The Mary Russell Companion (15 page)

“Come in,” I called.

“I say,” a voice began, and then changed from enquiry to concern. “I say, are you all right?”

I shoved my spectacles back onto my nose and dashed the hair out of my face with the back of my hand, and caught my first sight of Lady Veronica Beaconsfield, all plump five feet one inch of her, wrapped in an incredibly gaudy green-and-yellow silk dressing gown that did nothing for her complexion.

“All right? Of course. Oh, the books. No, they didn’t fall on me; I lay on them. I don’t suppose you have such a thing as a screwdriver?”

“No, I don’t believe I do.”

“Ah well, the porter may
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. Were you looking for someone?”

“You.”

“Then you have found her.”

“Petruchio,” she said, and seemed to pause in expectation. I sat back on my heels amongst the strewn volumes for a moment.

“Come on, and kiss me Kate?” I offered. “What, sweeting, all amort?”
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She clapped her hands together and squealed at the ceiling. “I knew it! The voice, the height, and she even knows the words. Can you do it à la vaudeville?”

“I, er—”

“Of course we can’t use real food in your scene where you throw it at the servants, not with all the shortages, it wouldn’t be nice.”

“May I ask…”

“Oh, sorry, how stupid of me. Veronica Beaconsfield. Call me Ronnie.”

“Mary Russell.”

“Yes, I know. Tonight then, Mary, nine o’clock, my rooms. First performance in two weeks.”

“But I—” I protested. But she was away.

I was simply the latest to discover the impossibility of refusing to cooperate in one of Ronnie Beaconsfield’s schemes. I was in her rooms that night with a dozen others, and three weeks later we performed
The Taming of the Shrew
for the entertainment of the Men of Somerville
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, as we called them, and I doubt that staid college of women had ever heard such an uproar before, or since. We gained several male converts to our society that night, and I was soon excused the rôle of Petruchio.

I was not, however, excused from participation in this amateur dramatic society, for it was soon discovered that I had a certain skill in make-up and even disguise, although I never let slip the name of Sherlock Holmes. I cannot now recall the process by which I, shy bluestocking intellectual Mary Russell, came to be the centre of the year’s elaborate prank, but some weeks later in the madness of the summer term
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I was to find myself disguised as an Indian nobleman (Indian, for the turban to cover my hair) eating with the undergraduates of Baliol College. The breath of risk made it all the more delicious, for we should all have been sent down, or at the very least rusticated for the term, had we been caught out
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.

The career of Ratnakar Sanji in Oxford lasted for nearly the entire month of May. He was seen in three of the men’s colleges; he spoke briefly (in bad English) in the Union; he attended a sherry party with the aesthetes of Christ Church (where he demonstrated exquisite manners) and a football game with the hearties of Brasenose (where he appeared to down a large quantity of beer and contributed two previously unknown verses to one of the rowdier songs); he even received a brief mention in one of the undergraduate newspapers, under the heading “Rajput Nobleman’s Son Remarks on Oxford.” The truth inevitably trickled out, and I only escaped the proctor’s bulldogs
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by moments. Miss Mary Russell walked demurely away from the pub’s back entrance, leaving Ratnakar Sanji in the dustbin behind the door. The proctors and the college authorities conducted a thorough search for the malefactors, and several of the young men who had been seen dining or at functions with Sanji received stern warnings, but scandal was averted, largely because no one ever found the woman who rumour said was involved. Of course the women’s colleges received their close scrutiny. Ronnie was called in, as one of the most likely due to temperament, but when I followed her in the door—quiet and bookish, loping along at Ronnie’s heels like a lugubrious wolf-hound—they discounted my height and the fact that I wore spectacles similar to Sanji’s, and excused me irritably from the interrogation.

Proctors’ bulldogs

The conspiracy left me with two legacies, neither of which had been in my original expectations of University life: a coterie of lasting friends (Nothing binds like shared danger, however spurious.) and a distinct taste for the freedom that comes with assuming another’s identity. All of which is not to say that I gave up work entirely. I revelled in the lectures and discussions. I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and, particularly before Sanji’s career began in May, would sit long hours in Bodley’s arms, to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books. The chemistry laboratories were a revelation in modernity, compared to Holmes’ equipment, at any rate. I blessed the war that had taken over the college rooms I might normally have been given, for the modernised quarters I found myself in had electrical lights, occasionally operating central heating radiators, and even—miracle of miracles—running water piped in for each resident. The hand-basin in the corner was an immense luxury (Even the young lords in Christchurch depended on the legs of the scouts
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for their supply of hot water.) and enabled me to set up a small laboratory in my sitting room. The gas ring
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, meant for heating cocoa, I converted into a Bunsen burner.

Duke Humfrey’s, oldest section of the Bodleian.

Between the joys of work and the demands of a burgeoning social life I found little time for sleep. At the end of the term in December I crept home, emptied by the passion of my first weeks in academia. Fortunately the conductor remembered my presence and woke me in time to change trains.

I turned eighteen on the second of January 1918. I arrived at Holmes’ door with my hair elaborately piled on my head, wearing a dark-green velvet gown and my mother’s diamond earrings. When Mrs. Hudson opened the door I was glad to see that she, Holmes, and Dr. Watson were also in formal dress, so we all glittered regally in that somewhat worn setting. When Watson had revived Holmes from the apoplectic seizure my appearance had caused, we ate and we drank champagne, and Mrs. Hudson produced a birthday cake with candles, and they sang to me and gave me presents. From Mrs. Hudson came a pair of silver hair combs. Watson produced an intricate little portable writing set, complete with pad, pen, and inkwell, that folded into a tooled leather case. The small box Holmes put before me contained a simple, delicate brooch made of silver set with tiny pearls.

“Holmes, it’s beautiful.”

“It belonged to my grandmother. Can you open it?” I searched for a clasp, my vision and dexterity hindered somewhat by the amount of champagne I had drunk. Finally he stretched out his fingers and manipulated two of the pearls, and it popped open in my hand. Inside was a miniature portrait of a young woman, with light hair but a clear gaze I recognised immediately as that of Holmes.

“Her brother, the French artist Vernet
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, painted it on her eighteenth birthday,” said Holmes. “Her hair was a colour very similar to yours, even when she was old.”

Émile Jean-Horace Vernet 

The portrait wavered in front of my eyes and tears spilt down my cheeks.

“Thank you. Thank you everybody,” I choked out and dissolved into maudlin sobs, and Mrs. Hudson had to put me to bed in the guest room.

I woke once during the night, disorientated by the strange room and the remnants of alcohol in my blood-stream. I thought I had heard soft footsteps outside my door, but when I listened, there was only the quiet tick of the clock on the other side of the wall.

              ***

I returned to Oxford the following week-end, to a winter term
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that was much the same as the autumn weeks had been, only more so. My main passions were becoming theoretical mathematics and the complexities of Rabbinic Judaism, two topics that are dissimilar only on the surface. Again the dear old Bodleian opened its arms and pages to me, again I was dragged along in Ronnie Beaconsfield’s wake (
Twelfth Night
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this time, and also a campaign to improve the conditions for cart horses plying the streets of the city). Ratnakar Sanji was conceived in the term’s final weeks, to be born in May following the spring holiday, and again I simply did without sleep, and occasionally meals. Again I emerged at the end of term, lethargic and spent. The lodgings house was looked after by a couple named Thomas, two old dears who retained their thick Oxfordshire country accents. Mr. Thomas helped me carry my things to the cab waiting on the street as I was leaving for home. He grunted at the weight of one case, laden with books, and I hurried to help him with it. He brushed off his hands, looked at the case critically, then at me.

Bodleian (Divinity School) Oxford

“Now, Miss, not to be forward, but I hope you’ll not be spending the whole of the holiday at your desk. You came here with roses in your cheeks, and there’s not a hint of them there now. Get yourself some fresh air, now, y’hear? Your brain’ll work better when you come back if you do.”

I was surprised, as this was the longest speech I had ever heard him deliver, but assured him that I intended to spend many hours in the open air. At the train station I caught a glance of myself in a mirror and could see what he meant. I had not realised how drawn I was looking, and the purple smudges under my eyes troubled me.

The next morning the alien sounds of silence and bird song woke me early. I pulled on my oldest work clothes and a pair of new boots, added heavy gloves and a woolly hat against the chill March morning, and went to find Patrick. Patrick Mason was a large, slow-moving, phlegmatic Sussex farmer of fifty-two with hands like something grown from the earth and a nose that changed direction three times. He had managed the farm since before my parents had married, had in fact run with my mother as a child (he three years older) through the fields he now tended, had, I think, been more than half in love with her all his life. Certainly he worshipped her as his Lady. When his wife died and left him to finish raising their six children, only his salary as manager made it possible to keep the family intact. The day his youngest reached eighteen, Patrick divided his land and came to live on the farm I now owned. In most ways this was more his land than mine, an attitude both of us held and considered only right, and his loyalty to his adoptive home was absolute, if he was unwilling to suffer any nonsense from the legal owner.