The Mary Russell Companion (23 page)

One is a force of nature, the other is a force of Nature.  One is order, one embraces chaos.  But, in
God of the Hive
at any rate, both are men, both have a man’s history and vulnerabilities, a man’s needs for confidence and safety, a man’s wish to be healed and make his life anew.

One is a steamroller, a Maxim gun, a battleship; a factory the size of a village.  The other is a fly in a fuel line, dirt in a feed, rust on a hull; a tiny green shoot pushing at the edge of a concrete slab.

The god of cities and noise, of aeroplanes and espionage and the manipulation of distant lands is in our faces, all the time. But even a small, green, vegetative god has a way of influencing the world, in manners at once unexpected, subtle, and subversive.

And if these two gods declare war?  Humankind are long accustomed to the battles of Titans, lighting the skies and ripping up the land: even Sherlock Holmes stands confused in the face of a London after the German zeppelins finish with it.  But what if the gods of the two hives, city and country, were to join battle?

Well, the victor is by no means certain.

(For more background and a longer excerpt, see this book’s page on the Laurie R. King website.  For more on Robert Goodman, see “Birth of a Green Man” in this Companion.)

Excerpt

Prologue

Two clever London gentlemen.  Both wore City suits, both sat in quiet rooms, both thought about luncheon.

The younger was admiring his polished shoes; the older contemplated his stockings, thick with dust.

The one was considering where best to eat; the other was wondering if he was to be fed that day.

One clever man stood, straightening his neck-tie with manicured fingers.  He reached out to give the silver pen a minuscule adjustment, returning it to symmetry with the edge of the desk, then walked across the silken carpet to the door.  There he surveyed the mirror that hung on the wall, leaning forward to touch the white streak—really quite handsome—over the right temple before settling his freshly-brushed hat over it.  He firmed the tie again, and reached for the handle.

The other man, too, tugged at his tie, grateful for it.  The men who had locked him here had taken his shoes and belt, but left him his neck-tie.  He could not decide if they—or, rather, the mind in back of
them
—had judged the fabric inadequate for the suicide of a man his size, or if they had wished subtly to undermine his mental state: the length of aged striped silk was all that kept his suit trousers from tumbling around his ankles when he stood.  There was sufficient discomfort in being hungry, cold, unshaved, and having a lidded bucket for toilet facilities without adding the comic indignity of drooping trousers.

Twenty minutes later, the younger man was reviewing his casual exchange with two high-ranking officials and a newspaper baron—the true reason for his choice of restaurants—while his blue eyes dutifully surveyed the print on a leather-bound menu; the other man’s pale grey gaze was fixed on a simple mathematical equation he’d begun to scratch into the brick wall with a tiny nail he’d uncovered in a corner:

a ÷ (b+c+d)

Both men, truth to tell, were pleased with their progress.

Chapter One

A child is a burden, after a mile.

After two miles in the cold sea air, stumbling through the night up the side of a hill and down again, becoming all too aware of previously unnoticed burns and bruises, and having already put on eight miles that night—half of it carrying a man on a stretcher—even a small, drowsy three-and-a-half-year-old becomes a strain.

***

It was a good thing Estelle knew what to do, because I was probably the most incompetent nurse-maid ever to be put in charge of a child. I knew precisely nothing about children; the only one I had been around for any length of time was an Indian street urchin three times this one’s age and with more maturity than many English adults. I had much to learn about small children. Such as the ability to ride pickaback, and the inability to whisper.

The child’s suggestion allowed me to move faster down the rutted track. We were in the Orkneys, a scatter of islands past the north of Scotland, coming down from the hill that divided the main island’s two parts. Every step took us further away from my husband; from Estelle’s father Damian; and from the bloody, fire-stained prehistoric altar-stone where Thomas Brothers had nearly killed both of them.

Stones of Stenness, Orkneys

Why not bring in the police, one might ask. They can be useful, and after all, Brothers had killed at least three others. However, things were complicated—not that complicated wasn’t a frequent state of affairs in the vicinity of Sherlock Holmes, but in this case the complication took the form of warrants posted for my husband, his son, and me. Estelle was the only family member not being actively hunted by Scotland Yard.

Including, apparently and incredibly, Holmes’ brother. For forty-odd years, Mycroft Holmes had strolled each morning to a grey office in Whitehall and settled in to a grey job of accounting—even his long-time personal secretary was a grey man, an ageless, sexless individual with the leaking-balloon name of Sosa. Prime Ministers came and went, Victoria gave way to Edward and Edward to George, budgets were cut and expanded, wars were fought, decades of bureaucrats flourished and died, while Mycroft walked each morning to his office and settled to his account books.

Except that Mycroft’s grey job was that of éminence grise of the British Empire. He inhabited the shadowy world of Intelligence, but he belonged neither to the domestic Secret Service nor to the international Secret Intelligence Service. Instead, he had shaped his own department within the walls of Treasury, one that ran parallel to both the domestic branch and the SIS. After forty years there, his power was formidable.

If I stopped to think about it, such unchecked authority in one individual’s hands would scare me witless, even though I had made use of it more than once. But if Mycroft Holmes was occasionally cold and always enigmatic, he was also sea-green incorruptible, the fixed point in my universe, the ultimate source of assistance, shelter, information, and knowledge.

He was also untouchable, or so I had thought.

***

But as I said, children are a burden, whether three years or thirty. My only hope of sorting this out peacefully, without inflicting further trauma on the child or locking her disastrously claustrophobic and seriously wounded father behind bars, was to avoid the police, both here and in the British mainland. And my only hope of avoiding the Orcadian police was a flimsy, sputtering, freezing cold aeroplane. The same machine in which I had arrived on Orkney the previous afternoon, and sworn never to enter again.

The aeroplane’s pilot was an American ex-RAF flyer named Javitz, who had brought me on a literally whirlwind trip from London and left me in a field south of Orkney’s main town. Or rather, I had left him. I thought he would stay there until I reappeared.

I hoped he would.

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

Pirate King

Russellisms

The insane logic of W. S. Gilbert had infiltrated our brains and turned them to blancmange.

**

Oh, Holmes: What have you got me into now?

**

As a non-sailor, I could not be certain, but drunken masts did not strike me as a promising start.

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

Britain: Sussex, London

Portugal: Lisbon, Cintra

Morocco: Salé and Rabat

(See the
Maps chapter
for details.)

Skull & Crossbones, Moorish Castle, Cintra

Laurie’s Remarks

After ten books filled with adventures around the world, Russell and Holmes are startled when their investigatory ship runs aground on the rocky shoals of silent movies.  What begins as a straightforward investigation—an English film crew is leaving a suspicious trail of wrongdoing wherever it goes, which now includes a missing girl—rapidly spirals down into a whirlpool of dizzy blonde actresses, megalomaniac directors, piracy both imagined and real, and the madness of poets. 

As often with the Russell books, one meets unexpected characters.  In
Pirate King
it is one Fernando Pessoa, self-proclaimed laureate of Portugal, a brilliant (again, self-proclaimed) poet and writer whose only published works during his lifetime were those in journals of his own manufacture.  Pessoa is in love with a fantasy Portugal, one in which his small country still rules the world’s waves, one where pirates swashbuckle and poets are feted.  One in which this thin, stoop-shouldered, bespectacled professional type-writer is a deadly privateer in disguise.

Fernando Pessoa: piratical poet?

Who better than Fernando Pessoa to reflect a case in which the silver screen is no match for off-screen antics, and in which Gilbert and Sullivan are the ones who make some sense?  The Gilbert and Sullivan team is one that seems to haunt Sherlock Holmes, if for no other reason than the D’Oyley Carte operas were contemporary forms of hugely popular entertainment.  Holmes quotes the plays—usually disparagingly—and once (
Monstrous Regiment
) goes undercover as the buxom good-time girl Buttercup from HMS Pinafore. 

In
Pirate King
, the metafictional elements of the Russell Memoirs are given their freest rein.  Absurdity is embraced, actors and poets are more competent than world-class detectives, and a sleepy village on the coast of Morocco is the capital of a piratical empire.

Ahoy, and avast!

Excerpt:

“Why should I wish to go work with pirates?” I repeated.

“You would of course be undercover.”

“Naturally. With a cutlass between my teeth.”

“I should think you would be more likely to wear a night-dress. “

“A night-dress.” Oh, this was getting better and better.

“As I remember, there are few parts for females among the pirates. Although they may decide to place you among the support staff.”

“Pirates have support staff?” I set my tea-cup back into its saucer, that I might lean forward and examine his face. I could see no overt indications of lunacy. No more than usual.

He ignored me, turning over a page of the letter he had been reading, keeping it on his knee beneath the level of the table. I could not see the writing—which was, I thought, no accident.

“I should imagine they have a considerable number of personnel behind the scenes,” he replied.

“Are we talking about pirates-on-the-high-seas, or piracy-as-violation-of-copyright law?”

“Definitely the cutlass rather than the pen. Although Gilbert might argue for the literary element.”

“Gilbert?” Two seconds later, the awful light of revelation flashed through my brain; at the same instant, Holmes tossed the letter onto the table so I could see its heading.