The Mary Russell Companion (12 page)

In those first weeks of spring I was like some tropical seed upon which was poured water and warmth. I blossomed, my body under the care of Mrs. Hudson and my mind under the care of this odd man, who had left behind the thrill of the chase in London and come to the quietest of country homes to raise bees, write his books, and, perhaps, to meet me. I do not know what fates put us less than ten miles from each other. I do know that I have never, in all my travels, met a mind like Holmes. Nor has he, he says, met my equal. Had I not found him, had my aunt’s authority been uncontested, I could easily have become twisted like her. I am fairly certain that my own influence on Holmes was also not inconsiderable. He was stagnating—yes, even he—and would probably have bored or drugged himself into an early death. My presence, my—I will say it—my love, gave him a purpose in life from that first day.

If Holmes slid into the niche my father had occupied, then I suppose one could say that dear Mrs. Hudson be came my new mother. Not, of course, that there was any thing between the two of them other than the strictest housekeeper-employer relationship, tempered by a long standing camaraderie. Nonetheless, mother she was and I a daughter to her. She had a son in Australia
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who wrote dutifully every month, but I was her only daughter. She fed me until my frame filled out (I never did become voluptuous, but my shape was quite fashionable for the twenties.) and I went up another two inches that first year, one and one-half the second year, to a total of one inch short of six feet. I became comfortable with my height eventually, but for years I was incredibly clumsy and a real hazard around knick-knacks. It was not until I went away to Oxford that Holmes arranged for lessons in an Oriental form of manual defence (most unladylike: at first only the teacher would work with me!), which brought my various limbs under control.
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Mrs. Hudson, needless to say, would have preferred ballet lessons.

Bartitsu

Mrs. Hudson’s presence in the house made possible my visits to the solitary man who lived there, but she was considerably more than a mere nod to propriety. From her I learnt to garden, to sew on a button, to cook a simple meal. She also taught me that being womanly was not necessarily incompatible with being a mind. It was she, rather than my aunt, who taught me the workings of the female body (in words other than the anatomy textbooks I had previously depended upon, which concealed and obfuscated rather than clarified). It was she who took me to the London dressmakers and hairdressers so that when I came home from Oxford on my eighteenth birthday I could inflict on Holmes a case of apoplexy with my appearance. I was very glad for the presence of Dr. Watson on that occasion. Had I killed Holmes with my dressing up I should surely have thrown myself into the Isis
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by the end of term.

Which brings me to Watson, a sweet bumbly man whom I came to call, to his immense pleasure, Uncle John. I was quite prepared to detest him. How could anyone work so long with Holmes and learn so little? I thought. How could an apparently intelligent man so consistently fail to grasp the point? How could he be so stupid? my teenaged mind railed at him. Worst of all, he made it appear that Holmes, my Holmes, kept him near for one of two purposes: to carry a revolver (though Holmes himself was a crack shot) or to act dense and make the detective appear even more brilliant by contrast. What did Holmes see in this, this buffoon?
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Oh, yes, I was ready to hate him, to destroy him with my scathing tongue. Only it didn’t work out that way.

I arrived unannounced at Holmes’ door one day in early September. The first storm of autumn had knocked out the telephone exchange in the village, so I could not ring ahead to say that I was coming, as I usually did. The road was a muddy mess, so rather than use the bicycle I had bought (with Mrs. Hudson’s loan account, of course) I put on my high boots and set off across the downs. The sun came out as I walked the sodden hills, and the heat soared. As a result I left my muddy boots outside the door and let myself in through the kitchen, spattered with mud and dripping with sweat from the humidity and the wrong clothing. Mrs. Hudson was not in the kitchen, a bit odd for that early in the day, but I heard low voices from the main room. Not Holmes, another man, rural tones heavily overlaid with London. A neighbour, perhaps, or a house guest.

“Good morning, Mrs. Hudson,” I called out softly, figuring that Holmes was still asleep. He often was in the mornings, as he kept odd hours—sleep was a concern of the body and of convenience, he declared, not of the clock. I went into the scullery and pumped water into the sink to wash my sweaty face and dirty hands and arms, but when my fingers groped for the towel they found the rail empty. As I patted about in blind irritation I heard a movement in the scullery doorway and the missing towel was pressed into my hand. I seized it and put my face into it.

“Thank you, Mrs. Hudson,” I said into the cloth. “I heard you talking with someone. Is this a bad time to come?” When no answer came I looked up and saw a portly, moustachioed figure in the doorway, smiling radiantly. Even without my spectacles I knew instantly who it was and concealed my wariness. “Dr. Watson, I perceive?” I dried my hands and we shook. He held on to mine for a moment, beaming into my face.

Doctor Watson

“He was right. You are lovely
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.”

This confused me no end. Who on earth was “he”? Surely not Holmes. And “lovely”? Stinking of sweat, in mismatched wool stockings with holes in both toes, hair straggling and one leg mud to the knee—lovely?

I extricated my hand, found my glasses on the sideboard, put them on, and his round face came into focus. He was looking at me with such complete, unaffected pleasure that I simply could not think what to do, so I just stood there. Stupidly.

“Miss Russell, I am so very happy to meet you at last. I will speak quickly because I think Holmes is about to arise. I wanted to thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for what you have done for my friend in the last few months. Had I read it in a casebook I would not have believed it, but I see and believe.”

“You see what?” I said. Stupidly. Like a buffoon.

“I’m sure you knew that he was ill, though not perhaps how ill. I watched him and despaired, for I knew that at that rate he would not see a second summer, possibly not even the new year. But since May he has put on half a stone, his heartbeat is strong, his colour good, and Mrs. Hudson says he sleeps—irregularly, as always, but he sleeps. He says he has even given up the cocaine to which he was rapidly becoming addicted—given it up.
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I believe him. And I thank you, with all my soul, for you have done what my skills could not, and brought back my truest friend from the grave.” I stood there struck dumb with confusion. Holmes, ill? He had looked thin and grey when we first met, but dying? A sardonic voice from the next room made us both start guiltily.

“Oh come now, Watson, don’t frighten the child with your exaggerated worries.” Holmes came to the doorway in his mouse-coloured robe
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. “‘From the grave’ indeed. Overworked, perhaps, but one foot in the grave, hardly. I admit that Russell has helped me relax, and God knows I eat more when she is here, but it is little more than that. I’ll not have you worrying the child that she’s in any way responsible for me, do you hear, Watson?”

The face that turned towards me was so stricken with guilt that I felt the last of my wish to dislike him dissolve, and I began to laugh.

“But, I only wished to thank her—”

“Very well, you’ve thanked her. Now let us have our tea while Mrs. Hudson finds some breakfast for us. Death and resurrection,” he snorted. “Ridiculous!”
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I enjoyed that day, although at times it gave me the feeling of opening a book halfway through and trying to reconstruct what had gone before. Previously unknown characters meandered in and out of the conversation, place names referred in shorthand to whole adventures, and, overall, the long years of a constructed relationship stood before me, an intricate edifice previously unseen. It was the sort of situation in which a third party, namely myself, could have easily felt awkward and outdistanced, but oddly enough I did not. I think it was because I was so very secure in my knowledge of the building Holmes and I had already begun. Even in the few weeks I had known him we had come far, and I no longer had any fear of Watson and what he represented. Watson, for his part, never feared or resented me. Before that day I would have scornfully said he was too dim-witted to see me as a threat. By the afternoon I knew that it was because his heart was too large to exclude anything concerning Holmes.

The day went quickly, and I enjoyed being an addition to the trio of old friends, Holmes, Watson, and Mrs. Hudson. When Watson went off after supper to gather his things for the evening train to London, I sat down beside Holmes, feeling a vague need to apologise to somebody.

“I suppose you know I was prepared to hate him,” I said finally.

“Oh yes.”

“I can see why you kept him near you. He’s so…good, somehow. Naïve, yes, and he doesn’t seem terribly bright
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, but when I think of all the ugliness and evil and pain he’s known…It’s polished him, hasn’t it? Purified him.”

“Polished is a good image. Seeing myself reflected in Watson’s eyes was useful when contemplating a case that was giving me problems
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. He taught me a great deal about how humans function, what drives them. He keeps me humble, does Watson.” He caught my dubious look. “At any rate, as humble as I can be.”

              ***

Thus my life began again, in that summer of 1915. I was to spend the first years of the war under Holmes’s tutelage, although it was some time before I became aware that I was not just visiting a friend, that I was actually being taught by Holmes, that I was receiving, not casual lessons in a variety of odd and entertaining areas, but careful instruction by a professional in his area of considerable expertise. I did not think of myself as a detective; I was a student of theology, and I was to spend my life in exploration, not of the darker crannies of human misbehaviour, but of the heights of human speculation concerning the nature of the Divine
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. That the two were not unrelated did not occur to me for years. My apprenticeship began, on my part, without any conscious recognition of that state. I thought it was the same with Holmes, that he began by humouring this odd neighbour for lack of anything more demanding at hand, and ended up with a fully trained detective, until some years later I recalled that odd statement he had made in his garden on our very first day: “Twenty years ago,” he had muttered. “Even ten. But here? Now?” I did ask him, but of course he said that he had seen it within the first minutes. However, Holmes has always thought of himself as omniscient, so I cannot trust him on it.

On the face of things it would have been extremely unlikely for a proper gentleman such as Holmes to take on a young woman as pupil, much less apprentice her to his arcane trade. Twenty years before, with Victoria on the throne, an alliance such as Holmes and I forged—close, underchaperoned, and not even rendered safe by the bonds of blood—would have been unthinkable. Even ten years before, under Edward, ripples of shock would have run through the rural community and made our lives difficult.

This was, however, 1915, and if the better classes clasped to themselves a semblance of the old order, it did little more than obscure the chaos beneath their feet. During the war the very fabric of English society was picked apart and rewoven. Necessity dictated that women work outside the home, be it their own or that of their employers’, and so women put on men’s boots and took control of trams and breweries, factories and fields. Upper-class women signed on for long stretches nursing in the mud and gore of France or, for a lark, put on smocks and gaiters and became Land Girls during the harvest.
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The harsh demands of king and country and the constant anxieties over the fighting men reduced the rules of chaperonage to a minimum; people simply had no energy to spare for the proprieties. Mrs. Hudson’s presence in the cottage made my long hours with Holmes possible. My parents being dead and my aunt caring little for my actions, as long as they did not intrude on hers: that too made it possible. Rural life conspired as well, for rural society, though rigid, recognises a true gentleman when it sees one, and the farmers trusted Holmes in a way that town-dwellers would never have done. There may have been gossip, but I rarely heard of it. Looking back, I think that the largest barrier to our association was Holmes himself, that inborn part of him that spoke the language of social customs, and particularly that portion of his makeup that saw women as some tribe of foreign and not-entirely-trustworthy exotics. Again, events conspired. Holmes was, after all, unconventional if not outright bohemian in his acquaintances and in his business dealings. His friendships ran the social spectrum, from the younger son of a duke through the staid and conventional Dr. Watson to a Whitechapel pawnbroker, and his profession brought him into contact with kings, and sewer-men, and ladies of uncertain virtue. He did not even consider lesser criminal activities any bar to social and professional relationships, as his ongoing fellowship with some of the shadier Irregulars of his Baker Street days would illustrate. Even Mrs. Hudson had originally come into his purview through a murder case (that written up by Dr. Watson as “Gloria Scott”).
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