The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor (66 page)

I
HAD LESS
success with Margery, who had regained what small amount of equanimity she had lost and now dismissed the danger. I reasoned, I pled, and finally I lost my temper and shouted at her, but without the slightest effect. She maintained that the attack had been a fluke and insisted she was in no danger; she would not restrict her movements or hire a bodyguard. I charged to my feet and loomed over her.

“I have not to this point considered you a stupid woman, but I am rapidly changing my mind. You obviously don’t care about your own skin, but what about mine? I could have been killed. A quarter of an inch more and I could have lost the strength of my writing hand. What about next time? Who will be with you then? What will she lose? A pretty coat? Or her life? Margery, ask Inspector Richmond to recommend a bodyguard—only for a week or two, until they solve it. Martyrdom is great for the ego, but I personally have always considered it a waste.”

She sat rigid, debating whether or not to have Marie throw me out, but she did hear my words, and after a while she wilted.

“I will think about it, Mary,” she said quietly, and we finished the evening’s lesson with no further furore.

  17  

SATURDAY, 22 JANUARY–TUESDAY, 1 FEBRUARY

Nature . . . paints them to be weak, frail, impatient,
feeble, and foolish, and experience has declared them to
be unconstant, variable, cruel, and lacking the
spirit of counsel and regiment.

—
JOHN KNOX

M
OST OF THE
passengers left the train in Reading. We sat for a few minutes in the station, carriage doors opening and closing several times, and then the train gave a shudder and we started up. I settled back with my book, eyelids heavy, although I was aware of a not-unpleasant blend of anticipation and apprehension as Friday’s public presentation approached.

Ever since I had met Margery Childe, I had been torn, mentally and physically, and above all spiritually, between the London that she shared with Holmes and my own comfortable Oxford. For nearly four weeks, I seemed to have shuttled back and forth, in my mind and on this train, increasingly aware that a choice was being prepared for me to make. Now, however, whether because of the assertiveness I had
shown to Holmes or the irritation I had felt with Margery, I felt considerably distanced from the problems the two of them represented. As the miles clicked by, I even began to reflect that, actually, one could almost look on the entire period since Christmas as a sort of holiday, an interesting and piquant interlude, possessed of an intellectual challenge, picturesque natives, a murder for spice, and the whole business tied up neatly before it threatened to trespass onto real life. I had renewed an old friendship and now cherished the addition of Margery Childe to my circle of acquaintances. Even the prickly state of affairs with Holmes had shown signs that the prickles were losing their more threatening points. Given time, and perhaps distance, that friendship might yet be maintained.

However, it was finished now—intoxicating feminists, doers of Good Deeds, and tutors with disturbingly male characteristics—an episode to be pulled out and remembered with fond amusement in the distant future. But now, Friday: a clear goal, known obstacles, all opponents out in the open, a hard challenge, but one I had been preparing myself for since I entered Oxford at the age of seventeen. Margery Childe, Veronica Beaconsfield, Miles Fitzwarren, and Sherlock Holmes were in a box labelled
LONDON
, and this short train journey should serve to close the top on it and place it, albeit temporarily, on a shelf.

Truly, honestly, I must never think these things.

Hubris was shattered without warning when my compartment door was calmly opened by a medium-sized man wearing a tweed ulster and an obviously false black beard, a disguise that effectively concealed the lower half of his face but could not hide the eyes. I did not need the gun barrel pointed at my chest to tell me what the man was, for I had seen such eyes before: This was a killer. Worse, there was intelligence there, as well as a distinct gleam of liquid pleasure. I sat very still. He closed the door behind him.

“Miss Russell,” he said, very businesslike. “You have two choices: I can shoot you here and now, or you can swallow a mixture I have with
me and become my prisoner for a few days. Obviously, the fact that I have not already used my gun indicates that I prefer the latter; bullets are unimaginative and do distressing things to human flesh, and the noise they make increases my personal risk of capture. That may appeal to you, but I assure you that you will be in no condition to feel satisfaction at my arrest. I suggest you choose the sleeping draught.”

The unreality of his entrance and the melodrama of his words robbed me of speech. I sat gaping at him for a long minute before I found my tongue.

“Who are you?”

“If I told you that, Miss Russell, I could hardly let you free again.”

“Free me? I should drink your poison quietly and save you the trouble?”

“You choose the bullet, then? So very final, that choice. No chance of escape, of subverting or overcoming your gaolers, of changing my mind.” He cocked the gun.

“No. Wait.” It is very difficult to think with the end of a revolver in one’s face. He was, quite clearly, a thug, with a heavy veneer of sophistication over an uneducated accent. Only a man who feared calloused hands spent time at a manicurist’s. Still, there were brains alongside the brutality: not a pleasant combination. “What is in the mixture?”

“I told you: a soporific, standard medical issue, suspended in brandy. It’s a decent brandy, too, if that matters to you. You will smell as if you were drunk, but you will sleep three or four hours, perhaps a little longer, depending on your sensitivity to the drug. You have one minute to decide,” he said, and stood calmly just inside the door of the compartment.

“Why?” I asked desperately.

“We need you out of the way for a bit. We had thought merely to kidnap you, drop a bag over your head or put chloroform to your face, perhaps a needle in a crowd. However, your little demonstration yesterday night made us a bit wary of your skills at defending yourself. It
was decided that the only options were those that kept us at a distance from you, while we were in public places where a prolonged struggle might draw attention.”

Lies and truth mixed together. I thought he was telling me the truth about what the mixture contained; I thought he was telling the truth when he spoke of keeping me prisoner; I thought he was lying when he said he would turn me free. I also felt I knew who he was—not that I had set eyes on him before, but Ronnie had described just such a man. Although he did not strike me as “gorgeous” under the circumstances, I had no doubt that this was Margery Childe’s dark, Mediterranean gangster. I had never felt so alone.

“Thirty seconds,” he said, without looking at a watch.

Perhaps, if I might get him to come closer . . . I nodded coldly and held out my hand.

His left hand went into an inner pocket and brought out a small decorated silver flask. He did not, however, bring it to me as I’d hoped, but tossed it onto the seat beside me. I put down my book and took up the flask, which was slightly warm from his body heat. I removed the stopper, sniffed it deeply: brandy, and something else. No bitter almonds, at any rate, or any of the other poisons that had an odour. I raised it to my mouth and wetted my tongue—again, no immediate taste of poison, but there was a familiar bitter undertaste, reminiscent of hospitals. I knew the taste; everything in me, body and mind, screamed against swallowing it. The thought of becoming unconscious in the hands of a man like this was intolerable, impossible. But would he use the gun, or was it a bluff? I looked into his eyes, and I knew with a certainty that it was no bluff. To fight in this small compartment would be suicide. Which, then, was it to be: a bullet or the chance of poison? I knew enough about poisons to be certain that the flask did not contain arsenic or strychnine, but that left a hundred others, from aconitine, which would kill with an imperceptible amount, to—

“Ten seconds.”

It would have to be a poison that acted very quickly, because this
train ended its run in Oxford, and if I were found alive, I might be saved; at the least, I would be capable of setting the police on his trail. The decision made itself, prompted, I think, less by logic than by the irrational conviction that he was telling me a degree of the truth, and that being a prisoner was preferable to death. I raised the flask at the same instant his arm was beginning to straighten out, then drank deeply.

“Drink it all,” he said, and I did, coughing and eyes watering, then held it out upside down to demonstrate that it was empty. One drop fell to the floor, but his eyes remained on me.

“Put it on the seat and relax. It takes a few minutes.”

He continued to stand with his back to the door. I continued to sit and stare at him, feeling after some miles as if this were one of the more avant-garde of the French plays that had recently become popular among the arty set. Perhaps this is the moment for me to make a forceful remark about my left toenail or the age of the sun, I thought flippantly, and then I felt the first quivers of impending unconsciousness as the drug began to descend on my nervous system.

A movement behind my would-be captor sent my heart thudding in wild anticipation, until I realised that the man looking in the door over the tweed shoulder also wore a false beard. Swooping disappointment made me peevish, and I opened my mouth to complain at the lack of imagination in their disguises, but to my consternation, what came from my mouth bore little resemblance to English. The newcomer looked at me and spoke from a great distance.

“She ain’t asleep yet?”

“In a minute. She’s not far—” And at his words, the compartment began to close in on me. My field of vision narrowed, from luggage racks and seats to the figures crowding the doorway, to two heads and a torso, and finally to the small scar that emerged from the false moustache and puckered the first man’s lip, and the word
far
reverberated in my brain as FARFARFarFarfarfarfarfar and erased me.

W
HEN I WOKE
, I was blind.

I was also violently and comprehensively ill onto the cold, hard surface I lay on, and when eventually I turned with a groan to escape the noxious stuff, I found that most of my body was in direct contact with the stones. Blind, stripped to my underclothing, and ill, I thought muzzily. Mary Russell, this is going to be very unpleasant. I laid my hot face back onto the cool stones and thought no more.

The second time I woke, I was still blind, still nearly naked, and felt just as ill. I did not vomit, although the sharp stink in the air made it a temptation and my mouth tasted unspeakably foul. I clawed my swarming hair out of my face, ran an automatic knuckle up the bridge of my nose to shove my absent spectacles into place, and then with an effort pushed myself upright. I wished I had not. My head pounded, my stomach quivered, and the darkness seemed to become denser, but I stayed sitting, and slowly I recovered.