Locked Rooms
Page 41
“You should, of course, feel welcome to remain here.”
The words seemed to contain a weight beyond their surface meaning. A dark and inauspicious weight. A Mariner’s albatross sort of a weight. I replied with caution. “This being my home, I generally do feel welcome.”
“Ah. Did I not mention that Mycroft is coming to stay?”
“Mycroft? Why on earth would Mycroft come here? In all the years I’ve lived in Sussex, he’s visited only once.”
“Twice, although the other occasion was while you were away. However, he’s about to have the builders in, and he needs a quiet retreat.”
“He can afford an hotel room.”
“This is my brother, Russell,” he chided.
Yes, exactly: my husband’s brother, Mycroft Holmes. Whom I had thwarted—blatantly, with malice aforethought, and with what promised to be heavy consequences—scant weeks earlier. Whose history, I now knew, held events that soured my attitude towards him. Who wielded enormous if invisible power within the British government. And who was capable of making life uncomfortable for me until he had tamped me back down into my position of sister-in-law.
“How long?” I asked.
“He thought two weeks.”
Fourteen days: 336 hours: 20,160 minutes, of first-hand opportunity to revenge himself on me verbally, psychologically, or (surely not?) physically. Mycroft was a master of the subtlest of poisons—I speak metaphorically, of course—and fourteen days would be plenty to work his vengeance and drive me to the edge of madness.
And only the previous afternoon, I had learnt that my alternate lodgings in Oxford had been flooded by a broken pipe. Information that now crept forward in my mind, bringing a note of dour suspicion.
No, Holmes was right: best to be away if I could.
Which circled the discussion around to its beginnings.
“Why should I wish to go work with pirates?” I repeated.
“You would, of course, be undercover.”
“Naturally. With a cutlass between my teeth.”
“I should think you would be more likely to wear a night-dress.”
“A night-dress.” Oh, this was getting better and better.
“As I remember, there are few parts for females among the pirates. Although they may decide to place you among the support staff.”
“Pirates have support staff?” I set my tea-cup back into its saucer, that I might lean forward and examine my husband’s face. I could see no overt indications of lunacy. No more than usual.
He ignored me, turning over a page of the letter he had been reading, keeping it on his knee beneath the level of the table. I could not see the writing—which was, I thought, no accident.
“I should imagine they have a considerable number of personnel behind the scenes,” he replied.
“Are we talking about pirates-on-the-high-seas, or piracy-as-violation-of-copyright-law?”
“Definitely the cutlass rather than the pen. Although Gilbert might have argued for the literary element.”
“Gilbert?” Two seconds later, the awful light of revelation flashed through my brain; at the same instant, Holmes tossed the letter onto the table so I could see its heading.
Headings, plural, for the missive contained two separate letters folded together. The first was from Scotland Yard. The second was emblazoned with the words D’Oyly Carte Opera.
I reared back, far more alarmed by the stationery than by the thought of climbing storm-tossed rigging in the company of cut-throats.
“Gilbert and Sullivan?” I exclaimed. “Pirates as in Penzance? Light opera and heavy humour? No. Absolutely not. Whatever Inspector Lestrade has in mind, I refuse.”
“One gathers,” Holmes reflected, reaching for another slice of toast, “that the title originally did hold a double entendre, Gilbert’s dig at the habit of American companies to flout the niceties of British copyright law.”
He was not about to divert me by historical titbits or an insult against my American heritage: This was one threat against which my homeland would have to mount its own defence.
“You’ve dragged your sleeve in the butter.” I got to my feet, picking up my half-emptied plate to underscore my refusal.
“It would not be a singing part,” he said.
I walked out of the room.
He raised his voice. “I would do it myself, but I need to be here for Mycroft, to help him tidy up after the Goodman case.”
Answer gave I none.
“It shouldn’t take you more than two weeks, three at the most. You’d probably find the solution before arriving in Lisbon.”
“Why—” I cut the question short; it did not matter in the least why the D’Oyly Carte company wished me to go to Lisbon. I poked my head back into the room. “Holmes: no. I have an entire academic year to catch up on. I have no interest whatsoever in the entertainment of hoi polloi. The entire thing sounds like a headache. I am not going to Lisbon, or even London. I’m not going anywhere. No.”
Afterword
Thanks are due, as always, to the wise and capable people of the McHenry Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, without whom this book would be a smaller and less lively thing.
Thanks are also due to Dick Griffiths, Jon Hart, and Fred Zimmerman of the Blackhawk Museum in Danville, California. If you want to see Donny’s blue Rolls-Royce, that’s where it lives.
To Abby Bridge, researcher extraordinaire, and the collections of the California Historical Society, the San Francisco Public Library, and the Mechanics’ Institute Library; Don Herron, who knows all things Hammett; and Stu Bennett, who uncovered some insider’s guides to the City.
Although none of the biographies of Dashiell Hammett I found, including that written by his daughter, Jo Hammett (Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers), mention this extraordinary meeting of minds in the spring of 1924, from all I can see, Miss Russell captures the man’s essence, from the dapper clothes and weak lungs to the man’s robust sense of ethics. It should be noted, regarding Hammett’s disinclination to sell out his employer in this story, that this desperately ill, lifelong claustrophobe, an old man at the age of fifty-seven, spent twenty-two weeks in federal prison during the Red-baiting fifties because he refused to give up the names of men who had trusted him. As Lillian Hellman said in the eulogy of her longtime lover (which can be found in Diane Johnson’s excellent Dashiell Hammett, A Life) Hammett submitted to prison because “he had come to the conclusion that a man should keep his word.”
No small goal for any of us.
Other Mystery Novels by
LAURIE R. KING
Mary Russell Novels
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
A Monstrous Regiment of Women
A Letter of Mary
The Moor
O Jerusalem
Justice Hall
The Game
Kate Martinelli Novels
A Grave Talent
To Play the Fool
With Child
Night Work
And
A Darker Place
Folly
Keeping Watch
About the Author
LAURIE R. KING became the first novelist since Patricia Cornwell to win prizes for Best First Crime Novel on both sides of the Atlantic with the publication of her debut thriller, A Grave Talent. She is the bestselling author of four contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, eight Mary Russell mysteries, and bestselling novels A Darker Place, Folly, and Keeping Watch. She lives in northern California.
LOCKED ROOMS
A Bantam Book / July 2005
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.<
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Copyright © 2005 by Laurie R. King
Excerpt from Pirate King copyright © 2011 by Laurie R. King.
Excerpt from The God of the Hive copyright 2010 by Laurie R. King
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and
the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.
Published simultaneously in Canada
www.bantamdell.com
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming title The God of the Hive. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
This book contains an excerpt from Pirate King by Laurie R. King. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the book.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90159-7
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