Dreaming Spies: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

by Laurie R. King

  Gingerly, unwilling to pick that volume up again, I edged it aside with the tip of my finger, finding an ivory comb, a tiny tube of something called “Eye Rejuvenator,” and the decorative Bible I had seen in Japan.

  Grateful that I had not been confronted by a stash of bed-toys (and wondering if I was being prudish), I closed the drawer and went to help Haruki check behind the other drawers.

  At the end, we stood near the door and looked back at the room. “Do you want to move the furniture to look under the carpet?” I asked Holmes.

  He shook his head. “It wouldn’t be in a place requiring more than one man to uncover. That bed would need four strong footmen. It must be somewhere else.”

  “What about the room marked ‘library’? Close enough to the bedrooms to feel safe, but separate.”

  Blackmailers had a tactile response to their key possessions: they liked their stolen diaries or photographs close to hand, for the same reason that girls hid love letters amongst their lingerie: to gloat and caress them. Practical reasons might separate an extortionist from the source of his power, but ideally, he—or she—wanted the physical reminder close at hand.

  As we walked down the carpeted corridor, the clock at the foot of the stairs rang two.

  The door to the room marked “library” opened not off the main corridor, but from its subsidiary leg. To our left were a pair of doors. The first was covered with light brown baize: a glance showed narrow, uncarpeted stairs descending to the kitchen realm. The second door was painted wood, behind which lay a shallow storage room packed to bursting with steamer trunks, hatboxes, valises, and the like.

  Separated from these doors by the width of a corridor and the great arched window, a single, far grander wooden door opened into a booklined room. Physically it was the start of the guest room wing, but the placement of its door and the sumptuous fittings said that this was not a room for guests. Heavy curtains in a rich shade of orange hid the other set of French doors and their balcony. Logs and kindling lay in the marble fireplace, ready for a match. Bottles and glasses clustered on a sleek sideboard next to a gramophone. Three comfortable chairs and a wide settee were arranged on a modern orange and green carpet in front of the fire. The closest thing to library furniture was a spindle-legged gilt writing desk against one wall; most of its top was taken up by two small porcelain busts and a hideous little ormolu clock.

  The room might have been designed originally as a place to read, but that was not its chief purpose now. The books were too uniform and decorative, the lighting too poor. In a public house, this would be the snug. There was even a latch on the door, lest a maid walk in at some inopportune moment.

  “How do they think they can keep their affair secret?” I wondered aloud.

  “A year has gone by, since Darley’s death. Perhaps they intend to move to Paris. Or New York.”

  “They could never raise their heads in Society.”

  “This is 1925,” Holmes pointed out. “If one has money, one forms one’s own Society.”

  “Not if one wishes to attend Palace functions.”

  His voice went hard. “No Darley has been invited to the Palace since 1914.”

  Yes, I thought: he would have seen to that much, before returning to his German spy case in America.

  Haruki had begun to methodically examine the room’s furnishings, tipping back paintings, running her good hand along the seams of the settee, pulling open the drawers on the writing desk. Each time she finished with something, she made a show of cleaning it with her linen handkerchief. She was humouring us, clearly disbelieving in the danger of finger-prints.

  Didn’t matter, so long as she wiped things down.

  We spent an hour searching that room, treading on each other’s toes all the while. Every book, every picture, every inch of the mantelpiece. At the end, I clawed my fingers through my hair. “There’s nothing here.”

  Haruki dropped onto the settee, cradling her arm. She looked pale. Holmes was grey with fatigue. He would probably kill for a cigarette. We all needed to eat something. And the clock had sounded three: before long, the servants would begin to stir.

  “Are we yet satisfied that it’s not here?” I asked. “Shall we try the London house next?”

  Neither of them replied. We were all gazing off into the preceding hours, trying to see what we might have missed. Holmes and I ought to check the downstairs—although, having watched Haruki search, she seemed as competent as I when it came to mistrusting surfaces.

  Failure, again. The first time, Lord Darley had outsmarted us, unlikely as that seemed, sticking his copy of the Bashō to the underside of a dining table. This time, we had looked at all such places, and found nothing. The library had given me such high hopes: not only close at hand, the room was so personal, it would feel like a haven to someone wishing to hide a valuable piece of criminality. The room had even been made over by its current residents: the rest of the house had paintings and decorations accumulated by previous generations, but here the wallpaper was fresh, the paintings au courant, even avant-garde. The gramophone on the sideboard was new, as were the records—many of them dance numbers, which explained the room’s patch of bare boards rather than carpet to the walls.

  It was a distinctive room. One could imagine the lovers choosing the pieces, comparing swatches of orange curtain fabric to the orange in the painting across the room. And the paintings: four of them, by different artists—not, I was glad to see, including Damian Adler. To find the work of Holmes’ son here would be intolerable.

  But the style was not unlike Damian’s: powerful, clear, modern. One of them was by a Spaniard whose work I had seen somewhere, a biting mockery of accepted virtues. Its figure in a City suit bore a slight resemblance to Lord Darley, although the crucified man sneering down at him had the pencil moustache and slicked hair of a jazz singer—looking not at all like Tommy, so the piece had probably not been commissioned.

  Holmes stirred. “I shall take a look at the rooms designated ‘guest bedrooms’ on Miss Pidgeon’s map,” he said. “Russell, would you please make certain we have left no finger-prints?”

  I grunted, absently. Something about the paintings was prodding at the back of my mind. “Do these pictures make you think of something?” I asked Holmes.

  He looked from the crucified jazz singer to the huge and undeniably phallic snake curled lovingly around a trio of kittens, to the cityscape with the brilliant green sky, and shook his head. “They make me think we should ban the sale of oil paint for a generation.”

  I looked at Haruki, but she just shook her head. What was it? Something that Holmes’ eye did not see, but mine did …

  “Jesus!” I said.

  Holmes raised his eyebrow, but I was not cursing. I looked at him, feeling the grin grow on my face. “I know where the book is.”

  A woman of flesh,

  A girl made from tempered steel,

  A man caught between.

  We stood beside Lady Darley’s bed, an unshielded torch shining into the drawer.

  “Lord Darley attended church services on the ship,” I said. “His wife preferred a day’s riding. She has none of the paraphernalia of religion in her rooms—not so much as a gold cross on a chain. She is having an affair with her husband’s son, may have committed adultery with him, and has paintings mocking religion in the room she created with her lover. Yet she keeps a Bible in the table beside her bed, beneath dirty books and, well, things.”

  I did not doubt what I would find. I pulled the Bible out from under the cotton gloves, the notebook, the Kama Sutra, and the rest, thumbing back the ornate silver latch. Inside lay the frontispiece, as it had earlier. I had even admired the binding that kept a book’s internal pages flat, rather than splaying to follow the cover.

  This time, I turned back the pages themselves. And there, at the beginning of 2 Kings, a rectangle had been sliced through the remaining pages. Inside it, fitting the hole precisely, nestled a book I had seen before, yet never laid e
yes on.

  I let Haruki work the Bashō from its nest.

  One could see its age. Bourke the Younger had done a superb job on his fake, but if one actually looked at this one, one could feel the number of hands that had opened it in its eighty-odd years of life, the royal—nay, divine—eyes that had lingered over it.

  To have it in the drawer with that … other thing was an obscenity.

  Haruki made to slip it behind her sling, then hesitated, and held the book out to me. “Will you look for the document, please, Mary?”

  I laid down my torch and accepted the volume that could topple an empire. Taking the knife from its sheath in my left boot, I slipped its point between the layers of the cover, using slow prising motions to keep the sharp steel from slicing through fibres. When the two halves were apart, I held out the book, spine-side up. Holmes raised the torch’s beam for her. Haruki’s childlike fingers eased between the layers, to emerge with a bit of paper folded into quarters. She started to drop the book onto the bed, then caught herself, handing it to me instead. She undid the folds, her eyes travelling down the first line of characters—and then closing, in a moment of relief.

  She let the page fall back into its tight folds without reading to its end, then inserted the letter into the cover, slid the book into its case, and finally tucked the whole thing into her sling. Except that her hand came away still carrying it—no: not the Emperor’s book, but Bourke’s copy. One of them.

  “That’s the one Darley had in Tokyo?” The one that deceived the Prince Regent. The one Sato had died to give him.

  She smiled.

  Of course it was. As if she might have been able to get at the other, stored safely on the Bodleian’s shelves. Far too safely. For the first time, it hit me: How on earth were we going to trade the real one for theirs? And on its heels, a second question: Or would Haruki have her own thoughts, as to whose was the rightful claim?

  She laid the false Hokusai in the Bible, and the Bible in the drawer. I arranged the Kama Sutra, the notebook, and the rest back where they had started. The drawer closed on this peculiar mix of holiness and sin, and as if to signal its import, a quick flare of light flashed through the room. Startled, I looked into Holmes’ face, realised that I could see it—then realised what that meant.

  “A car!” He was already in motion, around the bed to the balcony, peering through a gap of the curtains. Haruki and I stood breathless, waiting … Then the ripple of laughter came, followed by the slam of a car door.

  “The guest rooms,” Holmes ordered. We scurried from the bedroom and down the corridor, past the short leg of hallway and around the bend into the guest wing. Haruki and I stopped there, although Holmes continued on, opening the furthest door and disappearing inside. I heard the faint sound of a window cracking open, and he returned, having ensured our escape route.

  We clustered at the bend to listen.

  Noise echoed from below, voices and the thump of a door closing. The voices grew more distinct, rising up the stairs. Eventually, sound became words.

  “—that Annabelle would want to marry him?” Tommy’s voice, the same pompous drawl I had spent weeks hearing on the Thomas Carlyle. “He hasn’t tuppence to his name.”

  “He is quite pretty.”

  “And she’s a dog. But a rich dog.”

  She laughed. “You’re a bad man, Tommy.”

  “That’s why you love me.”

  “What were you and Anthony talking …” Her words became abruptly indistinct, although we could still hear the cadence of speech: they had gone into one of the bedrooms. Haruki stepped away, slipping past my grabbing hand. Halfway down the corridor she paused to listen. But the words were still unclear, so she, damn her wounded hide, then strode off down the carpeting to press her ear against Lady Darley’s door.

  “Holmes, this is impossible,” I hissed.

  It was also a touch ridiculous, two people cowering in the darkness while the third stood blatantly under the stairway lights. The Darleys were heading to bed: how much helpful information were they likely to let slip around their toothbrushes? That only happened in detective stories.

  He agreed. We crept forward on the thick carpet towards the muffled voices. At the doors, his hand reached out for Haruki’s good shoulder, but before he could turn her around and propel her towards the staircase, Tommy’s voice came, shockingly close.

  “I’m going to have a drink. Come with me?”

  The rattle of the doorknob no doubt hid the reply, but we did not wait for it. The voice sparked an undignified sprint down the corridor, Haruki at the fore.

  Except that, instead of making for the dim safety of the guest wing, she turned abruptly left, into the truncated corridor with the big window at the end. I, with Holmes at my back, veered after her.

  She grabbed the door to the storage room and stepped inside. No room for us, no time to yank her out. I reached for the baize door (“What did you think of that bubbly they served? He can put me in the way of a few cases, if we—”) but Holmes scooped me up and shoved me towards the library. Madness—but no time to argue, just duck inside and thread a path through the furniture while Holmes eased the door shut, then followed me across the room to the French doors that I had ready, unlatched and open. He passed through the orange curtains, then tugged them together but for a crack before shutting the glass doors.

  “What the hell was she thinking?” I whispered furiously. “And why didn’t you let me go down the servants’ stairs?”

  “They might ring for the butler. As for Miss Sato, she no doubt wanted to listen in.”

  “What is she, a child?”

  Then the library lights went on. We sank to the balcony’s tiled floor, and prepared to wait out the lovers while they had their drink and went back to their rooms.

  I hoped they wouldn’t dawdle: it was cold out here.

  Holmes’ arrangement of the curtains had granted us a narrow slice of the room. Tommy had put on weight in the last year—he looked more like his father than ever.

  The new earl laid a match to the fire, then poured a drink, walking over to study the mocking crucifixion for a minute before turning towards the door. “There you are. That’s a jolly robe on you. What would you like?” he asked. “Shall I ring for Baker?”

  “No, don’t wake him, unless you want ice. Although it’s bad they didn’t notice us coming in.” She, on the other hand, was looking extremely well. Widowhood clearly suited Lady Darley—widowhood and an illicit affair. Her “jolly” robe was a very effective piece of the dressmaker’s art: a sumptuous garment of dark red silk that looked about to slither to the floor under its own weight, with a neckline arranged to draw attention to womanly breasts. Her hair, too, seemed designed to tantalise, with pins holding its richness in precarious balance. She even sat down with a seductive wriggle that I did not think was unconscious, and raised large brown eyes at the young man before the fire. “I told you the servants were getting irresponsible. Is there any of that Chartreuse left? The bottle that mad friend of yours gave us?”

  “Should be a little—yes, here.”

  “Just a mouthful. That’s good. Aah.” She sat in the chair closest to the fire, her face towards us. Tommy stood with his back to the fire, gazing down at her.

  “Tired?” he asked.

  “Long drive.”

  “I know. But isn’t it nicer to be back here, rather than stay another night up in bloody Leicestershire?”

  “It’s nice wherever you are, my dear.” Some faint shade of meaning in her voice caught my ear, although there was nothing untoward in her face: gentle smile on her full lips, eyes crinkled in a show of affection.

  “I’m not sure about Baker, but I think we really ought to clear out the staff of the London house. They’re getting on my nerves, a little.”

  “Couldn’t we retain the cook?” she asked.

  “Clean sweep might be better.”

  “Whatever you say.” There it was again: did she sound just the least bit
… condescending? If so, it disappeared in the next sentence. “Your barrister friend seemed a bit more optimistic, tonight.”

  “He did, didn’t he? We might not have to move to America, after all. Though it would be a pity not to have it in a church.”

  “Damn the Church,” she said, and he laughed.

  “The laws of consanguinity,” I breathed into my husband’s ear. English civil law might possibly be persuaded that Lady Darley had never been Tommy’s stepmother, since he was an adult before his father married her, thus raising no bar against their marriage—but the Church of England would never agree.

  Again, I wondered at that faint dismissive edge to her voice. One did not generally patronise a man one was in love with.

  They talked for a while: a show they’d seen in London; gossip he’d heard about the actress and the theatre’s owner; a statue that he wanted to buy and she did not. My hands went numb.

  At last, he moved, setting his empty glass on the mantelpiece and walking around to the back of her chair. He bent to nuzzle his face in his lover’s neck. She tilted her head, encouraging his mouth to travel down. Several minutes passed, and matters were on the edge of becoming uncomfortable for a pair of onlookers when Tommy straightened and stood away, holding his hand out to the sitting woman. “Come to bed.”

  She stretched out an arm to her glass, down to the last half-inch—then jerked at some motion behind the young man. He whirled around to the back of her chair, and the two of them stared towards the library door, the sides of both faces taut with alarm.

  “Who the bloody hell are you?” he demanded.

  “Tommy, that’s—it’s the Japanese girl. From the boat—and the party.”

  Holmes’ iron grip stopped me from rising to crash through the doorway. “Wait,” he whispered.