The Murder of Mary Russell

by Laurie R. King

  “Not really. I tried, when I was very young, but it was, I don’t know…hard. Because the other actors weren’t real, and nothing came to life. Of course, stage-acting also means a lot of reading—of the scripts? I’m not too fast at reading.”

  “Yes. Tell me about your sister.”

  This rapid-fire change of direction was making her dizzy. “Alicia? She’s three years younger than I, pretty. Married. Last I heard, they were expecting a child.”

  “What does the husband do?”

  A discussion of the husband’s reliability and social standing led to questions about how Alicia had been raised, and ended up giving away rather more about her own past than Clarissa intended: Mother’s death, a father’s fists, a local constable who brought them pencils and books.

  Finally, his questions came to an end. The pipe had gone out, so he filled it again, lighting it with a spill from the fire. As he puffed, he seemed to be looking through the resultant smoke at the street below.

  At last, he turned to deliver his judgment.

  “This is what I propose. There is a clipper sailing with the tide, the day after tomorrow, bound for Sydney. You, Samuel, and young Mr Mudd will be on it. Your ticket and expenses will be paid. If you choose to remain in Australia, or indeed any place outside of the British Isles, I wash my hands of you. However…”

  He walked back to the stool and sat, knee to knee, his gaze locking her in place. “If you wish to come back to England, you will do so within one year’s time. You will come without your son. And it will be under the agreement that you abandon, completely and utterly, your former way of life. If you return to this country, you will be under my parole, but apart from that, you will be a woman without a past. Neither you nor I will ever mention what has happened these last few days. Nor will either of us ever forget it, for so much as a moment.

  “Miss Hudson, I give you my word, here and now: if you return, you will always be aware of your past, but I for one will never bring it up.”

  This was not the vow of a boy, Clarissa could feel that down to her bones. This was a promise Sherlock Holmes would keep to his grave.

  “The choice,” he continued, “is yours, absolutely. I will only add that, should you choose to come back, I may be in a position to offer you a life of considerable interest, and more acting than you could dream of.”

  She goggled at him. The words he’d said were so far removed from the threat and condemnation she had anticipated, they seemed to whirl through the room like a dust demon. Her brain spun about, her breath seemed caught in her throat. Her final awareness was his curse, as she slumped into a faint.

  Two days later, the Lady of the Seas shook off the last reaches of Gravesend and turned her slim prow to the south. Sails grew over their heads as Mrs Clarissa Hudson, a young widow lady travelling to Australia, bade her two sons (the dark and the light) to wave good-bye to England. Letting go of the baby’s tiny wrist, her own hand brushed against the hidden purse beneath her skirts, a motion she’d performed a hundred times since that morning: yes, the fat little Morocco leather folder with the letter of credit was still there, along with its handful of gold coins.

  Despite that weight, she’d never felt so light—light-hearted, light-headed, as buoyant as the graceful ship beneath her shoes, pulled into the future by the filling sails above her feathered hat. She laughed aloud at the thought. When Billy looked up in surprise, she laughed all the more. She had no idea why that mad young man with the grey eyes had set her up so thoroughly, with tickets bought, money provided, even a quick trip along Oxford Street to fill in the gaps of their wardrobes. She and the boys had all they would need for a year—more, with care.

  This irrational largesse would have made her uneasy had Mr Holmes not made it so abundantly clear that she was under no obligation to return. That so long as she stayed in the antipodes, she owed him nothing.

  It must be remorse, she’d decided: his way to acknowledge that she’d pulled the trigger for him, and that the stigma she felt for having killed her father was best dealt with by getting her out of his sight, for good.

  And for good it would be. Clarissa Hudson had no intention of coming back to England, never planned on seeing The Bishop, the city, or that lad with the piercing grey eyes, ever again. She could not help worrying a little about this fluke of freedom. She also knew that the dark events of Hampshire were far from over, that the hundred or more empty days that stretched out before her would be haunted by her father’s death. But for the moment—for this hour, on this ship, she would neither mourn her father nor argue with good fortune. Today, she would be a mother, and choose life. She would seize it and run, never to return from what Australia had to offer: freedom to make another life.

  She lifted her face to the sun, and laughed aloud again.

  —

  Three hundred fifty-one days later, in the third week of October, 1880, Clarissa Hudson leant over the rails of the steamer Ben Jonson and watched the Thames close in, turning the water around their hull from sea to sewer. She was not laughing this time as they churned methodically past Gravesend. Nor was she travelling as the widowed mother of two sons.

  Billy leant into her side, making himself small against the cold wind. She rubbed his shoulder, wondering yet again if she should have made him stay behind.

  Not that it was easy to persuade the boy into something he did not want. Eight-year-old William Mudd had a mind of his own.

  “Will Mr Holmes meet us?” he asked.

  “He doesn’t know we’re coming. When we left, he said I should place a message in the newspapers to say I had returned.” If I returned. Which, for some completely mad reason, it would seem I have done.

  She did not laugh with a light heart, nor did she reach down to touch the purse beneath her skirts. That reassurance was gone: the gold spent, the letter of credit dwindled to a mere breath of its beginnings. Most of it she had transferred to Alicia, Samuel’s new mother, that the boy would not be a burden on his adoptive family.

  Of course, if she and Billy had worked some Cheats, in Sydney…

  But they had not. She had lived a life of virtue, squeezing every farthing and ha’penny before it went out of the door. It would have been easy, to choose comfort instead, but for some reason, the memory of a pair of grey eyes got in the way.

  That strange, and strangely innocent, young man, Sherlock Holmes. The only person who had ever looked at her and seen beneath the surface. Not that she loved him—the very thought of romance was ridiculous. Yet she had given up her son and her freedom to return here, to the life he offered.

  And—a truth she would whisper to none but herself? Leaving Samuel had been less devastating than she had anticipated. Nowhere near as hard as it should have been.

  In part, it was the situation. Alicia’s own son had died in June, and Allie, whose doctors said she would have no more children, responded to the loss with a deep and abiding bitterness. She would not be comforted, by husband or sister. Clarissa’s apparent success in life only made matters worse. Clarissa had jewels, travel, a healthy son—everything but a husband; Alicia’s jewels were paste and opals; she had travelled no further than her husband’s family in Melbourne; her son was nothing more than aching breasts and a black-bordered photograph.

  So Clarissa gave her Samuel.

  It was hardly an impulsive gesture. The possibility had been in her mind since…well, since young Mr Holmes had told her that she would not be returning if she had Samuel. She had come to Australia fully intending to make her future there—school for Billy, a family for Samuel, a new life unencumbered by a past.

  That had not worked out. Billy never fit in, no more than she did. He came home from school with blackened eyes. As for her, well, Australia was never the right size for her, somehow, both too big and too small at once. She had spent most of her life as an Australian girl, but she longed for London, for home. Still, she would not have left Samuel—until Alicia’s need was greater than hers.

 
Truth to tell, Samuel had never seemed to like his mother, much—but he took to Alicia the moment he saw her, settled right into her arms. Even when Alicia’s son was alive, she and Samuel had been a match, as akin in personality as they were in looks. Not that Allie was the most maternal of women. Clarissa had even wondered if there wasn’t something missing in her sister, who had never outgrown her childhood tendency towards selfishness and secrets.

  However, Alicia had married a gem. Raymond McKenna was a good man, a solid man, who would raise a son as strong as he. Clarissa liked Ray. She admired him. When he understood that Clarissa was offering him a son—she spoke with him about it first, before Alicia—he broke down and sobbed. He already loved his nephew, and now he would love him as a son. With Raymond to guide his family, the arrangement would be as good for Alicia as it was for Samuel.

  Giving up a baby, Clarissa thought, should have been harder. Perhaps she’d never been meant to be anyone’s mother. If so, things had been set aright: she had Billy now, and that would be enough.

  Clarissa had once dreamed, back when she was waltzing through her Seasons, of having a person she could speak with openly—someone her equal, if not in wit, then at least in ruthlessness. At the time, she had pictured that person as a husband, or at least a friend. Instead, she looked to have the grey-eyed enigma of London.

  There was enough in her purse to eke out ten days in the city. If young Mr Holmes had not laid claim to her by then, Clarissa would have little choice but to go, hat in hand, to The Bishop.

  The next morning, her notice appeared in the agony columns of several newspapers:

  Lady Clarissa to Mr Holmes—I have come

  home and await your news at the Dragon.

  On the third day, he came.

  —

  “You’ve grown,” she told him. The gawky boy was nowhere to be seen in this sleek, confident man who waited in the threadbare yard of the Dragon Inn. No protruding cuffs on this one.

  “As have you, I think. Are you free to come with me?”

  “Now?” He gave an eloquent glance at the warm cloak over her shoulders, hardly necessary for an indoor meeting, and put on his hat by way of reply. She hastened to follow. “I thought you might want to talk, so I told Billy to stay in the room.”

  He stopped. “Billy has returned?”

  “He insisted.”

  “But not the infant.”

  “Samuel…no. My sister’s own son died last June. She was happy to have Samuel.”

  “I see.”

  Clarissa gave him a sad smile. “They will raise him as their own. He even looks like her.” Although his eyes, she suspected, would be considerably lighter than Alicia’s cornflower blue.

  Mr Holmes gave a quick nod, blithe dismissal of a mother’s pain, and threw up an arm to hail a passing cab—a hansom.

  He held out a supporting hand, but she hesitated: a hansom was a rather…intimate container, for a man and a woman who were unrelated.

  “We haven’t all day,” he said. She gathered her skirts, and folded herself inside.

  The cab bumped along the stones of Southwark to the river, then across, making in the direction of Regent’s Park. The interior was remarkably full, what with her skirts and the silk hat upon his knees. The hat juddered up and down—not, she noticed, in time with the wheels. No: his left leg was jumping a rapid rhythm. She glanced at his face. He did not look in the least nervous, merely impatient. She’d seen that kind of jitter in neighbours over the years, men and women who indulged in certain chemicals. Were his pupils perhaps larger than usual?

  He turned, feeling her gaze. “Is something the matter?”

  “No, no, I was just wondering—”

  “Yes?”

  It was too dark to tell, inside the cab. “Are you still in University, then?”

  He turned his face forward. “Not anymore.”

  “What do you do?” Gentlemen tended not to “do” much, but this one was hardly of the usual run of gentlemen.

  His narrow mouth twitched. “One might say I have been finding my vocation.”

  “How nice. And what vocation have you found?”

  “Detective.”

  She recoiled, as far as possible in their crowded confines. “You’re a policeman?”

  He gave a scornful swipe of the hand. “Certainly not—the limitations would stifle. I shall turn my skills to those problems the police are baffled by, or unable to address.”

  “A private enquiry agent, then?”

  “Of a sort.”

  To spend one’s days investigating cases of fraud, missing children, and illicit love affairs did not sound appealing to her. Perhaps his was a Boy’s Own sort of romance. “Like Mr Poe’s stories?”

  “Dupin!” he scoffed. “Showy tales, lacking in substance.”

  In fact, when she’d read the orang-utan story to Billy, they had agreed that M. Dupin’s abilities were remarkable—but she would not argue the point with a man of such conviction as Mr Sherlock Holmes.

  Instead, she nodded thoughtfully. “A sort of…consulting detective, then. Are there many of those?”

  “So far as I know, I am unique.”

  Thank the heavens for that, she thought fervently, and let the rest of the ride pass in silence.

  After a time, the horse turned along a row of terrace buildings, the upper storeys brick with shop-fronts or stone faces on the street level. The hooves clopped to a halt before the number 221.

  Holmes tossed the driver a coin and helped Clarissa down from the cab, fishing in his pocket as he trotted up the front steps. The house was clearly empty—had been for some time, to judge by the condition of the paint around its windows—but the lock mechanism worked smoothly.

  Inside lay cracked floor tiles, dusty cobwebs, and buckling wallpaper that had known the touch of many greasy hands. A half-windowed door missing its glass was tucked behind the stairs. On its upper rail, a tarnished brass A dangled from a surviving screw. Mr Holmes stepped forward to open the door to apartment A, pressing his back against the wall as invitation. She gathered her skirts and pushed around him, but rather than follow, he retreated to continue up the stairs. She watched his polished boots disappear, then turned her jaundiced eye to the rooms that composed 221A Baker Street.

  Every inch of it wanted carbolic, plaster, paint, and fresh paper. Any attempt to kindle heat would burn the place down. However, once the surface decay had been banished and the flues entirely rebuilt, she imagined the kitchen, pantry, and small sitting area would be comfortable enough.

  At which time, the only way she could afford the rent would be to go back to work for The Bishop.

  She closed the door on flat A and started up the stairs, testing each before committing her weight to it. The carpet was frayed and filthy and the carpet rods were either missing or loose, but the wood beneath seemed in good shape.

  On the next floor up, flat B did not even have its letter, merely two holes in a door that was leaning against the wall. Through the empty door frame lay a potentially comfortable suite consisting of two spacious bedrooms at the back and a large sitting room at the front. In this latter, a pair of stingy windows looked ready to dive onto the street. The floorboards were bare, apart from the dust and droppings of vermin, the wood so badly gouged and scraped, it looked as if a pony with loose shoe-nails had been stabled here. The sound of pigeons came from above—and not, she thought uneasily, from out of doors.

  Clarissa studied a twisted length of gas pipe protruding from the wall, wondering how much force was required to break a light fixture away like that. “Is the house yours?”

  “No. I have no wish to take on the burdens of householder.” His voice echoed from the next room, followed by the ominous thumps and trickle of falling plaster.

  “Good thing,” she said, relieved that he was not proposing that she let a room from him.

  “Don’t you want to see the rest of it? Go ahead up.”

  “No, that’s quite all right.” She did not
want to see what the birds had done to the upper level. “The next flight of stairs looks about to fall in.”

  He came back into the sitting room, slapping off bits of plaster from his shoulders. “I shouldn’t think the place has got quite that bad.”

  “Whose is it?” she asked, meaning, Why show it to me?

  His reply startled a yelp out of her: he grasped her hand, pressing it fervently between both of his. She stepped smartly back, her mind awhirl—But he said—Is this some mad declaration of affection? His face says nothing of the—only to realise that what he had been pressing was not his suit, but a physical object. She looked down at her gloved palm.

  A key.

  “The lease has been purchased in your name,” he told her. “Assuming, that is, you are willing to take on the burden of Sherlock Holmes as a tenant. I intend to live here, although I shall make certain demands as to the rooms. These windows, for one thing, will prove meagrely in winter.”

  He was squinting at the window putty, peeling out bits with his finger-nail. “Also, one year ago, I gave you my word that neither of us need mention your previous life. Concerning that agreement, let me say three things. First: your debt to the man known as ‘The Bishop’ has been paid in full. Second, lest you wonder, no: you do not actually have a choice as to this arrangement. That is due to my third and final point.” He turned to pin her down with those eyes. “Never, ever, even begin to think that your crimes and your father’s death have faded in my memory. They will always stand between us. They will echo through every conversation we have, every request I make, my every month’s payment of rent. If this is not acceptable to you, I shall put you on the next ship to Sydney. Is that understood?”

  A nod was the only motion she could venture, until his cold grey gaze finally let go its hold. She drew a shaky breath, while he frowned up at the twisted gas pipe, shaking his head. “Very well. Although I fear, Mrs Hudson, that you will find me a most troublesome tenant. Also, if I might suggest, concerning your given name? ‘Clarissa’ seems a touch frivolous for a Baker Street landlady. ‘Clara’ might make the rôle more—oh, for God’s sake, woman, don’t faint on me again!”