A Letter of Mary (23 page)

"No, you idiot," I said over the giggles he always managed to draw from me. "Just remove them for twenty minutes. Take them to view the peacocks, or see the etchings, or bring them in to hear you play something horrid and dissonant on this machine."

"Please, don't insult the poor thing. It can't help how it looks, and its inner parts deserve better than the twentieth century." He patted the encrusted inlay of the top reassuringly.

"Play them Bach or Satie, I don't care, just so I have time to eat and escape into the grounds. In those dresses, they can't plan to venture far from the house."

"Deep waters, Holmes, and no small danger, from the peacocks if nothin' else. But your faithful Watson is ready as always to plunge into the fray, all enthusiasm and no wits. Who are these two delectable creatures awaitin' my seductive wiles, and if I may be so bold, on whose ears is not to fall the name of Holmes?" He held the door for me, and we entered the dark corridor.

"The ladies are silly but sweet, and you won't have to think of topics of conversation. The ears belong to a Colonel Dennis Edwards, who currently employs Miss Mary Small as his secretary."

"Edwards, you say? You do move with strange fish, my dear. I will demand payment for this onerous deed, you know. Which are my victims?" he added, peering alertly through the open door. I pointed them out to him, and he sighed. "Yes, we have met. A policeman's lot is not an 'appy one. Adieu, my lady, and if I do not survive this day, tell my mother that I loved her."

He screwed his monocle into place with a gesture of buckling on armour, then glided smoothly out into the crowd. I watched with amusement as he greeted his hostess, kissed the fingers of a matched brace of dowagers, shook various hands, greeted the colonel and said something that made him laugh, scooped up three glasses of champagne from a passing tray, and finally, with the ease of a champion sheepdog, cut out his two victims from the flock. Within four minutes from leaving my side, he was strolling down the terrace stones, one fluttering female on each arm, and I stepped out to take a plate. Rule, Britannia, with an aristocracy like that.

I applied myself industriously to a plate of assorted foodstuffs, drank thirstily several glasses of the excellent champagne, nodded politely to the bits of conversation that came my way, and watched warily for other familiar faces. The colonel seemed taken aback by my brusque manners, so after slapping my empty plate down onto a nearby tray, I made an effort to smile ingratiatingly at him before urging him to lead me to the stables.

Inside that dim and fragrant environment, I managed to avoid both the sidesaddle and the placid mare the colonel would have chosen for me, settling instead on a rangy gelding with a gleam of equine intelligence in his eye and airily brushing off the colonel's worried fussing that it was too much horse for me. Mary Small was slipping away fast, and I was fortunate that the horse had already been out that morning and was therefore less interested in bolting or scraping me off under a branch, situations that our Miss Small might have found trying.

Once away from the house, I began to breathe more easily, and I settled down to the business of enjoying myself. During the shakedown canter through the shady lane, the horse and I had a discussion about our partnership's chain of command, and when that had been settled to my satisfaction, I gave him some rein and aimed him at a fence. Despite his looks, his legs had springs like a Daimler, and when he recognised that he had a rider who appreciated his skills, he settled his ears with a nod of prim satisfaction and happily set about proving his worth.

A couple of miles later, I belatedly became aware of my escort and employer on my heels, and half-turning, I shot him a grin of pure enjoyment. He came alongside with a grin of his own, and we rode under the hot Kentish sky in something very like companionship. He was different mounted on the horse in his borrowed coat, more sure of himself, yet paradoxically less assertive. I thought he would be the same when engaged in any physical activity, hunting or rugby, closer to his essential nature than when in his too-large house in the city. He sat the horse well and took the hedges and walls smoothly, and he politely allowed me to win the race to the far edge of Capability Brown's compulsory lake. We dismounted and I unpinned my hat, unbuttoned my gloves, and rinsed out a handkerchief in the rather muddy water to cool my face. I spread my borrowed jacket out on the grass and lay back on it to let the sun work at increasing my freckles, listening to far-distant voices and birdcalls and the occasional slight jingles of the grazing horses.

"You ride well, Mary. Where did you learn?"

"I am a farmer." I came to myself with a start. "That is, I grew up on a farm in Oxfordshire."

"What does your family grow?"

"A bit of everything, really. Hay, market vegetables, a few horses, cows."

"That's where the calluses on your hands come from?"

I held them up against the sky and studied them.

"Not a city girl's hands, are they? Too many cows to milk." The musculature was much too generalised for that, but I doubted that he would notice my lack of the milkmaid's characteristic bulging carpal muscle. I flexed my fingers, then dropped my arms down at my sides and closed my eyes.

Moments of pure relaxation were rare for me. There was always the nagging of books unread, work undone, time a-wasting. For this brief slice of an afternoon, though, the choice was taken from me; the only alternative to relaxation was fretting. But the sun was too warm and my muscles too pleasantly loosened to fret, so I stretched out my long legs, crossed them at the boots, folded my glasses onto my stomach, and gave myself over to the sheer debauchery of simply lying in the sun. I was vaguely aware that I was presenting a sight shocking to the eyes of an Edwardian gentleman, long jodhpur-clad limbs and thin blouse, bare head and naked face and hair awry, giving herself over to a shameless and unafraid snooze. I smiled at the thought.

In the arms of Nature's soft nurse, I half-dozed, aware of the sun on my eyelids and a fitful breeze across my cheeks, the food in my stomach and the good air in my lungs and the faint remnant of wine in my blood, the odours of cleaning fluid and cedar from the coat under my head and the clean smell of horse moving off and the aroma of a warm male human nearby. I held the awareness of all these things of the day and the birdsong in a compartment, a light place into which I could reach at any instant, and allowed the rest of myself to sink away into the silent, warm, dark place that lies within.

Mary Magdalene. I had not thought of her in days, and yet a week ago, reading her letter aloud to Holmes, I should have said she would remain before my eyes for the rest of my days. Mary of Magdala, one vital link between the ministry of Jesus the Nazarene carpenter, the crucifixion of Jesus the political criminal, and the resurrection of Jesus the Son of God— a link who, having brought the news of the resurrection to the male disciples, vanishes utterly on Easter afternoon. I reflected, not for the first time, on the irony that this woman, later called a harlot, traditionally identified with John's "woman taken in adultery," this mere woman and her vision of the empty tomb was the foundation stone on which two thousand years of Christian faith was laid, and at that moment, lying there in the sun, I knew in my heart that, despite the difficulties, I accepted her authorship of my papyrus. I was filled with admiration for the pure, distilled strength of the woman with her simple, deadly decisions— and for the first time I wondered what had become of the granddaughter, Rachel, how old she had been, if she made it safely to Magdala. "I look out across my rocky desolation," the woman had written, in that flowing and spiky hand that gave the impression of hurried calm even before I knew her words, a rocky desolation and fleeing the coming wrath of the conqueror that would turn the holy place that was the heart of Judaism into a ruin where jackals would howl and soldiers empty their bladders, the same soldiers who carried pikes and swords and who stank of garlic and stale sweat in that land of sun and little water, a smell very unlike the cedar and the tobacco and the fresh male smell that was in my own nostrils now, which combination was evocative of Holmes. I lay limp, part of me drifting on a hillside in a long-off age under a different sun, and a bit of me aware of Mr Brown's cultivated natural landscape, and gradually a third part of me becoming aware of a series of distinctly arresting sensations that slowly transformed my state of torpid dreaminess into hypnotic attention, a third point of awareness that kept me frozen and divided, the awareness of lips exploring the exquisitely sensitive tracery of veins that ran up the inside of my wrist.

It was overwhelmingly erotic, the feather touch and dreamlike movement of his breath and mouth and moustache in my palm, on the swell and hollow of my thumb, up the line of my tendons, the amazing, unexpected, electrifying gentleness and sensitivity of his mouth taking possession of my right hand, and I arched my fingers to him and took one deep, shuddering breath, and an instant later I was on my feet, stumbling away from him, seeking the safety of my horse.

I scrubbed my palm and the inside of my wrist hard across the bristle of the animal's coarse hip, and as I yanked at the girth with unnecessary violence, I cursed my stupidity, my carelessness, my— yes, damn it, my absentmindedness— and I cursed as well my overreaction, for the second time in twenty-four hours, to an Edwards male. He came up behind me and held out glasses, gloves, hat, and jacket, and I clothed myself and mounted the horse without looking at him or taking his offer of a hand up.

"Mary, I—"

"No, Colonel. No." My rough voice was pure Russell. "I am sorry, but no. It's time to be getting back." I drove the hat pins roughly home, buttoned the gloves, and then forced myself to look down at him, but he only looked puzzled and a bit hurt, then slightly amused.

"Very well, Mary, if that's how you want it." He turned away to catch his own horse, but I couldn't leave it at that.

"Colonel? Look, I am sorry. It has nothing to do with how I want it, but it's how it has to be. I can't explain, not just now. I am sorry." And for a moment, with the tingle still warm on my wrist, I was truly sorry, and he saw it, and he smiled crookedly.

"I understand, Mary. It was foolish of me to think that you could be interested in an old man like me. I do understand."

I swallowed hard the protest that rose up, a bitter mouthful indeed. We both left the topic as it stood, and after he had mounted, we turned and rode back in a silence that was, oddly enough, not unfriendly. When the stable lads had received back their charges, I excused myself to go and reclaim my own clothes. Walking warily through the corridors, I made the upstairs room without challenge. Once there, I dismissed the maid as firmly as I had before, took my clothes from the wardrobe, and dressed quickly. I had just begun to pin my hair back together when a light tap at the door startled me.

"Yes?"

"Saint George here, slayer of dragons, at your service," drawled a light male voice.

I opened it, and my rescuer slipped in.

"I thought I'd check to see if my services were still needed, though short of a bigamous elopement, I cannot see how I might keep those two from the dinner party."

"Heaven forbid. No, we're going, as soon as I've taken my leave of the Westburys. Do you think you could—"

"A glass of bubbly under the rose bower is the most I can manage, I'm afraid."

"That would be perfect. Thank you, you dear man, you've saved me from a potentially difficult situation."

"The salvation of fair ladies is the entire purpose of my class, in case you had not realised. When ladies stop being in need of rescue, all like me will fade away."

"Like King Arthur, waiting to come again when England has need of him?"

"Good Lord, what a dreadful thought. Give me an honest retirement anytime. Speakin' of which, kindly present my greetings and regards to the gentleman with the pipe."

"I will. Come down for a weekend when this is all over, and I'll tell you all the sordid details. There's even an immensely early manuscript for you to admire."

"A first edition?"

"Without a doubt."

"Interestin'. I shall hold you to the offer. Well, it's been loverly, ducks, but two other ladies await my escort services. Give me five minutes to remove the dragons from downstairs, and the coast, as the fogbound lighthouse keeper said to his wife, will be clear."

"Thank you," I said again, and impulsively leant forward and kissed his cheek. He very nearly blushed, then busied himself with cleaning his monocle with his silk handkerchief and screwing it energetically over his eye.

"Yes, well, ta and all that. Cheerio."

I turned back to the mirror, smiling, and was surprised to see his fair head reappear at the door, the silly-ass attitude temporarily suspended from face and voice.

"By the by, Mary, a word in your ear. Doubtless you know already that your colonel has a potential for nasty behaviour, but you may not have met his son yet. If you do, watch yourself: He's a felony waiting to happen, and in him, the nasty streak goes clear across."

"We've met."

"Yes?"

"Indeed. He may walk carefully around sweet young things for a while."

"Hello, hello, do I see a gleam in your eyes? Heaven protect me from an emancipated woman who can throw men over her shoulder."

"I should think you know me better than to accuse me of something as unsubtle as that."

"But no less painful, perhaps?"

"Well ..."

"Take care, Mary." He laughed, then went down the hall whistling something complicated and Mozartian.

EIGHTEEN

sigma

I expected the drive back to London to be something of an ordeal, but it was not. The colonel was, if anything, more relaxed and friendly, almost as if he were relieved to have some bothersome question out of the way. The clouds, actual rather than metaphorical, gathered again as we neared London, and it was raining lightly when Alex pulled up in front of Isabella's boardinghouse. The colonel moved to open his door, but I put out a hand to stop him.