The Mary Russell Companion (26 page)

I might have done it long before, truth to tell, but for the identity of my husband. When one is married to a person of considerable fame, one tends to choose invisibility over all else. And since any memoirs I was to pass on would be of occasionally inflammatory nature, I needed to choose my literary agent with care.

2.

Any literary agent whom I put in charge of my memoirs needed to be, first of all, a woman. She needed to be strong-minded enough to resist the blandishments and threats unleashed upon her once the nature of these manuscripts came to light. And since I thought it best to begin with someone whose ties to Mary Russell would come before any affection for Sherlock Holmes, I cast my mind over my relatives: cousins of various stripe abounded, but search as I might, I could find no combination of literary interest and common sense.

Next, I sought out the descendents of my university friend, Veronica Beaconsfield, only to find that the current generation lacked the wit of their grandparents.  So I went further back, to my childhood in San Francisco.  There, in the early weeks of 1992, I found the person I sought. The granddaughter of a childhood friend, she was in the early stages of a literary career—her first novel had been accepted at a New York publisher—but she was also sensible enough to balance the demands of children, travel, a husband with his own career, and a complex household. And an untold benefit: She had a background in Old Testament theology!

Without delay, I began to assemble the manuscripts and prepared to send them off to Ms King in California.  Before I could do so, catastrophe struck.

3.

I doubt it will come as a surprise to the reader when I say that my husband’s popularity in the world of letters approximates that of a lesser divinity. More than a century ago, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had an attack of pique and sent Holmes to his “death” over the Reichenbach Falls, readers protested with black arm-bands, cancellation of subscriptions to
The Strand
, and fury to Conan Doyle’s face. Were that story to be published now, I should expect flame wars, if not actual Molotov Cocktails.

This degree of renown brings, as you might expect, considerable problems. The cooperation of our neighbours is essential, and elaborate ploys are occasionally necessary to turn would-be visitors from our door in Sussex—although we have found that the most effective of these is encouraging the world to think of us as fictional characters. This weeds out all but the overly whimsical and the truly insane and, until one cool spring morning in April of 1992, permitted us to maintain our privacy.

I was in the downstairs sitting room finishing the task of assembling and sealing together the pages of my various memoirs, when my eye was attracted by motion at the window. I looked up, and saw to my horror that our rural home was being invaded, by none other than a ravening pack of Sherlockians.

4.

Seeing the press of eager faces at my window, I knew in an instant that I was in mortal danger—or if not our lives, then certainly our sanity was to be challenged. At least ten of them, Americans all, each wearing one or several lapel-decorations depicting a bee or a calabash pipe or the address 221B. They were unmistakable, and unstoppable.

I raised my voice in alarm, and scurried as fast as a woman of 92 can to check the locks on the doors. The cook came to see, and being a woman of wit as well as culinary ability, joined instantly in battening down our defences. While she went around the perimeter, closing the curtains, I picked up the telephone and summoned assistance: the stout, and stout-hearted, grandson of my old farm manager, both of the generations named Patrick.

In minutes, young Patrick was roaring over the paddocks in his Land Rover, dog and shotgun to hand. The Sherlockians made a hasty retreat, first to the road and then, when Patrick took up a position mid-drive with his shotgun over his arm, up the road in the direction of the village. I was tempted to telephone the inn and request that they deny these invaders entrance, or at least make certain their beer was overly warmed, but on second thought, an open declaration of war might only stir these Americans’ dander. Still, a declaration of war it had become.

5.

Holmes eventually came to a safe pausing place in his current laboratory experiment and toddled down the stairs to see what the uproar was. The cook set before us a pot of powerful tea and a plate of scones flavoured with outrage; Patrick leant his gun inside the door and joined us, trusting to his dogs to raise an alarm; we sat around the kitchen table for a council of war.

Holmes and I had long been prepared for this day when his past came to roost on our heads. In fact, given a mere thirty seconds’ warning, we were equipped to walk out with the essentials of life on our persons, and disappear permanently.

This, we thought, would not require such extreme measures. Instead, we planned how best to instigate our second defence, which we had come up with some years earlier when the local amateur Eastbourne Dramatic Society put on a production of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. The gentleman playing the lead, a local solicitor of barely forty, did a competent (if somewhat flambouyant) job of acting Holmes; later, we invited him to the house and arranged with him a smaller-scale dramatic rendition of the Great Detective. The thought of acting in place of the actual Holmes appealed to his droll, Sussex-born sense of humour, and he agreed to be available, if and when we called on him.

It was time to raise the curtain on our idiosyncratic one-man show.

6.

By good fortune, our solicitor-actor would be available for several days, to play the part of a genial if rather befuddled elderly farmer who, indeed, happened to bear a resemblance to one Sherlock Holmes. With him in place, the Americans could batter themselves against our doors until they were convinced that their information was faulty, at which time they might go back to the Plains or prairies whence they had come.

Behind our drawn curtains, Holmes returned to his experiment and I to my manuscripts. Before padlocking the trunk, however, I went through the house and collected an armful of treasured memorabilia that called to mind our cases and adventures over the years. They were, with certain exceptions, items of little commercial value—a friend’s trademark monocle, one of Holmes’ more disreputable pipes, some newspaper clippings—but were they to be spotted by any sharp-witted Sherlockian (if that be not an oxymoron) they could not only give lie to our ruse, they would be themselves vulnerable to the predations of the horde outside: Sherlockians are inveterate collectors.

I arranged them atop my memoirs, and padlocked the lid. When I had more leisure, I should write a letter of explanation to the recipient of the trunk, but today, I had much to do.

7.

With the trunk of manuscripts and memorabilia securely packed, I went upstairs and assembled a pair of valises for us, that we might at least keep dry and comfortable in exile during the American siege. I doubted that they had found my own house in Oxford— I would have heard, had there been strangers climbing over the walls and loitering out front—but Holmes and I have not made it to our respective ages by making easy assumptions.

Night came. Mrs Hudson—our latest Mrs Hudson—did the washing up and grumbled her way towards bed. The downstairs lights were turned off, then those in the laboratory, and finally the bedroom went dark. All this time, Patrick sat prominently behind the wheel of the Land Rover while the dogs prowled the grounds.

Except that shortly after dark, Patrick’s outline in the car was in fact a scarecrow made of stuffed shirts and a hat. Leaving the more obedient of his two dogs to guard the dummy and the car, and the less obedient one inside the house to bark warningly, the three of us set off across the dark landscape.

One advantage of having walked the Downs for the better part of a century— daylight and dark, rain and snow—is that one’s feet know the way when one’s eyes do not. We strolled in easy silence over the cropped grass, keeping to the sheep-tracks to reduce the sound of crackling frost. In half an hour, we came out in the roadside car-park near the road to Eastbourne, and Patrick went forward to tap at the window of the Mercedes sedan that waited there.

8.

The door of the waiting car clicked open and the gravel crunched. Our actor greeted us in low whispers as we handed over Holmes’ outer garments (which the Americans might recognise, if they had been keeping watch for some days) in exchange for his keys. In under two minutes, we were in the car and Patrick was leading the actor back the way we had come.

He was, I thought, already dressed and made up for his role, although anyone paying attention to his gait would know his middle-aged strength—he was a competitive runner, which gave him the necessary thinness to enact Holmes. In fact, I learnt later, this fleetness of foot came in useful the very next afternoon, when the waiting Sherlockians saw “Holmes” set out for a walk along the cliffs and took off baying in pursuit, only to be utterly confounded when Sherlock Holmes broke into a brisk sprint and left them panting in his wake.

(The following day, Patrick withdrew his guard, and within the hour, knock came on the door. The actor was suitably taken aback by these Americans who imagined his stone cottage was inhabited by Sherlock Holmes. With exquisite rural politeness he asked, Were they not aware that Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character?)

By the time the confused and downhearted pack walked back up the drive, we had been gone for three days.

9.

The house in Oxford to which we retreated was in the northern district of the town, a tree-studded neighbourhood of large brick houses inhabited by dons and their families. It is close enough to town that a stroll to the Bodleian and Radcliffe libraries, even with an arm full of books, is a pleasant interlude; it is far enough from the centre that the wrangle of bells on a Sunday morning is amusing, not headache-inducing.

My house is like its fellows from the outside, with high walls on all sides, a spacious gravel drive at the front, and a narrow turret glued onto one corner. The house and its garden are too nondescript for any passer-by to bother with a second glance, and as far as the neighbours are concerned, the owner is an independent older woman who spends much of her live travelling and working on her academic studies, which (it being Oxford) could be Romanian campanology or liver flukes of the upper Nile.

Many, many years before, Holmes had arrived at my student flat through an upper window, setting off an elaborate and circuitous traverse of Oxford’s roof-tops in the snow.  Fortunately for us, this time I was permitted to drive through the elaborate and circuitous city roads in the actor’s Mercedes.

10.

My Oxford house has a self-contained apartment at the front, in which I habitually install a series of graduate students, mostly women, whose only rent is an agreement to air the rooms, keep the car’s battery charged, pick me up at the train station if I ring, and above all, to tell the neighbours nothing about me. The resident that year was a small, wide girl with adenoids and a brilliant medical mind, who greeted our 6:00 am arrival in a startling pink dressing gown, a cup of tea in one hand and the current copy of Lancet in the other.

I greeted her, and asked if she was aware of any stray Americans asking about me, or if she had received any odd telephone calls. “No calls, no questions,” she said. “Shall I bring a bottle of milk through to your kitchen?”

I thanked her for her thoughtfulness, blessed her for her preoccupation, and left luggage and husband in the house while I drove the Mercedes over to the train station for retrieval.

I thought we were safe.

11.

I rang Patrick the following evening—trusting that our Sherlockian pursuers lacked the wherewithal to tap lines and trace telephone calls—to ask him to stow the trunk of memoirs with a third party for the time being.  He told me of the pack’s confounding by the actor’s cross-country sprint, and said he would spend another night sleeping in the Land Rover at our door.  On the morrow, he would load up our trunks and valuables and abandon his post, leaving the actor to his play.

We spent a pleasant three days in my second home of Oxford, visiting with old friends, pursuing our varied studies, and worrying not in the least that we would be discovered—the ancient city is generously endowed with ancient academics, and even the closing days of April are cool enough to justify low-pulled hats and the occasional scarf.

On the fourth day, my medical student greeted our return with the news that a couple of rather odd Americans had come to the door while we were out. With sinking heart, I asked if they had worn lapel pins with pipes, deerstalker caps, or 221B.

No, she replied—they were hounds. “Holmes,” I shouted up the stairs, “time to be off.”  But when I went to get out the car, they were lying wait.

12.

You need to remember, this was 1992, and the number of people who knew that Sherlock Holmes had a wife was relatively small. No doubt our pursuing Sherlockians thought I was a housekeeper, or a nurse—they were standing watch outside of the gate, and began to bay wildly when first I set foot out of the house. I feigned great age—admittedly not a difficult act, at ninety two years—and hobbled to the car, back bent with apparent arthritis and a large straw hat pulled down, not so much to hide my features as to explain why I wasn’t seeing ten jumping figures thirty feet away. I got the door open with my ancient hands, bent slowly—slowly, to retrieve some small object from the door pocket, then inadequately closed the door and, crouching low, crept back into the house.

Thus, before dawn the next morning, the three who had been set to watch overnight from their hire car recognised the hatted old lady behind the wheel of the motor that pulled out of the gate, and hastened to follow—it being too dark to see that the person at the wheel was a foot shorter and seventy years younger. Nor did they notice that the brisk young man closing the gate was in fact the old woman they thought they were following.