The Mary Russell Companion (4 page)

He brushes her hair.  He sits beside her and fiddles with her fingers.  And that is as steamy as the Memoirs get.

However, we must remember that the Memoirs speak in the voice of a proud, private woman in her eighties, a person with a very clear image of just how eager people might be in seizing the more ribald details of her husband’s life.  And like a film star who honestly wishes to retain a degree of un-public life, she watches her every word and revelation.

This applies to other aspects of her life as well.  No matter how long she wanders in the desert or among the Welsh hills, whether dressed as a fashionable heiress or a twin brother, on pirate ships or turbulent aeroplane rides, she rarely breathes a word about any necessary bodily functions that might take place along the way.

Miss Russell is a most private person.  She makes clear that she would appreciate it if her readers respect her privacy, and that of her famous husband.

And if that frustrates her readers, she probably would rather not know.

From “The Man with the Twisted Lip”

Russell’s Homes

Several of Mary Russell’s homes appear in the Memoirs, in England and in the United States.  We have yet to hear of any family house in London—or indeed many particulars concerning her mother’s family at all, other than their longstanding alienation.   The earliest of her homes mentioned in the stories is her father’s home in Boston, about which we know little apart from its existence, and his San Francisco house where young Mary spent much of her childhood, located on Pacific Heights near Lafayette Park (
Locked Rooms
).

Primarily, in the Memoirs, her homes are three: the Sussex farm belonging to her mother, where her family spent idyllic summers, and to which fifteen year-old Mary demands to be sent after the accident that orphaned her; the “villa” where Sherlock Holmes lived after retiring from London; and Oxford, the home of Russell’s heart (and, eventually, her person.  This last home, which she seems to have bought in 1923 or 1924, makes no appearance in the first dozen novels, although it does enter into
Dreaming Spies
, and in “My Story” and “A Case in Correspondence” in this Companion.)

A caveat

There is, unsurprisingly, some difficulty in precise identification of all three sites.  Mary Russell is a woman who values her privacy, and clearly does not wish to make it easy for the outside world to locate her.  Town names given in the Memoirs should be regarded as suspect, and actual distances even more so.  With this caveat in mind, let us consider Russell’s homes in order.

(Please note: other remarks are attached to the annotated chapters of
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice,
found in Book Two, below.)

Sussex

Sussex Downs, vicinity of Beachy Head

Russell’s farm site

We first hear of Russell’s inherited home in the second paragraph of
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
:

I had set out at dawn from the silent farmhouse, [and] chosen a different direction from my usual—in this case southeasterly, towards the sea.

Unfortunately, she has a book.  With her nose firmly planted therein, she says:

[I] spent the intervening hours wrestling with Latin verbs, climbing unconsciously over stone walls, and unthinkingly circling hedge rows, and would probably not have noticed the sea until I stepped off one of the chalk cliffs into it.

Therefore, her original intentions as to direction is no clue.  As to the meeting place itself:

I thought for a minute, got up, and walked to the top of the hill, scattering ewes and lambs, and when I looked down at a village and river I knew instantly where I was.  My house was less than two miles from here.

Since it is probable that, even with the engrossing Virgil in hand, she might have noticed if she’d actually forded the Cuckmere River, this suggests that her farm is to the east of that meandering stream.  Between the Cuckmere and the seaside resort town of Eastbourne lies a great deal of open land, the South Downs. (Mutton grazed on Sussex fields—particularly fields where the native
thymum serpyllum
grows—is still regarded as a delicacy.)  To the north of this open chalk-based landscape stands the Weald, vestige of the ancient forest.  Roughly along the line between Weald and Downs, a road connects Eastbourne with the larger city of Lewes (with London beyond).

The Eastbourne seafront, with Pier and shingle beach

In the early Twentieth century, the farther one got from this road, the slower progress could be, particularly in wet weather.  Even the more adventurous of London holiday-makers might tend towards those villages where they could count on getting in and out with ease: thus, near the roads and railways.  The Lewes road, marked by the Ordnance Survey as “good and fit for fast traffic”, lies one mile from the village of Folkington, or two and a half from Jevington.  The Lewes road also passes through Polegate, a town with a station on the Southern Railway that would be similarly convenient for regular London travel.  

Russell’s home is, unusually enough for a holiday retreat belonging to a family of city-dwellers, a working farm.  Reference is made to the farm manager Patrick, to Patrick’s draft horses and their stables, to chopping wood, and the like.  Again, one would have found farmland on the outskirts of either Folkington or Jevington.

Holmes’ villa site

Describing his home in “The Lion’s Mane”, Holmes (yes, Holmes himself) writes, “My villa is situated upon the southern slope of the Downs, commanding a great view of the Channel.”  The preface to “His Last Bow” makes reference to Holmes’ “small farm upon the Downs, five miles from Eastbourne”, while in the story itself, Watson says to his friend that he has heard Holmes is “living the life of a hermit among your bees and your books in a small farm upon the South Downs." 

Leaving aside Dr. Watson’s well-documented habit of eliding details for the sake of drama, there is a question of what precisely is meant by “five miles”?  Is this a direct measurement on the map, or the length of the windy and indirect road out of Eastbourne?  And does “Eastbourne” refer to the town hall, or the railway station, or the furthest edges of suburban development—which even in 1915 was creeping up the escarpment towards the Downs beyond?

Further, more problems crop up in a close analysis of the Memoir text.  For example, Russell (in
Beekeeper
) tells Holmes, “my home is two miles north of where we met.”  From that spot, she says:

It was a lovely walk, that, nearly four miles over the downs.

It would be helpful if she stated that they made straight from the meeting spot to Holmes’ house, but no, she does not.  And since Holmes is out that day to search for wild (or perhaps feral) honeybees, one suspects that “four miles” on foot might have been a single mile on the back of a crow.  Indeed, since the bees he marks with blue paint then fly off a north-easterly direction, the meeting place could even be in Holmes’ back yard.

The actual meeting place was “uncluttered hillside” or open Downland, but bare pastureland would be an unusual place for
apis mellifera
to choose as a new home.  Honeybees prefer shelter: a dead tree, a derelict building, or a loosely laid stone wall—but also require open ground or orchards where flowers grow.  A more likely site for the meeting would be along the hilly ground between Jevington and Litlington, where several hills would permit a view of the Cuckmere and “a village”, perhaps Alfriston.

Again, this would place Russell’s farm is the area of Folkington or Wilmington, either of which would be an easy cycle-ride to the Holmes villa.

A second caveat

There remains one other thought worthy of consideration: the brother of Sherlock Holmes is a man with such power he “occasionally
is
the British government.”  As such, Mycroft Holmes would be quite able to ensure that one Downland estate is removed from view, when it comes to governmental Ordnance Survey maps.

The Villa

The Conan Doyle stories mention the Sussex “villa” to which Sherlock Holmes retired in the early years of the Twentieth century.   This word later came to mean (particularly in America) any kind of grand house located outside a city—and in modern Britain can refer to a semi-detached with a tiny lawn—but when Holmes uses the word, he is evoking (ironically or otherwise) the original Roman sense of a rich person’s working country estate.

Russell calls his house a “cottage”.  In “Lion’s Mane”, Holmes calls it “my little Sussex home”.  Thus, we may assume that the original building was smaller, suited to the needs of a solitary bachelor and his elderly housekeeper.  However, even by the time of Russell’s first visit in 1915, changes had been made to the fabric of the house, and after she arrived, with her books and her possessions, it would appear that either additions were made, or that some of the adjoining farm out-buildings were converted and tied to the main house.

She describes it thus:

Sherlock Holmes’ house was a typical ageless Sussex cottage, flint walls and red tile roof. This main room, on the ground floor, had once been two rooms, but was now a large square with a huge stone fireplace at one end, dark, high beams, an oak floor that gave way to slate through the kitchen door, and a surprising expanse of windows on the south side where the downs rolled on to the sea. A sofa, two wing chairs, and a frayed basket chair gathered around the fireplace, a round table and four chairs occupied the sunny south bay window (where I sat), and a work desk piled high with papers and objects stood beneath a leaded, diamond-paned window in the west: a room of many purposes. The walls were solid with bookshelves and cupboards.

She adds:

Outside the French doors lay an expanse of flagstones, sheltered from the wind by a glass conservatory that grew off the kitchen wall and by an old stone wall with herbaceous border that curved around the remaining two sides. The terrace gathered in the heat until its air danced, and I was relieved when he continued down to a group of comfortable-looking wooden chairs in the shade of an enormous copper beech. I chose a chair that looked down towards the Channel, over the head of a small orchard that lay in a hollow below us. There were tidy hive boxes arranged among the trees and bees working the early flowers of the border.

As one might imagine, the location of Holmes’ Home (as it were) is one of the most hotly debated in all of Sherlockiana. 

Three candidates come most clearly to mind: Birling Farm just below the hamlet of East Dean; Hodcombe Farm on the secondary road around Beachy Head, and a small cottage marked by a square two hundred yards southwest of the “Hotel” on Beachy Head.  This last, once a signal-keeper’s cottage and now a natural history centre, is popular among Sherlockians.  However, the internal evidence of the  Memoirs suggests its inadequacy, if for no other reason that the residents would surely have complained at some point about their close neighbours.