“I found it in that little shop near the Eastbourne Library,” I said. “The cliffs near Birling Gap. A sentimental reminder of a long-time home, given to you by someone who loves you, and whom you love. A person who knows you so well, they know that you would never, ever, hide jewellery inside a pair of stockings or banknotes in the tea caddy. No more than you would answer your door without seeing who is there, or live in a house with a barred back exit.”
I carried the painting back to my chair and sat down, laying it on my knees with its brown-paper backing face up. I reached down to my boot-top for the sharp little throwing-knife I wore there, holding it poised above the paper.
“When is a cliff a bluff?” I mused. “And if a cliff, or a picture of a cliff, is used to hide something that no sensible person would hide there, does it become a double-bluff? No prudent and experienced woman would hide anything precious in her sock-drawer, in the flour canister, or at the back of a picture. Places any amateur sneak-thief knows to look.
“But what if one is dealing with the very opposite of the amateur sneak-thief? What if one fears, not a clumsy housebreaker, but a man with the very sharpest of eyes and the most devoutly suspicious of minds? A man who, moreover, has watched a woman’s every move for years, who has come to respect both her wit and her accumulated skill? In that case, wouldn’t a stupid act be the wisest?”
I lowered the needle-sharp point of the knife into the backing paper. Down one side, across the bottom, up the other. I folded the paper back, prised up the white card-stock below, and saw…
To be honest, I was not sure what I was seeing, other than it being old, and ornate, and formal.
“What is this?”
“That is what made Count Vasilev so eager to throw me from the boat—or at any rate, one very like that. There are two more underneath.”
I worked the top sheet out of its frame. It resembled an amusing trifle one would find in a market stall of decorative jumble—those ornate stock certificates from long-defunct railways or coal mines that closed a generation ago. In this case, it appeared to be a bearer bond from a rural English bank, with a face value of £50,000. It had to be a joke.
So she explained.
Back in another age, the year before one Clarissa Hudson came squalling into the world, an embezzler named Jack Prendergast had enlisted the help of a career criminal to convert the better portion of a quarter-million pounds sterling into four pieces of paper. For seventy years, the pages had been lost—until this past spring, when she happened to go looking, and found them. She knew they were worthless, they had to be—and yet, various men had thought them valuable enough to kill over. So, tentatively, she had handed one of the four over to a man who was once the Czar’s banker…
Only to discover that he also considered the piece of paper worth killing over.
She looked at the sheet in my hand—calligraphed, stamped, water-stained, and old. “I found them in the old rag dolly, the day I left Sussex. I never thought they would be worth anything. Perhaps a few francs as decorative items. Even now, I’m half convinced that the Count was lying about the money being in the bank in San Remo. Although why he’d persist with the act when it was clear he was going to kill me, I can’t think.”
“You told him you’d make sure his daughter was cared for.”
“Monaco and France will stop his accounts, until they are satisfied that the money in them is not from crimes. But no one else knows about the San Remo monies. They could sit there forever, unless her sanitorium hears of them. And if that fails, well, Lillie will step in and care for the girl.”
“Will she?”
“It was my promise. That is what friends are for.”
“It’s not a hospital for tuberculosis, is it?”
“No. Natalia’s problems are of the mind. And heart. Her mother and brothers were murdered before her eyes, and she was…Well, she was broken, by the War.”
Natalia Vasilev. A woman damaged by men, who might be saved by women.
After a time, my hands fitted the sheet back on top of its siblings. Tucked the cardboard behind it. Smoothed down the brown paper that curled away from its sliced edges.
“Mrs Hudson, I have to tell Holmes about this.”
“I would expect no less.”
I set the picture on the tea-table, face down, as cautiously as if it were a bomb. The lining paper refused to lie flat, however much my fingers smoothed it.
Slowly, I finished my thought. “I might not have to tell him right away.”
She said nothing. She may have stopped breathing.
I pressed my hand against the rising paper one last time, then slid the painting across the table towards her. “I don’t like keeping secrets from him. So I’d suggest you take care of this as fast as you possibly can.”
“Mary, I can’t ask you to do that. To lie to him. It’s wrong, and he’ll be very angry.”
“I know. But he keeps things from me. And sometimes—well. Sometimes a woman is a wife, and sometimes she’s a friend.”
In any event, Mrs Hudson was probably right: her three decorative pieces of paper with the absurd sums on them would turn out to be nothing but amusements.
Besides which, Holmes and I had a task in Roumania waiting for us. After this adventure of bearer bonds and smuggled Romanov gold, a problem of vampires would be something of a relief.
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
(SHAKESPEARE, FROM CYMBELINE)
Portions of this Memoir, the reader will notice, describe events and conversations that took place outside of the author’s point of view. Several of those chapters contain information that took months—even years—to piece together, but I found it simpler, for the sake of the narrative, to assume the guise of omniscience.
The chapters concerning Mrs Hudson’s conversations with Lillie Langtry came to me in 1930 as a sheaf of poorly typed pages, heavily annotated in colloquial French with various inks but the same hand, and marred here and there by what would appear to be fallen tears. The typescript itself records a verbatim series of overheard exchanges in English. The hand-written commentary amounts to a year-long cris de coeur, which I imagine could only stop when the manuscript had left her hands.
These chapters, too, incorporate my later knowledge of events.
It may surprise my readers to hear that I made no effort to locate the sender. Not that it would have been difficult, but I felt there was a reason the author deserved her privacy.
Also, unlike my husband, I occasionally find myself treasuring life’s small mysteries.
—MRH
Sara and Gerald Murphy lived in Antibes until 1929, when their younger son, Patrick, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. It made an abrupt end to Gerald Murphy’s brief painting career, as he and Sara spent the next years near their son’s Swiss sanatorium, then returned to the United States in 1934 for Gerald to run Mark Cross, the family business. Patrick fought his disease until 1937—but his older brother, Baoth, had already died, in 1935, from a complication due to measles.
Lillie Langtry, Lady de Bathe, died in 1929. Her faithful French companion, Mathilde Peat, lived on in Monaco, until 1965.
The Czar’s missing gold remained a mystery until 2017, when a coded document was interpreted by a Soviet mathematician, leading searchers to an abandoned railway tunnel filled with Romanov gold bullion. Unless that wasn’t the missing gold, and it lies at the bottom of Lake Baikal…
Basil Zaharoff, too, remains a mystery. Most records of his birth, life, and history conveniently disappeared along the way, including the extensive memoirs and pap
ers he burned after his wife’s death in 1926. He was, however, a close friend of Sarah Bernhardt; he did live in Monaco in the 1920s; and he did own what may have been a majority holding in the Société des Bains de Mer.
Elsa Maxwell discovered Monaco a year after the events of this Memoir. In 1926, she was brought in to help Monaco become the new Lido.
Events referred to in the story—Jack Prendergast’s embezzlement and the appearance of Mrs Hudson’s son—can be found in the Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott,” and Mary Russell’s earlier Memoir The Murder of Mary Russell, respectively.
To all the grey-haired ladies out there,
filled with wisdom and mischief.
And yes—to some of the men.
In any book like this, thanks extend in many directions and over much time.
I was grateful for the cheerful expertise of Sean M. Monaghan and Courtney Scruggs of Bronze Works in Santa Cruz, who let me get in the way during their pouring, and waste their time on endless idiotic questions. Naturally, anything wrong in this final story is my own wrongdoing, playing fast and free with the art and science of bronze casting.
Similarly, the staff of the Hôtel Hermitage in Monaco did their best with a stray American writer, ignoring her unsuitable clothing, politely responding to her questions, never reporting her for photographing odd corners and making notes of dull details, and in all, leaving her certain that the hotel would never have permitted an infamous arms dealer to take up residence on their top floor.
My editors are, as always, responsible for much that is good in the story—both Kate Miciak, who saw the book started, and Hilary Teeman, who has seen it finished. Bless you, my ladies of the sharp eyes and sensitive ears.
The rest of my team is, as always, as much family as friends. Allison Schuster, Kim Hovey, Melissa Sanford, and Carlos Beltrán from Penguin Random House are among the many who conspire to make me look better than I am. Similarly, on the other side of the Atlantic, Susie Dunlap and my other friends at Allison & Busby, UK.
Then there is my home team of Zoë Quinton and Bob Difley, who do all kinds of stuff that I’m simply useless at, while my long-time Team LRK of Alice Wright, Merrily Taylor, Erin Bright, John Bychowski, Sabrina Flynn, and Karen Buys help to keep me in line and up to date.
Thank you, everyone.
—Laurie R. King
BY LAURIE R. KING
MARY RUSSELL
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
A Monstrous Regiment of Women
A Letter of Mary
The Moor
O Jerusalem
Justice Hall
The Game
Locked Rooms
The Language of Bees
The God of the Hive
Pirate King
Garment of Shadows
Dreaming Spies
The Murder of Mary Russell
Mary Russell’s War and Other Stories
Island of the Mad
Riviera Gold
STUYVESANT & GREY
Touchstone
The Bones of Paris
KATE MARTINELLI
A Grave Talent
To Play the Fool
With Child
Night Work
The Art of Detection
AND
A Darker Place
Folly
Keeping Watch
Califia’s Daughters (as Leigh Richards)
Lockdown
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LAURIE R. KING is the award-winning, bestselling author of sixteen Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, and many acclaimed stand-alone novels such as Folly, Touchstone, The Bones of Paris, and Lockdown. She lives on California’s Central Coast, where she is at work on her next Mary Russell mystery.
LaurieRKing.com
Facebook.com/LaurieRKing
Twitter: @LaurieRKing and @Mary_Russell
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