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

by Laurie R. King

  Back in the darkening cellar, I was sick again, this time into a canvas bucket I found in my hands. The clang of bolts echoed long in the cellar, leaving me on the cold and lonely stones in the darkness. When the echoes had faded, it was immensely quiet, apart from my laboured breathing and the heavy reverberations within my skull. I patted around me until I came across the straw pallet, moved over to it, and tried to grasp something that was me in the maelstrom. All I came up with was, appropriately enough, Job.

  “I have made my bed in the darkness,” I said aloud, and began to giggle dangerously. After a while, I put my head down, and I wept.

  I WAS NOT at the time certain what He had injected me with, but it was similar enough to the painkillers I had known that I thought it might be morphine, or more probably the stronger derivative, heroin. His plan gained dimension in my mind: sure signs of drug use, the marks of the needle in my arm, the drug in my bloodstream. However, the same doubts as before still applied: Were these signs to be used to discredit some testimony of mine, or to explain my death? A third possibility occurred to me: Might He possibly believe that by a systematic exposure to heroin I would become inescapably addicted to the stuff, permanently corrupted to his nefarious purposes? Even in my muzzy state this seemed to me sheer romantic claptrap, a Victorian fancy akin to white slavery, but it was just possible that He might believe it. I should encourage the idea in his mind, I decided.

  All this took some time to sort itself out. At first, I just lay and shivered and was sick again, into the bucket, but after a time my reasoning faculties began to return to me, although my body felt very peculiar.

  Opiates leave one with a profound disinclination to do much of anything. It is not exactly difficult to go through the motions of life, or to think (other than the first half hour or so following an injection), but it is difficult to want to move, or eat, or think. One feels so very satisfied with life, the only improvement is actual slumber.

  My only hope of salvation lay in my will, lay in contradicting the almost overwhelming desire to sit, and nod, and sleep, in refusing to submit to Lethe’s seductive charms. I staggered to my feet and demanded that my disinterested limbs carry me around the walls of my prison, once, and again, and again, until I began to feel that my legs were my own again. The movement helped. Finding my way deliberately in the darkness helped. Thinking about the number of steps in a circuit and the number of circuits in a mile helped. Thirty circuits to the mile. I did two miles, ending at a jog trot and barely touching the walls, so that by the time I quit, my right shoulder hurt where I had scraped the wall a few times, and one of my toes was bleeding, but the soles of my feet knew the smoothness of the stones at the door, the slight rise that indicated the northeast corner (the door, I had decided, for the sake of argument, was to the south) and, had I been dropped down into the room, I could have differentiated the buckle in the stones beside my bedding from the one at the western wall.

  I dropped onto my mat, feeling strange still, but not impossibly so, and drank some water and made myself eat, and felt the myriad of cells in my body return slowly to equilibrium. The gears in my mind began to mesh again, and I sat back against the wall, and I thought.

  I thought about Margery Childe’s sermon on light and love. I thought about Miles Fitzwarren and what his true nature must be to inspire such loyalty in Veronica.

  I thought of the odd and long-forgotten fever I had run all those years ago after the accident, the muscle cramps and the illness that had seized me after the healing was well under way and the medications were withdrawn.

  I thought of Margery, and wondered if it were possible that she spent her love on this man, my captor; whether she quenched the thirst she had spoken of with this clever, brutal man who so obviously enjoyed causing pain.

  I wondered about the rapture of mystics and the cost of that ecstasy, and how it compared to the everyday passion of simple human beings.

  I thought of my early childhood, and of what my mother would think, seeing her daughter in the cellar, and how my father would rage, and how my brother would calculate methods of escape.

  I thought of Patrick and Tillie, until the smell of Tillie’s chicken cooking overcame the stench of paraffin.

  I thought of Mrs Hudson, and her scones, and about how she had taught me to arrange my hair.

  I drank again, deeply, ate half the bread, and found to my pleasure that a small and withered apple had been added to my cache, along with a second canvas bucket containing several inches of cold water and a scrap of face flannel. I ate the apple down to the stem, made good use of the water, and I began to feel like myself, strong and purified.

  Two hours later, my captor returned, and it all began again.

  SUCH WAS THE pattern of my life for a long, long nine days, begun that Sunday and repeated some four dozen times. It became difficult to keep track of time. I knew just how many injections I had been given, from the growing pile of chips and stones I placed as markers in the southeast corner, but after a dozen had accumulated, I thought that my captor’s visits were becoming more frequent, from approximately every six hours the first days down to five, or even four.

  There was no telling the hours. My natural time sense, normally quite clear, was muddied along with everything else by the increasingly frequent and, I thought, increasingly powerful doses of the drug. Occasionally, his thugs brought with them definitive odours—eggs and bacon on the breath meant it was morning outside; beer defined the latter end of the day—but it was uncertain, and the variations in my own meals—the apple was sometimes a tough carrot, an onion, three dried apricots, twice a knob of cheese, and several times a cold boiled egg—followed no pattern.

  Only once was I aware of the passage of time, and that was after some two dozen stones had accumulated, and it came to me with conviction and bleak resignation that in the meeting room in Oxford gowned men and women were coming together, and I was not there. After that, it no longer seemed so vital to keep the clock in my head ticking. It became more of an effort to do my sixty circuits after each injection, to keep my hair bound and my body clean. It became less of a pretence to hold my arm still for Him to inject me. Had He ever let down his guard and arrived without his three thugs, I should surely have attacked Him, but He did not, and I did not. The bread that was left for me soon lost all small interest it once had had, and I lived on water and the extras.

  The only variations were in the food I ate and the thoughts I occupied myself with. At first, I drove myself to mental gymnastics, verb forms and recitations, mathematical problems and exercises in logic. I doubt that lasted more than a couple of days, however, before the engine began to run down. After that, I thought of many disjointed things. I recalled with crystalline clarity the first meal I had taken with Margery, the robe she wore. I tasted the honey wine Holmes had served me on a spring day in another lifetime. I thought of the way Watson beheaded his boiled eggs, and Lestrade drinking his beer, and the tea I had sipped with the maths tutor who had tried to kill me. Eventually, hunger, too, passed, and I thought mostly of Holmes.

  Of Holmes, whom I loved. Stripped of dignity, sight, and probably life itself, I was stripped as well of self-delusions. I loved him, I had loved him since I met him, and I doubted not that I should love him with my dying breath.

  But, was I “in love” with him? Ridiculous thought, instantly dismissed. The doubts and frenzies of a grand passion had by their very nature to wither under the cold, illuminating light of daily knowledge.

  Love, though. Comfortable, interested, concerned, reciprocal love; was that perhaps a different matter?

  And what rôle the physical? What place the body’s passion?

  I could never, I knew then, lose myself “in love.” Margery had accused me of coldness, and she was right, but she was also wrong: For me, for always, the paramount organ of passion was the mind. Unnatural, unbalanced, perhaps, but it was true: Without intellect, there could be no love.

  Since that moment on top of the h
ansom when the last lingering bubble of romanticism had burst, I had been looking for an alternative: freedom, academia, a régime of women.

  Oddly enough, the very considerations that had made marriage impossible for him were mirrored in my own being: a rabidly independent nature, an impatience with lesser minds, total unconventionality, and the horror of being saddled with someone who would need cosseting and protection—the characteristics, come to that, that would have made it difficult for me to join Margery Childe, even without the rest of it.

  Perhaps, though, the resemblance was not odd. Holmes was a part of me. Because of my age when we met, neither of us had erected our normal defences, and by the time I came to womanhood, it was too late: He had already let me in under his guard, and I him. Holmes was a part of me, and to imagine myself “in love” with him was to imagine myself becoming passionately enamoured of my arm or the muscles in my back. Yet in the same vein, it is not a part of Judaism to practice bodily mortification, to deny God’s gift of a physical body. One accepts and appreciates this act of creation; one loves one’s body, clumsy, inconvenient, and untidy as it may be. It was in this sense that I could love Holmes: Irritating as he could be, he was a part of me, and yes, I loved him.

  Neither of us were domestic creatures. Holmes, by his nature and by the demands of his profession, had remained unfettered by domesticity, had never knowingly given a hostage to fate. The only woman he had allowed himself to love had been as jealous of her independence as he: Irene Adler had loved him for a time and then sent him away. And what of Mary Russell, a young woman as violently opinionated and as fiercely protective of her freedom as Holmes himself, and as competent as he at looking after herself?

  It was, intellectually speaking, a pretty problem, and it occupied me for several days. By this manner, continuously interrupted by drugs and sleep and increasing befuddlement, I came tentatively to a point of balance with Holmes in his absence.

  When thirty chips had gathered in the corner, I became aware of a new element in the cycle: anticipation. In another day or two, it degenerated into overt restlessness before his entrance, and there was distressingly little acting in the eagerness with which I stood, blinking and cringing at the light, to greet Him.

  In the end, there came a third state, between the sweet horror of the poison flooding my veins and the body’s craving for the next, a state of—I can only use the Christian concept—grace. For a brief time as the drug ebbed, I was granted a few minutes’ respite. I ate, and to my mild surprise, one day I found myself speaking aloud the traditional Hebrew blessing over bread. After that, I used the time deliberately to do those things that returned me to myself. It was my nerves’ calm eye, between the gale of quivering and the wind shift to restlessness, and after I had found it, Holmes was usually there, as a companion, beside me in the black and endless night. I strode up and down in my cellar, scorning the walls and avoiding the pillars as if I walked in the clear light of day, debating and arguing and reviewing the moves of chess games with Holmes, reciting psalms and the ritual prayers taught me by my mother, biding my time beneath a veneer of madness.

  18

  TUESDAY, 1 FEBRUARY

  Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,

  Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,

  And for thy maintenance; commits his body

  To painful labour both by sea and land . . .

  Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe . . .

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  FORTY-FIVE CHIPS WERE in place. Restlessness for the forty-sixth had set in, and I was keeping busy sweeping up the débris from the rubbery boiled egg I had been eating, when suddenly I froze, aware somehow of unusual movement in the building above me. I had gradually, when I was in a state to notice, come to read the subtle vibrations in stone that transmitted distant footsteps, the faint sense of movement against one wall that I took to be water in pipes, and occasionally, rarely, a thread of hum that was human speech in the crack under the door. I swallowed the stub end of the egg and all but ran over to the most revealing wall. Movement there was; the stones fairly shuddered with it. Some emergency had hit the organisation. I backed away and turned to the door, thinking to press my ear to the crack, when I heard the familiar sound of feet on the stone steps. An injection was due, but those were not the normal footsteps approaching; this was a solitary man, and he was hurrying. Was this my death, coming for me?

  I dove for the corner where I stored my larger rocks and scooped them up, flew to my bed and gathered the stones and the nail I had sharpened on the stones, and made the safety of the western pillar just as the key sounded in the lock. The bolts slid, and I prepared myself for a final defence. Light poured in with the opening of the door, more light than I had seen for days—an electrical bulb outside the door. I squinted desperately around the stones at the vague figure outlined there.

  “Russell?” he said, and the breath congealed in my throat. “Russell, are you in here? Dear God, they’ve taken her.” His voice went hoarse with despair, and he stepped back to shout, “Constable! Fetch one of those torches down here!”

  “Holmes?” I said. The paltry stones of my defence rattled down around my toes.

  “Russell! Are you all right? I cannot see you.”

  “I’m not certain you want to, Holmes,” I croaked, and edged into the light, one hand out against the painful glare.

  I could see nothing but a tall, dark shape, which made a strangled noise and took a step towards me, when the sound of constabulary boots on stones came from above. He whirled around and barked out an order.

  “The torch won’t be necessary, Constable. Resume your position at the top of the stairs.” He paused, with his back to me for a moment, and when the footsteps had retreated up the stairs, he turned and walked past me into my prison. He stood first and contemplated my bed, the remnants of my food, and the gourd of water, spilt onto the stones in my final rush. Finally, reluctantly, he turned to me, and with no expression whatsoever, he looked at me, read the state of my pupils and my matted hair, my stinking rags. He reached for my arm. I flinched away from him as if he had lashed me, and he halted, then slowly put his hand out again and took my wrist, drew out my arm, glanced at the state of my veins, and let go. His only reaction was a brief spasm along the edge of his jaw. He looked back into my face.

  “Will you be all right if I leave you here and go find you some clothes?”

  “Leave the door open.” My voice trailed upwards and cracked.

  “Of course.”

  He ran light-footed up the stairs, and returned within three minutes, to find me cowering just inside the door like some timid beast afraid to seize its freedom. He held out a pair of trousers, a linen shirt, a pair of carpet slippers. I just looked at them.

  “It will take me some time to locate your own clothing,” he said, mistaking my hesitation. I reached for the things, avoiding his hand, and stepped back into the dark to dress. The clothes were my captor’s. I could smell Him, feel the imprint of his body. A curious intimacy, but, oddly enough, not unsatisfying. I straightened my shoulders and stepped into the light, then walked out of my cellar prison and up the bright stairs, feeling like the mermaid granted feet.

  Holmes escorted me up into the house, never touching me but guiding me with his physical presence, as substantial beside me as one of my pillars. In the main corridor, a uniformed constable came up to us, eyeing me with alarm before recalling himself and greeting Holmes.

  “Mr Holmes, sir, Inspector Dakins sent me to ask you if the young lady would see fit to identify the men under arrest. He thinks there may be one or two missing, and it’d be helpful he says if the young lady could give us descriptions. If she’s up to it, he says,” the constable added dubiously. I straightened my shoulders again and felt the fingers of the restless shakes playing over my nerve endings.

  “Yes, I’m quite fit,” I said in an unfamiliar and far-off voice.

  “Very good, miss. If you’
d follow me.”

  Holmes stayed at my shoulder, close enough that I felt the heat of him, but never actually making contact. A part of me was disintegrating, not only because of the drug, and without him beside me, I could never have looked into the knowing, leering eyes of the thugs (easily recognised despite the absence of the false beards) and the curious, disapproving eyes of the police, could never have described my captor (two inches under six feet, thirteen and a half stone, black hair, small scars on his right lip and in his left eyebrow, Yorkshire-born, London-raised, with a fairly well-seated French addition to his accent, various moles, and the habits and abilities I had deduced), could never have made it out the door and up the stairs to the anonymous guest quarters and walked calmly in and waited while the constable brought in a tray with tea and biscuits and cheese and fresh plump apples and set it clumsily on a table. Holmes chased him out, poured a cup, and brought it to me where I stood with my face pressed up against the window, drinking in the glorious sight of a rain-swept hillside. The vibrancy of the green grass against the grey sky was almost frightening in its intensity; it certainly hurt my eyes. Holmes stood at my shoulder for a moment before putting the cup down on a polished table and reaching past me to work the latch and push the window open. Sweet, freezing air engulfed me, an almost tangible substance pressing against my face and in my hair.

  “What time is it?” I asked him.

  I heard the sound of his watch rubbing against the coin he wore on it, a faint metallic sound I had heard a thousand times before and had not thought I would hear again. “Twelve minutes past eleven.”

  For the first time in days I was anchored again to the progress of the sun through the heavens. Holmes took up the tea cup, put it into my hands, and then snatched it back to keep it from tumbling out the window. He carried it back to the tray, stirring in three spoons of sugar before bringing it back to where I stood. He held the cup to my lips, and I drank. When the cup was drained to the sugary dregs he gently closed the window and led me to a chair in front of the fire. I sat where I could see out of the window, and I managed to hold the second cup of tea on my own. The horrid iced biscuits he pressed on me were too much, and I told him so, my words ending in a jaw-cracking yawn.