A Monstrous Regiment of Women mr-2

by Laurie R. King

  “That’s not what it says,” I told her. “Oh, it’s what the Authorised translation says, but it’s not what the original says. The final phrase, ‘formed thee,’ is nowhere in the Hebrew. The verb used is hul, which means ‘to twist.’ Elsewhere, it is used of the movement in a dance, or, as it is here, in childbirth. The verse ought to be translated, ‘You have forgotten the Rock that begot you; you have forgotten the God who writhed in the effort of giving birth to you.’ The purpose of the verse is to remind the people of the intimacy of God’s parenthood, using both the male and the female forms.”

  Well, I thought as I watched her face, if the hardened academics react to my paper with even a fraction of her response, it will prove a memorable gathering.

  She came out of her chair like a scalded cat, moved across the room, and pounced on a drawer, emerging with a worn volume of soft white leather. She flipped expertly to the place and stared at the words as if she’d expected them to have changed. They had not. She turned and thrust the open book at me accusingly.

  “But that’s… That means…”

  “Yes,” I said wryly, pleased with the effect my idea had on her. “That means that an entire vocabulary of imagery relating to the maternal side of God has been deliberately obscured.” I watched her try to sort it out, and then I put it into a phrase I would definitely not use in the presentation in Oxford: “God the Mother, hidden for centuries.”

  She looked down at the book in her hands as if the ground beneath her feet had, in the blink of an eye, become treacherously soft and unstable. She turned carefully to the drawer, riffled the gold-edged India paper speculatively, and put her Bible away. She returned to her chair a troubled woman and lit another cigarette.

  “Is there more of this kind of thing?”

  “Considerably more.”

  She smoked in silence and squinted through the smoke. “Yes, I see,” she said yet again, her eyes far away. In a minute, she jumped up again and began a prowl around the perimeter of the room, and so strong was the image of cat that I should not have been greatly surprised had she leapt up on the sideboard and threaded her way between the bottles. She came back to her chair and stabbed out her cigarette.

  “I see now why you’ve come. You have come to teach me.” I felt my eyebrow go up in a movement that was pure Holmes. “Could you teach me… to read the original, I mean?” she demanded urgently, as if ready to roll up her silken sleeves at that hour and begin.

  “Neither Hebrew nor Greek is terribly difficult to learn,” I said noncommittally, then added, “given time.”

  “You must show me this ‘God the Mother.’ Why don’t I know about this?” Before I could answer, she went on. “It makes all the difference. There is more, you said?”

  “It’s no fluke. Once you’re looking for it, it’s everywhere. Job thirty-eight, Psalm twenty-two, Isaiah sixty-six, Hosea eleven, Isaiah forty-two. And, of course, the Genesis passages you cited tonight.” That gave her pause.

  “Yes, of course. But I never thought…” And there was the essence of it, I knew. She had absorbed the words, had hammered a few of them into a shape that suited her purpose, but it had never occurred to her to question the underlying themes, to look for patterns other than those handed down over the centuries, patterns that did not include the uncomfortable idea of the motherhood of the Divine. This woman was no deep thinker; the life of the intellect was foreign to her, and whatever her prayers and contemplations were, they were not analytical. Nonetheless, she was like a substance in a beaker, ripe for the transformation of a catalysing agent. And I had just dropped the first measure of that reagent into her quick, hungry mind. Time to stand back.

  As if she had heard my thoughts, she raised her hand to stop me from withdrawing, then dropped it with a rueful smile.

  “I’m sorry, I get too excited about things and want to have it all, now. You have your own work to do.” The smile became wistful. “All the same, I’d appreciate any help you might give me. If there are any books… You can see how important it could be to me, though I realise you haven’t the time to wait around here and be my tutor.”

  I protested that I should be happy to help and that the term’s responsibilities had not yet taken hold, and only when the words had left my mouth did I realise that her humility had trapped me as her authority could not, and her expressions of gratitude at my offer had an edge of triumph. Reluctantly, disarmed, I gave her my wry smile, and she laughed.

  “I like you, Mary Russell. Please, do come and teach me. I think I shall learn a great deal from you. Even if it isn’t about Hebrew or theology.”

  I laughed then, and she rose and pulled her shoes out from under the chairside table, and we walked through the now-silent maze to the entrance. She talked easily, mostly about flowers and the fact that she no longer had time for gardening, saying possibly that was why her friends (her followers) plied her with roses, though it still made her uncomfortable to accept them.

  She was friendly and relaxed and self-deprecating, but I could not feel entirely at ease with her. Precisely what it was about her that I found unsettling, I could not pin down. Partly, it was the childlike size of her, which made me tower awkwardly in my ill-fitting clothes. Partly, it was the way she walked so very close, her shoulder occasionally brushing my sleeve, so that I breathed in her not-unattractive aroma of sweat and hot silk and some subtle and musky perfume. Partly, it was the awareness of how easily she had found a weakness in my ready defences and made me agree to help her. Mostly, though, it was an intangible, a low, pulsing wave of fascination and discomfiture that continued, even now, to radiate from her like some fabulous tropical flower whose heavenly fragrance mesmerises the insects on which it feeds.

  It was with relief that I wished her a good night. However, the relief was tempered by a certain wistful regret, and by the awareness that I had not entirely escaped the trap after all.

  The impassive door guard got up from his chair and his yellow-back novel to unlock the wide door for me. It was raining still, and though the street was well lit, it was quite deserted.

  I hesitated for a moment, half-tempted to telephone for a cab, but the image of Margery Childe as a carnivorous plant and a waft of disapproval from the guard came together, and I realised that despite the wet, I wanted to be out of the building, away from the provocative scent and into the clean shock of the night. I pulled my thin borrowed coat up around my neck, settled my hat low over my spectacles, and set out resolutely towards the brighter lights at the end of the street.

  Halfway there, the cloy had rinsed away. The rain had also gained both my shoulder blades and the inside of my shoes, and I was occupied with mordant thoughts about the English climate and ambiguous thoughts about the woman I had left, when a surreptitious movement from inside the unlit doorway I was passing brought me whirling around in a crouch. A tall, indistinct figure loomed up, darkness in a dark place, with a pale slash the only indication of its face. It whispered at me, a sly and salacious hiss that oozed suggestively into the night, barely above the sound of the rain.

  “Pretty young ladies like you have no business on the streets at this time of night.”

  I froze, but before the first immediate frisson of shock could pass on into gooseflesh, I straightened and began to laugh in relief.

  “Holmes! Good God, what on earth are you doing here?”

  He gathered his dark garments around him and stepped into the dim light, looking for all the world like some Byronic version of a vampire. (Thirty years before, I thought briefly, he’d have been run in, or strung up, for Jack the Ripper.) His face was largely in the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat, but one corner of his thin mouth was turned up in a familiar sardonic smile. When he spoke, his tones were half an octave lower than usual, which meant that he was feeling inordinately content with life.

  “A whim, Russell,” he said, and tilted his head back so I might see his eyes, crinkled in silent laughter. “Merely a whim.”

  FIVE

&nb
sp; Monday, 27 December-

  Tuesday, 28 December

  Since private affairs are part of the human condition, as well as public ones, God has doled them out: All that takes place outside, He has trusted to man, all that is within the house, to woman… This is an aspect of the divine providence and wisdom, that the one who can conduct great affairs is inadequate or inept in small things, so that the function of woman becomes necessary. For if he had made man able to fulfil both functions, the feminine sex would have been contemptible. And if he had entrusted the important questions to women, he would have filled women with mad pride.

  —John Chrysostom

  My dear Holmes, whatever it was and however you found me, we are well met. I was coming to see you tomorrow, in fact. I don’t suppose you have an umbrella tucked beneath your assorted raiment?” I asked hopefully as a dollop of icy rain from the diabolically designed hat brim gushed down the back of my neck.

  “You are dressed somewhat inadequately,” he agreed unsympathetically, “and from the ill fit, I observe that the clothes are not your own. Perhaps another layer would not go amiss,” and he began to undo the fastenings of the long, caped greatcoat he wore. I protested, but as he shrugged it off, I saw that underneath he wore a similar garment, in an unfortunate houndstooth check. He shook the coat free of half a gallon of water and dropped it onto my shoulders. It was enormously heavy but still dry inside. I straightened my buckling knees and fancied I could feel the inner layers of wool beginning to steam.

  “Thank you, Holmes, that was most gallant of you. Precisely what I should expect of a Victorian gentleman. I don’t suppose you have a Primus stove and teakettle in an inner pocket? Although an all-night restaurant with good radiators would do nicely.”

  “If your feet will carry you a mile in those shoes, I might offer you a greater degree of hospitality than a brew-up in a sheltered doorway.”

  “You have a room?”

  “I have a hole-in-the-wall. You’ve not been to this one, I think, but it is one of the more comfortable.”

  “Any bolt-hole in a storm, Holmes. Lead on.”

  Although we began by walking side by side, he did in fact lead in the end, down several narrow passageways, up a fire ladder, across a roof, down another ladder, and through the crawl space beneath a large department store. We ended up at a blank wooden wall surrounded by blank brick walls. Holmes took out an electric torch and a key and inserted the latter into a tiny fissure in the wood. With a low click, one section of the wall lost its solidity. He set his shoulder against it, we slipped into the resultant dark space, and he pushed the door to and bolted it. With his torch, he indicated the way, undid and locked another door, led me up numerous stairs, then through a shadowy office and into a mahogany wardrobe hung with musty overcoats. We unfolded from the back of it into a space that smelt of coffee and tobacco and coal fire and the ineffable essence of books.

  “Guard your eyes, Russell,” he warned, and flicked on a dazzle of electric lights.

  We were in one of his bolt-holes, the sanctuaries he maintained across London, each of them a small, self-contained, and invisible hideout equipped with the means of withstanding a siege (water, food, and reading matter) and an assortment of disguises, weapons, and the like that might be called upon in venturing out into a hostile city. I had been in two others, and this was the most elaborate, if not sumptuous, of the three. It even had paintings on the wall, something Holmes rarely bothered with: He preferred to use the space for bookshelves, corkboards, or target practice. I dragged off my sodden outer garments and looked for a place to drape them. Holmes held out a hand.

  “Give them to me; I’ll hang them in the airing cupboard.”

  He opened a narrow panel in the wall and took some clothes hangers from the metal-lined space. I went to look over his shoulder, and found a vertical ventilation shaft about two feet across, into which he had set a length of metal pipe as a clothes rail.

  “Emergency exit?” I asked, peering into the depths.

  “Only in a considerable emergency. There is a bar forty feet down that ought to stop one from actually entering the furnace, although whether or not a person could remove the four screws from the access panel before being roasted or asphyxiated, I have yet to determine. I estimate that it is possible, but I have actually attempted it only when the furnace was cool. However, it is an eminently successful means of drying wet clothing.” He closed the door. “Tea, coffee, wine, or soup?”

  We decided on the last three, the wine splashed into the tinned soup to enliven it, and while he pottered with kettle, pan, and gas ring, I lit a fire and looked around, fetching up at one of the paintings, a large, too-perfect evocation of hills, trees, and sheep.

  “This is a Constable, isn’t it?” I asked him. “And who did the shipwreck?” This latter was a powerful, savage scene of pounding waves and drunken masts—like the Constable, very dated in its romanticism, but technically superb.

  “That’s a Vernet.” His voice came muffled by cupboard doors as he shovelled about looking for edibles.

  “Ah yes, your great-uncle.”

  “His grandfather, actually. Do you prefer turtle or cream of tomato?” he asked, emerging with two tins.

  “Whichever is newer,” I said cautiously.

  “Nothing has been here longer than three years. However, a comparison of the respective dust layers would seem to indicate that the tomato is half the age of the other.” He eyeballed them judiciously. “Perhaps eighteen months.”

  “The tomato, then. Did you bring everything in through the back of that wardrobe?”

  “Hardly, Russell. I arranged the rooms, then bricked up the wall behind.”

  “It’s nice, Holmes. Cosy.”

  “Do you think so?” He sounded pleased, and standing with a spoon in one hand and a jagged-topped tin in the other, all he needed to complete the picture of domesticity was a lace apron. I was much taken aback by this utterly unexpected side of Holmes—I had never known him to be so much as conscious of his surroundings, save where they intruded on his work, and to have him admit to a deliberate choice and arrangement of household furnishings—well, I was taken aback.

  “It was an experiment,” he explained, and returned to his soup tin. “I was testing the hypothesis that one’s surrounds influence one’s state of mind.”

  “And?” I prompted, fascinated.

  “The results are hardly conclusive, but I did find that after seventy-two hours here, I seemed to be less irritable, more rested, and had a higher threshold of distraction than after seventy-two hours in the Storage Room.”

  The ‘Storage Room’ was the first of his bolt-holes I had encountered, an ill-lit, ill-furnished, claustrophobic survival space in the upper floors of a large department store. Seventy-two hours in it would have sent me raving into an asylum.

  “You don’t say,” I commented mildly, and shook my head.

  “Yes, quite interesting, really. I intend to work the results into a monograph I’ve been writing, ‘Some Suggestions Concerning the Long-Term Rehabilitation of Felons.’ ”

  “Rehabilitation through interior decoration, Holmes?”

  “There is no call for sarcasm, Russell,” he said with asperity. “Drink your soup.”

  There followed a meal even odder than my breakfast/tea of eight hours previous, consisting of cream of tomato soup liberally dosed with Madeira, rock-hard water biscuits, two cold boiled eggs, half an orange that had begun to ferment, a slab of good crumbly cheddar, and the offer of a box of congealed after-dinner mints, which I refused in favour of a second wedge of the cheese. Holmes cleared the plates off onto a tray.

  “Thank you, Holmes,” I said politely.

  He paused with a soup bowl in one hand, scowling down at the scum of dirty brown-red liquid that had been the result of wine meeting soup.

  “Do you know, Russell,” he mused, “I once earned an honest living for six entire months as a sous-chef in a two-star restaurant in Montpellier.” He shook his
head in self-reproach and rattled the dishes off into the cupboard-sized kitchen, leaving me to stare openmouthed at his retreating back.

  Never, never would I get his limits.

  He came back some minutes later with black coffee and a bottle of crusty port, handed me a cup and a glass, and lowered himself with a sigh into the other chair, feet towards the fire.

  “So, Russell, are you going to tell me why you have suddenly become a church-goer, or shall I invent another topic of conversation?”

  “If you knew I was there, you must know whom I went with. Did you find me through that amazing tea shop?”

  “You left your philanthropic tracks across London like hob-nailed boots on a snowy hillside,” he snorted in comfortable derision. “What on earth moved you to give that child five whole pounds? The entire parish was on fire before noon, though there was considerable disagreement over whether the series of gifts was, like lightning, a solitary occurrence or if it marked the beginning of a run of angelic visitations, and, if the latter, whether the better approach would be to wait calmly to be one of the chosen or to drag in benighted strangers from the streets and force food and drink into them. You may laugh,” he protested, “but your little gesture has caused the whole of Limehouse to be overrun with beggars. Word got out that good meals were to be had, and hungry men from all over the city are now lurking under all the steps. Or they would be, if they weren’t snatched up and fed before they had the opportunity to settle. At any rate, yes, after that, the general drift of your movements led me to the chestnut-seller who had found silver among the ashes, various elderly and unprosperous ladies of the evening, and finally to the denizens of the dockside tea shop. All except the chestnut seller remembered the inexplicable and unrewarded generosity of a bespectacled young man dressed for the country, and at the end, one of them knew the whereabouts of the young lady this singular young man finally went away with. Discreet enquiries proved that she was in the habit of going to hear the words of a certain woman of the cloth, if that be the right term, of a Monday night. That lady is not listed in Crockford, but I found her, and you. I had not realised you should be closeted with her for half the night, though. My bones protest.”