A Letter of Mary (31 page)

"For heaven's sake, Holmes, she's just an old granny, not a Napoléon of crime."

I should have known that the phrase would tip him over the edge into an icy rage.

"It's a damned good thing for Lestrade's lot that she's too much a middle-class English woman to turn her hands to crime. Napoléon went to war, but she's satisfied herself with one brief, self-righteous campaign, and now she's captured her goal— whatever the deuces it might have been— she's entrenched. The police will never prise her out on their own. No, I ought never to have listened to you and Mycroft. If we'd kept Scotland Yard out of it, I might have got to her without giving warning, but now it's going to mean weeks, months of delicate, painstaking, cold, and uncomfortable work, and I tell you honestly, Russell, I'm feeling too old and tired to relish the thought very much."

His last bleak phrase deflated any reciprocal anger I might have summoned. I sat while he fished a crumpled packet of Gold Flakes from his pocket and lit one. He looked out the window; I looked at the cigarette.

"Since when have you taken to gaspers again?" I asked mildly, more mildly than I felt, seeing the sucks and puffs of nervous anger.

"Since I first laid eyes upon Erica Rogers. She's not the only one with premonitions." That cut it. I took a deep breath.

"Holmes, look. We will get her. Give me a week to tie things up in Oxford, and then we can go after them. Or to Paris, or Palestine, if you think there's anything there."

He snatched the cigarette from his lips and dashed it to the floor, ground it under his heel, and immediately took out the packet again.

"No, Russell, I'll do this myself. I can hardly expect you to sacrifice your firstborn for the cause."

I was furious and crushed and obviously superfluous in the compartment, so rather than making matters worse, I left and walked up the train to stand staring out the window at the gathering clouds and sea drizzle.

This was by no means the first failure Holmes had had, but it rankled to be defeated by a woman of no great wits, her lumpish grandson, and a small-time crook. Holmes, too, had been touched by Dorothy Ruskin, and it was hard not to feel that we had let her down. The dead have a claim on us even heavier than that of the living, for they cannot hear our explanations, and we cannot ask their forgiveness.

I knew, however, that what disturbed him most was the thought that he had failed me. He knew the affection and respect I had had for Dorothy Ruskin, and it could only have been devastating to know that all his skills were not enough. I did not hold him to blame, and I had tried to make it clear that I did not, but nonetheless, for the first time he had on some level failed me.

However, I had to admit that he had been right, yet again, back there in the compartment: Were I to lay down my academic career, even temporarily, in order to expiate my guilt and bolster his ego, it could well prove damaging to the strange creature that was our marriage. On the other hand, were I to lay the books aside out of my own free choice— well, that was another matter entirely.

I had known Holmes for a third of my life and had long since accustomed myself to the almost instantaneous workings of his mental processes, but even after two years of the intimacy of marriage, I was able to feel surprise at the unerring accuracy of his emotional judgement. Holmes the cold, the reasoner, Holmes the perfect thinking machine, was, in fact, as burningly passionate as any religious fanatic. He had never been a man to accept the right action for the wrong reason, not from me, at any rate: He demanded absolute unity in thought and deed.

Oh, damn the man, I grumbled. Why couldn't he just be manipulated by pretty words the way other husbands were?

* * *

The train slowed. I climbed down and walked back along the platform to help Holmes with the bags. We got the car running, I drove back to the cottage, and we went about our separate tasks, with barely a word exchanged— not in anger, but in emptiness. He went out late in the afternoon. After an hour or so, I laced on my boots against the wet grass and followed. I found him on the cliff overlooking the ocean, one leg dangling free, the smell of a particularly rancid brand of tobacco trailing downwind. We sat in silence for some time, then walked home.

That evening, he picked at his dinner, drank four glasses of wine, and ignored the accumulation of newspapers spilling from the table near the door. Later, he sat staring into the fire, sucking at an empty pipe. He had aged since that fragrant August afternoon so long ago, when we had drunk tea and honey wine and walked the Downs with a woman who would be dead in a few hours.

"Have we overlooked anything?" I had not meant to speak, but the words lay in the room now.

For a long moment, he did not respond; then he sighed and tapped his teeth with the stem of the pipe.

"We may have done. I don't know yet. I begin to doubt my own judgement. Not overlooking things used to be my métier," he said bitterly, "but then they do say it's notoriously difficult to see what one has overlooked until one trips over it."

Like a taut wire on a street corner, I thought, and thrust it away with words.

"She told me that afternoon that it was the most pleasurable day she could remember for a long time, coming here. At least we gave her that." I shut my eyes, encouraging the brandy to relax my shoulder and my tongue, to push back the silence with a tumbling stream of reminiscence. "I wonder if she knew it was coming. Not that she seemed apprehensive, but she mentioned the past several times, and I shouldn't have thought that like her. She used to come here as a child, she told me. She was also fond of you. Perhaps
fond
is not the right word," I said, though when I looked, he didn't seem to be listening. "Impressed, perhaps. Respectful. She was intrigued by you. What was it she said? 'One of the three sensible men I've ever met,' I think it was, grouping you with a French winemaker and a polygamous sheikh." I smiled to myself at the memory.

"I'll never forget meeting her at her tell outside Jericho, coming up over the edge and there's this little white-haired English woman glaring up at us from the bottom of the trench, as if we had come to steal her potsherds. And that house of hers, that incredible hotchpotch of stone and baked-earth bricks and flattened petrol drums, and inside a cross between a Bedouin tent and an English cottage, with great heaps of things in the process of being classified and sketched and a silver tea service and a paraffin heater and block-and-board shelving sagging with books and gewgaws. She had a handful of exquisite pieces, didn't she? Like that ivory puzzle ball." I sipped my brandy, so lost in the memory of those exciting few weeks in Palestine that I could almost smell the dusty night air of Jericho.

"Do you remember that ball? Odd, wasn't it, that she should have a Chinese artefact? Such a lovely thing it was, with that pearl buried in it. She mentioned it, come to think of it, when I was driving her back to the station. You made quite an impression on her, the way your hands seemed to figure it out by themselves while you carried on with some story about Tibet. I wonder what happened to it? It looked so incongruous on those bare planks, like the silver tea set complete with spirit burner pouring Earl Grey tea through the silver strainer into rough clay—"

I stopped abruptly. Something had changed in the room, and I sat up startled, half expecting to see someone standing in the doorway, but there was no one. I pulled out my handkerchief and wiped the spilt brandy from my hand and the knee of my trousers, then took up the glass again to settle back into the cushions, but when I turned to my companion to make some sheepish remark about the state of my nerves, the words strangled unborn. Meeting his eyes was like brushing against a live electrical wire, a humming shock so sudden, my heart jerked. He had not moved. In fact, he sat so still in his chair that he looked as if he might never move again, but his eyes glittered out from the hardened brow and cheekbones, intent and alive.

"What did you say, Russell?" he asked quietly.

"How incongruous the ball and the tea set looked—"

"Before that."

"How she saw your hands as an extension of your mind when—" I stopped. The barest beginnings of a smile lurked in the grey eyes opposite me, and I continued slowly, "when you opened the ball."

"Yes."

"Dear God in heaven. Master of the Universe, how could I have been so unutterably dense?"

"Bring the box, will you please, Russell?"

I flew up the stairs to the heap of bags I had thrown in a corner and returned with the gleaming little depiction of paradise that was the Italian box. I held it out to Holmes. He took up his heavy magnifying glass, and after a minute he shook his head in self-disgust and handed both objects to me. Once I knew to look, I could easily see that the decorative carved line forming the lower border was not just a surface design, but a crack, no wider than a hair. The box had a secret base, but there was not the remotest hint of a latch or keyhole.

"I'm not going to tear this box apart, Holmes," I said, though we both knew that it might come to that, and the realisation brought a sharp, almost physical pain.

"I shall endeavour to prevent that from becoming necessary," Holmes said absently, absorbed in the box.

"Do you think you can open it?"

"Dorothy Ruskin thought I could. She may have been impressed by my parlour trick, but I doubt that it led her to endow me with godlike abilities. I don't suppose she made offhand mention of any of the box's attributes, as a help?"

"Not that I remember."

"Then it should not be terribly difficult. Ah, here. May I borrow a hairpin, Russell?"

He found the tiny pressure points fairly quickly— two of the giraffe's jet spots and one of the monkey's eyes had infinitesimal and unnoticed dents in the adjoining wood— but beyond that he was wrong, it was difficult, extraordinarily so considering the age of the thing. After two hours, he had found that by pressing in a certain sequence with varying pressures, he could loosen the bottom, but it would not come free. I went to make coffee, and when I brought it in, he was looking as frustrated as I have ever seen him.

"Leave it for a while," I suggested, pouring.

"I shall have to. The nearness of it is maddening." He stood up, stretched the kinks from his back, placed his right hand gently on the box, and leant forward to take his cup. We both heard the click, and we looked down at the thing, every bit as astonished as if it had addressed us. He gingerly spread his fingers around it and lifted the top and sides away from the base. A clockwork intricacy of brass latches and gears lay revealed and, pushed down between the works and the wooden side, a tight roll of paper resembling a long, thin cigarette, tied in the middle with a length of black thread. Holmes picked it out with a fingernail and held it out to me. I rubbed my suddenly sweaty palms on my trousers, then took it.

It was a letter, tiny, crowded words on half a dozen small sheets of nearly transparent onionskin paper, and I had a sudden image of Dorothy Ruskin bent over her hotel table with the magnifying glass. I read her words aloud to Holmes.

"Dear Miss Russell,

Were I not blessed with the ability to appreciate the humour in any trying situation, this one would verge on the macabre. I sit here at my shaky desk in a distinctly third-rate Parisian hotel, writing to a young woman whom I met but once— and that several years previously— in the hopes that she and her husband will choose to make enquiries should I die a suspicious death whilst in my homeland, despite the fact that I will have given them no hints, no clues, no reason to believe that someone wants my death. Indeed, I am not at all sure that I do have reason to believe it.

A peculiarly amusing situation.

I have spent several days trying to imagine the circumstances under which you will read this, if indeed you ever do. Are you investigating my death? What a queer sensation comes with writing those words! And if your answer is in the affirmative, how might I respond? 'I'm pleased to hear that' seems inappropriate, somehow. And yet, if that is what you are doing, if that has led you to this letter, it would give me the— surely
satisfaction
is not the right word?— of knowing that my inchoate, illogical fears were entirely justified.

Again, a most peculiar situation.

But, enough meandering. I intend to visit you in your Sussex home and leave with you this box, the manuscript, and, incidentally, these contents of the secret compartment. I shall have to find a means of planting in your mind the possibility that the box can be opened and do so casually enough to be natural, yet firmly enough that you remember it later if the need should arise. If I have failed in the first instance, and your curiosity has led you to open the box while I am still alive, then I beg you, please, to replace the following document in the box and have a good laugh over the imagination of an old woman. If I fail in the second instance and you do not remember my dropped hints, well, then, I am writing this for the chance, future amusement of a total stranger, and my precautions have been for naught.

It is ridiculous. It is foolish of me, and I am not accustomed to doing foolish things. I have no evidence that I will die, no signs or portents or threatening letters in the post. And yet ... I am filled with a strange dread when I think of crossing the Channel, and I want to turn for home, to Palestine. I cannot do that, of course, but I also cannot ignore this odd, compelling feeling of menace and finality. It is not death that I fear, Miss Russell. Death is a person with whom I have some passing acquaintance, and if anything, it is a motherly figure who holds out forgiving, welcoming arms. I do, however, dread the thought that my work, my life, will die with me. If I return to Palestine, I intend to work out more fully the details of how my estate, minor as it may be, might best be put to support the archaeological effort there. This letter is merely insurance. I have no time to have a proper will drawn up, so I have written and signed a holograph will, witnessed by two of my fellow guests in this hotel. It clearly states my wishes and intentions regarding the disbursement of my estate. You will please take it to the appropriate authorities, whom, no doubt, you know better than I.