A Monstrous Regiment of Women (35 page)

No. No, thank you, there would be cobwebs and steps and hidden latches at the other end, and me with one small box of vestas.

One thing, though: I’d learnt skills in the dark.

Absolutely not. I will wait here until she goes to dress, and then I will sneak out. The place will be nearly deserted, of a Sunday morning.

How long? Two hours, three? Your bladder will burst, thanks to the refuge’s tea.

That, unfortunately, was true, and truth to tell, the fear of having to do something about it in the passageway, all too reminiscent of my time in the cellar, drove me down into the dark more than anything else.

It was a long, long passage, tortuous and utterly unrelieved by light. The vestas I clutched as talismans against the night. I lit each one with care, scurried along until it began to burn my finger, then groped my way down the passage for a few more feet, considerably more disorientated than if I had remained in the dark. I knew that if I gave my senses a chance, they would guide me, but in craven cowardice I clung to my feeble lights, and I still had three in the box when I reached the end.

There was a door, a narrow one, and it opened easily onto an equally narrow passageway that was, glory of glories, open to the sky. I sidled between two buildings, stepped out onto a street, and stood breathing in the early-morning air.

The street seemed to me a foretaste of paradise—the morning mist was the breath of God; the early pedestrians, angels. I had come straight through the block of buildings onto the next street up from the hall, so with a wary eye for constables and Temple members, I made my way around the two corners until I found Holmes (Buttercup long discarded for the costume of an indeterminate labourer). I seized his hand, which surprised me as much as it did him. What is more, I did not release it until we reached my flat.

TWENTY-ONE

Sunday, 6 February

[Thy husband] craves no other tribute at thy hands

But love, fair looks, and true obedience—

Too little payment for so great a debt…

Even such a woman oweth to her husband;

And when she’s froward, peevish, sullen, sour,

And not obedient to his honest will,

What is she but a foul contending rebel,

And graceless traitor to her loving lord?

—William Shakespeare

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^

That silly demonstration seemed to convince Holmes that I was at the ragged edge, either physically or mentally. On reaching my flat, he insisted that I undress, bath, and take Mrs Q’s breakfast in bed, where he sat scowling horribly at me until I had pushed the last of it down. I was taken aback, as Holmes normally treated my infirmities as his own—that is, he ignored them. Perhaps, as Q had hinted, the previous days had been as hard on him as they had been on me, if for different reasons. I looked at him over the rim of my cup and dutifully recited all I had done and found within the Temple buildings. He sat on a pink satin boudoir chair, his labourer’s boots propped on the foot of my Brobdingnagian bed, his fingers steepled, his eyes shut. I reached an end, then waited, but there was no response. I suspected he was asleep. I put the cup noisily on the tray, and his eyelids flashed open.

“I never asked you, Holmes. How did you find me… in that house in Essex?”

He leant forward and busied himself with the coffeepot, and I thought at first he was not going to answer. However, renewing his scowl and transferring its focus to his cup, he said. “My career has been sprinkled with glittering examples of incompetence, Russell, normally buried under the verbiage by Watson, but rarely has my stupidity had such potential for truly calamitous disaster. I did not even realise you were missing until Friday morning.”

“When I didn’t show up for the presentation. But didn’t Duncan miss me sooner than that? We had planned to spend Wednesday together—Holmes! You went there, to the presentation?”

“I was there, properly gowned—my own gown, too, mind you, not from a costume box. I walked into the hall, to find utter panic, of the Oxford variety: tight voices, careful polysyllables, a certain amount of wringing of hands. Margery Childe was there, too, incidentally. I found your colleague Duncan and he controlled himself long enough to tell me that no one had seen you that week. I sought out Miss Childe and she confirmed that you had not come to the Temple during the week, as you had halfway promised, but she had assumed that you were busy. After your landlady assured me that you had indeed not been in your rooms for nine days, it took me the remainder of Friday to confirm that you had been on the late Saturday train and to assemble an investigatory team, half of Saturday to locate a stationmaster who remembered a party of drunken Londoners, which included a totally unconscious woman, and then the trail went dead. Your abductor took to the minor roads in a Ford automobile, and the number of farmers who remembered hearing a Ford go by in the wee hours of Sunday, in opposite ends of a county at once, could not be believed. By Monday, I was reduced to quartering the countryside, with—”

He broke off at the sound of the telephone. I obediently allowed Q to answer it, then waited until he came to the doorway to pick up the instrument at the side of my bed (installed there, no doubt, for the convenience of ladies who sleep until noon). When I put it to my ear, all I heard was a wild gabble of male voices.

“Stop!” I ordered. “I cannot understand you. Who is this?”

“Miss Russell, oh Miss Russell, it’s Eddie here, she’s off, is Mr ’Olmes there, he said I should ring if she came-out onto the street, my cousin’s following her, but he said to tell you and Mr ’Olmes, is he there—”

“Eddie, where are you?” I said loudly. Holmes went rigid.

“Around the corner from the Temple building, miss, she’s making for the river, Billy’s on her tail, she and that maid of hers came out and had a blooming row and she ended up shoving the old grouch on her backside in the street, and then she just took off.”

“Stay where you are, Eddie. We’ll be there in five minutes.” I slammed the receiver down, cracking off some of the gilt decoration, and threw myself out of bed. Holmes was already at the door.

“Russell, you’re in no condition to—”

“Oh do shut up, Holmes. Fetch us a taxi,” I said, and began to remove the few clothes I had on. He made haste to disappear.

Instead of a taxi, I found Q behind the wheel of the car, Holmes beside him. I jumped in and the car was moving away before the door had shut. We were soon driving past the Temple, deserted on the Sunday morning, and around the corner a lanky sixteen-year-old waved us down from the door of a newsagent’s. I held the door for him, and he climbed cautiously in. He bobbed his head at me and greeted Holmes with the same excitement he had demonstrated on the telephone.

“Mornin’, Mr ’Olmes, sir. Billy said he was doin’ just like you said. There’s a string of us left behind where she goes. He’s stayin’ with her,” and then he began to repeat himself in slightly different words, several times. There were indeed a string of them, the youngest a girl of six, the oldest a gaffer bent over a cane, each of whom we gathered up into the car. I had shaken the hands of eight of Billy’s multitudinous relatives when Holmes’ sharp order came from the front seat.

“Down!”

Ten of us collapsed onto the floor and seat while the car drifted sedately past first Billy and his current cousin and then Margery Childe, turned into a side street, and pulled up to the kerb. Holmes and I extricated ourselves.

“Q,” I said, “I want you to return these good folk to their homes. If you can find a tea shop open, give them breakfast first. I’ll reimburse you.” Despite protests, I closed the door firmly in all those faces and Q drove off. Holmes and I pressed ourselves into a doorway and waited for Margery to pass on the adjoining street; then we walked out to intercept Billy and tell him to drop back.

She was making for the river, that was clear. She looked back twice, but both times Holmes seemed somehow to anticipate her, and she did not see us. Other than those two backwards glances, there was no attempt at subterfuge, no urge to take to wheeled transport, and she went straight south to Tower Bridge. We followed her over the greasy, cold river, staying well back until she had gone off of it going east, when we trotted to catch her up. She took to the dockyards on the south bank of the river, the dirty warrens where the sun never penetrates, and we alternately strolled and sprinted in her wake.

We were, it seemed, nearly to Greenwich when, hurrying up to a corner, we peered forward and caught the glimpse of a disappearing cloak.

“Gone to earth, by God. I thought she’d walk to Dover,” muttered Holmes. “You stay here. Follow if she reappears. Drop crumbs or something. I’ll place Billy on the corner back there, in case of a back door.” He faded into the background.

A conscientious bobby can be one of the most irritating things on the face of London. One such found me after less than five minutes, took a look at my young man’s clothing and long henna hair, and began to give me a hard time. I took my eye off the street, fixed him with a condescending stare, and spoke down my nose in my most imperious of plummy tones.

“My good man, I should inform you that you are speaking to Margaret Farthingale Hall. Lady Margaret Hall. What you see before you is the tail end of a long and not terribly amusing party that Jeffie Norton—the American film star?—held yesterday night. A costume party, as you can see. I suppose I ought to be gratified that you find my costume so intriguing, but I am beginning to find the game just the least bit tedious, and I fear the costume is proving less exotic than I had anticipated. My escort for the evening, when last I saw him, had the more interesting costume, a nineties number with feathers and sequins—too, too Folies Bergère, don’t you know? You haven’t seen him, I don’t suppose? No, that’s too much to hope for. Knowing him, he is waiting around the corner until you leave. He’s a dear boy, but so conservative without champagne to keep up his nerve. So, if you’ll just run along, I shall see if I can coax him out of the woodwork.” I turned a dismissive back.

An older constable might well have persisted, but I had intimidated this one into believing the voice and the attitude rather than the clothing, and after issuing a stern warning, he left me to my vigil.

After ten minutes, I was beginning to wonder how long my constable’s rounds took him. After fifteen, Holmes’ head appeared unexpectedly, protruding from the doorway into which Margery had gone. I hurried forward and slipped inside.

There was a body just inside the door, bound and gagged.

“The only guard?” I whispered.

“There was another at the back. Help me carry this one out of the way.”

I picked up his feet, then nearly dropped him as I saw his features.

“Holmes, this was the other man from the house in Essex.”

“Good,” was his only remark; but he showed no gentleness when we dumped the body in an adjoining office room.

“She’s upstairs,” Holmes whispered. “Second floor, by the sound of it. The place seems almost deserted.”

“Perhaps they’ve all gone to church.”

The building was a warehouse, which seemed to contain little but great coils of rope and bales of rag. Two lorries stood near the gates, but as a business, it seemed none too prosperous. There were voices coming from upstairs, wordless but angry. As we went carefully up, they sorted themselves out into a man’s rumble and a woman’s shrill, and closer still, I knew them both. The woman was Margery, although I’d never heard her sound like this. The male voice was that of Claude Franklin: my captor; Margery’s husband.

I flushed, hearing him, and felt abruptly how very ill and tired I was. I must have sagged slightly, because Holmes’ hand was on my elbow.

“Take the revolver,” he said, holding the thing out to me. I reached for it automatically, then pushed it back into his hand.

“You keep it, Holmes,” I whispered. “I’d shoot my own foot.”

He slid it back under his belt and we began to creep up the stairs until we were on a level with the arguing voices. They didn’t hear any of the creaks the old stairs made, and there seemed to be no other people in the building.

“—could you possibly think I wouldn’t find out, Claude?” Margery was saying. “I suppose I’ve been incredibly stupid, but when I heard Friday that Mary was held captive, and then her will— That’s why you’ve been away, all this time, isn’t it? Were you planning on… Would you actually have killed her? For her
money
?” Her voice rose with incredulity.

“You stupid bitch. Why do you think I married you? Why do you think I wait around in this godforsaken hell-hole every Thursday night? For your bloody conversation?”

Had we heard any movements from the room during the lengthy silence that followed, we should have moved to intervene, but there was nothing but silence. Finally Margery spoke, calmly, in a voice I’d heard her use during our lessons.

“That boy with the knife; he was from you, wasn’t he? I thought for a moment he might be, that you’d decided the beating wasn’t enough, but I couldn’t believe it. But he was. And he died. Did you arrange that, too? You must have. You wanted me dead so you could have the Temple’s money. My God, what kind of an animal are you?”

I glanced at Holmes, and knew that the look of strain on his face was duplicated on my own. “He’s going to kill her,” I whispered.

“That may be what she’s after,” he said.