A Letter of Mary (14 page)

"Would you prefer that I leave?" Lestrade said stiffly.

"Not unless you prefer not to be put in the awkward position of having to withhold information from the official record. Your word is sufficient assurance of that for me."

"I have no real choice, have I?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Very well, I agree."

"Good. My information concerns Miss Ruskin herself. Like most of the English in the Near East, she was connected with Intelligence during the war, and in fact she worked for some months in an unofficial, but nonetheless vital, capacity for His Majesty in 1916 and 1917. It is mildly surprising that she and Colonel Edwards seem to have never crossed paths, but at the time he was in Cairo, she was a small and private cog, in addition to being for the most part, as they say, 'in the field.' A curiosity, perhaps, that they never met, but hardly sinister. Her work began with translation, first of documents and then in interviews and interrogations. She acted as a guide on a handful of on-the-quiet occasions, and several times as a courier. By late 1916, she had gained a certain level of independence in her activities and had befriended a number of leading Arabs. They were fascinated by her, as their brothers to the east were by Gertrude Bell, and gave her the freedom of movement and speech that normally only men are allowed in that society. Plus, of course, having access to the women's quarters.

"However, in 1917 a small thing happened. History is often made by small things, which is why it can be useful to maintain a person such as myself to take notice of them. The small thing that happened to Miss Ruskin was that her car broke down near one of the new Zionist settlements, and while she was waiting for the driver to return with a part, she ate a boiled egg that had sat too long in the heat. She became very ill. The Zionists took her in, their doctor cared for her, and she spent several days recuperating amongst the gardens they were calling into existence from out of the bare earth. She saw their commitment, the strength and pleasure they drew from the land and from their children, and by the time she drove away, she was a Zionist. A Christian still, perhaps even more of a Christian than she had been before, but a Zionist.

"She was a highly intelligent woman from all indications. I believe I should have enjoyed meeting her. It did not take her long to decide that Zionism and Arab self-rule were fundamentally incompatible. There are many people who would not agree with her, but Miss Ruskin became convinced that Jews and Mohammedan Arabs could not easily be neighbours in the same small country, and so she gradually withdrew herself from her former work and returned to archaeology. Her work for the Zionist movement has gone on, but quietly, so as, I think, not to oppose directly her Arab friends and not to burden the movement with an apparent turncoat.

"Inevitably, there were some members of the Arab faction who were angered by what they saw as her desertion of their cause, her betrayal. There was one family in particular with cause for bitterness. She had been supporting them in a land dispute before her, shall we say, 'conversion,' and afterwards she backed away. They lost their claim and were forced to move into town. Last year, the Zionists established a settlement on that piece of land."

"And equally inevitably, there are at least two young men in the family who are well educated, and they were in this country last Wednesday, and they naturally have black hair," I groaned. "Oh, why couldn't this be a simple case?"

"Don't complain, Russell," said my unsympathetic husband. "Just think how pretty it will look when you get around to writing your memoirs."

"I would settle for writing my Wisdom book, thank you."

"Well, you'll not have time for either just yet. There remains much to do. Lestrade, shall we meet tomorrow night to discuss tactics?"

"Here?"

"Mycroft?"

"Certainly. I cannot promise grouse again, but my housekeeper is always happy to oblige."

"Eight o'clock, then, Lestrade."

Good nights were given all around, glasses were cleared away, Mycroft excused himself, and I went off to our rooms to wash the late-night grit from my eyes. I came back, to find Holmes where I had left him, curled into a chair with his pipe, glowering fiercely at the scoured, empty tiles of the fireplace. I turned down the lights, but he did not move. The threads of smoke surrounding his head looked like the emissions of some hard-pressed engine, smoking with the fury of its labours. I turned at the doorway and watched him for a long minute, but he gave no sign of feeling my eyes on him.

Normally when Holmes was in this state, I would slip away and leave him to his thoughts, but that night something pulled me over to his chair. He started when I touched his shoulder, and then his face relaxed into a smile. He uncurled his legs, and I wedged myself next to him in the chair, which, being fitted to Mycroft, held the two of us with ease. We sat, silent, aware of the occasional clop of shod hooves, the growl of motors, the slight shift of the building around us going to bed, once the call of a night vendor wandered away from his home territory. The lace curtains moved faintly and brought in a much-adulterated hint of a change in the weather.

Holmes and I had met when I was fifteen, and I became, in effect, his apprentice. Under his guidance, I harnessed my angry intelligence, I found a direction for my life, and I came to terms with my past. When I was eighteen, we worked together on a series of cases, which culminated with finding ourselves the target of one of the cleverest, most deadly criminals he had ever faced. After that case, I was an apprentice no longer— I was, at the age of nineteen, a full partner.

I was now twenty-three, though considerably older internally than the calendar would suggest. However, for the last year and a half the partnership had been, in some ways, in abeyance. We had worked together on only two serious cases since our marriage. Instead, I had immersed myself in the rarefied air of Oxford, where I was beginning to make a name for myself in the more abstruse divisions of academic theology. My only real contact with the art of detection for some months had been in its theoretical aspects as I helped Holmes with his magnum opus on that subject. Holmes had, I realized now, been waiting, and now his world had come again to lay claim upon me.

As if to underscore the point my thoughts had reached as I lay back in the chair with my eyes closed, half-drowsing, I felt my left hand taken up. In the silence of our breathing, he began to explore my hand with his, in a slow, almost impersonal manner that left me unaware of anything else in the universe. He ran his smooth, cool fingertips along each of my fingers, exploring the swell of the knuckles and the shape of my nails, teasing the tiny hairs, probing the soft webs between the fingers and the joint of the thumb and the tendons and the large vein up to the wrist, arousing the skin and the hand itself to a most extraordinary pitch of awareness. He ended, at the point when the exquisite sensations threatened to become unbearable, by raising my hand almost formally to his lips, lingering there for an instant, and then restoring it to me.

I sat for a long moment, eyes closed as before, but glowing now and no longer in the least drowsy, and said what was foremost in my mind.

"What is troubling you, husband?"

I thought he would not answer me. Eventually, he disentangled himself and reached forward to knock his pipe out with unnecessary violence into the pristine fireplace.

"Data," he said, sounding like a man pleading for water in a desert place. "I cannot form so much as an hypothesis without raw material."

I waited, but no more was forthcoming. He sucked at the empty pipe stem and squinted at the mantelpiece as if there were words to be deciphered in the grain of the wood. I finally broke the silence.

"Yes, we need more information. Neither Lestrade's information nor Mycroft's has changed that. Assuming that I followed your train of thought this evening, this means that you will have to go to Mrs Rogers, while I ingratiate myself to Colonel Edwards. I ask you again, why does this trouble you?"

"I don't—" He stopped, then continued more quietly. "I do not know why, and I realise it is unreasonable, but I find that the idea of your being in the colonel's house makes me profoundly uneasy. It brings to mind the day we returned from Palestine all those years ago, when I stood on the boat and watched you walk away, completely exposed, while I knew full well that the trap we were setting might catch you instead. It was, I think, the hardest thing I have ever done."

"Holmes," I said, startled into speech, "are you going all sentimental on me?"

"No, you're right, that would never do. What I am trying to say in my feeble male way is that I cannot think why the idea troubles me. I cannot see any signs of a trap, I could detect no threat in his manner when I met him, and I cannot put my finger on any one piece of data that makes me mistrust him. It is a totally irrational reaction on my part, but nonetheless, the thought of placing you within his reach disturbs me greatly."

I sat speechless. In a minute, he went on, his voice muffled by my hair. "My dear Russell. Many years ago, in my foolish youth, I thought I should never marry. I was quite convinced that strong emotion interfered with rational thought, like grit in a sensitive instrument. I believed the heart to be a treacherous organ which served only to cloud the mind, and now ... now I find myself in the disturbing position of having my mind at odds with— with the rest of me. Once I would have automatically followed the dictates of the reasoning mind. However." I could feel his breath warm on my scalp. "I begin to suspect that— I shall say this quietly— that I was wrong, that there may be times when the heart sees something which the mind does not. Perhaps what we call the heart is simply a more efficient means of evaluating data. Perhaps I mistrust it because I cannot see the mechanism working. Perhaps it is time for me to retire once and for all. Do not worry," he said in response to my brief stir of protest, "I shall see this case to its end before I turn to learning Syriac and Aramaic and spending my days correcting your manuscripts. Until then, however, we must assume that the old man still possesses his full wits and that his nerviness is not unjustified. Take care in that house, please, Russ. For God's sake, don't be absentminded."

Holmes, although as energetic and scrupulously attentive to detail in the physical aspects of marriage as ever he was in an investigation or laboratory experiment, was not otherwise a man demonstrative of his affections (a statement which will come as no surprise to any of Dr Watson's readers). His proposal of marriage was less a proposal than a challenge flung, and expressions of affection tended towards the low-key and everyday rather than the dramatic and intermittent. I believe the reason for this was that I had become by that time too much a part of him to be the focus of the great alternating sweeps of manic passion and grey despair that had been characteristic of his earlier life. At any rate, I answered him lightly, but acknowledging his serious intent.

"You have succeeded in setting my nerves on edge, I assure you. At the slightest creak of a floorboard, I'll be out of there like a shot."

PART THREE

Tuesday, 28 August 1923-

Saturday, 1 September 1923

In a man's letters his soul lies naked.

— Samuel Johnson

TWELVE

mu

Tuesday was a day of preparation, a time of backstage hustle and the anticipatory discord of instruments tuning. I spent the better part of the morning in the shops, assembling a wardrobe appropriate to a salesgirl or a colonel's secretary, and most of the afternoon rendering my purchases down into a state of shabby gentility by the judicious use of too-hot water and an overheated iron, and by replacing the odd button with one that almost matched. Shoes were a problem, but in the end I settled on a good pair, for the strength of the heel and the relative comfort of the toe, and added a patina of age with grit and a poorly matched polish. The effect I was aiming for was someone who understood quality but couldn't quite afford it. Beyond this, my character's clothing needed to be innocently seductive, with the emphasis on innocence. Young, naïve, unprotected, determined, and a bit scared— that was the image I held in front of me as I tried on white lawn blouses, looked at embroidered collars, and studied the effects of different sleeves. I even bought six lacy handkerchiefs embroidered with the letter
M.

Holmes came in at three o'clock. He had left immediately after breakfast, dressed in a singularly Lestradian brown suit (the sort that is obviously purchased with an eye to shoulder seams and the amount of wear the knees will take), a soft brown hat that looked as if it had shrunk in the rain, a new-school tie, and sturdy shoes, sporting a moustache that resembled a dead mouse and a tuft of whiskers in the hollow of his left jaw that the razor had missed. He returned smooth of chin and sleek of hair, gloriously resplendent in an utterly black City suit cut to perfection and a shirt like the sun on new snow, a tie whose pattern was unfamiliar to me but which evoked immense dignity and importance, cuff links of jet with a thread of mother-of-pearl, shoes like dancing pumps, a stick of ebony and silver, and a hat ever so slightly dashing about the brim but of the degree of self-assurance that guarantees there will be no label inside. Under his arm, he carried a bulky, roughly entwined brown paper parcel that reeked of mildew and the cleansing solution used in gaols and hospitals.

"Natty duds, Holmes," I commented deflatingly, and turned to hang another maltreated, over-ironed blouse from the door frame. Mycroft's rooms smelt like a bad laundry, all steam and scorched cotton, and now the added aromas from Holmes' bundle. "What is the tie from?"

He tossed his load down on a chair, where it burst open and began to leak garments that looked as unsavoury as they smelt. He fingered the scrap of silk on his breast.

"The Royal Order of Nigerian Blacksmiths," he said. "I am actually entitled to wear it, Russell. For services rendered." He eyed the dress I was systematically attacking, looked at it more closely in disbelief, and threaded his way past me and under my finished garments to our rooms. I heard the door of one of the phalanx of wardrobes click open, followed by the clatter of clothes hangers. I raised my voice a fraction.