Dreaming Spies

by Laurie R. King

  I could, therefore, rest assured that although I should have to carry my own belongings from car to door, once inside I would find warmth, refreshment … and silence.

  Holmes and I had been in each other’s pockets for a bit too long.

  The house was still, weighty with the comfort of a thousand books. The air was warm from the radiators, and fragrant with the housekeeper’s lemon-scented wax. As I drew closer to the kitchen, the scent gave way to bay and onions: a soup kept warm on the back of the stove.

  Tea caddy, pot, and cup were on an ancient tray beside the modern electrical kettle. I checked it for water—full, of course—switched it on, and carried my bag upstairs.

  I was rather longer than I anticipated, since halfway up I decided to change out of my driving clothes into more comfortable garments, and needed to dig slippers from the depths of the wardrobe. I came back down the stairway at a trot, hearing the kettle spouting furious gusts of steam into the kitchen, but even with that distraction, my head snapped up the moment I left the last step: the air from the kitchen doorway was nowhere near as warm and moist as it should have been. In fact, it felt decidedly chilly—and scented with the sharp tang of rosemary.

  A rosemary bush grew outside of the back door.

  One of Miss Pidgeon’s estimable qualities was her horror of invading my privacy: even when she suspected the house was empty she would first knock, then ring the bell, and finally call loudly as she ventured inside. For her simply to walk in was unthinkable.

  My response was automatic: I took three steps to the side, stretched for a high shelf, thumbed a latch, and wrapped my fingers around one of the house’s three resident revolvers. The weight assured me it was loaded. I laid it against my thigh as I moved stealthily towards the kitchen door.

  From the hallway, I could see that the door to the garden was shut. I could also see footprints marring the clean tiles: prints composed of rain, and mud, and something more brilliant than mud.

  I raised the weapon. “I am armed. Stand where I can see you.”

  The sound of movement came—not from just inside the door, where an attacker would wait, but from the pantry across the room. Its light was off, but enough spilled from the kitchen to show me the dim figure inside.

  A tiny woman with short black hair and the epicanthic fold of Asia about her eyes. Her muscular body was inadequately clothed, as if she had fled into the rain too fast to grab a coat. Her shoes were sodden, her trousers showed mud to the knees.

  Her right arm lay across her chest, the fingers encircling the left biceps dark with blood.

  “Mary-san,” she said. “Help me.”

  Bombay: oppressive

  Harsh sky pounds the land below.

  Faint breeze thrills the spine.

  The only thing that made Bombay’s heat anywhere near bearable was a faint breeze off the sea, stirring the back of my neck. To think that when we’d first come down from the Himalayan foothills the week before, I had actually welcomed the balmy tropical climate! Now, with clothing that scraped my skin’s prickly-heat and spectacles that slipped continually down my nose, any change from this torpid steam-room would be for the better. If someone had handed me a razor, I’d have shaved off what little hair I possessed.

  “Why aren’t we leaving?” I complained. “Three days, and it’s been one delay after another.” A diabolical conspiracy of bureaucracy, inefficiency, and the traditional bland face of the Sub-continent had put us here, on just about the last ship Holmes and I would have chosen: one designed not for the brisk transport of goods, mail, and the occasional paying passenger, but an actual cruising steamer, with all the social life and interaction that entailed. Holmes had suggested the alternative of aeroplane journeys, but with a nearly catastrophic one still trembling in our bones, it was a relief to discover the lack of anything resembling commercial air flight in this part of the globe. As a compromise, we had taken the berths offered, but intended to transfer away as soon as one of the touristic pauses coincided with a nice quick freighter heading for Japan without the tedium of Society.

  At the moment, I was not the only one to be questioning the delay. Half the population of the Thomas Carlyle was leaning on the rails, sweating into their flimsiest garments and glaring down at terra firma, while the great engines throbbed and the sun bellowed its way up the eastern sky.

  “There.” Holmes nodded up the docks, past the nearly-completed Gateway, physical assertion of the British Empire’s claim to the lands beyond. A carriage bearing three passengers drove hard towards us, its horse dripping lather. When they were below us, the poor animal was allowed to stagger to a halt. I thought the creature would collapse then and there, but it managed to brace itself, head down and legs splayed, while two Englishmen (they could only be English) descended to the rough boards.

  The first was a vigorous, bare-headed, blond-haired fellow in his early twenties whose first act was that apparent impossibility of looking down his nose at people looming far above. As if the ship had been placed there for his entertainment, then caused to wait for his convenience. My prickly-heat burst into fresh life as I reacted instantaneously to his aristocratic priggery: my face took on its own expression of amused scorn, my mind instantly classifying his taxonomic rank: Phylum: Priapulida; Class: upper; Order: giving of; Family: not mine, thank God—

  I caught myself, and felt a flush of embarrassment rise over that of the heat. Don’t be a child, Russell! It’s been a very long time since you’ve felt inferior to a boor.

  I shot Holmes a glance, finding him blessedly unaware of this vestige of my adolescence, then went back to watching the arrivals. The young man was probably only trying hard to conceal his own chagrin.

  The second man was a large, once-muscular figure in his late fifties, who turned to help the remaining passenger down from the carriage: a woman, not as old as he. A daughter? The prig’s wife? (Heaven help her.) But the younger generation made no effort to assist, merely marched around to the bags strapped to the rear of the carriage and, pompously and predictably, began to tell the ship’s men how to do their jobs.

  Meanwhile, the woman took the older man’s hand—no girl, this, but with a womanly shape and a gleam of chestnut hair beneath the wide brim of her hat—to descend gracefully to the boards. Once there, she straightened her hat, tucked her gloved hand through her companion’s arm—gloves, in this heat!—and strolled towards the gangway, ignoring the figures swarming around their bags as blithely as she ignored the rows of disapproving, downturned faces. Seeing the possessive tuck of his arm against her, I decided that this was neither daughter nor daughter-in-law. This was the older man’s wife. His second wife.

  “Good thing they caught us,” I remarked to the man at my side. “Their trunks must be loaded already.” A woman that polished would be furious to watch her belongings sail away down the coast of India. But Holmes was not looking at them, nor was he taking any note of the young man, bullying the stevedores towards the gangway.

  He was squinting through the sun at another fast-approaching passenger, inadvertent beneficiary of the trio’s tardiness. The others were halfway up the ramp when a tiny black-haired figure trotted out from behind the quayside sheds, slipping around stevedores, carts, carriages, and one exhausted horse in the direction of the gangway, a valise in one hand. Its gait was not that of a child—but only when the figure raised its head to thank the purser’s steward at the base of the ramp did I see that it was a woman.

  The English couple came to a halt on the one remaining gangway, immediately below us. I thought for a moment that they were hesitant about committing their exalted feet to the Thomas Carlyle’s admittedly mature decking, but then a brilliant white sleeve came into view. Leaning out a bit, I confirmed that it was attached to our Captain. The great man had descended from the heights for this greeting.

  Hat brims concealed the newcomers’ faces, but the lady’s voice was quite clear as she withdrew her gloved fingers from her husband’s sleeve and held them
languidly out. “I can’t think what the Viceroy’s man was up to!” she pronounced. “Ludicrous, simply ludicrous. However, Captain, it is good to see you again.”

  The Captain bowed over the lady’s hand before straightening to shake the man’s.

  “Terribly sorry,” the husband told him. “Idiot boy the Viceroy sent, some peculiar business with forms. Typical of Isaacs. I’ll be having a word with the PM when I get back. Never would have happened under Baldwin.”

  His words were less an apology than a means of venting irritation. Clearly, there had been no question but that the boat would be held for them. And steamship captains being as politically savvy as any Prime Minister, this one took care not to rebuke the late-comers, or even cast a meaningful glance at the queue of bag-laden men piling up behind them. He merely stepped onto the gangway to offer the lady his elbow. She slipped her arm through his, and allowed herself to be drawn onboard. Her husband paused to remove his hat, running a hand through a thick head of greying hair before glancing upwards. His ruddy skin indicated some weeks in the tropics, but not months. He had the son’s same aristocratic manner of simultaneously expecting, surveying, and discounting his audience, with features that were handsome at fifty but would sag into petulance by seventy. In other words, a face that warned of that most dangerous of personality flaws: charm.

  There was a sudden commotion among the passengers farther along the rails. A tall woman with dramatically cropped brown hair hurried for the ship’s interior, loosing a sudden wave of fellow passengers, their contemplation broken by the advent of progress. Below, the train of baggage-handlers was filing rapidly on, the son herding them before him. The tiny black-haired girl slipped onboard in his wake, ungreeted and unwelcomed.

  With a ship-wide sigh of relief, the gangway was pulled in, the great hawsers went slack, and the throb of the engines deepened.

  “I wonder who those people are we waited for?” I mused aloud. Important, wealthy: probably minor aristocrats, accustomed to the bows of captains and the scattering of crowds. Just what we had hoped to avoid. I glanced at my wrist-watch. “Only three hours late. I think I’ll go sort out my things, and then take a book onto the deck. What do you—good heavens, Holmes, you look as if you’d bitten into something rotten. What is it?”

  “ ‘Rotten’ is the word. That was the Earl of Darley.”

  “Sorry, do I know Lord Darley?”

  “I hope for your sake you do not.”

  “Holmes …”

  “He is what might be termed an amateur blackmailer.”

  I shied away from the main classification. “Amateur? What would be the point of that?”

  The objects of his dagger look having disappeared from the deck below, Holmes turned his scowl to the receding Gateway. “Perhaps ‘occasional’ rather than ‘amateur.’ James Darley is a famous clubman, an amiable aristocrat long on social connections and short on cash. I am fairly certain that he acted as informant for a French blackmailer by the name of Émile Paget. I was assisting the Surété with a case of extortion in early 1914, just before I went back to America in pursuit of Von Bork.*1 Since German spies took priority over French extortionists, I was forced to abandon the investigation. In any event, they told me in June that they were closing in on Paget. Once War was declared, they lost sight of him. Permanently. They eventually decided he had been killed on the Front.”

  “Do you agree?”

  “I’ve yet to catch wind of him, so perhaps that is the case.”

  “And you’re fairly certain the blackmailer wasn’t actually Lord Darley?”

  Reluctantly, Holmes shook his head. “I never thought he had the brains for independent planning.”

  “Well, have you any reason to think Darley is still active? Either on his own or working for some other blackmailer?”

  “Again, not that I’ve heard.”

  “I should think you would have.” For both personal and professional reasons, Holmes detested blackmailers with a passion reserved for no other wrongdoer: he had witnessed, first hand and at an impressionable age, the devastation that can be wrought when a good person fears public shame. There was no doubt in my mind that any rumour of Darley’s continuing activities would have caught his attention.

  “It is possible,” he admitted.

  “This is all the more reason to make certain we’re not seated at the Captain’s table,” I said.

  “What if they are only going as far as Colombo?”

  I prayed they would be. But then I realised what that would mean. “Oh, please don’t tell me you want to follow them off,” I pleaded.

  “I shall ask the purser.”

  “Do that.” That should give me time to come up with a good reason why we couldn’t hie off through Ceylon in pursuit of a gentleman crook.

  “Perhaps if we were at the Captain’s table, we might have the opportunity to—”

  “Holmes, no! Surely you can find something better to do for the next three weeks than listen in on a clubman’s inane conversation in hopes of catching him at something.”

  To my relief, he did not persist. However, I would not leave it to chance, that we might be honoured by seats alongside the Captain and his most revered guests. Table assignments are what shipboard bribes are designed for.

  We watched Bombay recede, then went below to arrange our possessions, and our bribes.

  We had been in India since the middle of January, working on a case for Holmes’ brother Mycroft, recently concluded.*2 Rather than turn back for England, we were now heading for California, where the pressure of my long-neglected family business could no longer be ignored.

  It was also, truth be known, something of a holiday. Not that Holmes or I took holidays, but a change of focus can refresh the mind, and we intended to break our journey for a few days in southern Japan. As I unpacked my possessions in the sweltering cabin, I was aware of a distinct glow of satisfaction: for once, we were heading to a place as foreign to Holmes as it was to me. I would not be following in his footsteps, racing to catch up with skills he had mastered before I was even born.

  While I arranged on a shelf the half-dozen books I had brought with me from England and never opened, then reached back into my case for the toiletries, Holmes flung a few odds and ends into a drawer, kicked his trunk under the bed, patted his pockets, drew out his cigarette case, and found it empty. With a grumble, he bent to drag the trunk back out from under the bunk. I sighed. It was going to be a long twenty-three days. Normally, we had more to keep us occupied during ocean voyages.

  Perhaps I should turn him loose on Darley, after all? No, things would have to be desperate for that.

  “It is going to feel odd,” I remarked, “to be on a ship without having a new language beaten into me.”

  His voice came, rendered hollow by the lid of his trunk. “I thought I’d put the cigarettes in here. I don’t suppose they’re in your bags?”

  “No. You probably put them into the ‘trunks not wanted.’ ” He rarely used the middle option of “wanted on journey,” being convinced he knew his own mind, and his own possessions.

  “Drat. Would it be cheaper to bribe the purser for access to the hold, or to buy onboard tobacco?” he wondered aloud. “And, I’ve never beaten you.”

  “Metaphorically.”

  He began to wrestle the trunk away. “You do not enjoy our intense language tutorials?”

  “Oh, I’ll admit they have their satisfactions”—(chief among them: survival)—“but I don’t know that I’m masochist enough to use the word ‘enjoy.’ ”

  “I do wish I knew more than a few words of Japanese,” he complained.

  “Perhaps there’s a phrase-book in the ship’s library.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “Well, there’s sure to be a native speaker onboard. Maybe down in Third Class—or in the engine room?”

  “I wonder where that girl went to?”

  “Which girl?”

  “The one who followed on the Darleys’ h
eels.”

  “You think she was Japanese?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Sorry, I find the various Oriental faces hard to distinguish.”

  “The Japanese tend to be longer in face and sharper in feature than the inhabitants of China or Korea. However, it’s more the way she held her body and that little bow she gave as she ducked around them.”

  “Well, if she’s in First she may have better things to do than give language lessons. You’d have better luck in Second or Third.” I latched my trunk and slid it smoothly out of the way, then rose, brushing off my hands and reaching for a book. “I’m going for a nice peaceful read. You are welcome to borrow one of my books, but you are not to go through my trunk looking for something you imagine might be there.”

  “I shall let you know if I find a tutor.”

  “Holmes, I’m very happy to make use of a native guide, just this once.” And so saying, I picked up my wide-brimmed hat and left the cabin, ignoring the disapproving glare against the back of my head.

  A quick survey of the Thomas Carlyle gave me its layout: main deck below, promenade deck with our staterooms and First-Class dining, boat deck above us with saloon bar, smoking room, and a few more elaborate staterooms. Above that was the sun deck, from which rose the ship’s bridge, wireless rooms, and the like. I claimed a relatively peaceful deck chair on the shaded promenade. Tropical coastline glided past. The damp pages turned. For two hours, absolutely nothing happened: no shots rang out, no tusked boars rampaged down the decks, no flimsy aeroplanes beckoned.

  Normal life can be extraordinarily restful.

  I came to the end of a chapter, and let myself surface. I had been aware of activity around me, voices bemoaning cabins and climate, exclaiming over chance-met friends, embarking on those preliminary conversations found among those who intend to engage fully in the compulsory social life of a sea voyage. But the racket had faded as I read, and now, closing the book, I found the area around me nearly devoid of passengers.