intelligent, courageous, and loyal. Holmes himself said of Watson, “[he] has some remarkable characteristics of his own to which in his modesty he has given small attention amid his exaggerated estimates of my own performances.” (“The Blanched Soldier”). He was, above all, a man upon whom Holmes could “thoroughly rely.” (“The Boscombe Valley Mystery”) See also footnotes 9 and 45.

  [64] “Lovely” is a highly unlikely word for Holmes to have used concerning his young neighbor, and indeed, makes no appearance at this scene in “Beekeeping for Beginners”. It is, however, very much the kind of word Dr. Watson would use to interpret any positive description of her by Holmes.

  [65] Watson had hopes that he had weaned Holmes from the habit, but in “The Missing Three-Quarter,” generally dated in 1896 or 1897, Watson admitted that “I was well aware that the fiend was not dead, but sleeping; and I have known that the sleep was a light one and the waking near when in periods of idleness I have seen the drawn look upon Holmes’s ascetic face, and the brooding of his deep-set and inscrutable eyes.”

  [66] Holmes’ habitual wearing of a dressing-gown suggests that Mrs Hudson was forced to discard a number of them over the years. Hence his blue one in “The Man with the Twisted Lip” has become purple in “The Blue Carbuncle” and mouse-colored in “The Bruce-Partington Plans” and “Empty House.”

  [67] This theme was of course familiar Watson—many term “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House” as grand tales of death and resurrection.

  [68] Humph. See note 62, above.

  [69] As Holmes tells Watson (in Hound of the Baskervilles), “It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light.”

  [70] It has been noted that Russell’s theological interests bear a remarkable similarity to those of Laurie King, whose MA degree included a thesis entitled, “Feminine Aspects of God in the Old Testament”. Indeed, that overlap contributed to Russell’s choice of Ms King as literary agent for the memoirs. (For details, see “My Story”, elsewhere in this Companion.)

  [71] The Board of Agriculture of England organised the “Land Army” in 1915, enlisting women to replace the agricultural manpower lost to enlistment in the military. By the end of 1917, there were over 250,000 women working as farm labourers, with 20,000 in the land army itself. The women who served in the “Land Army” were known as “Land Girls,” and their contribution went far to bringing women the vote beginning in 1918.

  [72] Biographers have long wondered whether there might be a connection between “Hudson,” the crew member of “The Gloria Scott” who becomes a blackmailer, and Holmes’s landlady. Others have noted another possible connection with Morse Hudson, the owner of a shop selling pictures and statuary in Kensington (“The Six Napoleons”). Then again, Hudson was a common name in 19th century London.

  [73] No doubt the Barkers, introduced at the end of this chapter.

  [74] German zeppelins began dropping explosives over London in January, 1915, and kept up the barrage until the last summer of the War, a precursor to The Blitz of WWII. Zeppelin bombing enters into the events of Laurie R. King’s “Beekeeping for Beginners”.

  [75] Oxford’s Michaelmas or Autumn term runs from October to December.

  As Holmes before her (Was he at Oxford? Or a Cambridge man?) Russell never specifically reveals which college she attended (although when under cover, she gives the pseudonym of Lady Margaret Hall). At the time, there were four women’s colleges: Lady Margaret Hall, Somerville, St Hugh’s, and St Hilda’s. Women were permitted to sit University exams, but not until October, 1920 did the University formally matriculate women, including those who had previously taken the exams. Dorothy L. Sayers (Somerville, 1912-1915) received her MA degree then, along with Annie Mary Anne Henley Rogers, whose application in 1873, under the name A. M. A. H. Rogers, had been accepted by the University, then de-accepted when her sex became known. She received first-class honours in Latin, Greek, and Ancient History in 1877 and 1879, but had to wait until she was 64 to join that first matriculating class in 1920.

  [76] In A Study in Scarlet and “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” Holmes’s expertise regarding tobacco ash is mentioned, and in The Sign of Four, his monograph entitled Upon the Distinction Between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos is specifically referenced. Holmes describes it in the course of the latter case as “enumerat[ing] a hundred and forty forms of cigar, cigarette, and pipe tobacco, with coloured plates illustrating the difference in the ash. “ Evidently the study was somewhat simplified for Ms. Russell by eliminating the last category of tobacco. Either that or by 1917 the number of “common” brands had decreased.

  [77] “Pal’s Regiments” were an attempt to boost enlistment by encouraging groups of men, from businesses, villages, colleges, and the like, to join together, assuring them that they would be serving together to defend their country. The policy lapsed after conscription began in early 1916, but existing “Pals” were often left together.

  [78] The episode has yet to come to light in Russell’s memoirs. Perhaps this is an adventure for which the world is not yet ready.

  [79] The nickname for a British soldier, “Tommy”, comes from the fuller “Tommy Atkins,” but beyond that, the origins become cloudy. There was no doubt a private of that name, but whether he was one of Wellington’s men in 1843, a Royal Welch Fusilier in 1776, or a soldier in a Jamaican uprising in 1743, can no longer be established.

  [80] Russell appears to have decided to leave the chemical demands of their partnership to Holmes, since with certain exceptions over the years, theology became her central focus.

  [81] Although a few thousand US soldiers arrived in France during 1917 (and there were individual volunteers from the very start) the bulk of the American Expeditionary Forces did not arrive until the beginning of 1918. By May, a million US “Doughboys”—and their vast shiploads of arms and supplies—were pouring into the exhausted Front, and the balance began rapidly to tip in favor of the Allies.

  [82] One goes “up” to Oxford, no matter the point of origin. And although from Oxford one may go �
�up” to Town (ie, London), if one goes to London permanently, one is going down. Also see note 61.

  [83] That is, the trio made a circuit of the Christchurch meadows, then passed between Cathedral and Hall (the college dining room, as seen in the Harry Potter films) to enter the grand central quad, then passed beside the porter’s lodge to exit through the St Aldate’s gate. (Which, incidentally, is repetitive, since Aldate began as “old gate,” a persona later informally sanctified, hence they go through the Saint Old-Gate’s Gate. It is mildly noteworthy that the pedantic Russell does not feel the need to point this out here.)

  [84] A pandemic occurring in 1348 to 1350 C.E., killing between 75 to 200 million people in Europe. In England, it first appeared in Bristol, moving rapidly to Oxford and then to London. However, Ms. Russell’s remark is undoubtedly hyperbolic rather than based on actual figures.

  [85] The hansom cab, a two-wheeled, horse-drawn closed carriage capable of holding two close friends, had a roof some six feet off the ground. Curfew was at 9:00—or rather, 9:20, since it took a good twenty minutes for the Christchurch clock to ring its 101 chimes.

  [86] Since so many undergraduates of both sexes and dons (teachers) were serving in the armed forces or various aspects of the “home front”, it was a logical use of college buildings to fill the college beds, common rooms, and kitchens with the wounded. This was the closest many young soldiers came to an Oxford education.

  [87] “Blighty” is a corruption of a Hindi word, used by British soldiers in the Subcontinent to refer fondly to home. A Blighty wound was much to be desired in the trenches, since it was serious enough to mean home leave or even discharge—hence “Blighty return”—but not permanently maiming. Self-inflected attempts at Blighty wounds were dangerous, since if caught, it could mean execution.