The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4

by Laurie R. King

  “Odd,” she said, studying the paper for hidden meaning. I distracted her.

  “A better translation might be, ‘If it happened, then it is possible.’ A good slogan for the feminist movement, don’t you think?”

  “Surely not, Mary. The possibility must come first.”

  I plucked the sheet from her hand and pushed it into the pocket of my trousers.

  “History is littered with odd happenings that were allowed to fade away into nothing, instead of being seized on as a new beginning.”

  The discussion moved away into Jean d’Arc, Queen Elizabeth, the women of the New Testament, George Sand, and on into the trackless wastes of theory.

  THAT AFTERNOON, I had a tutorial with Margery. Marie showed me in and then carried in the tea things, and without speaking or meeting my eyes, she managed to convey an attitude of scorn, superiority, and profound dislike. She had contrived to forget the state of her mistress’s face, remembering only that I had tricked her and maltreated her and made a fool of myself. I sat and studied my hands until she had unloaded the tray and the door clicked shut behind her. I then looked across at Margery.

  “What happened, Margery? How did you heal yourself?”

  Amazingly, she laughed.

  “You, too? Marie seemed to think I was on death’s door the other night—why, I can’t think. I’d have thought you have more sense.”

  “And you weren’t.”

  “Of course not! I cut my finger on a broken glass and must somehow have rubbed it against my face.” She held out her left hand. There was a plaster around the middle finger.

  “Your dress was torn,” I noted.

  “Yes. I caught the lace on a rough spot on the bookshelf,” she said evenly.

  “Why did you burn it?”

  “You are very inquisitive, Mary. I find the sight of blood repugnant, and bloodstains make me quite faint.”

  “May I see your finger, please?”

  With a tiny shrug, she held out her hand. It was cool and quite calm in mine as I unfastened the plaster. The slice it concealed had been deep, had undoubtedly been made by a piece of broken glass, and had not been there on Thursday night.

  There was nothing I could do, no one I could talk to. The only other person who had seen Margery’s injuries was Marie, and she was firmly set on forgetting. If only I had allowed Ronnie to enter the chapel. With her as a witness, I might force an answer from Margery. As it was, mine had been the only eyes, and I was beginning to doubt them. I let loose her hand and she began to do up the plaster.

  “It’s very nice of you all to be concerned about me, but do save it for something serious like the ’flu.” She turned her hand palm up to see that the plaster was neat, then paused, looking, I was certain, at the skin over her soft wrist that on Thursday night had shown a welt dotted with blood, where a ring worn by a clenched fist had slid across the ineffectual defence of the small hand. She stared at the spot as if mesmerised, and then she said, in a voice so low I could scarcely hear, “Occasionally, grace is given to the undeserving.” After a moment, she turned her hand back, patted the plaster, and looked up at me, her eyes clear of anything but a slight amusement. “Now, Mary, you take your tea white and without sugar, is that right?”

  We spoke that afternoon of one of her guide words: love. I talked about the earthy roots of the Hebrew ahev and hesed, hashaq, dd, raham, and rea’, and the more ethereal Greek agap and phileos (as well as eros, although it is not a part of the New Testament vocabulary).

  I lectured, and she responded, but there was a distance between us. All I could think about was the ease with which she had lied.

  As I gathered my books together, Margery stood up to fetch one we had left on her desk, and when she handed it to me my eyes were drawn again by the plaster on her finger. I decided to try one more time for an answer.

  “You won’t tell me what happened?”

  “I did tell you, Mary. Nothing happened.”

  “Margery,” I blurted out in a passion of frustration, “I don’t know what to make of you!”

  “Nor I you, Mary. Frankly, I cannot begin to comprehend the motives of a person who dedicates a large portion of her life to the contemplation of a God in whom she only marginally believes.”

  I felt stunned, as if she had struck me in the diaphragm. She looked down at me, trying to measure the effect of her words.

  “Mary, you believe in the power that the idea of God has on the human mind. You believe in the way human beings talk about the unknowable, reach for the unattainable, pattern their imperfect lives and offer their paltry best up to the beingless being that created the universe and powers its continuation. What you balk at is believing the evidence of your eyes, that God can reach out and touch a single human life in a concrete way.” She smiled, a sad, sad smile. “You mustn’t be so cold, Mary. If you are, all you will see is a cold God, cold friends, cold love. God is not cold—never cold. God sears with heat, not ice, the heat of a thousand suns, heat that inflames but does not consume. You need the warmth, Mary—you, Mary, need it. You fear it, you flirt with it, you imagine that you can stand in its rays and retain your cold intellectual attitude towards it. You imagine that you can love with your brain. Mary, oh my dear Mary, you sit in the hall and listen to me like some wild beast staring at a campfire, unable to leave, fearful of losing your freedom if you come any closer. It won’t consume you; I won’t capture you. Love does not do either. It only brings life. Please, Mary, don’t let yourself be tied up by the bonds of cold academia.”

  Her words, the power of her conviction, broke over me like a great wave, inundating me, robbing me of breath, and, as they receded in the room, they pulled hard at me to follow. I struggled to keep my footing against the wash of Margery’s vision, and only when it began to lose its strength, dissipated against the silence in the room, was I seized by a sudden terror at the nearness of my escape.

  I made some polite and noncommittal noises, and quickly drew the session to a close. As I left the Temple precincts I tried to tell myself that Margery had not answered my questions; however, I knew that she had.

  12

  SUNDAY, 9 JANUARY–THURSDAY, 13 JANUARY

  Man for the field and woman for the hearth:

  Man for the sword and for the needle she:

  Man with the head and woman with the heart:

  Man to command and woman to obey;

  All else confusion.

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  I LEFT THE next morning for Oxford with a strong sense of brushing the dust from my boots. I would push it all from me, all the upset and confusion of Margery’s apparent duplicity and, behind it, the impossible occurrences of Thursday night. Not for me the tugs and pulls of Right Action, the flattery of being Margery’s personal tutrix, the courtly intrigue of the Inner Circle, the plotting and animosity of Marie. I did not feel any urge to take up my copy of Mysticism and find what Miss Underhill had to say about the physical side effects of mystical rapture, the bodily manifestations that could occur when the soul joined the Divine in a state of ecstasy. Like a child sick on too much chocolate, I wanted nothing more to do with it, and so I turned my back on London and returned to my own country.

  The truth of it struck me as soon as I saw the spires of Oxford beginning to glimmer into solidity through the mist. This was, indeed, my home, as no other place was, or had been, or would be. I would buy a house here, I thought. What did I need with London? Or with Sussex, for that matter? Sussex could be for me what it had been for my mother, a summer cottage where I might play at farmer, but here, in this fold of earth between the rivers, this collection of buildings at once ethereal and human, was where my heart lay. Boar’s Hill, perhaps, or Marston. Holmes did not need me; far better to take the initiative and remove myself from his irritated, and irritating, presence. I would speak to an estate agent—after the twenty-eighth.

  I crawled into my books and pulled the pages up over my head, emerging only when I was thrown out of B
odley in the evenings. It was too dark to read by the light of the streetlamps, so I had a quarter hour or so of simple, mindless movement in the cold, wet, dark air to my rooms. In the mornings, I carried an umbrella, that I might read while walking back to the Bodleian, and each day I slipped into the library’s miasma of old leather and damp wool with the incredulous relief of a caught fish being put back into its pool.

  Even a fish must eat, however. On Wednesday, I rose briskly from my table to check a reference and was swept by a wave of nausea and dizziness. I grasped the edge of the table until it passed, and it dawned on me that I had not had a proper meal since—when, Saturday, Friday? And then, as if my body had been waiting for one sensation to push its way through to the surface, I was made immediately aware of dire thirst, the need to visit a WC, a stiff back, an incipient headache, and a corpselike sluggishness of all the muscles in my legs and arms. I dropped my pen and took up my coat and made straight for the nearest pub that served decent bar food: I couldn’t even bear to wait while a proper meal was cooked.

  The crowded pub was sprinkled with black gowns. I pushed my way in with determination, until halfway across the room a hand came up from the level of my waist and imperiously bade me stop. I focused on the people at the table and saw three familiar faces looking up at me with amusement at the grim set of my features, as well as with a flattering amount of welcome and bonhomie. I do not make friends easily, but these three were more than acquaintances.

  “Mary, just the person! Reggie, go get her a pint,” said Phoebe. The two of them were an unlikely pair, she big, brusque, and horsey, he small, neat, and quiet, but they were both brilliant in their shared field, which was cellular biology. I had met them two years ago in an anatomy lecture.

  “Half a pint, thanks, Reggie,” I said, reaching into a pocket for some coins. “And take these and get sandwiches, as well. Many sandwiches—I’m starving.”

  That half-pint was replaced by several more, and the sandwiches, though plentiful, did not go far in absorbing the alcohol. It was a merry lunch and a noisy one. Phoebe goaded me to the dartboard (which some tasteless undergraduate, if that is not a tautology, had stuck with a cardboard label printed ABSALOM) and after I had beaten every arm in the house, I played to the audience that had gathered, and I collected nearly two pounds in wages. An accurate throwing arm is perhaps the only truly remarkable skill I possess. It has, I admit, saved my life, but its chief benefit is parlour (and pub) tricks. I took in my winnings, used them to buy a round for the house, and sat down, glowing.

  When we were thrown out for the afternoon closing, we stood blinking on the street, somewhat at a loss. The fourth member of the party, the one whose hand had so imperiously halted my progress, was a gangling young baronet, still an undergraduate, with a passion for both Einstein and a sweet-smelling blend of pipe tobacco, and an unexpected talent for brilliant puns and obscene limericks. I had known and liked him, as a friend, for eighteen months. This young man took a pipe from a tweed pocket, eyed it with mistrust, and put it back unlit.

  “So, chaps. Back to the House to continue this mad debauchery, or some fresh air?”

  We decided on both, a wide circle up through the Parks and down Mesopotamia, across the High and along the Cherwell, bleak and denuded of its summer wildlife of punters and ducklings, and down to the Isis, where darkness and a shower of sleet caught up with us almost simultaneously and sent us racing up the meadow to the shelter of the stairway. We burst into the warm rooms with an explosion of good spirits, coats and scarfs grew into a mountain on the floor, the baronet sent his scout off for hot drinks and poured us each a glass of cold fire, and we were all four of us brimming with an immense and inexpressible well-being.

  It was Phoebe, inevitably, who gave voice to it.

  “God, I’m so sick of work! I want to walk and walk until my fingers freeze and my feet blister and I fall into a room with a fire as if it were Paradise.” Then, after hearing what she had said, she asked, “Why not? Why don’t we?”

  “Because it’s raining out there, my dearest Phoebe,” drawled the baronet. “And I want my tea.”

  “Not tonight; I don’t mean tonight. But soon. Tomorrow? Why not tomorrow? Before term sets in again. Mary, shake away dull sloth, set an icy broom to the mental cobwebs. Just what you need.”

  Phoebe’s irresponsible, imprudent, preposterous suggestion dropped into a ripe medium and bloomed brilliantly in my mind. With a flavour of throwing over traces and the logic of alcohol behind it, I agreed immediately, and the two genial men fell in. It was decided: A lengthy cross-country ramble was just the thing, for the four of us, as soon as possible. Tomorrow, in fact. We would meet at St. Sepulchre’s cemetery, to set a cheery tone on our departure, at eight o’clock, walk up the river as far as our feet should take us, and stop the night at an inn or house, then walk back on Friday. If it rained, well, we should just get wet.

  The next morning, I woke knowing I’d been a fool and knowing it was far too late to withdraw. I made haste to throw everything warm I owned into my worn rucksack and set off at a run at the cemetery.

  We did get wet, but not disgustingly so. We followed the loops of the Isis upriver as it wound through the fields. In the afternoon, we came to a promising inn, ate a surprisingly good dinner, and drank too much. Phoebe and I tossed for the narrow bed, and I lost, but there were comforters enough to soften the floor. I fell asleep, beautifully tired and slightly drunk, and was awakened at three in the morning by a pounding on our door. I staggered across, wrapped still in a feather comforter, and peered out. My glasses were behind me in my boot, but I could make out the face of our host, irate and disheveled in the light of his lamp.

  “Is one of you lot named Mary something?” he demanded. My heart tried to sink at the same time as it began to accelerate.

  “I’m Mary Russell.”

  “That’s it. There’s a person outside, knocked me up at this gawdforsaken hour sayin’ as how he absolutely had to talk to you, though why ’e can’t wait for a decent hour I’m sure I—” I shut the door on his complaints and scrambled for clothing. Heavy jersey over my head, I stubbed my toe on my boots and rescued my spectacles, began to put on my woollen trousers and got them started back to front, but by that time, Phoebe, calm and efficient, had the candles lit and I could see.

  “What is it, Mary?”

  “Some kind of emergency for me. I’m going to see.”

  “Shall I come?”

  “Good heavens no. No reason for all of us to climb into wet clothes in the middle of the night. I’ll be back in a tick.”

  “Take your walking stick,” she ordered. “A strange man, at this hour.”

  It was easier to obey than explain.

  Mine host led me down the narrow stairs to the door—he had actually left my messenger standing on the step. It was raining again, but despite the garments, I did not think I knew the figure huddled there.

  “Holmes?” I said doubtfully.

  The man turned, and I did know him, but only just.

  “It’s Billy, isn’t it?” Once an Irregular, then Holmes’ long-ago messenger boy from the Baker Street days, and even now in middle age an enthusiastic assistant in London adventures. He looked completely out of place here.

  “Yes, mum.”

  I reached out and hauled him into the inn, ignoring the splutters of the innkeeper. Billy peeled off his hat and woollen scarf, looked around for a place to put them and then dropped them on the floor, and began to unbutton his overcoat with blue fingers. I dug into my pocket and thrust a bill of some denomination or other into the innkeeper’s hand. His protests cut off sharply.

  “A fire, if you please. And hot drink, and food.”

  “Yes, miss. Right away, miss.”

  “Miss Russell, I have orders to take you to Town, immediately I find you.”

  “Speed will not be improved by your turning to ice,” I pointed out, “and I have no boots on. Are you alone?”

  “My brother’s out
side,” he muttered, and finally succeeded in opening his coat. He groped into an upper pocket and came out with an envelope. I took it but did not open it.

  “How did you find me?”

  “They told me at your house you’d set off on a walking tour, planned on putting in for the night along the way. There were twenty-eight other places I asked before this one.” The memory of twenty-nine sets of furious landlords was not, it seemed, a pretty one, and I was struck by the vision of two Cockneys hunting through the wilds of Oxfordshire in a London taxi, pounding on door after enraged door.

  “Why didn’t—oh, never mind. Here’s something hot. I’ll call your brother in. No, you dry out a bit.” The envelope in my hand, I put my head out into the rain and gave a low whistle, and the driver of the cab was soon huddled beside his brother in front of the fire, drinking a horrid mixture of tea and brandy while their coats steamed. Only then did I put my thumb into the envelope and tear open the flap. I read, in Holmes’ cramped and hurried hand:

  Veronica Beaconsfield had a nearly fatal accident on the Underground today (Thursday) at four o’clock. Her doctor says she will recover. She’s in Guys, room 356. I’ve dug Watson out to stick to her.

  So much for my walking tour. So much for the resumption of my real life, I went up for my kit and followed Billy and his brother out to the incongruous, mud-spattered black taxi.

  MY FRIEND RONNIE lay in her private room, bandage and plaster and a few inches of skin. The grizzled figure beside her bed looked up as the door opened, and I knew that under the coat lying across his knees there was an old Army revolver pointing at me. His face lightened immediately and he got to his feet, leaving the coat on the chair. I stepped back into the corridor so as not to disturb Veronica.

  “Mary! I was beginning to wonder if the lad had fallen into the Irish Sea.” “The lad,” Billy, being old enough to be my father.