A Monstrous Regiment of Women E-Book

Laurie R. King

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 471

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

It is 1921 and Mary Russell--Sherlock Holmes's brilliant apprentice is on the verge of acquiring a sizable inheritance. Independent at last her most baffling mystery may now involve Holmes and the burgeoning of a deeper affection between herself and the retired detective. Russell's attentions turn to the New Temple of God and its leader, Margery Childe, a charismatic suffragette and a mystic, whose draw on the young theology scholar is irresistible. But when four bluestockings from the Temple turn up dead shortly after changing their wills, could sins of a capital nature be afoot?

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR LAURIE R. KING

‘The Mary Russell series is the most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today, and this is the best instalment yet’

Lee Child

‘Fabulous reading, breathless excitement, and the myriad pleasures of watching great minds at work’

Booklist

‘Excellent … King never forgets the true spirit of Conan Doyle’

Chicago Tribune

‘Outstanding examples of the Sherlock Holmes pastiche … the depiction of Holmes and the addition of his partner, Mary, is superbly done’

Mystery Women

‘The great marvel of King’s series is that she’s managed to preserve the integrity of Holmes’ character and yet somehow conjure up a woman astute, edgy and compelling enough to be the partner of his mind as well as his heart’

Washington Post Book World

A MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN

LAURIE R. KING

for Zoe

Contents

Title PageDedicationEditor’s PrefaceEpigraphChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveChapter ThirteenChapter FourteenChapter FifteenChapter SixteenChapter SeventeenChapter EighteenChapter NineteenChapter TwentyChapter Twenty-OnePostscriptAbout the AuthorBy Laurie R. KingCopyright

EDITOR’S PREFACE

THE STORY BETWEEN THESE covers is the second I have resuscitated from the bottom of a tin trunk that I received anonymously some years ago. In my editor’s introduction to the first, which was given the name The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, I admitted that I had no idea why I had been the recipient of the trunk and its contents. They ranged in value from an emerald necklace to a small worn photograph of a thin, tired-looking young man in a WWI army uniform.

There were other intriguing objects as well: The coin with a hole drilled through it, for example, heavily worn on one side and scratched with the name IAN on the other, must surely tell a story; so, too, the ragged shoelace, carefully wound and knotted, and the short stub of a beeswax candle. But the most amazing thing, even for someone like myself who is no particular Sherlock Holmes scholar, are the manuscripts. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice told of the early days of a partnership heretofore unknown to the world: that of young Mary Russell and the middle-aged and long-retired Sherlock Holmes.

These literally are manuscripts, handwritten on various kinds of paper. Some of them were easy enough to decipher, but others, two of them in particular, were damned hard work. This present story was the worst. It looked as if it had been rewritten a dozen or more times, with parts of pages torn away, scraps of others inserted, heavy cross-hatching defying all attempts at bringing out the deleted text. This was not, I think, an easy book for Ms Russell to write.

As I said, I have no idea why this collection was sent to me. I believe, however, that the sender, if not the author herself, may still be alive. Among the letters generated by the publication of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice was an odd and much-travelled postcard, mailed in Utrecht. It was an old card, with a sepia photograph of a stone bridge over a river, a long flat boat with a man standing at one end holding a pole and a woman in Edwardian dress sitting at the other, and three swans. The back was printed with the caption, FOLLY BRIDGE, OXFORD. Written on it, in handwriting similar to that of the manuscripts, was my name and address, and beside that the phrase, ‘More to follow.’

I certainly hope so.

LAURIE R. KING

For who can deny that it is repugnant to nature that the blind shall be appointed to lead and conduct such as do see, that the weak, the sick and the impotent shall nourish and keep the whole and the strong, and, finally, that the foolish, mad, and frenetic shall govern the discrete and give counsel to such as be sober of mind? And such be all women compared to man in bearing of authority.

– JOHN KNOX (1505-1572)

The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (Published in 1558 against Mary Tudor; later applied to Mary Stuart.Regiment is used in the sense of régime.)

CHAPTER ONE

Sunday, 26 December – Monday, 27 December 1920

Womankind is imprudent and soft or flexible. Imprudent because she cannot consider with wisdom and reason the things she hears and sees, and soft she is because she is easily bowed.

—JOHN CHRYSOSTOM (C.347-407)

ISAT BACK IN MY chair, jabbed the cap onto my pen, threw it into the drawer, and abandoned myself to the flood of satisfaction, relief, and anticipation that was let loose by that simple action. The satisfaction was for the essay whose last endnote I had just corrected, the distillation of several months’ hard work and my first effort as a mature scholar: it was a solid piece of work, ringing true and clear on the page. The relief I felt was not for the writing, but for the concomitant fact that, thanks to my preoccupation, I had survived the compulsory Christmas revels, a fete which had reached a fever pitch in this, the last year of my aunt’s control of what she saw as the family purse. The anticipation was for the week of freedom before me, one entire week with neither commitments nor responsibilities, leading up to my twenty-first birthday and all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto. A small but persistent niggle of trepidation tried to make itself known, but I forestalled it by standing up and going to the chest of drawers for clothing.

My aunt was, strictly speaking, Jewish, but she had long ago abandoned her heritage and claimed with all the enthusiasm of a convert the outward forms of cultural Anglicanism. As a result, her idea of Christmas tended heavily towards the Dickensian and Saxe-Gothan. Her final year as my so-called guardian was coincidentally the first year since the Great War ended to see quantities of unrationed sugar, butter, and meat, which meant that the emotional excesses had been compounded by culinary ones. I had begged off most of the revelry, citing the demands of the paper, but with my typewriter fallen silent, I had no choice but crass and immediate flight. I did not have to think about my choice of goals – I should begin at the cottage of my friend and mentor, my tutor, sparring partner, and comrade-in-arms, Sherlock Holmes. Hence my anticipation. Hence also the trepidation.

In rebellion against the houseful of velvet and silk through which I had moved for what seemed like weeks, I pulled from the wardrobe the most moth-eaten of my long-dead father’s suits and put it on over a deliciously soft and threadbare linen shirt and a heavy Guernsey pullover I had rescued from the mice in the attic. Warm, lined doeskin gloves, my plaits pinned up under an oversized tweed cap, thick scarf, and a pause for thought. Whatever I was going to do for the next three or four days, it would be at a distance from home. I went to the chest of drawers and took out an extra pair of wool stockings, and from a secret niche behind the wainscoting I retrieved a leather pouch, in which I had secreted all the odd notes and coins of unspent gifts and allowances over the last couple of years – a considerable number, I was pleased to see. The pouch went into an inner pocket along with a pencil stub, some folded sheets of paper, and a small book on Rabbi Akiva that I’d been saving for a treat. I took a last look at my refuge, locked the door behind me, and carried my rubber-soled boots to the back door to lace them on.

Although I half-hoped that one of my relatives might hail me, they were all either busy with the games in the parlour or unconscious in a bloated stupor, because the only persons I saw were the red-faced cook and her harassed helper, and they were too busy preparing yet another meal to do more than return my greetings distractedly. I wondered idly how much I was paying them to work on the day a servant traditionally expected to have free, but I shrugged off the thought, put on my boots and the dingy overcoat I kept at the back of the cupboard beneath the stairs, and escaped from the overheated, overcrowded, emotion-laden house into the clear, cold sea air of the Sussex Downs. My breath smoked around me and my feet crunched across patches not yet thawed by the watery sunlight, and by the time I reached Holmes’ cottage five miles away, I felt clean and calm for the first time since leaving Oxford at the end of term.

He was not at home.

Mrs Hudson was there, though. I kissed her affectionately and admired the needlework she was doing in front of the kitchen fire, and teased her about her slack ways on her free days and she tartly informed me that she wore her apron only when she was on duty, and I commented that in that case she must surely wear it over her nightdress, because as far as I could see she was always on duty when Holmes was about, and why didn’t she come and take over my house in seven days’ time and I’d be sure to appreciate her, but she only laughed, knowing I didn’t mean it, and put the kettle on the fire.

He had gone to town, she said, dressed in a multitude of mismatched layers, two scarves, and a frayed and filthy silk hat – and did I prefer scones or muffins?

‘Are the muffins already made?’

‘Oh, there are a few left from yesterday, but I’ll make fresh.’

‘On your one day off during the year? You’ll do nothing of the sort. I adore your muffins toasted – you know that – and they’re better the second day, anyway.’

She let herself be persuaded. I went up to Holmes’ room and conducted a judicious search of his chest of drawers and cupboards while she assembled the necessaries. As I expected, he had taken the fingerless gloves he used for driving horses and the tool for prising stones from hoofs; in combination with the hat, it meant he was driving a horsecab. I went back down to the kitchen, humming.

I toasted muffins over the fire and gossiped happily with Mrs Hudson until it was time for me to leave, replete with muffins, butter, jam, anchovy toast, two slices of Christmas cake, and a waxed paper-wrapped parcel in my pocket, in order to catch the 4:43 to London.

I used occasionally to wonder why the otherwise canny folk of the nearby towns, and particularly the stationmasters who sold the tickets, did not remark at the regular appearance of odd characters on their platforms, one old and one young, of either sex, often together. Not until the previous summer had I realised that our disguises were treated as a communal scheme by our villagers, who made it a point of honour never to let slip their suspicions that the scruffy young male farmhand who slouched through the streets might be the same person who, dressed considerably more appropriately in tweed skirt and cloche hat, went off to Oxford during term time and returned to buy tea cakes and spades and the occasional half-pint of bitter from the merchants when she was in residence. I believe that had a reporter from the Evening Standard come to town and offered one hundred pounds for an inside story on the famous detective, the people would have looked at him with that phlegmatic country expression that hides so much and asked politely who he might be meaning.

I digress. When I reached London, the streets were still crowded. I took a taxi (a motor cab, so I hadn’t to look too closely at the driver) to the agency Holmes often used as his supplier when he needed a horse and cab. The owner knew me – at least, he recognised the young man who stood in front of him – and said that, yes, that gentleman (not meaning, of course, a gentleman proper) had indeed shown up for work that day. In fact, he’d shown up twice.

‘Twice? You mean he brought the cab back, then?’ I was disappointed, and wondered if I ought merely to give up the chase.

‘T’orse ’ad an ’ot knee, an’ ’e walked ’er back. ’E was about ter take out anuwer un when ’e ’appened t’see an ol’ ’anson just come in. Took a fancy, ’e did, can’t fink why —’sbloody cold work an’ the pay’s piss-all, ’less you ’appen on t’odd pair what wants a taste of t’ old days, for a lark. ’Appens, sometimes, come a summer Sunday, or after t’ theatre Sattiday. Night like this ’e’d be bloody lucky t’get a ha’penny over fare.’

With a straight face, I reflected privately on how his colourful language would have faded in the light of the posh young lady I occasionally was.

‘So he took the hansom?’

‘That ’e did. One of the few what can drive the thing, I’ll give ’im that.’ His square face contemplated for a moment this incongruous juxtaposition of skill and madness in the man he knew as Basil Josephs, then he shook his head in wonderment. ‘’Ad ta give ’im a right bugger of an’orse, though. Never been on a two-wheeler, ’e ’asn’t, and plug-headed and leather-mouthed to boot. ’Ope old Josephs ’asn’t ’ad any problems,’ he said with a magnificent lack of concern, and leant over to hawk and spit delicately into the noisome gutter.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘there couldn’t be too many hansoms around, I might spot him tonight. Can you tell me what the horse looks like?’

‘Big bay, wide blaze, three stockin’s with t’ off hind dark, nasty eyes, but you won’t see ’em —’e’s got blinkers on,’ he rattled off, then added after a moment, ‘Cab’s number two-ninety-two.’ I thanked him with a coin and went a-hunting through the vast, sprawling streets of the great cesspool for a single, worn hansom cab and its driver.

The hunt was not quite so hopeless as it might appear. Unless he were on a case (and Mrs Hudson had thought on the whole that he was not), his choice of clothing and cab suggested entertainment rather than employment, and his idea of entertainment tended more toward London’s east end rather than Piccadilly or St John’s Wood. Still, that left a fair acreage to choose from, and I spent several hours standing under lampposts, craning to see the feet of passing horses (all of them seemed to have blazes and stockings) and fending off friendly overtures from dangerously underdressed young and not-so-young women. Finally, just after midnight, one marvellously informative conversation with such a lady was interrupted by the approaching clop and grind of a trotting horsecab, and a moment later the piercing tones of a familiar voice echoing down the nearly deserted street obviated the need for any further equine examination.

‘Annalisa, my dear young thing,’ came the voice that was not a shout but which could be heard a mile away on the Downs, ‘Isn’t that child you are trying to entice a bit young, even for you? Look at him – he doesn’t even have a beard yet.’

The lady beside me whirled around to the source of this interruption. I excused myself politely and stepped out into the street to intercept the cab. He had a fare – or rather, two – but he slowed, gathered the reins into his right hand, and reached the other long arm down to me. My disappointed paramour shouted genial insults at Holmes that would have blistered the remaining paint from the woodwork, had they not been deflected by his equally jovial remarks in kind.

The alarming dip of the cab caused the horse to snort and veer sharply, and a startled, moustachioed face appeared behind the cracked glass of the side window, scowling at me. Holmes redirected his tongue’s wrath from the prostitute to the horse, and, in the best tradition of London cabbies, cursed the animal soundly, imaginatively, and without a single manifest obscenity. He also more usefully snapped the horse’s head back with one clean jerk on the reins, returning its attention to the job at hand, while continuing to pull me up and shooting a parting volley of affectionate and remarkably familiar remarks at the fading Annalisa. Holmes did so like to immerse himself fully in his roles, I reflected as I wedged myself into the one-person seat already occupied by the man and his garments.

‘Good evening, Holmes,’ I greeted him politely.

‘Good morning, Russell,’ he corrected me, and shook the horse back into a trot.

‘Are you on a job, Holmes?’ I had known as soon as his arm reached down for me that if case it were, it did not involve the current passengers, or he should merely have waved me off.

‘My dear Russell, those Americanisms of yours,’ he tut-tutted. ‘How they do grate on the ear. “On a job.” No, I am not occupied with a case, Russell, merely working at the maintenance of old skills.’

‘And are you having fun?’

‘“Having fun”?’ He pronounced the words with fastidious distaste and looked at me askance.

‘Very well: Are you enjoying yourself?’

He raised one eyebrow at my clothes before turning back to the reins.

‘I might ask the same of you, Russell.’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘As a matter of fact, I am enjoying myself, Holmes, very much, thank you.’ And I sat back as best I could to do so.

Traffic even in the middle of London tends to die down considerably by the close of what Christians mistakenly call the Sabbath, and the streets were about as quiet now as they ever were. It was very pleasant being jolted about in a swaying seat eight feet above the insalubrious cobblestones, next to my one true friend, through the ill-lit streets that echoed the horse’s hoofs and the grind of the wheels, on a night cold enough to kill the smells and keep the fog at bay, but not cold enough to damage exposed flesh and fingertips. I glanced down at my companion’s begrimed fingers where they were poised, testing the heavy leather for signs of misbehaviour from the still-fractious beast with the same sensitivity they exhibited in all their activities, from delicate chemical experiments to the tactile exploration of a clue. I was struck by a thought.

‘Holmes, do you find that the cold on a clear night exacerbates your rheumatism as much as the cold of a foggy night?’

He fixed me with a dubious eye, then turned back to the job, lips no doubt pursed beneath the scarves. It was, I realised belatedly, an unconventional opening for a conversation, but surely Holmes, of all people, could not object to the eccentric.

‘Russell,’ he said finally, ‘it is very good of you to have come up from Sussex and stood on cold street corners for half the night striking up inappropriate friendships and flirting with pneumonia in order to enquire after my health, but perhaps having found me, you might proceed with your intended purpose.’

‘I had no purpose,’ I protested, stung. ‘I finished my paper more quickly than I’d thought, felt like spending the rest of the day with you rather than listening to my relations shrieking and moaning downstairs, and, when I found you missing, decided on a whim to follow you here and see if I might track you down. It was merely a whim,’ I repeated firmly. Perhaps too firmly. I hastened to change the subject. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’

‘Driving a cab,’ he said in a voice that told me that he was neither distracted nor deceived. ‘Go on, Russell, you may as well ask your question; you’ve spent seven hours in getting here. Or perhaps I ought to say, six years?’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I was very cross at the threat of having my nice evening spoilt by his sardonic, all-knowing air, though God knows, I should have been used to it by then. ‘I am having a holiday from the holidays. I am relaxing, following the enforced merriment of the last week. An amusing diversion, Holmes, nothing else. At least it was, until your suspicious mind let fly with its sneering intimations of omniscience. Really, Holmes, you can be very irritating at times.’

He seemed not in the least put out by my ruffled feathers, and he arched his eyebrow and glanced sideways at me to let me know it. I put up my chin and looked in the other direction.

‘So you did not “track me down”, as you put it, for any express purpose, other than as an exercise in tracking?’

‘And for the pleasurable exercise of freedom, yes.’

‘You are lying, Russell.’

‘Holmes, this is intolerable. If you wish to be rid of me, all you need do is slow down and let me jump off. You needn’t be offensive to me. I’ll go.’

‘Russell, Russell,’ he chided, and shook his head.

‘Damn it, Holmes, what can you imagine was so urgent that I should come all the way here in order to confront you with it immediately? Which, you may have noticed, I have not done?’

‘A question you finally nerved yourself up to ask, and the momentum carried you along,’ he answered coolly.

‘And what question might that be?’ I did leave myself right open for it, but once launched in a path, it is difficult to change direction.

‘I expect you came to ask me to marry you.’

I nearly fell off the back of the cab.

‘Holmes! What do you … How can you …’ I sputtered to a halt. In front of me, the speaking vent in the roof of the cab was rising, and in a moment I could see two sets of eyes, dimly illuminated by the carriage lights and a passing streetlamp. One set was topped by a bowler, the other by a frippery gobbet of flowers, and they passed over us like two pair of roving spotlights, apprehensively examining the two men who were carrying on this lunatic dialogue above their heads.

Holmes lifted his hat and gave them a genial smile. I waggled the brim of my own and gave what I felt to be a look of criminal idiocy, but was apparently only slightly disconcerting. They stared between the reins at us, mouths agape.

‘Sumfing Oi can do fer you, sir?’ Holmes asked politely, his voice sliding down towards the Cockney.

‘You can explain the meaning of this extraordinary conversation which my wife and myself have been forced to overhear.’ He looked like a schoolmaster, though his nose was dark with broken capillaries.

‘Conversation? Oh yes, sorry, Oi s’pose it sounded sumfing mad.’ Holmes laughed. ‘Amatoor dramatics, sir. There’s a club of us, rehearses parts whenever we come across one another. It’s an Ibsen play. Do you know it?’ The heads shook in unison, and the two looked at each other. ‘Fine stuff, but taken out of context, like, it sounds summat potty. Sorry we disturbed you.’ The eyes studied us dubiously for another long moment, then looked again at each other, and the hats sank slowly back into the cab. Holmes began to laugh convulsively in complete silence, and reluctantly I joined him. Some minutes later, he wiped his face with his filthy gloves, snapped the horse back to its trot, and took up a completely different topic.

‘So, Russell, this gentleman and his lovely wife are going to number seventeen Gladstone Terrace. Kindly search your memory and tell me where it is to be found.’ It was an examination, and out of habit, I reviewed my mental picture of the area.

‘Another nine streets up, on the left.’

‘Ten streets,’ he corrected me. ‘You forgot Hallicombe Alley.’

‘Sorry. This is getting far out for my knowledge of the map. I admit that one or two of the areas we’ve been through I’ve never seen before.’

‘I should think not,’ he said primly. Holmes tended to recall his Victorian attitudes and my gender at the oddest times – it always took me by surprise.

Holmes drew to a halt on a deserted side street and our passengers scurried for the shelter of their dark terrace house, not even waiting for the change from their coin. Holmes shouted a thanks at the closing door; his voice bounced off the disapproving bricks and scuttled off into the night.

‘Jump down and get the rug, will you, Russell?’

When we were settled with the thing around our knees, he flicked the reins and the horse circled us back into the main road. We took a different route for our return to the stables, through streets even darker and dirtier than those we had come by. I was enjoying myself again, half-drowsing despite the continuous jolts, when Holmes spoke.

‘So, Russell, what say you? Have you a question for me?’

It is difficult to pull away from a man when the two of you are compressed shoulder-to-shoulder and wrapped in a rug, but I managed.

‘Come now, Russell, you are a great proponent of the emancipation of women; surely you can manage to carry out your intentions in this little matter.’

‘Little?’ I seized on the word, as he knew I would. ‘First you place the proposition in my mouth, and then you denigrate it. I don’t know why I even—’ I bit back the words.

‘Why you thought of it in the first place, is that what you were about to say?’

Before I could respond, a fast blur shooting out of a dark alley brought Holmes to his feet, nearly knocking me from my perch. A black shape was at the heels of the horse, snarling and snapping with a flash of white teeth as it dodged into the dim light from our lamps. In one smooth movement, Holmes wrapped the reins around his left hand and hauled back on them as he snatched the long whip from its rest with his right, and with considerable accuracy he turned the yaps into yelps. Sheer brute strength brought the horse back onto its haunches and kept it from bolting, but sheer artistry allowed it just enough of its head to resume progress. The animal’s blinkered head tossed and fretted the reins from its shoe-leather mouth to the driver’s arms, and its heavy and graceless neck gleamed with sweat, but it obeyed its driver. In a moment, still on his feet and with both hands now on the reins, Holmes resumed as if there had been no interruption.

‘So, why did you think of it?’ he pressed, his voice calm but with a finely honed edge to it. ‘Have I given you any reason to believe that I might welcome such a suggestion? I am fifty-nine years old, Russell, and I have long been accustomed to the privacy and freedom of the bachelor life. Do you imagine that I might succumb to the dictates of social norms and marry you in order to stop tongues from wagging when we go off together? Or perhaps you imagine that the pleasures of the wedding bed might prove irresistible?’

My patience broke. I simply could not sit and listen to another peace-shattering, friendship-threatening, and, yes, hope-destroying phrase. I tossed the rug up over him, pulled both knees up to brace my boots on the top edge of the hansom, then straightened my legs and flipped over the seat backwards, an acrobatic feat I could not possibly have performed had I stopped to think about it first. I staggered on the uneven stones, a jolt of pain shooting through my bad shoulder, but I was off the cab. Holmes shook his arm free of the rug and started to rein in, but the much-abused horse had the bit in his teeth now and fought him, kicking and heaving in the traces. I took three bent steps to the gutter, seized a gin bottle from the night’s rubbish, and skipped it across the stones to smash at the horse’s feet. It sent him onto his hind legs, the sting of a fist-sized bit of brick brought him down again, and at the third missile he bolted.

By the time Holmes got him under control again, I was gone, having fled through an alley, over a wall, around two corners, and into a sink of blackness. He never caught me.

CHAPTER TWO

Monday, 27 December

A woman moved is like a fountain troubled, Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty, And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1554-1616)

IT WAS OF NO importance; I knew that even as I had gone off the back of the cab. Arguments were a part of life with Holmes – a week without a knockdown, drag-out fight was an insipid week indeed. Tonight’s was hardly a skirmish compared with some of the vicious running battles we had indulged in over the five years I had known him. No, Holmes had been merely venting general irritation through a convenient, if unfortunate, blowhole. I had found him to be particularly irritable when a case was going badly, or when he had been too long without a challenge, and although I was not absolutely certain which was the circumstance that night, I should have put money on the latter. When we met again, it would appear as if it had never happened. On a certain level, it had not.

Still, just then I had felt more in need of a companion in bohemian abandonment than of a sparring partner, and when faced with intense verbal swordplay, I had decided to bow out. Rare for me – one of the things I most liked about Holmes was his willingness to do battle. Still, there it was, and there I was, walking with considerable stealth down a nearly black street at one o’clock in the morning in a part of London I knew only vaguely. I pushed Holmes from my mind and set out to enjoy myself.

Twenty minutes later, I stood motionless in a doorway while a patrolling constable shot his light’s beam down the alley and went his heavy-footed way, and the incongruity of my furtive behaviour struck me: Here went Mary Russell, who six months previously had qualified for her degrees with accolades and honours from the most prestigious university in the world, who should in seven – six – days attain her majority and inherit what would have to be called a fortune, who was the closest confidante and some-time partner of the almost-legendary figure of Sherlock Holmes (whom, moreover, she had just soundly outwitted), and who walked through London’s filthy pavements and alleys a young man, unrecognised, unknown, untraceable. Not a soul here knew who I was; not a friend or relation knew where I was. In an extremity of exhilaration, intoxicated by freedom and caught up by the power in my limbs, I bared my teeth and laughed silently into the darkness.

I prowled the streets all that dreamlike night, secure and unmolested by the denizens of the dark. Two hundred yards from where Mary Kelly had bled to death under the Ripper’s knife, I was greeted effusively by a pair of ladies of the evening. In a yard off what had once been the Ratcliff Highway, I warmed my hands over the ashes of a chestnut seller’s barrel and savoured the mealy remnant I found in one corner as if it were some rare epicurean morsel. I followed the vibration of music and was let into an all-night club, filled with desperate-looking men and slick, varnished women and the smell of cigarettes and avarice. I paid my membership, drank half my cloudy beer, and escaped back out onto the street for air. I stepped over a body (still breathing and reeking of gin). I avoided any number of bobbies. I heard the sounds of catfights and angry drunks and the whimper of a hungry baby hushed at the breast, and once from an upper room a low murmur of voices that ended in a breathless cry. Twice I hid from the sound of a prowling horse-drawn cab with two wheels. The second time launched me on a long and highly technical conversation with a seven-year-old street urchin who was huddled beneath the steps to escape a drunken father. We squatted on cobbles greasy with damp and the filth that had accumulated, probably since the street was first laid down following the Great Fire, and we talked of economics. He gave me half of his stale roll and a great deal of advice, and when I left, I handed him a five-pound note. He looked after me awestruck, as at the vision of the Divine Presence.

The city dozed fitfully for a few short hours, insomniac amidst the tranquil winter countryside of southern England. There were no stars. I walked and breathed it in, and felt I had never been in London before. Never seen my fellowman before. Never felt the blood in my veins before.

At five o’clock, the signs of morning were under way. No light, of course, though in June by that hour the birds would have almost finished their first mad clamour and the farmers would have been long in their fields. Here, the first indications of day were in the knockers-up with their peashooters aimed at the windows of clockless clients, the water carts sluicing down the streets, the milk carts rattling down the cobblestones, and the strong smell of yeast from a bakery. Soon certain areas vibrated with voices and the rumble of carts, wagons, and lorries bearing food and fuel and labouring bodies into London town. Men trotted past, dwarfed by the stacks of half-bushel baskets balanced on their heads. In Spitalfields, the meat market warned me away with its reek of decaying blood, pushing me off into neighbouring areas less concerned with the trades of early morning. Even here, though, people moved, listless at first, then with voices raised. London was returning to life, and I, stupefied by the constant movement of the last hours, light-headed and without a will of my own, was caught up, swept along by the tide of purposeful heavy-booted workers who grumbled and cursed and hawked and spat their way into the day.

Eventually, like a piece of flotsam, I came to rest against a barrier and found myself staring uncomprehending at a window into another world, a square of furious movement and meaningless shapes and colours, snatches of flesh and khaki, shining white objects bearing quantities of yellow and brown that disappeared into red maws, a fury as far removed from the dim and furtive London I had emerged from as it was possible to imagine. It was a window, in a door, and the slight distortion of the glass gave it a look of unreality, as if it were an impressionist painting brought to life. The door opened, but the impression of a two-dimensional illusion was curiously intensified, so that the rush of steam-thick, impossibly fragrant air and the incomprehensible babble lay against my face like a wall. I stood fascinated, transfixed by this surreal, hypnotic vision for a solid minute before a shoulder jostled me and the dream bubble burst.

It was a tea shop, filled shoulder-to-shoulder with gravel-voiced men cradling chipped white mugs of blistering hot, stewed-looking tea in their thick hands, and the smell of bacon grease and toast and boiled coffee swept over me and made me urgently aware of a great howling pit of emptiness within.

I edged inside, feeling unaccustomedly petite and uncertain of my (character’s) welcome, but I need not have worried. These were working men beginning a long day, not drunks looking for distraction, and although my thin shoulders and smooth face, to say nothing of the wire-rim spectacles I wiped free of fog and settled back on my nose, started a ripple of nudges and grins, I was allowed to push through the brotherhood and sink into a chair next to the window. My feet sighed in gratitude.

The solitary waitress, a thin woman with bad teeth, six hands, and the ability to keep eight quick conversations on her tongue simultaneously, wove her way through the nonexistent gaps, slapped a cup of tea onto the table in front of me, and took my order for eggs and chips and beans on toast without seeming to listen. The laden plate arrived before my sweet orange-coloured tea had cooled, and I set to putting it inside me.

When she reappeared at my elbow, I ordered the same again, and for the first time she actually looked at me, then turned to my neighbours and made a raucous joke, speculating on what I’d been doing to work up such an appetite. The men laughed uproariously, saw the blush on my downy cheeks, and laughed even harder before they hitched up their trousers and left in a clatter of scraped chair legs. I eased my own chair away from the wall an inch or two and devoured the second plate with as much pleasure as the first, though with more leisure. I lovingly mopped up the last smear of yolk with the stub of my toast, raised my fourth cup of tea to my cautious lips, and looked out the window beside me – directly into a face I knew, and one which an instant later recognised me.

I signalled her to wait, threaded my way through the burly shoulders and backs, thrust a large note into the waitress’s pocket, and fell out onto the street.

‘Mary?’ she asked, doubtful. ‘That is you, isn’t it?’

Lady Veronica Beaconsfield, a lodgings mate in Oxford who had read Greats a year ahead of me, an unpretty person who guiltily loved beautiful things and invested vast amounts of time and money in Good Works. We had been close at one time, but events had conspired to cool her affection, and to my sadness we had not managed to regain any degree of closeness before she went down from Oxford. I had last seen her seven months before, and we had exchanged letters in September. She looked exhausted. Even in the half-light, I could see smudges under her eyes and a look of grimy dishevelment, foreign to her tidy, competent self.

‘Of course it’s me, Ronnie,’ I said, cheerfully ungrammatical. ‘What a surprise to see a familiar face amidst that lot.’

I gestured with one hand and nearly hit an enormous navvy coming out of the cafe. He growled at me, I apologised, and he rolled his shoulders and strode off, allowing me to live. Ronnie giggled.

‘You still do that, I see, dressing like a man. I thought it was just undergraduate high spirits.’

‘“When we’ve got our flowing beards on, who beholding us will think we’re women?”’ I recited. ‘There’s good precedence.’

‘Dear old Aristophanes,’ she agreed. ‘Still, don’t you find it a drawback sometimes, dressing like a man?’ she asked. ‘I thought that man was going to punch you.’

‘It’s only happened once, that I didn’t have time to talk my way out of a brawl.’

‘What happened?’

‘Oh, I didn’t hurt him too badly.’ She giggled, as if I had made a joke. I went on. ‘I had a much rougher time of it once during the War, with a determined old lady who tried to give me a white feather. I looked so healthy, she refused to believe me when I told her I’d been turned down for service. She followed me down the street, lecturing me loudly on cowardice and Country and Lord Kitchener.’

Ronnie looked at me speculatively, unsure of whether or not I was pulling her leg. (As a matter of fact, I was not, in either case. The old lady had been severely irritating, though Holmes, walking with me that day, had found the episode very amusing.) She then shook her head and laughed.

‘It’s splendid to see you, Mary. Look, I’m on my way home. Are you going somewhere, or can you come in for coffee?’

‘I’m going nowhere, I’m free as the proverbial bird, and I won’t drink your coffee, thanks, I’m afloat already, but I’ll gladly come for a natter and see your WC – I mean, your rooms.’

She giggled again.

‘One of the other drawbacks, I take it?’

‘The biggest one, truth to tell,’ I admitted with a grin.

‘Come on, then.’

It was nearly light on the street, but as we turned off into a narrow courtyard of greasy cobblestones four streets away, the darkness closed in again. Veronica’s house was one of ten or twelve that huddled claustrophobically around the yard with its green and dripping pump. One house was missing, plucked from its neighbours during the bombing of London like a pulled tooth. The bomb had not caused a fire, simply collapsed the structure in on itself, so that the flowery upstairs wallpaper was only now peeling away, and a picture still hung from its hook twenty feet above the ground. I looked at the remaining houses and thought, there will be masses of children behind those small windows, children with sores on their faces and nothing on their feet even in the winter, crowded into rooms with their pregnant, exhausted, anaemic mothers and tubercular grandmothers and the fathers who were gone or drunk more often than not. I suppressed a shudder. This choice of neighbourhood was typically Veronica, a deliberate statement to her family, herself, and the people she was undoubtedly helping – but did it have to be quite such a clear statement? I looked up at the grimy windows, and a thought occurred.

‘Ronnie, do you want me to remove enough of this costume to make it obvious that you’re not bringing a man home?’

She turned with the key in her hand and ran her eyes over me, looked up at the surrounding houses, and laughed for a third time, but this was a hard, bitter little noise that astonished me, coming from her.

‘Oh, no, don’t worry about that, Mary. Nobody cares.’

She finished with the key, picked up the milk, and led me into a clean, uninspiring hallway, past two rooms furnished with dull, worn chairs and low tables, rooms with bare painted walls, and up a flight of stairs laid with a threadbare, colourless runner. A full, rich Christmas tree rose up beside the stairs, loaded with colourful ornaments and trying hard, and long swags of greenery and holly draped themselves from every protrusion. Instead of being infused with good cheer, however, the dreary rooms served only to depress the decorations, making them look merely tawdry. We went through the locked door at the top and came into a house entirely apart from the drab and depressing ground floor.

The Ronnie Beaconsfield I had known was a lover of beauty who possessed the means of indulging herself, not for the desire of possession, for she was one of the least avaricious people I knew, but for the sheer love of perfection. Her uncle was a duke, her grandfather had been an advisor to Queen Victoria, there were three barristers and a high-court judge in her immediate family, her father was something big in the City, her mother devoted her time to the Arts, and Veronica herself spent most of her time and money trying to live it all down. Even while an undergraduate at Oxford, she had been the moving force behind a number of projects, from teaching illiterate women to read to the prevention of maltreatment of cart horses.

To her despair, she was short, stout, and unlovely, and her invariably unflattering hairstyle should have nudged the wide nose and thick eyebrows into ugliness had it not been for the goodness and the gentle, self-deprecating humour that looked out from her brown eyes when she smiled. That bitterness had been new, and I wondered when it had crept in.

This upper portion of the house was much more the Veronica I knew. Here, the floors gleamed richly, the carpets were thick and genuine, the odd assortment of furniture and objects d’art – sleek, modern German chair and Louis XIV settee on a silken Chinese carpet, striped coarse Egyptian cloth covering a Victorian chaise longue, a priceless collection of seventeenth-century drawings on one wall contemplating a small abstract by, I thought, Paul Klee on the opposite wall – all nestled together comfortably and unobtrusively like a disparate group of dons in a friendly Senior Commons, or perhaps a gathering of experts on unrelated topics trading stories at a successful party. Veronica had a knack.

The house had been converted to electricity, and by its strong light I could see clearly the etched lines of desperate weariness on her face as my friend pulled off gloves, hat, and coat. She had been out most of the night – on a Good Work, her drab clothes said, rather than a social occasion – and a not entirely successful Good Work at that. I asked her about it when I came out of the WC (indoor, though I had seen the outside cubicles at the end of the yard below.)

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. She was assembling coffee. ‘One of the families I’ve adopted. The son, who’s thirteen, was arrested for picking the pocket of an off-duty bobby.’

I laughed, incredulous.

‘You mean he couldn’t tell? He’s new to the game, then.’

‘Apparently so. He’s not very bright, either, I’m afraid.’ She fumbled, taking a cup from the shelf and nearly dropping it from fingers clumsy with fatigue.

‘Good heavens, Ronnie,’ I said, ‘you’re exhausted. I ought to go and let you have some sleep.’

‘No!’ She did drop the cup then, and it shattered into a thousand shards of bone china. ‘Oh, damn,’ she wailed. ‘You’re right, I am tired, but I so want to talk with you. There’s something … Oh, no, it’s useless; I can’t even begin to think about it.’ She knelt awkwardly to gather up the pieces, drove a splinter of porcelain into her finger, and stifled a furious sob.

Something fairly drastic was upsetting this good woman, something considerably deeper than a sleepless night caused by an incompetent pickpocket. I had a fairly good idea what in general she wanted me for, and I sighed inwardly at the brevity of my freedom. Nonetheless, I went to help her.

‘Ronnie, I’m tired, too. I’ve been on my feet – literally – for the last twelve hours. If you don’t mind my disreputable self on your sofa, we can both have a sleep, and talk later.’

The intensity of the relief that washed over her face startled me and did not bode well for my immediate future, but I merely helped her sweep up the broken cup, overrode her half-hearted protestations, and sent her to bed.

There was no need to disturb the chaise longue. She had a guest room; she had a marvellous bathtub long enough for me to soak the aches from both the shoulder and my legs; she had a nightdress and a dressing gown and a deep bed that welcomed me with loving softness and murmured soporific suggestions at me until I drifted off.

I woke at dusk, to complete the topsy-turvy day, and rose to crane my neck at the smudge of heavy, wet sky that was visible between the roofs. I put on the too-short quilted dressing gown that Ronnie had given me and went down to the kitchen, and while the water came to a boil, I tried to decide whether I was making breakfast or afternoon tea. Veronica’s idea of a well-stocked kitchen ran to yoghourt, charcoal biscuits, and vitamin pills (healthy body, healthy mind), but a rummage through the cupboards left me with a bowl of some healthy patent cereal that looked like wood chips, though they tasted all right doused with the top milk from the jug and a blob of raspberry jam, some stale bread to toast, and a slice of marzipan-covered Christmas fruitcake to push the meal into the afternoon. After my meal, I washed up, went down for the paper, brought it up along with the mail, lit the fire in the sitting room, and read all about the world’s problems, a cup of coffee balanced on my knee and a very adequate coal fire at my feet.

At 5:30, Ronnie appeared, hair awry, mouthed a string of unintelligible noises, and went into the kitchen. In lodgings, she had been renowned as a reluctant waker, so I gave her time to absorb some coffee before I followed her.

‘Mary, good morning – afternoon, I suppose. You’ve had something to eat?’

I reassured her that I had taken care of myself, then poured another cup of coffee from the pot and sat down at the small kitchen table to wait for whatever it had been she wanted to tell me.

It took some time. Revelations that come easily at night are harder by the light of day, and the woman who had cried out at a minor cut was now well under control. We talked interminably, about her needy and troubled families and the problem of balancing assistance and dependency while maintaining the dignity of all concerned. She enquired as to my interests, so I told her all about the paper on first-century rabbinic Judaism and Christian origins I’d written for publication, and about my work at Oxford, and when her eyes glazed over, I probed a bit deeper into her life. At some point, we ate pieces of dried-up cheese from a piece of white butcher’s paper and dutifully chewed at a handful of unpalatable biscuits, and then she opened a bottle of superb white wine and finally began to loosen up.

There was a man; rather, there had been a man. It was an all-too-common story in those post-war years: A friend in 1914, he joined the New Army in 1915, was sent virtually untrained to the Western Front, and promptly walked into a bullet; sent home for eight weeks’ recovery, their friendship deepened: He returned to the trenches, numerous letters followed, and then he was gassed in 1917 and again sent home: an engagement ring followed; he returned yet again to the Front, was finally demobbed in January 1919, a physically ruined, mentally frail mockery of his former self, liable to black, vicious moods and violent tempers alternating with periods of either manic gaiety or bleak inertia, when all he could do was silently smoke one cigarette after another, seeming completely unaware of other people. It was called shell shock, the nearly inevitable aftermath of month after month in hell, and every man who had been in the trenches had it to some degree. Some hid it successfully until the depths of night; others coped by immersing themselves in a job and refusing to look up. Many, many young men, particularly those from this young man’s class – educated, well-off, the nation’s pool of leadership, who died in colossal numbers as junior officers – became fatuous, irresponsible, and flighty, incapable of serious thought or concentrated effort, and (and here was the crux of this particular case) willing to become involved only with women as brittle and frivolous as they were. Veronica no longer wore the ring.

I listened in silence and watched her eyes roam over her glass, the tablecloth, the mail, the dark, reflecting window, anywhere but my face, until she seemed to run down. I waited a minute longer, and when she neither spoke nor looked up, I gave her a gentle prod.

‘It does take time, that sort of thing,’ I suggested. ‘A lot of young men—’

‘Oh, I know,’ she interrupted. ‘It’s a common problem. I know a hundred women who’ve been through the same thing, and they all hope it’ll solve itself, and every so often it does. But not Miles. He’s just … it’s as if he’s not there any more. He’s … lost.’

I chewed my lip thoughtfully for a moment, and the image of those slick faces in the nightclub came back to me. Lost was a good word for a large part of our whole generation.

‘Drugs?’ I asked, not quite the shot in the dark it seemed, and she looked at me then, her eyes brimming, and nodded.

‘What kind?’ I asked.

‘Any kind. He had morphine when he was in hospital, and he got used to that. Cocaine, of course. They all use cocaine. He goes to these parties – they last all night, a weekend, even longer. Once he took me to a fancy-dress party where the whole house was made over to look like an opium den, including the pipes. I couldn’t bear the smell and so had to leave. He took me home and then went back. Lately, I think it’s been heroin.’ I was mildly surprised. Heroin had been developed only a couple of years before I was born, and in 1920 it was nowhere near as commonplace as cocaine or opium or even its parent drug, morphine. I had some personal experience of the drug, following a bad automobile accident in 1914, when it was given me by the hospital in San Francisco – it being then thought that heroin was less addictive than morphine, a conclusion since questioned – but an habitual use of the drug would be very expensive.

‘Did you go with him very often? To the same house?’

‘The few times I went, they were all different houses, though mostly the same people. I finally couldn’t take seeing him like that any more, and I told him so. He said … he said some horrid, cruel things and slammed out of here, and I haven’t heard from him since then. That was nearly two months ago. I did see him, about ten days ago, coming out of a club with a … a girl hanging on his arm and laughing in that way they do when they’ve been taking something and the whole world is so hysterically funny. He looked awful, like a skeleton, and his cough was back. He sounded like he had when he was home after being gassed; it made my chest hurt to hear it. I do get news of him – I see his sister all the time, but she says he never visits his parents unless he runs out of money before his next allowance is due.’

‘And they give it to him.’

‘Yes.’ She blew her nose and took a deep breath, then looked straight at me, and I braced myself.

‘Mary, is there anything that you can do?’

‘What could I do?’ I did not even try to sound surprised.

‘Well, you … investigate things. You know people, you and Mr Holmes. Surely there must be something we might do.’

‘Any number of things,’ I said flatly. ‘You could have him arrested, and they might be able to keep him until the drugs have left his system, though it would probably mean hospitalisation, considering the shape he’s in. However, unless he’s actually selling the drugs himself, which sounds unlikely if his parents support him, he’d be let free in a few days and would go right back to the source. You’d have put him through considerable discomfort with little benefit. Or, you could have him kidnapped, if you don’t mind great expense and the threat of a prison sentence. That would ensure his physical well-being, for a time. You’d want to let him go eventually, though, and then it would almost surely begin again.’ It was cruel, but not so cruel as raising her hopes would have been. ‘Ronnie, you know what the problem is, and you know full well that there’s not a thing that you or I or the king himself can do about it. If Miles wants to use drugs, he will. If not heroin, then morphine, or alcohol. As you said, he’s just not there, and until he decides to find his way back, the only thing on God’s green earth you can do is make sure he knows your hand is there if he wants it, and leave him to it.’ I offered her a pain-filled smile. ‘And pray.’

She collapsed, and I stroked her hair and waited for the storm to abate. It did, and when she raised her face, I felt a moment’s pity for the man Miles, confronted by this red-eyed, dull-haired, earnest young woman with her Good Works and her small eyes set into an unfashionably round face of pasty skin, now blotched from her tears. For someone terrified of responsibility and commitment, Veronica in her present state would loom huge and hideous, the embodiment of everything his former life held to reproach him with. Despite my harsh words, for her sake I should make an effort.

‘Ronnie, look, I’ll see what I can do. I know a man at Scotland Yard’ – this was a slight exaggeration – ‘who might be able to suggest something.’

‘You’re right, Mary.’ She fumbled with her sodden handkerchief. ‘I know you’re right; it’s just that it’s so damnable, feeling completely hopeless while Miles is destroying himself. He’s – he was – such a good man.’ She sighed, then sat back, her hands on her lap. We sat together as if at a wake.

Suddenly, she looked up at the clock on her wall, and a curious look of shy animation crept onto her face.

‘Mary, are you free tonight? I don’t know what you had planned, but there’s someone you might be interested in meeting.’