“Would you hitch it up with Vicky to pull a plough?”
It was such a patently foolish question that he looked at me for a minute before answering.
“You’re saying that Mr. Holmes wants you to be a plough horse?”
“And that, right now anyway, I need to run. Nothing wrong with a plough horse. It’s just that if you force a race horse to work along with a plough horse, they’ll both get upset and kick apart the traces. That’s what happened with Holmes and me.”
“He’s a good man. He came and took out a swarm from under Tillie’s eaves last year. Didn’t fuss.” Not fussing was Patrick’s highest accolade. “See if you can hold yourself in long enough to see him. I think he’d like it. His gardener tells me he’s ailing.”
“Yes. I will see him. This afternoon, in fact.”
He mistook the hint of excitement in my voice for nervousness, and reached over to pat my soft scholar’s hand with his big, calloused one.
“Don’t you worry. Just remind yourself that you’re not yoked to him, and you’ll be fine.”
“I’ll do that, Patrick, and thank you.”
I HAD ARRANGED to be at Holmes’ cottage at four o’clock, knowing that tea was Mrs. Hudson’s favorite meal to produce. There was a farm cart overturned on the road, which made me somewhat late, but at a quarter past four I pulled the car into his gravel drive and shut off the motor. The sound of Holmes’ violin came to my ears. The violin is by its very nature one of the most melancholy of instruments when played alone; played as Holmes was doing, a slow and tuneless meditation, it was positively heart-wrenching. I slammed the car door noisily to interrupt and retrieved the basket of cheeses and fruits I had brought from Oxford. When I straightened up, the door of the cottage was open, and Holmes was leaning against the door jamb, no expression on his face.
“Hello, Russell.”
“Hello, Holmes.” I walked up the path trying to discern what was behind those hooded grey eyes, and failing. I stood below him on the doorstep and held out the basket. “I brought you and Mrs. Hudson a few things from Oxford.”
“That was nice of you, Russell,” he said politely, voice and eyes saying nothing. He stepped back into the room to let me pass. “Please come in.”
I took the basket through into the kitchen and somehow survived Mrs. Hudson’s welcome without breaking down into tears. I allowed myself to embrace her, hard, and let my lip quiver slightly to let her know that I was still Mary Russell, and then became polite again.
She laid out vast quantities of food for us and talked on and on about the ship and the Suez Canal and Bombay and her son’s family while I filled my plate with morsels I did not want.
“How did you hurt your head, Mary?” she finally asked me.
I decided to make a joke out of it, the absentminded undergraduate walking smack into the lightpost, but it didn’t really succeed as humour. Mrs. Hudson smiled uncomfortably and said she was glad the glass hadn’t hurt my eye, and Holmes watched me as if I were a specimen under his microscope. She excused herself and left us alone.
Holmes and I drank our tea and pushed the food around on our plates. I told him what I had been doing that term, and he asked a few questions. Silence crept heavily in. I desperately asked him what he had been working on, and he described an experiment going on in his laboratory. I asked some questions to keep the flow of words going, and he answered, without much interest. Finally he put his cup down and gestured vaguely in the direction of his laboratory.
“Do you want to see it?”
“Yes, certainly, if you want to show it to me.” Anything was better than sitting here crumbling a cheese scone into a pile of greasy bits.
We stood up and went into his windowless laboratory, and he closed the door behind us. I saw immediately that there was no ongoing experiment, and when I turned to question him, he was standing against the door, his hands deep in his pockets. “Hello, Russell,” he said for the second time, only now he was there in his face, and his eyes looked out at me, and I couldn’t bear it. I turned my back on him, my hands two fists, my eyes shut. I could not see him now, talk to him, and still keep up the act. After a moment two soft taps came on the door, and I smiled in sheer relief. He understood. He pushed a tall lab stool up behind me and I sat on it, my back to him, eyes still closed.
“We have perhaps five minutes without it looking odd,” he said.
“You’re watched, I take it.”
“Every move, even in the sitting room. They’ve made some arrangement with the neighbours—telescopes in the trees. They may even be able to read lips. Will tells me that rumour in town says they have a deaf person there.”
“Patrick says they were asking about me, and you. They are city people, and don’t know that you can’t hide anything in the country.”
“Yes, and they are sure of themselves. I assume you are being watched.”
“I only saw them two weeks ago, two men and a woman. Very good, too. Five cars followed me down here. The lady has money.”
“We knew that.” His eyes studied my back. “Are you all right, Russell? You’ve lost half a stone since January, and you aren’t sleeping.”
“Only six pounds, not seven, and I sleep as you do. I’m busy.” My voice dropped to a whisper. “Holmes, I wish this were over.” I felt him behind me and stood up abruptly. “No, don’t come near me, I couldn’t bear it. And I don’t think I can do this trip again. I’m fine when I’m in Oxford, but don’t ask me to come down again until the end. Please.”
Silence radiated off the man like heat waves, and the low, hoarse voice that came from him was a thing I had never heard before. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I understand.” He stopped, cleared his throat, and I heard him take a deliberate, long breath before he spoke again in his customary incisive tones.
“You are quite correct, Russell. There is nothing to be gained by it, and much to lose. To business then. I had copies of the photographs made for you. I gave the Roman numeral series to Mycroft, but neither of us can make any sense of it. I know it’s there. Perhaps you can dig it out. It’s that packet on the bench in front of you.” I took the oversized brown envelope and put it in an inner pocket.
“We must go back out now, Russell. And in about ten minutes we will begin again, and you will leave angrily before Mrs. Hudson can offer you any supper. Yes?”
“Yes, Holmes. Good-bye.”
He went back out into the sitting room, and I joined him a few minutes later. Within twenty minutes the sarcastic remarks were beginning to escalate, and shortly after six o’clock I slammed out of his cottage door without saying good-bye to Mrs. Hudson and sped off down the lane. Two miles away I stopped the car and rested my forehead on the wheel for some time. It was all too real.
16
The Daughter of the Voice
It is so certain, then, that the new generation…will do something you have not done?
THE DREARY WEEKS dragged on. My watchers remained discreet and I, absentminded. Trinity term began, and I was almost too busy to remember that my isolation was an act. Almost. Often at night I would start awake from bed or chair, thinking I had heard two soft taps at the door, but there was never anything. I moved in a woolly cocoon of words and numbers and chemical symbols, and spent my every spare minute in the Bodleian. Oddly, the Dream did not come.
Spring arrived, hesitant at first and then in a rush, heady, rich, long days that pushed the nighttime back into ever smaller intervals, the first spring in five free from the rumour of guns across the Channel, a spring anxious to make up for the cold winter, life bursting out from four years of death. All of England raised her face to the sun; or nearly all. I was aware of the spring, peripherally, aware that no one in the University save myself and a number of shell-shocked ex-soldiers was doing any work, and even I submitted to a picnic on Boar’s Hill and another day allowed myself to be dragged off for a punting expedition upriver to Port Meadow.
For the most part, though, I ignored the blandis
hments of my former friends and current neighbours and kept my head down to work. That was the pattern for most of May, and it was the case on the day nearly at May’s end when the tight snarled threads of the case began to come loose in my hands.
Upon my return from Sussex I was faced with the problem of where to put the envelope Holmes had given me. I could no longer depend on the security of my rooms, and preferred not to carry it about on my person at every moment. In the end I decided that the safest place to hide it was behind one of the more obscure volumes around the corner from the desk where I habitually worked in the Bodleian. It was a risk, but short of buying a safe or visiting the bank vaults with suspicious regularity, either of which would have alerted our enemy that I was up to something, it was the safest risk I could come up with. After all, the general public was not allowed inside the library, so my watchers usually waited long hours outside, and both the hiding place and my worktable were in dim corners where it was easy to see people approaching. Over the weeks I retrieved it any number of times to study the mysterious series of Roman numerals. Like Holmes, I knew our opponent well enough to be positive that this was a message, and like Holmes and his brother both, I could find no key to unlock it.
However, the mind has an amazing ability to continue worrying away at a problem all on its own, so that when the “Eureka!” comes it is as mysterious as if it were God speaking. The words given voice inside the mind are not always clear, however; they can be gentle and elliptical, what the prophets called the bat qol, the daughter of the voice of God, she who speaks in whispers and half-seen images. Holmes had cultivated the ability to still the noise of the mind, by smoking his pipe or playing nontunes on the violin. He once compared this mental state with the sort of passive seeing that enables the eye, in a dim light or at a great distance, to grasp details with greater clarity by focussing slightly to one side of the object of interest. When active, strained vision only obscures and frustrates, looking away often permits the eye to see and interpret the shapes of what it sees. Thus does inattention allow the mind to register the still, small whisper of the daughter of the voice.
I had been working hard, I had spent a sleepless night and rose to bird song. I had attended a lecture, finished an essay, and twice taken out the packet of photographs Holmes had given me. I held each one by its increasingly worn edges, studying the mute series of numerals until they were burnt into my brain, every wisp of horsehair that tufted from the crossed slashes, every straight edge of the twenty-five recalcitrant black Roman numerals. I even turned the photographs upside down for twenty minutes, in hopes of stirring some reaction, but there was nothing. All that happened was that I became increasingly irritable at having to cover them with some innocent papers every time someone walked by my worktable.
In the late afternoon the traffic past my table picked up, and after having slipped the photographs away seven times in less than an hour my temper snapped. I had no idea if those accursed slashes meant anything or not, and here I was wasting precious hours on a problem that quite possibly existed only in my mind. I shoved the photos back in their envelope and into their hidey-hole and stalked out of the library in a foul mood. I did not even care what my watchers would think, I was so disgusted with myself. Let them wonder. Maybe there is no god-damned enemy, I thought blackly. Maybe Holmes really has gone mad, and it’s all one of his little tricks. Another “examination.”
By the time I reached my rooms I had calmed down somewhat, but the look of my desk waiting reproachfully in the corner was more than I could bear. I heard my neighbour moving around in her room next door. I went out into the corridor.
“Hello, Dot?” I called. She appeared at her door.
“Oh, hello, Mary. Cup of tea?”
“Oh, no thanks. Are you doing anything urgent tonight?”
“Going to hell with Dante, but I’d be glad of an excuse to put it off. What’s up?”
“I’m so sick of it, I can’t face another book, and I thought—”
“You? Sick of books?” Her face would not have registered more disbelief if I had sprouted wings. I laughed.
“Yes, even Mary Russell gets fed up occasionally. I thought I’d have dinner at the Trout and go listen to a harpsichord recital a fellow in one of my lectures is giving. Interested?”
“When do we leave?”
“Half an hour all right with you?”
“Forty-five minutes would be better.”
“Right. I’ll call for a cab.”
We had a pleasant dinner, Dorothy found a friend to flirt with, and we went to the recital. It was an informal affair, mostly Bach, which has the beauty and cadence of a well-balanced mathematical formula, particularly when played on the harpsichord. The symmetry and nobility of the master’s music, together with a glass of the champagne served afterwards, calmed my nerves, and I found myself in bed before midnight, a rare occurrence in the past few months.
It was, I think, about three in the morning when I jerked up in my bed, my pulse thudding thickly in my ears, my breath coming as fast as if I had sprinted upstairs. I had been dreaming, not the Dream, but a confusing mixture of things real and imagined. A shadowy face had leered at me from the bookshelf in the corner, half-hidden by blonde hair, and held out a clay pipe in a twisted hand. “You know nothing!” the figure cackled in a voice both male and female, and laughed horribly. His/her gnarled fist tightened over the pipe, which I knew to be one of Holmes’, and then opened.
Shards bounced slowly about the floor. I stared despairingly at the shattered pipe and knelt down to retrieve the pieces, in hopes of glueing it together again. Some of the larger bits had rolled underneath the bookshelf, and I had to lie down to reach them. As I felt around, my hand was suddenly seized, and I shot upright in terror with a fading image of the bookshelf in my mind’s eye. It had been a section of history, the titles all on Henry VIII.
I groped for a light and my spectacles and lay back until my cold sweat dried and my heart no longer pounded in my chest. I knew that I could never get back to sleep after that, so I reached for my dressing gown and went to make myself a cup of tea.
In a few minutes I was sitting, inhaling the comforting steam, and thinking about the nightmare. It was very rare for me to be aware of dreams, other than the Dream, and I could not remember having another nightmare since my family had died. What was the purpose behind this one? Some of its elements were obvious, but some were not. Why, for example, was the hidden blonde both male and female, when I invariably thought of my adversary as female? The smashed pipe was an easily understood image of my intense, nearing frantic anxiety about Holmes, and bookshelves were such a part of my life that I could hardly imagine any part of me, even a dream, omitting them. But why were the books on history? I held no great passion for recent history, and due to my erratic schooling English history was a relative stranger. What was King Henry doing in front of my eyes? That obscene, gout-ridden old man with his numerous wives, all of them sacrificed to his desire for sons, as if it were their fault and not that of his own syphilitic self. What would Freud make of that dream, I wondered, with Holmes falling beneath the misogynist king, to the echoes of a man/woman’s laughter? It was the sort of thing that would have made Dr. Leah Ginzberg lean forward in her chair with a Germanic “Ja, and then?” I sighed into the silent room and reached for my books. If I had to be up at three o’clock in the morning, I might as well make some use of it, Henry VIII or no. I settled myself to work, but all morning the dream kept intruding, and I would find myself staring blankly at the wall in front of me, seeing the spines of those books. Henry VIII. What did that mean?
I worked on, and in the afternoon I went out to take coffee in the covered market before an afternoon lecture, and I ended up ordering a large meal I had not known I wanted until I had walked into the tantalising smell of frying bacon. Two meals, actually, and pudding—more food than I had taken at one sitting at any time since Mrs. Hudson had been feeding me.
Somewhat bloated, I lef
t the market stalls and walked up Turl Street for the afternoon lecture, only to find my steps slowing as I approached the Broad. I stopped. Henry VIII. When in ignorance, consult a library. With few qualms I abandoned the enquiry into Second Dynasty Burial Texts and turned right instead of left. (The familiar loitering and overaged undergraduate behind me emerged from a shop entrance and followed me up Broad Street and past the Sheldonian, but not through the doors of the library.) I called up several books on the period, but they bore no resemblance to my dream image, and leafing slowly through them caused no bells to go off in my mind. Knowing it was hopeless, I retrieved the photographs, laid them out on the desk in front of me, and it was then that the voice spoke to me, and I knew.
Holmes and I had discussed the possibility that the series was based on a number/letter substitution code, in which, for example, 1 might be read as A, 2 as B, and 3-1-2 translates as CAB. Extreme complexity—basing the substitution on a key text, primarily—is commonly used to make the translation from number to letter difficult: A long message in such a code can be broken by a bit of fiddling, but for short phrases, one must discover the key. If the key is something external, such as the words on a page of a book, decoding a brief message such as the one we were faced with may prove virtually impossible.
In this case the numerals used were not our Arabic ones, but Roman ones, and as they had not been spaced or had their divisions marked, it was sheer guesswork to know whether there were twenty-five separate numbers, or only seven, or some total in between. That is where Holmes and I had left off, as we could make no sense in the number/letter result we had extracted.
I had to make a few basic assumptions in looking at the problem. First of all, I had to assume that she had left it there for us to see and, eventually, understand, that it was not just a means of maddening us with tantalising clues that led nowhere. Second, I had to believe that the key to it lay somewhere in front of me, waiting to be seen. Third, I assumed that once the key was found, it would unlock the puzzle fairly quickly. If it did not, I would undoubtedly conclude that this was not the correct key and lay it down again. To give an example, it would call for a boneheaded sort of persistence to unravel the Roman numeral series XVIIIXIIIIXXV through all its possible Arabic equivalents into the numbers 18-13-1-25, and then into RMAY, and then finally to unscramble it to MARY, unless the person already knew what she was looking at. No, the key would not give too much difficulty once it was inserted into the lock. Of that I was certain.
The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4 Page 30