The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor (90 page)

I became aware, with that logic of dreams, that I was younger than I had thought, that my feet were imprisoned in the heavy corrective buttoned shoes I had worn until I was six, and that the shoes came nowhere near the end of the couch. Dr Ginzberg waited, silent, in her chair behind me. I drew up my right foot and pushed with the heavy shoe against the leather, then twisted my body around to look at her.

Her hair had gone white, and instead of being gathered into its heavy chignon, it flared in an untidy bowl around her ears. She wore a pair of black, black glasses, like two round holes staring out from her face, hiding all expression. What bothered me most, though, was not her appearance—for she was still Dr Ginzberg, I knew that—but the fact that she held in her hands not her normal notepad but an object that looked like a small Torah scroll, spread across one knee while she made notes on it.

She stopped writing and tilted her head at me.

“Yes?”
Ja
.

I felt comforted, but gave a last glance at the scroll on her lap, and then I noticed her hands. They had wide, blunt fingers, and no ring, and a thick fuzz of dark copper hairs covered their backs. After a moment, the hands capped the pen, clipped it over the top of the scroll, and reached up for the black, black spectacles. I watched her hands rise slowly, slowly from her lap, past her ordinary shoulders, to her temples, and as they began to pull at the earpieces, I saw the shape of her head, the flat wrongness of it, and with a rush of childish terror I knew that I did not want to see the eyes behind those dark lenses, and I sat up with a moan strangling in my throat.

The boardinghouse seemed to throb with movement, but it was only the pounding in my ears. The shabby furnishings, grey in the light that seeped through the ungenerous curtains, were at once comforting and inordinately depressing. I sighed, considered and discarded the thought of finding the kitchen and making myself a hot drink, and
squinted at the bedside clock. Ten minutes past four. I sighed again, put on my dressing gown, lit the gas lights, and reached for the colonel’s manuscript.

It was not time wasted. By the time dawn overtook the streetlamp, I had confirmed a few hypotheses, drawn others into question, and given myself something to think about during the day.

T
HE DAY PROVED
to contain a surfeit of things to think about, even without the manuscript. The first was the figure who greeted me as I entered the study: The son had arrived home from Scotland. He looked up from his coffee and gifted me with what I’m sure he thought of as a captivating grin, which might have been had it reached his eyes.

“’Allo, ’allo, ’allo, the pater’s new secretary is certainly an improvement over the last one. I see he didn’t tell you that the prodigal was coming home. Gerald Edwards, at your service.” He was the quintessential 1923-model final-year Cambridge undergraduate, sprawled with studied negligence across the maroon leather armchair, dressed
in the height of fashion in an amazing yellow shantung lounge suit. His dark hair was slicked back, and he wore a fashionable air of disdainful cynicism on his face, with a watchful awareness in his bloodshot eyes. He made no move to stand, merely watched my body move across to the desk and bend down to tuck my handbag into a drawer. I straightened to face him and answered smoothly.

“I’m Mary Small, and no, he didn’t mention it. Is he here?”

“He’ll be down in a tick. We were up until some very wee hours last night, and the old
sarx
doesn’t recover as fast when you’re Father William’s age, does it?”

Looking back, I do not know what it was that raised my hackles at that point. His use of a Greek word to a marginally educated secretary could have been innocent, but somehow I knew, instantly, that it was not. The mind could not justify it, but the body had no doubts, and my heart began to pound with the certainty that this unlikely young man suspected that he was talking with no innocent secretary. Here was danger, totally unexpected, perceptible danger. I used bewilderment to cover my confusion.

“I’m sorry, I thought his name…What did you say about sharks?”

“
Sarx
, my dear Miss Small,
sarx
.
Corpus
, you know, this too, too solid and all that. But surely you know Greek, if this is yours.” He held up yesterday’s dictated notes and watched me calmly. “I mean, this isn’t Greek, though it’s Greek to me, but there are a goodly smattering of thetas and alphas.”

“Oh, yes,
sarx,
sorry. Actually, I don’t know an awful lot of Greek, or Hebrew, which is the other language there. Don’t you use this system at Cambridge? Your father did tell me you were there, I think?”

“Aha, a secret Oxford hieroglyphic, is it? How did you learn it?”

“Well, actually, it was…I mean, well, there was this boy who taught it to me one summer.”

“Taught you Oxford shorthand, eh, on a punt up the river? And did you learn a lot, moored beneath the overhanging branches?” He
hooted most horribly, and I felt my face flush, though not, as he thought, with embarrassment. “Look at her blush! Oh, Pater, look at your secretary, blushing so prettily.”

“Good morning, Mary. I didn’t hear you come in. Is my son teasing you?”

“Good morning, Colonel. No, he only thinks he is. Pardon me, I’d like to get those letters typed.” I retrieved my notebook, and the temptation to kick one long fashionably clad young limb as I passed was strong, but I resisted. Russell, I thought as I wound the paper into the machine, that young man is going to be a capital
P
Problem, even if you’re wrong about his suspicious nature. Roving hands and a happy drinker, Rosie had said. Of the first, I had no doubt.

And so it proved during the day. While the colonel was off dressing, young Edwards perched on the desk where I was typing and undressed me with his eyes. I ignored him completely, and through tremendous effort, I made not a single typing error. After lunch, at which he drank four glasses of wine, he began to find excuses to brush past me.

In between episodes of avoiding the son, the father and I got on with our work. That afternoon, I reviewed the manuscript with him, made hesitant suggestions for expanding one chapter and reversing the positions of two others, and extended his outline for the remainder of the book. He sat back, well satisfied, and rang for tea. I accepted his offer of a cigarette and steadied the hand that held the gold lighter.

“So, Mary, what do you make of it?”

“I found it very informative, Colonel, though I haven’t much background in the political history of Egypt.”

“Of course you don’t. I’m glad you find it interesting. What about going to Oxford the first part of the week and getting on with a bit of that research, eh? Think you could handle it?”

“Oh yes, I know my way around the Bodleian.” I paused, wondering if I should ask one of the questions that had come to me in the night.

“Something else on your mind, Mary?”

“Well, yes, now that you mention it. It occurred to me, after I read it, that you make very little of the activities of women.” That was putting it mildly: His two mentions of the female sex were both highly disparaging, one of them almost rabid in its misogyny. “Had you planned on—”

“Of course I haven’t put women into it,” he cut me off impatiently. “It’s a book on politics, and that’s a man’s world. No, in Egypt the women have their own little world, and they don’t worry themselves about the rest.”

“Not like here, is it?” I deliberately kept my manner noncommittal, but he flared up with a totally unexpected and unwarranted violence, as if I had taunted him.

“No, by Jove, it isn’t like here, all these ugly sluts running around screaming about emancipation and the rights of women. Overeducated and badly spoilt, the lot of them. Should be given some honest work to do.” His face was pale with fury, and his narrowed eyes fixed on me with suspicion. “I hope to God you’re not one of them, Miss Small.”

“I’m sorry, Colonel Edwards, one of whom?”

“The insufferable suffragettes, of course! Frustrated, ugly old biddies like the Pankhursts, with nothing better to do than put ideas into the heads of decent women, making them think they should be unhappy with their lot.”

“Their lot being laundry and babies?” He did not know me well enough, but Holmes could have told him he was walking on paper-thin ice. I become very quiet and polite when I am angry.

“It’s a Godly calling, Miss Small, is motherhood, a blessed state.”

“And the calling of being a secretary, Colonel?” I couldn’t help it; I was as furious as he was, though where he looked ready to go for my throat, I had no doubt that I appeared calm and cool. I readied myself for an explosion, at the very least for the drawer to be emptied over my head, but to my astonishment, his face relaxed and the colour flooded back in. He suddenly sat back and began to laugh.

“Ah, Mary, you’ve got spirit. I like that in a young woman. Yes, you’re a secretary now, but not forever, my dear, not forever.”

I understood then, in a blinding flash of rage at his complacent, self-satisfied condescension, the deep revulsion a smiling slave feels for the master. It took every last iota of my control to smile wryly, take up my pen with my trembling hands, and move across to my place at the typewriter. At the same time, singing through me alongside the rage and the remnants of a fear I could not justify, was the triumphant sureness that here, at last, as clearly as if he had dictated it, was a motive for the murder of one Dorothy Elizabeth Ruskin.

I
EXCUSED MYSELF
from dinner with a headache and insisted that the following evening I had an unbreakable engagement with a cousin. Yes, perhaps Sunday, we should talk about it tomorrow. No, the headache was sure to be gone by morning, and I should be happy to come in tomorrow. No, it was a pleasant evening, the rain had let up, and no doubt the fresh air would help my head. No need for Alex to turn out. I bid good night to Colonel and Mr Edwards.

I walked the two miles to the boardinghouse through crowded streets, and though my toes hurt, my not entirely fictitious headache had cleared by the time I let myself in the front door. Twice during the walk, I felt the disturbing prickle of someone watching, but when I casually turned to browse in the windows, there were too many people on the streets to enable me to pick out one trailer. Nerves, no doubt, the same nerves that made me overreact to the colonel’s temper tantrum.

After Isabella’s hearty tea, which was geared more towards the labourer’s appetite than that of an office worker, Billy and I went around the corner for a pint. The pub, considerably more working-class than the Pig and Whistle, was owned by a cousin-in-law of one of Billy’s maternal aunts, and the bitter was brewed on the premises. I poured the dark yeasty liquid down my throat and with one long draught washed away the cloying tastes of sweet sherry, the Edwards household, and
Mary Small. I put the glass down with a sigh, realising belatedly that I had broken character. Oh well, even Mary Small was allowed her quirks.

“So, Billy, what have you been doing with yourself?”

He answered me quietly, though in the noisy pub, it was hardly necessary.

“I’m taking up art, miss. Painting.”

“Really?” I looked at his clean hands. “What medium?”

“Medium?”

“Yes, what do you paint with?”

“Tubes of stuff, oily paint. Makes an ’orrible stink, it does.”

“What sorts of things are you painting?”

“Boards with cloth pulled over them, mostly.”

“Canvases.”

“That’s right. Actually, we’re neighbours during the day, as well, miss.”

“Are we?”

“Yes, I have a studio place upstairs over the bookshop, down the street from where you’re working.”

“Ah. I see.”

“Yes, so you see, if you ever needs something during the day, I’m quite often looking out the window.”

“Of course. Do you have a patron?”

“A what?”

“Someone who supports you in your art?”

“Oh yes, I certainly does. Do. Another half?”

“Let me pay for this round. By the way, Billy, were you by any chance following me this evening, when you left your studio?”

“Not followin’, exactly. It may have been I was walkin’ the same way as you.” He stopped, looking sheepish. “Didn’t make a very good job of it, did I?”

“Oh, on the contrary, I didn’t see you at all. I just felt someone watching me. Glad to know it was you. However, if you don’t mind, I’d rather you didn’t trail me about. It makes me jumpy.”

“If you say so.”

“Thanks. And Billy? Smear a bit of paint on your hands and clothes tomorrow, would you? Just for effect.”

He looked down accusingly at his betraying hands, then shook his head. “And here I keep thinkin’ I’m getting better at this kind of thing. Only good for fetchin’ beer, I am.”

“And following a person. A real artful dodger, you are.”

He grinned at the compliment and pushed his way through the crowd to the bar, shouting jovially to every third person. A less likely artist it was hard to imagine, but with a palette and the smell of turpentine about him, he would pass a cursory examination. As for any paintings he might produce, well, almost anything passed as art these days. He seemed to be enjoying himself, at any rate.

Half an hour later, I put down my empty glass.

“I must be off, Billy, I’m expecting a telephone call.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“Stay and have another, Billy. The night’s young.”

“No, I’ll go.”

He called good nights and shepherded me to my door.

That night’s telephone call was again closely guarded. He was ringing from a noisy pub, and though I didn’t exactly shout, I’m sure Isabella’s top floor could hear my every word. We greeted each other, and he asked about my day.

“Much the same. The son was there today, a very sharp young man, too sharp for his own good. He’ll cut himself one of these days. Wanted to talk about Greek, of all things.”

“Greek? Why did he think you knew Greek?”

“That shorthand I learnt in Oxford.”

“Interesting.”

“Yes. And the colonel was a wee bit unhappy with me today. Seems he doesn’t like uppity women. Truly doesn’t like them, I mean.”

“But you disabused him of the notion that you might be one of them?”

“That I did. He said he liked young women with spirit, but he seemed to think I should marry and have babies.”

“Did he now?” Laughter bubbled underneath his nonchalance. “And what did you say?”

“Not a thing. I just went back to my typing.”

“A ladylike response.”

“What else could I do? And you, did you finish the wallpaper?”

“Started hanging it. Luckily, it’s a dark room. She’s a funny old bat, talks your ear off once she gets started.”

“That’s good. The work goes faster if you can carry on a good conversation. Is she nice?” “Nice” meant a probability of innocence.

“She seems nice, yes. Don’t know about her sons yet.”

“No. We’ll talk about it tomorrow night, shall we?”

“I do hope so. Take care, and Mary? Watch out for those suffragettes.”

“Ugly sluts, overeducated and badly spoilt. Need to be given some honest work.”

Little spurts of laughter leaked out of the receiver, and the connexion went dead. A satisfactory conversation, all things considered. I had told him the colonel was violently misogynist, unless the
gyn
were in the kitchen or nursery (or, presumably, bedroom), and he let me know that Mrs Rogers appeared uninvolved, though the sons were an open question. On top of it all, I had given him something to laugh about, to soften the hard floor of Mrs Rogers’s shed.