The Mary Russell Companion (16 page)

Up until now my sporadic attempts to help out with the myriad farmyard tasks had been met with the same polite disbelief with which the peasants at Versailles must have greeted Marie Antoinette’s milkmaid fantasies.
[99]
I was the owner, and if I wanted to push matters he could not actually stop me from dirtying my hands, but other than the seasonal necessity of the wartime harvest (which obviously pained him) My Lady’s Daughter was taken to be above such things. He ran the farm to his liking, I lived there and occasionally wandered down from the main house to chat, but neither he nor I would have thought of giving me a say in how things were run. This morning that was about to change.

I trudged down the hill to the main barn, my breath smoking around my ears in the clear, weak winter sunshine, and called his name. The voice that answered led me through to the back, where I found him mucking out a stall.

Draught horses

“Morning, Patrick.”

“Welcome back, Miss Mary.” I had long ago forbidden greater formality, and he in turn refused greater familiarity, so the compromise was Miss and my first name.

“Thank you, it’s good to be back. Patrick, I need your help.”

“Surely, Miss Mary. Can it wait until I’ve finished this?”

“Oh, I don’t want to interrupt. I want you to give me something to do.”

“Something to do?” He looked puzzled.

“Yes. Patrick, I’ve spent the last six months sitting in a chair with a book in my hands, and if I don’t get back to using my muscles, they’ll forget how to function altogether. I need you to tell me what needs doing around here. Where can I start? Shall I finish that stall for you?”

Patrick hurriedly held the muck-rake out of my reach and blocked my entrance to the stall. “No, Miss, I’ll finish this. What is it you’d like to do?”

“Whatever needs doing,” I said in no uncertain terms, to let him know I meant business.

“Well…” His eyes looked about desperately and lit on a broom. “Do you want to sweep? The wood shavings in the workshop want clearing up.”

“Right.” I seized the big broom, and ten minutes later he came into the workshop to find me furiously raising a cloud of dust and wood particles that settled softly onto every surface
[100]
.

“Miss Mary, oh, well, that’s too fast. I mean, do you think you could get the stuff out the door before you fling it in the air?”

“What do you mean? Oh, I see, here, I’ll just sweep it off of there.”

I took the broom and made a wild sweep along the workbench, and an edge of the unwieldy head sent a tray of tools flying. Patrick picked up a chipped chisel and looked at me as if I had attacked his son.

“Have you never used a broom before?”

“Well, not often.”

“Perhaps you should carry firewood, then.”

I hauled barrow-cart after barrow-cart of split logs up to the house, saw that we needed kindling as well, and had just started using the double-bitted axe to split some logs on a big stone next to the back door when Patrick ran up and prevented me from cutting off my hand. He showed me the cutting block and the proper little hand axe and carefully demonstrated how not to use them. Two hours after I had walked down the hill I had a small pile of wood and a very trembly set of muscles to show for my work.

The road to Holmes’s cottage seemed to have lengthened since last I rode that way, or perhaps it was only the odd sensation of nervousness in the pit of my stomach. It was the same, but I was different, and I wondered for the first time if I was going to be able to carry it off, if I could join these two utterly disparate sides of my life. I pushed the bicycle harder than my out-of-condition legs cared for, but when I came over the last rise and saw the familiar cottage across the fields, faint smoke rising from the kitchen chimney, I began to relax, and when I opened the door and breathed in the essence of the place, I was home, safe.

“Mrs. Hudson?” I called, but the kitchen was empty. Market day, I thought, so I went to the stairs and started upwards. “Holmes?”

“That you, Russell?” he said, sounding mildly surprised, though I had written the week before to say what day I would be home. “Good. I was just glancing through those experiments on blood typology
[101]
we were doing before you left in January. I believe I’ve discovered what the problem was. Here: Look at your notes. Now look at the slide I’ve put in the microscope…”

Good old Holmes, as effusive and demonstrative as ever. Obediently, I sat before the eyepieces of his machine, and it was as if I’d never been away. Life slid back into place, and I did not doubt again.

On the third week of my holiday I went to the cottage on a Wednesday, Mrs. Hudson’s usual day in town. Holmes and I had planned a rather smelly chemical reaction for that day, but as I let myself in the kitchen door I heard voices from the sitting room.

“Russell?” his voice called.

“Yes, Holmes.” I walked to the door and was surprised to see Holmes at the fire beside an elegantly dressed woman with a vaguely familiar face. I automatically began to reconstruct mentally the surroundings where I had seen her, but Holmes interrupted the process.

“Do come in, Russell. We were waiting for you. This is Mrs. Barker. You will remember, she and her husband live in the manor house. They bought it the year before you came here. Mrs. Barker, this is the young lady I was mentioning—yes, she is a young lady inside that costume. Now that she is here, would you please review the problem for us? Russell, pour yourself a cup of tea and sit down.”

It was the partnership’s first case.

The Adventure of the Yellow Face

(For more background, see this book’s page on the Laurie R. King website.)

A Monstrous Regiment of Women

(Nero Wolfe Award)

Russellisms

Holmes tended to recall his Victorian attitudes and my gender at the oddest times—it always took me by surprise.

**

“Russell, I am hardly the man to impose sobriety on another, save perhaps by my own wicked examples.”

**

“I’ve never taken orders, from anyone,” he muttered, almost too low to hear
.

“High time then, Holmes,” I pronounced with asperity.

All the world’s stage: places Russell goes in this Memoir

Britain: Sussex, Portsmouth, Essex, London

(See the
Maps chapter
for details.)

Laurie’s Remarks

“I appreciate the forms of crime fiction, because it gives me an entertaining story to tell, while at the same time unrolling threads of meaning throughout the plot lines. Mysticism, feminist identity, scriptural interpretation, the struggle for equality between the sexes, control and submission, friendship and love: all the colors on the painter’s palette, brought together in service of an entertainment.”               —
Laurie R. King

***

An entertainment?  What would Miss Russell say to
that
description of her multi-volume, meticulously detailed, closely reasoned work of autobiography?

This second Memoir marks the place where Mary Russell’s life changes for the second time.  In
Beekeeper’s Apprentice
, the young orphan finds a path forward; in
Monstrous Regiment,
she faces the truth of where that path leads. 

Does she want to be forever tied to Sherlock Holmes?  Is she willing to link her life with him, knowing that the completeness of that bond will make it impossible to be anything but his partner?  She has known him for six years.  She is now 21 years old, and has just begun to explore the possibilities of academia, to feel her muscles as a scholar, as a friend, as an adult.

One of those friends she has made introduces her to the alternative path, represented by a religious leader named Margery Childe.  Margery is the center of a health and service organization helping the poor women of London, feeding their bodies and their souls.  Important work, challenging, and offering Russell a community of strong, like-minded women.  Most tantalizing of all, Margery needs precisely what Russell has to offer.  Once they get past the little question of criminality…

Women’s Clinic, London

So, where does Russell’s future lie?  With Margery Childe, or with Sherlock Holmes?

This is the Memoir that reveals the most of Russell’s common ground with her literary agent.  Laurie King’s background is Old Testament theology, specifically, the woman’s side of things.  When Russell lectures Margery Childe on “feminine aspects of God”, she uses language Laurie King would understand.

This is also one language in which Sherlock Holmes is not fluent. 

Holmes and his own agent, Arthur Conan Doyle, stand on opposite sides of a great chasm of belief.  Doyle was a devout Spiritualist, a believer in seances with the dead, telepathy, ectoplasm, fairies—pretty much anything in the way of psychic phenomena found him eagerly gullible.

By way of contrast, Sherlock Holmes is a devout believer in the evidence of his own eyes.  In “Sussex Vampire”, he declares, "This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply."

On the other hand, there lives a trace of the believer—or at least, the agnostic—in the great Rationalist. “It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable.” (
Cardboard Box
)  And elsewhere, “There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,” he says.  “It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner.  Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers.  All other things our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra.  Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it.  It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

This rose in an extra.

Perhaps
Monstrous Regiment
shows Mary Russell coming around to the idea that religion is a language that Sherlock Holmes can be taught.  Perhaps this Memoir reveals Mary Russell’s revelation: that she can shape him, as he has shaped her.