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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes
- Sprache: Englisch
1925. Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes arrive home to find a stone. The stone is inscribed with the same name that they last saw in the Tokyo garden of the future emperor of Japan. It is the first indication that the investigation they did for him a year ago might not be as complete as they had thought. In Japan there were spies### in Oxford there are dreams. In both places, there is a small, dark-haired woman, and danger . . .
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Seitenzahl: 527
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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DREAMING SPIES
LAURIE R. KING
For Barbara Peters and Rob Rosenwald: travelling companions in the Empire, and beyond
… that sweet city with her dreaming spires …
– Matthew Arnold
Contents
PREAMBLE
Sussex and Oxford March 1925
CHAPTER ONE
Old grey stone travels
Moss-covered, cradled in straw,
Blinks at English spring.
‘IT’S A ROCK, HOLMES.’
Sherlock Holmes raised his teacup to his lips. He swallowed absently, then glanced down in surprise, as if the homecoming drink had brought to mind the face of a long-forgotten friend. ‘Is it the water from our well that makes Mrs Hudson’s tea so distinctive,’ he mused, ‘or the milk from Mrs Philpott’s cows?’
My lack of reply had no effect on his pursuit of the idea.
‘It would make for an interesting monograph,’ he continued. ‘The significance of a society’s hallmark beverage. Tea: Moroccan mint, Japanese green, English black. In America, there is – well, one can hardly call it “coffee”. The Bedouin, of course …’
I only half-listened to his reverie. Truth to tell, I was enjoying not only the contents of my cup, but the lack of fretting waves beneath my feet and the peace of this cool spring afternoon. We had just returned, after what began as a brief, light-hearted trip to Lisbon became (need I even add the word ‘inevitably’?) tumultuous months in several countries. This was far from the first time I had stood on the terrace with a cup of tea, appreciating not being elsewhere. Although it did seem that no sooner was I enjoying the peace than something would come along to shatter it: an urgent telegram, a bleeding stranger at the door. I stirred.
‘Holmes, the rock.’
‘You are right, it’s probably best to leave America out of the matter. Although possibly—’
‘Holmes!’
‘Yes, Russell, it is a rock. A rather fine rock, would you not agree? An almost … Japanese sort of a rock?’
I turned my eyes from husband to granitic intruder.
Higher than my knee, with an interesting pattern of moss and lichen and a tracery of dark veins running through it, the stone had been planted – for ‘planted’ was the word – in the flower bed encircling the terrace. And not in a central position, but asymmetrically, half-concealed behind a rounded juniper. In the spring, it would almost disappear beneath Mrs Hudson’s peonies.
Almost disappear. As it was almost Japanese. As I reflected on the massive and permanent shape, I realised that it looked as if it had risen from the Sussex earth long before juniper and peony were introduced. Before the old flint house behind me was built, for that matter – although it had definitely not been there when I left for Portugal the previous November.
‘It was most peculiar.’ Mrs Hudson’s voice behind us sounded apologetic. ‘These four Oriental gentlemen drove up in a lorry, and while the three young ones began to unpack the thing – it was wearing a sort of straw overcoat! – the older one marched back here to look at the terrace. He poked at the ground for a few minutes – hard as stone itself, it being that cold snap we had in December – and asked me what colour my peonies were. It’s beyond me how he knew there were peonies at all. He was polite, you understand, but a little … quiet.’
We both turned sharply to look at her. ‘Did he threaten you?’ Holmes demanded.
‘Heavens, no. I told you he was polite. Just … well, once or twice you’ve had folk here who, shall we say, give one the feeling that it’s good they’re on your side. If you know what I mean?’
‘Dangerous.’
‘I suppose. Although honestly, it was only his nature, not in the least aimed at us. In any event, Patrick was here.’ A complete non-sequitur, since our farm-manager looked about as threatening as one of his draught horses. ‘But the fellow clearly wasn’t about to explain. So I told him – what colour they were, that is – and he said he was terribly sorry, his men would need to move one of them, but that the darker one should be fine where it was, and that’s what they did. They were careful, give them that. Seemed to know what they were doing. After they left, I’d have had Patrick put Daisy into harness and drag the thing away into the orchard, but I thought it might be something you’d arranged and forgot to mention. In any event, once I’d lived with it for a few days, it grew on me, like. Peculiar ornament for an herbaceous border, but not all that bad. And I could see that the peony would be better where the Oriental gentlemen put it. So, shall I have Patrick remove it?’
‘No!’
Under other circumstances, I’d have read Holmes’ quick reply as an urgent need to keep her from danger, but I thought it pretty unlikely that this massive object could be hiding a bomb. Instead, I took his fast refusal to mean that this drastic addition to our accustomed view was having the same effect on him as it was on me: once the eyes had accepted the shape, the mind began to rearrange the entire garden around it. In less than the time it took to drain one cup of tea, I was beginning to suspect that, were Patrick to hitch up his horse and haul this foreign stone into the fields, our terrace would forever be a lesser place.
As Mrs Hudson said, the thing grew on a person.
‘They didn’t leave a message?’ I asked our housekeeper.
‘Not as such. Although he did say one odd thing. When they were done, the others went back to the lorry but he sat, all cross-legged and right on the paving stones, just looking at his rock. In the cold! I brought him out a travelling rug, I was that worried that he would freeze, but he took no notice.
‘I went back inside, looking out at him every so often, and I was just wondering if what I needed was Constable Beckett or the doctor, when the fellow stood up again. He walked all the way around the thing, then came and knocked on the kitchen door to give me back the rug. Neatly folded, too. I offered him a cup of tea, but he said thank you, he had to be getting on. And then he said, “Tell your master he has a chrysanthemum in his garden”, although how he’d know that at this time of—’
At the name of the flower, Holmes and I looked at each other, startled.
‘Mrs Hudson,’ I interrupted, ‘what did the fellow look like? Other than being Oriental.’
‘Well, I suppose he was a bit taller than usual. Certainly he was bigger than the other three.’
‘With a scar on his hand?’ Holmes asked.
‘Yes, now that you ask. All down the back of his hand, it was—’
But we didn’t wait to hear the rest of it. As one, we set our cups upon the table and strode across the terrace to the steps leading to the orchard and the Downs beyond. At the small inner gate, we turned to look. This, the more hidden side, looked as if someone had tried to carve a flower on it, a thousand years before.
Not a chrysanthemum: the Chrysanthemum.
A venerable stone we had last seen a year ago in the Emperor’s garden in Tokyo.
CHAPTER TWO
Scholar-gipsy, I,
Homecoming to a strange land,
Trinity Terms mist.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING WAS wet and blustery. We took our breakfast in front of the fire, reading an accumulation of newspapers. Inevitably, the news was all about the horrors of the weather (a woman killed when a tree fell across her house), imminent threats to world peace, and the attempts at good-humoured news that convince one the human race is a lost cause. With yesterday’s reminder of Japan, my eyes were caught no fewer than three times by the country’s name: an art display in London, the Japanese–Russian treaty that was going into effect soon, and the results of an inquest into a drowned Japanese translator named Hirakawa. At this last, I glanced out the window at the rain-soaked rock, and closed the newspaper.
Minutes later, I abandoned Holmes to The Mystery of the Emperor’s Stone (as well as a meeting he had that afternoon in London, concerning Turkey’s upcoming Hat Law) to turn my face towards Oxford. I took the Morris, having tasks to do along the way, and although the drive promised to be difficult, as I passed through tiny East Dean, I found myself humming in time with the pistons. When I crossed the Cuckmere, I was singing aloud – tunelessly, yes, but with modern music, who cares?
Once my business in Eastleigh was concluded (an elderly tutor, installed there and in need of good cheer and enticing reading material), I turned north. Traffic crept around an overturned wagon outside of Winchester, and again slowed out in the countryside twenty miles later, for some reason I never did see. As a result, although I’d intended to be in Oxford before teatime, I could tell that it would not be until after dark. I was glumly bent over the wheel, bleary-eyed and trying to ignore the growing headache (a bad knock in December had yet to heal completely), when a snug and ancient building rose up alongside the road ahead: grey stone, heavy vines, yellow glow from ancient windows, wood-smoke curling from a chimney dating to Elizabeth. With Japan so recently in my mind, for a brief instant I saw the building as a ryokan – an ancient inn, with steaming baths and a waiting masseur. A cook who had worked there his entire life, a welcoming tray of pale, scalding, deliciously bitter tea … But no, it was just a pub.
Still, my arms were already turning the steering wheel. The quiet of shutting down the engine made my ears tingle. I picked up my bag and, coat pinched over my head against the heavy drops, scurried for the door.
Heaven lay within, an ancient gathering space that could only be in England, every breath testifying to its centuries of smoke and beer, damp dogs, and the sweat of working men. I made for the massive stone fireplace, and stood close enough to feel the scorch of the glowing coals through the back of my coat. A placid barmaid took my order, while I continued to stand, revolving slowly, divesting myself bit by bit of the layers. Heavy gloves, woollen scarf, and fur hat migrated to a nearby chair, eventually joined by my fur-lined driving coat. When my food came, I was down to a heavy cardigan, and my bright pink fingers were restored enough to grasp fork and knife.
After a few bites, I paused to retrieve a pair of books from the bag. The first was an unlikely but colourful novel I had bought in the Gare de Lyon two days earlier, by an Englishman named Forster. It was a year since Holmes and I had watched Bombay fade behind us – almost exactly a year, come to that: seemed like a decade – and I’d bought it thinking that Forster’s Passage might remind me of the pleasanter aspects of our trip. Instead, I was finding the plot increasingly difficult, and after another chapter I closed the covers on Dr Aziz and the criminally ridiculous Adela, to pick up the other volume, a melancholy old friend.
What is it about Oxford that puts one in a poetical state of mind? One would think that a long-time resident like me would grow inured to Oxford poetry, if for no other reason than the sheer volume of the stuff. Every undergraduate (and most tourists) who walked through one of her doors found it necessary to sit down and compose verse about the experience, all of it romantic and most of it twaddle. But still, in private moments, Matthew Arnold crept under my guard. Who would not wish to be a scholar-gipsy, leaving the safe walls – this strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims – to learn the eternal secrets of the gipsies, like some latter-day Merlin? Which of us had not deliberately chosen to return to the city by way of Boar’s Hill, in hopes of glimpsing one of the few remaining views of the city below, and thus be given an excuse to murmur Arnold’s enchanting phrase:
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
I sighed, and squinted at the pub’s rain-streaked window. Not much of June’s beauty-heightening today. Were it not for the pull of Oxford – less its dreaming spires than its comfortable bed and waiting fire – I would have taken a room here and ordered another pint of the man’s very decent beer. Instead, warm through and well fed, I paid for my meal and dashed back through the rain, wishing I had Arnold’s luck. This winter-eve is warm, Humid the air; leafless, yet soft as spring.
It was spring by the calendar alone, with no softness in sight. I got the wiper-blades going and turned cautiously back out onto the road, hoping the headlamps would last until I got in.
Newbury. Abingdon. Here came I often, in old days. Too rare, too rare grow now my visits …
Rare, indeed. Every time I set out with the firm intention of installing myself as a fixture amongst the stacks in Oxford’s ever-blessed libraries, some figurative bomb went off under my feet and hauled me away. Once, a literal bomb.
Littlemore; Iffley. The morning’s singing had long given way to groans of tedium. To keep myself awake, I recited mathematical formulae, irregular verbs and poetry. Haiku was ideal for the purpose, being both mathematical and poetic: the 5/7/5 structure was deceptively simple, which I supposed was why old Bashō came up with so many of them on his wanderings. What would the man have produced if he’d been driving through rain? Perhaps –
Sweet city of minds:
Her spires dream, wrapped in earth’s folds.
June gilds the lily.
Or what about:
Dark tyres splash along,
Wanting nothing better than
A place for the night.
I snorted. Matsuo Bashō need feel no threat from me.
The tyres did indeed splash along, down the darkening road, until the edges of civilisation came down to greet me. Much more of this weather and the two Hinkseys would again be separated by swamp – despite the efforts of that other poet, Oscar Wilde, during his unlikely road-building days at Magdalen. I noticed (as Matthew Arnold had foretold) that yet more houses had been raised since I last drove this way: the dreaming spires would soon vanish beneath a tide of suburban villas.
At Folly Bridge, the heavy raindrops turned to sleet. Grandpont was all but afloat. Christchurch probably had a lake at its door instead of a meadow. Even the Scholar-Gipsy would require a roof over his head tonight. The shops on the High were shuttered, the restaurants closing, and only the drinking establishments glowed in contentment.
Dodging trams and the odd umbrella-blinded pedestrian, I wound my way through Carfax and Cornmarket, past St Michael’s and the martyr’s memorial, giving a tip of the hat to the Ashmolean (without actually taking my eyes from the road). At long last, more than half a day since I’d left Sussex, I turned off the many-named Banbury Road into my own lane, and my own front gate, left standing open for me.
The car tyres eased into their place for the night. The engine gave a small shudder of gratitude, and went still.
I had been blessed, three years earlier, to find a house and a housekeeper in one, when one of my aged college dons died and her lifelong companion fell on hard times. Miss Pidgeon understood the conflicting urges of comfort and privacy, and provided the first without threatening the second. She lived in what had once been the servants’ quarters, separated by a small garden from the house proper, and with so much as a few hours’ warning, I would arrive to find the icebox filled with milk and essentials, a fire laid (if not actually burning), newspapers beside the settee, and never more sign of an actual person than a brief note of welcome on the kitchen table. She never made the mistake of tidying my papers, and she had an unexpectedly good eye for who might be an intruder and who looked like one of the owner’s odd friends.
I could, therefore, rest assured that although I should have to carry my own belongings from car to door, once inside I would find warmth, refreshment … and silence.
Holmes and I had been in each other’s pockets for a bit too long.
The house was still, weighty with the comfort of a thousand books. The air was warm from the radiators, and fragrant with the housekeeper’s lemon-scented wax. As I drew closer to the kitchen, the scent gave way to bay and onions: a soup kept warm on the back of the stove.
Tea caddy, pot and cup were on an ancient tray beside the modern electrical kettle. I checked it for water – full, of course – switched it on, and carried my bag upstairs.
I was rather longer than I anticipated, since halfway up I decided to change out of my driving clothes into more comfortable garments, and needed to dig slippers from the depths of the wardrobe. I came back down the stairway at a trot, hearing the kettle spouting furious gusts of steam into the kitchen, but even with that distraction, my head snapped up the moment I left the last step: the air from the kitchen doorway was nowhere near as warm and moist as it should have been. In fact, it felt decidedly chilly – and scented with the sharp tang of rosemary.
A rosemary bush grew outside of the back door.
One of Miss Pidgeon’s estimable qualities was her horror of invading my privacy: even when she suspected the house was empty she would first knock, then ring the bell, and finally call loudly as she ventured inside. For her simply to walk in was unthinkable.
My response was automatic: I took three steps to the side, stretched for a high shelf, thumbed a latch, and wrapped my fingers around one of the house’s three resident revolvers. The weight assured me it was loaded. I laid it against my thigh as I moved stealthily towards the kitchen door.
From the hallway, I could see that the door to the garden was shut. I could also see footprints marring the clean tiles: prints composed of rain, and mud, and something more brilliant than mud.
I raised the weapon. ‘I am armed. Stand where I can see you.’
The sound of movement came – not from just inside the door, where an attacker would wait, but from the pantry across the room. Its light was off, but enough spilt from the kitchen to show me the dim figure inside.
A tiny woman with short black hair and the epicanthic fold of Asia about her eyes. Her muscular body was inadequately clothed, as if she had fled into the rain too fast to grab a coat. Her shoes were sodden, her trousers showed mud to the knees.
Her right arm lay across her chest, the fingers encircling the left biceps dark with blood.
‘Mary-san,’ she said. ‘Help me.’
BOOK ONE
Bombay to Kobe The year before: April 1924
CHAPTER THREE
Bombay: oppressive
Harsh sky pounds the land below.
Faint breeze thrills the spine.
THE ONLY THING THAT made Bombay’s heat anywhere near bearable was a faint breeze off the sea, stirring the back of my neck. To think that when we’d first come down from the Himalayan foothills the week before, I had actually welcomed the balmy tropical climate! Now, with clothing that scraped my skin’s prickly heat and spectacles that slipped continually down my nose, any change from this torpid steam room would be for the better. If someone had handed me a razor, I’d have shaved off what little hair I possessed.
‘Why aren’t we leaving?’ I complained. ‘Three days, and it’s been one delay after another.’ A diabolical conspiracy of bureaucracy, inefficiency, and the traditional bland face of the subcontinent had put us here, on just about the last ship Holmes and I would have chosen: one designed not for the brisk transport of goods, mail and the occasional paying passenger, but an actual cruising steamer, with all the social life and interaction that entailed. Holmes had suggested the alternative of aeroplane journeys, but with a nearly catastrophic one still trembling in our bones, it was a relief to discover the lack of anything resembling commercial air flight in this part of the globe. As a compromise, we had taken the berths offered, but intended to transfer away as soon as one of the touristic pauses coincided with a nice quick freighter heading for Japan without the tedium of society.
At the moment, I was not the only one to be questioning the delay. Half the population of the Thomas Carlyle were leaning on the rails, sweating into their flimsiest garments and glaring down at terra firma, while the great engines throbbed and the sun bellowed its way up the eastern sky.
‘There.’ Holmes nodded up the docks, past the nearly completed Gateway, physical assertion of the British Empire’s claim to the lands beyond. A carriage bearing three passengers drove hard towards us, its horse dripping lather. When they were below us, the poor animal was allowed to stagger to a halt. I thought the creature would collapse then and there, but it managed to brace itself, head down and legs splayed, while two Englishmen (they could only be English) descended to the rough boards.
The first was a vigorous, bare-headed, blonde-haired fellow in his early twenties whose first act was that apparent impossibility of looking down his nose at people looming far above. As if the ship had been placed there for his entertainment, then caused to wait for his convenience. My prickly heat burst into fresh life as I reacted instantaneously to his aristocratic priggery: my face took on its own expression of amused scorn, my mind instantly classifying his taxonomic rank: Phylum: Priapulida; Class: upper; Order: giving of; Family: not mine, thank God—
I caught myself, and felt a flush of embarrassment rise over that of the heat. Don’t be a child, Russell! It’s been a very long time since you’ve felt inferior to a boor.
I shot Holmes a glance, finding him blessedly unaware of this vestige of my adolescence, then went back to watching the arrivals. The young man was probably only trying hard to conceal his own chagrin.
The second man was a large, once-muscular figure in his late fifties, who turned to help the remaining passenger down from the carriage: a woman, not as old as he. A daughter? The prig’s wife? (Heaven help her.) But the younger generation made no effort to assist, merely marched around to the bags strapped to the rear of the carriage and, pompously and predictably, began to tell the ship’s men how to do their jobs.
Meanwhile, the woman took the older man’s hand – no girl, this, but with a womanly shape and a gleam of chestnut hair beneath the wide brim of her hat – to descend gracefully to the boards. Once there, she straightened her hat, tucked her gloved hand through her companion’s arm – gloves, in this heat! – and strolled towards the gangway, ignoring the figures swarming around their bags as blithely as she ignored the rows of disapproving, downturned faces. Seeing the possessive tuck of his arm against her, I decided that this was neither daughter nor daughter-in-law. This was the older man’s wife. His second wife.
‘Good thing they caught us,’ I remarked to the man at my side. ‘Their trunks must be loaded already.’ A woman that polished would be furious to watch her belongings sail away down the coast of India. But Holmes was not looking at them, nor was he taking any note of the young man, bullying the stevedores towards the gangway.
He was squinting through the sun at another fast-approaching passenger, inadvertent beneficiary of the trio’s tardiness. The others were halfway up the ramp when a tiny black-haired figure trotted out from behind the quayside sheds, slipping around stevedores, carts, carriages, and one exhausted horse in the direction of the gangway, a valise in one hand. Its gait was not that of a child – but only when the figure raised its head to thank the purser’s steward at the base of the ramp did I see that it was a woman.
The English couple came to a halt on the one remaining gangway, immediately below us. I thought for a moment that they were hesitant about committing their exalted feet to the Thomas Carlyle’s admittedly mature decking, but then a brilliant white sleeve came into view. Leaning out a bit, I confirmed that it was attached to our Captain. The great man had descended from the heights for this greeting.
Hat brims concealed the newcomers’ faces, but the lady’s voice was quite clear as she withdrew her gloved fingers from her husband’s sleeve and held them languidly out. ‘I can’t think what the Viceroy’s man was up to!’ she pronounced. ‘Ludicrous, simply ludicrous. However, Captain, it is good to see you again.’
The Captain bowed over the lady’s hand before straightening to shake the man’s.
‘Terribly sorry,’ the husband told him. ‘Idiot boy the Viceroy sent, some peculiar business with forms. Typical of Isaacs. I’ll be having a word with the PM when I get back. Never would have happened under Baldwin.’
His words were less an apology than a means of venting irritation. Clearly, there had been no question but that the boat would be held for them. And steamship captains being as politically savvy as any Prime Minister, this one took care not to rebuke the latecomers, or even cast a meaningful glance at the queue of bag-laden men piling up behind them. He merely stepped onto the gangway to offer the lady his elbow. She slipped her arm through his, and allowed herself to be drawn onboard. Her husband paused to remove his hat, running a hand through a thick head of greying hair before glancing upwards. His ruddy skin indicated some weeks in the tropics, but not months. He had the son’s same aristocratic manner of simultaneously expecting, surveying, and discounting his audience, with features that were handsome at fifty but would sag into petulance by seventy. In other words, a face that warned of that most dangerous of personality flaws: charm.
There was a sudden commotion among the passengers farther along the rails. A tall woman with dramatically cropped brown hair hurried for the ship’s interior, losing a sudden wave of fellow passengers, their contemplation broken by the advent of progress. Below, the train of baggage-handlers was filing rapidly on, the son herding them before him. The tiny black-haired girl slipped onboard in his wake, ungreeted and unwelcomed.
With a ship-wide sigh of relief, the gangway was pulled in, the great hawsers went slack, and the throb of the engines deepened.
‘I wonder who those people are we waited for?’ I mused aloud. Important, wealthy: probably minor aristocrats, accustomed to the bows of captains and the scattering of crowds. Just what we had hoped to avoid. I glanced at my wristwatch. ‘Only three hours late. I think I’ll go sort out my things, and then take a book onto the deck. What do you—good heavens, Holmes, you look as if you’ve bitten into something rotten. What is it?’
‘“Rotten” is the word. That was the Earl of Darley.’
‘Sorry, do I know Lord Darley?’
‘I hope for your sake you do not.’
‘Holmes …’
‘He is what might be termed an amateur blackmailer.’
I shied away from the main classification. ‘Amateur? What would be the point of that?’
The objects of his dagger look having disappeared from the deck below, Holmes turned his scowl to the receding Gateway. ‘Perhaps “occasional” rather than “amateur”. James Darley is a famous clubman, an amiable aristocrat long on social connections and short on cash. I am fairly certain that he acted as informant for a French blackmailer by the name of Émile Paget. I was assisting the Surété with a case of extortion in early 1914, just before I went back to America in pursuit of Von Bork.1 Since German spies took priority over French extortionists, I was forced to abandon the investigation. In any event, they told me in June that they were closing in on Paget. Once War was declared, they lost sight of him. Permanently. They eventually decided he had been killed on the Front.’
‘Do you agree?’
‘I’ve yet to catch wind of him, so perhaps that is the case.’
‘And you’re fairly certain the blackmailer wasn’t actually Lord Darley?’
Reluctantly, Holmes shook his head. ‘I never thought he had the brains for independent planning.’
‘Well, have you any reason to think Darley is still active? Either on his own or working for some other blackmailer?’
‘Again, not that I’ve heard.’
‘I should think you would have.’ For both personal and professional reasons, Holmes detested blackmailers with a passion reserved for no other wrongdoer: he had witnessed, first hand and at an impressionable age, the devastation that can be wrought when a good person fears public shame. There was no doubt in my mind that any rumour of Darley’s continuing activities would have caught his attention.
‘It is possible,’ he admitted.
‘This is all the more reason to make certain we’re not seated at the Captain’s table,’ I said.
‘What if they are only going as far as Colombo?’
I prayed they would be. But then I realised what that would mean. ‘Oh, please don’t tell me you want to follow them off,’ I pleaded.
‘I shall ask the purser.’
‘Do that.’ That should give me time to come up with a good reason why we couldn’t hie off through Ceylon in pursuit of a gentleman crook.
‘Perhaps if we were at the Captain’s table, we might have the opportunity to—’
‘Holmes, no! Surely you can find something better to do for the next three weeks than listen in on a clubman’s inane conversation in hopes of catching him at something.’
To my relief, he did not persist. However, I would not leave it to chance, that we might be honoured by seats alongside the Captain and his most revered guests. Table assignments are what shipboard bribes are designed for.
We watched Bombay recede, then went below to arrange our possessions, and our bribes.
We had been in India since the middle of January, working on a case for Holmes’ brother Mycroft, recently concluded.2 Rather than turn back for England, we were now heading for California, where the pressure of my long-neglected family business could no longer be ignored.
It was also, truth be known, something of a holiday. Not that Holmes or I took holidays, but a change of focus can refresh the mind, and we intended to break our journey for a few days in southern Japan. As I unpacked my possessions in the sweltering cabin, I was aware of a distinct glow of satisfaction: for once, we were heading to a place as foreign to Holmes as it was to me. I would not be following in his footsteps, racing to catch up with skills he had mastered before I was even born.
While I arranged on a shelf the half-dozen books I had brought with me from England and never opened, then reached back into my case for the toiletries, Holmes flung a few odds and ends into a drawer, kicked his trunk under the bed, patted his pockets, drew out his cigarette case, and found it empty. With a grumble, he bent to drag the trunk back out from under the bunk. I sighed. It was going to be a long twenty-three days. Normally, we had more to keep us occupied during ocean voyages.
Perhaps I should turn him loose on Darley, after all? No, things would have to be desperate for that.
‘It is going to feel odd,’ I remarked, ‘to be on a ship without having a new language beaten into me.’
His voice came, rendered hollow by the lid of his trunk. ‘I thought I’d put the cigarettes in here. I don’t suppose they’re in your bags?’
‘No. You probably put them into the “trunks not wanted”.’ He rarely used the middle option of ‘wanted on journey’, being convinced he knew his own mind, and his own possessions.
‘Drat. Would it be cheaper to bribe the purser for access to the hold, or to buy onboard tobacco?’ he wondered aloud. ‘And, I’ve never beaten you.’
‘Metaphorically.’
He began to wrestle the trunk away. ‘You do not enjoy our intense language tutorials?’
‘Oh, I’ll admit they have their satisfactions’ – (chief among them: survival) – ‘but I don’t know that I’m masochist enough to use the word “enjoy”.’
‘I do wish I knew more than a few words of Japanese,’ he complained.
‘Perhaps there’s a phrasebook in the ship’s library.’
‘There isn’t.’
‘Well, there’s sure to be a native speaker onboard. Maybe down in third class – or in the engine room?’
‘I wonder where that girl went to.’
‘Which girl?’
‘The one who followed on the Darleys’ heels.’
‘You think she was Japanese?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Sorry, I find the various Oriental faces hard to distinguish.’
‘The Japanese tend to be longer in face and sharper in feature than the inhabitants of China or Korea. However, it’s more the way she held her body and that little bow she gave as she ducked around them.’
‘Well, if she’s in first she may have better things to do than give language lessons. You’d have better luck in second or third.’ I latched my trunk and slid it smoothly out of the way, then rose, brushing off my hands and reaching for a book. ‘I’m going for a nice peaceful read. You are welcome to borrow one of my books, but you are not to go through my trunk looking for something you imagine might be there.’
‘I shall let you know if I find a tutor.’
‘Holmes, I’m very happy to make use of a native guide, just this once.’ And so saying, I picked up my wide-brimmed hat and left the cabin, ignoring the disapproving glare against the back of my head.
A quick survey of the Thomas Carlyle gave me its layout: main deck below, promenade deck with our staterooms and first-class dining, boat deck above us with saloon bar, smoking room, and a few more elaborate staterooms. Above that was the sun deck, from which rose the ship’s bridge, wireless rooms, and the like. I claimed a relatively peaceful deckchair on the shaded promenade. Tropical coastline glided past. The damp pages turned. For two hours, absolutely nothing happened: no shots rang out, no tusked boars rampaged down the decks, no flimsy aeroplanes beckoned.
Normal life can be extraordinarily restful.
I came to the end of a chapter, and let myself surface. I had been aware of activity around me, voices bemoaning cabins and climate, exclaiming over chance-met friends, embarking on those preliminary conversations found among those who intend to engage fully in the compulsory social life of a sea voyage. But the racket had faded as I read, and now, closing the book, I found the area around me nearly devoid of passengers.
That indicated it was lunchtime. I stretched, luxuriously anticipating twenty-three days of enforced leisure, and – ‘You did not hear the bell, miss, I think?’
I jumped, completely unaware of any person so close behind me. I spun around on the cushions and found myself beneath the dark gaze of the small Japanese girl we had seen board.
Her features were, as Holmes had described, more angular than those of the Chinese people I had grown up around in San Francisco. She was wearing ordinary Western clothing, although her frock must have been made for her diminutive frame: put her in a frilly dress and bonnet and she’d pass for a child of ten. Even with her pleated skirt and pearls, she looked no more than fifteen – until she opened her mouth, and the urge to ask if her parents were onboard faded.
I realised that she’d asked me a question, and gave her a smile. ‘No, I don’t tend to spend much time below decks on a ship.’
‘Keezy?’
I listened to the word in my memory: queasy.
‘Fresh air is better,’ I agreed.
‘I feel right at home/Lazily drifting asleep/In my house of air.’ I raised my eyebrows politely.
‘Bashō,’ she told me. ‘One of my country’s greatest poets.’
I’d heard the name. I reflected on his words: finding comfort in a house made of air. I smiled, then climbed out of the deckchair and approached her, hand out. ‘Mary Russell. Headed for Nagasaki.’
Standing, she barely came to my chin. ‘Haruki Sato,’ she said, giving a slight emphasis to the Ha. ‘I go to Kobe.’ Her handshake was practised, although I vaguely recalled that hands were not much shaken in her country.
‘Am I right in thinking that in Japan you would be known as Sato Haruki?’
Her face lit up. ‘That is correct. Easier to turn names around than say to every European that no, I not “Miss Haruki”.’ She had a charming little gap between her front teeth, and she worked hard to push the R sound to the back of her tongue, away from the L. ‘Correct’ came out closer to collect, and ‘European’ – well, perhaps I could provide her with a synonym.
‘What about you?’ I asked Haruki-san. ‘Does the sea make you queasy as well?’
‘Western food make me kee—queasy,’ she said, giving it three syllables in an attempt at the W sound. ‘If I wait until all are finished, I can go talk the cook into some rice and vegetables.’
‘But you sound as if you’d spent time among Westerners.’ Beneath the accent, her English was more American than British, and too colloquial for language school. New York, my ear told me.
‘Over one year,’ she replied. ‘My father think that Japan’s future lies in its relations with the West.’
‘So, he sent you to school?’
‘NYU.’
Not school: university. ‘What did you read?’
Her eyebrows drew together. ‘Read? I read many—’
‘Sorry – I meant, what was your major field of study?’
‘Ah, so. Economic.’
Economics. ‘Does your family run a business? Sorry, that was nosey.’
‘Not at all. Economic is useful, yes, but not immediately to my family’s … “business”.’
I waited, not about to be caught out twice in the intrusive queries endemic to shipboard society. If she wanted to tell me, fine, but I would not enquire further.
To my surprise, she grinned, as if she’d read my thoughts. ‘I do not think you would ever guess the nature of my family’s emproyment.’
‘You’re probably right.’ The possibilities were extensive, given what little I knew of Japanese society: rickshaw runners, bamboo farmers, ninja assassins, pearl divers. Octopus fishermen.
She leant towards me a little. ‘If I say, will you promise not to tell the others? If it become known, it would be … distracting for me.’
Oh, heavens: she was from a long line of geisha? ‘Very well.’
‘We have been acrobats. For generations, my family performed for the royalty of Japan. Juggling, tightrope walking, gymnastics. My grandmother was the Emperor Meiji’s favourite contortionist.’
I was delighted: I’d never met a professional acrobat before. ‘How superb! What is your speciality?’
‘Oh, sorry, all that is the past. You see, when I was small, my father fell. From a wire. He was famous jester, you understand? Like – you know Harold Lloyd?’ It took me a moment to identify the name with its transposed Rs and Ls, but who didn’t know Harold Lloyd’s character with the round glasses, dangling from extraordinary situations and snatching victory from precarious perches? I nodded. ‘Father would fool on the high wire and do silly jokes.’
‘Stunts?’
‘Stunts, yes. His Majesty the Meiji Emperor laugh very hard at him. Father was so proud.
‘And then he fell. He near to died, but His Majesty sent his own doctors and he did not die, and then His Majesty sent his … anma. Massage man?’
‘Masseur.’
‘Yes, masseur. With them, Father learn to – learnt again to walk. But he could not work. And more, it made him look at what he wished for his children. He decided to move us away from the, um, uncertainties of life as an acrobat. He retired to the family ryokan – inn, of the traditional sort, with hot springs. When his uncle died, Father became its owner. Some years ago, he saw that the future of Japan lies in its relations with the West. He think, perhaps English-speaking tourists would be most happy to come to traditional inn, but one where their language is spoken, their food and customs understood. And so five year ago, Father send my cousin to university in London. Next, he send me – sent me – to America for one year. My younger brother will go to New York for school as well.’
I studied her exotic features, a question mark bubbling up on the heels of my initial delight. Shipboard life was conducive to self-invention. In the course of too many sea voyages, I’d met a ‘professional gambler’ who disembarked wearing a priest’s collar; a self-proclaimed dowager countess whom Holmes recognised as a brothel-owner; two remarkably indiscreet ‘secret agents’; seventeen married couples who weren’t; eight American retired Congressmen, three Senators, and a Vice President, only two of whom appeared in the Congressional Record; and enough superfluous Royals to fill a supplemental volume of Debrett’s. My approach to all was the same I gave Miss Sato now: a face of willing belief.
‘Fascinating. So you are on your way home?’
‘I am. Although not by a direct route – I decided to see something of the world on my way. But I will be very glad to get back to proper food. And an actual bath.’
‘I’ve heard about Japanese baths. They sound … interesting.’ They sounded like giant cannibal pots in which the sexes casually simmered shoulder to shoulder, but ‘interesting’ would do to begin with.
She was traditional enough to cover her mouth when she laughed. ‘Westerners do find them a puzzling side of Japan, it is true.’ The word ‘puzzling’ coming from her mouth made me want to pinch her cheeks.
‘As the Japanese no doubt find our beef pies and boiled vegetables. Although I agree, one disadvantage in travel is how it makes one crave certain foods.’
‘Wrapping her dumplings/In bamboo leaves, the girl’s hand/Tidies a stray lock.’
‘Bashō again?’
‘Bashō spent most of his life wandering; how he must have missed his mother’s cooking!’ She glanced down at her wristwatch. ‘I shall now go and smile at the cooks. Can I bring you something?’
‘No, thanks. They’ll come by with tea in a while.’
She gave a little grimace. ‘English tea, with milk: another thing I never learn to enjoy.’
She dipped her torso at me and walked away.
I watched her go, with two thoughts in my mind. First, that my chances of getting through the coming days without ‘intense tutorials’ had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. And two, for someone who was not being groomed as a gymnast, the slim figure disappearing down the steps possessed a lot of hard muscle.
1. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘His Last Bow’.
2. Details given in The Game.
CHAPTER FOUR
Pert gaze, quick sure flight.
What brings this lady sparrow
Onboard a great ship?
ASHORTTIME LATER, HOLMES found me, to deliver the news that the Darleys were not scheduled to abandon ship in Colombo. To the contrary, they planned to sail all the way to Japan. ‘Oh, good,’ I said gloomily.
‘You don’t sound too pleased, Russell.’
‘Holmes, I have several printed means of keeping the boredom at bay. I have no wish to hound the footsteps of a man who may or may not have had a criminal past, ten years ago. If you want something to do, why don’t you keep an eye on his son? He looks the sort who cheats at cards.’
Holmes paused in the act of lighting a cigarette. ‘Cards. Excellent idea, Russell. Thank you.’ He strode happily away. I sighed, and went back to my book. I would let the purser know that there was a hefty tip in it for him if he managed to transfer us onto a faster ship to Japan. Perhaps I could convince Holmes that Darley had recognised him?
I did not tell Holmes about Miss Sato, not then. I wanted to see what she would do next.
Were it not for the muscle, and the sharp intelligence in those black eyes, I would more readily have accepted her as nothing more than a fellow passenger. After all, a sea voyage goes more quickly if one has sympathetic company, and a woman on her own might be expected to seek out another of her kind, even if not of her race.
But there were other possible reasons for a stranger to seek me out. Yes, Sherlock Holmes was currently travelling under the name ‘Robert Russell,’ but neither of us was unknown, and this oh-so-casual meeting could be the preamble to any number of things. So I anticipated a second approach.
It did not come. She did emerge back on the deck after a time, carrying a book of her own, but merely nodded in a friendly fashion before settling into a shaded corner to read. A glance at the cover showed it to be a volume of Shakespeare’s plays, heavy going for someone to whom modern English was a foreign country. From the corner of my eye, I watched her struggles, and waited for her to put forward a question.
She did not. Two hours later, when she closed the book and stood up, I expected her to ‘notice’ me and resume our conversation. Instead, she briefly joined a group of fellow passengers exclaiming at a pod of dolphins riding our bow-wake, then went below without so much as a glance.
When the sun was hovering at the horizon, with the sea reassuringly calm, I went to the cabin to get ready for dinner – for which, it being the first night, formal dress was not required. In any event, I needed to survey the options for table companions. We had followed our standard shipboard survival plan of booking an entire table with the purser, telling him that we would provide the names later. Over the course of the day, I had identified a handful of candidates for the remaining seats: two solitary schoolteachers, a young wife travelling alone (but for a pair of small children and their omnipresent nanny), an elderly woman artist gone contentedly deaf, and a professor of botany from an American agricultural college. During pre-dinner cocktails in the Palm Lounge, each of these proved almost pathetically grateful to be invited to join us, and I was about to take the list of names to the purser (and tell him firmly that we would begin such arrangements tonight) when I spotted Miss Sato in the doorway.
She did not look fifteen years old now. Paint emphasised her mouth and eyes, heels brought her up to a more adult height, and her dress made the most of her boyish figure. Again I waited for an overture. Again, she gave me a friendly dip of the upper torso, then began threading her way through the crowded room towards another young Japanese woman a couple of inches taller than Miss Sato. The two greeted each other with bows rather than embraces, and their expressions seemed to contain the reserve of near-strangers. As I watched their apparently brittle conversation, I reflected that the vocabulary of non-verbal interactions was at times more foreign than a language: I could not tell if these two had recently met, or were long-time friends – or long-lost sisters. The two accepted drinks from the tray of a passing waiter. Within seconds, a pair of young American men came up, drawn like wasps around a picnic, causing shy giggles and knowing glances. Before long, several other Westerners, male and female, had joined them.
I felt almost jilted.
‘Whom are you studying so intently, Russell?’
I turned away from the social gathering with a wry smile. ‘A perfect innocent whom I suspected of hidden plots. Holmes, your misanthropy is contagious.’
‘The alert young lady with the muscles of a gymnast?’
‘Precisely! What gave her away?’
‘Less the build than the balance. A typhoon wouldn’t tip her over.’
‘Well, now she juggles books rather than clubs. She lingered on deck earlier, and I feared she might be playing up to me. It would appear that she was merely being friendly.’ I glanced at his fingernails, wrapped around a glass. He’d scrubbed away the engine-room grime, leaving the skin a bit raw: I for one had no intention of joining him for lessons from that instructor. ‘If you’re interested in language tutorials that don’t involve smothering heat and asphyxiating smoke, Miss Sato might be worth asking.’
Thus, from being a suspicious character, Miss Sato became a resource. We were too late to claim her for our table, but she dutifully introduced us to her friend, Fumiko Katagawa, and once I had reciprocated with my husband, ‘Mr Russell,’ the names began to run past us. The Americans were Clifford Adair from New York, dressed in a blinding white linen suit; Edward Blankenship from Iowa, whose evening wear looked borrowed from an elder brother; and Virginia and Harold Wilton, a shy brother and sister from Utah. There were two Australians, nearly identical brothers named John and James Arthur in rumpled tropical suits, who laughed loud and often and who both answered to the nickname of ‘Jack’.
Then came the five English travellers in my fellow group of under-thirties. Two of them knew no one onboard: an ebony-haired woman in her late twenties with a knowing look and the unlikely name of Lady Lucy Awlwright, and Harold Mitchell, a very young man headed for a job at an uncle’s business in Hong Kong, whose pronounced northern accent, spotty face and off-the-rack suit suggested he would find friendship here an ill fit. Two of the others were travelling together, an extended version of the Grand Tour that signalled their families’ enthusiasm to have them safely out from underfoot for a long time: Reginald Townsman and the Honourable Percy Perdue (‘I’m Reggie’ ‘Call me Percy’), both of whom were Eton and King’s College. They were acquainted with the other man, Thomas, Viscount Darley, the fair-haired snob who had so absurdly set my hackles on edge the moment he stepped down from the carriage in Bombay. I resolved to be friendly to him, to make up for the slight.
On a simple Atlantic crossing, the numbers of young and unattached passengers would have been much higher, but this was the end of the world when it came to wealthy Westerners, thus the population of the Thomas Carlyle was more heavily weighted to married couples in Colonial service, retired Europeans and Americans, and Asians from Subcontinental to Chinese.
No doubt there were more Westerners onboard, attached or otherwise, but on this first night out of Bombay, nine young men and two women drew together like nervous cattle, pulling into their sphere a pair of Japanese women, a delicate lad from Singapore, a stunning Parsee girl whose husband was abed with a sore tooth – and one Mary Russell.
With a murmur in my ear – ‘You “young things” are better without me’ – Holmes faded away. And it was true: once he had left, the younger men relaxed, their voices growing louder as they began to crow before the women and jostle for superiority.
In no time at all, aided by the emptying of glasses, the competition had sorted itself out on national lines, with the Australian brothers on one side, the four British men on the other, and the Americans undecided between them.
Talk veered, perhaps inevitably, into sport: specifically, the kind of football – or as the Americans called it, soccer – they had witnessed in India. At that point, Thomas Darley lifted his glass and said, ‘To the Colonies, long may they take our cast-offs.’
American and Australian eyes met, and a common loyalty was declared.
His indiscreet words, added to the slow and deliberate blink of his eyes, pointed to his being well on the way to drunkenness – which surprised me, as he did not seem to be drinking very rapidly. I kept an eye on him as I listened to the conversation, nodding at random points, and saw the deft way in which he stepped aside to take a drink from a passing tray, then reinserted himself into the circle next to Miss Sato. He sipped from his glass and made a remark that brought a gust of laughter. A few minutes later, he raised his hand to make another comment. When he lowered it again, somehow it ended up across Miss Sato’s shoulder.
She gave Miss Katagawa an uncomfortable little smile and tittered into her hand, but the arm remained heavily in place. After a while, he lowered his head to say something into her ear. She replied, he said something else – but at her next response, his grin locked. He drew back slightly. A few moments later, his possessive hand dropped from her shoulder and slid with feigned nonchalance into his pocket.
What had she said? He was charming (that sinister word again) and educated and clearly had money at his command: if he hadn’t emerged as the leader of the ship’s rich, bored and unattached populace by mid-day tomorrow, I would eat my cloche. He looked about my age – twenty-four – which meant that either he had not seen active service during the War, or if he had, it was limited to the final months. He also looked to be exaggerating his drunkenness as an excuse for misbehaviour.
A few minutes later, he repeated the ritual of freshening his glass, using it to end up beside the Awlwright girl. No: perhaps I would not reconsider my initial impression of young Darley. But as his absence created a space beside Miss Sato, I moved into it.
‘Mrs Russell,’ she said, with that charming little half-bow. ‘Not so queasy now?’
‘Much better, thank you. But I have to ask. What did you tell the Viscount that put him off?’
The look she gave me was wide-eyed and oh-so-demure. ‘He ask me where I live in Japan. I tell him, Kobe, where my father is big manufacture of guns. Also my four brothers.’
I laughed; she raised her glass, and her dark eyes sparkled at me over the rim. ‘Well, for fear of inviting a similar rebuke, my husband and I have a rather different kind of proposal for you. We wondered if you might be interested in teaching two foreigners a bit of Japanese, both language and customs?’
She demurred, on the grounds that she was a poor teacher.
‘I can understand if you’re not interested, but we would be happy to pay you.’
At that, she turned pink and tittered through her fingers. ‘Oh, no, I could not take your money!’
‘Still, think about it. We’d be grateful for any time you could give us, paid or not.’
‘But I would be most happy to meet with you and talk about Japan, teach you useful phrases. Many people in America did such for me. This would repay some kindness.’
‘Say, I’d like to learn a little Jap-talk – er, that is, Japan-talk, too.’ This from the corn-fed Iowan, Mr Blankenship.
I realised belatedly that I should not have made my request in such a public venue, since every young man in earshot chimed in to say they’d love Japanese lessons, too, followed (with a degree less enthusiasm) by the women. I started to object, then thought the better of it. Instead, I extended my hand to my petite neighbour. ‘That is most generous of you, Miss Sato. Shall we say seven o’clock tomorrow morning, in the library?’
The early hour rather deflated the interest of the others, which was what I’d had in mind, but Miss Sato gave a little bob and said she would see us then.
When the dinner bell sounded, Holmes collected me for our stroll down the grand stairway to the first-class dining room, and our chosen table. He claimed a chair with a clear view of the Captain’s table: I did not comment, merely greeted our invited fellows as they arrived, making introductions all the while. A few deft questions dispelled any awkwardness, and soon the table was launched into the discovery of shared enthusiasms. When the purser came by with his seating chart, halfway through the fish course, none at our table indicated that they might be moving elsewhere.
The two schoolteachers – a man and a woman – discovered a mutual passion for Greek mythology. The deaf artist, when she’d had the topic shouted into her ear, happily turned the page on her small sketchbook and began to punctuate the conversation with a series of witty (and occasionally risqué) interpretations of Olympus, with Zeus bearing a striking resemblance to our Captain and Athena wearing a pair of spectacles remarkably like mine. Even the botany professor chimed in, with his opinion that the rites of Dionysius were fuelled not by wine but by a particular mountain herb, and that led to a merry debate on poisonous plants and the difficulties of determining cause of death. All in all, an auspicious beginning for a lengthy voyage.
Holmes, in between comments and food consumption, kept his eye on the Captain’s table. I, too, glanced that way from time to time, but all I could tell was that Lady Darley and her stepson were (as happened, when inheritances were on the line) barely on speaking terms, and that she was more quick-witted than her husband. Still, even in his slowness, Darley possessed a certain easygoing attraction. The Captain seemed honestly to enjoy him, and certainly the rest of the table laughed at his remarks. Granted, one might expect a blackmailer to have mastered the art of easy banter, as a tool to disarm the unwary, but easygoing conversation did not a villain make. Some men just liked to talk.
We came to the meal’s end. The schoolteachers shyly agreed to risk an attempt at the after-dinner dancing. The artist tore off a few sketches and handed them around. While the botany professor went off to examine the contents of one of the large flower arrangements, the young mother said in a wistful voice that she ought to go and see if her children needed her – then rapidly allowed the two schoolteachers to talk her into just a few minutes of dancing.
