The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4

by Laurie R. King

  “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.

  WHEN 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.

  I was alive. There was that. In the dark, in an unknown place, held captive for an unknown reason by an unknown number of enemies, clothed in nothing but knickers and camisole, without so much as my glasses and hairpins as weapons, but alive.

  That I had lived was not in itself terribly reassuring. I sat on the stones, my head in my hands, and tried to think through the throbbing. After half an hour, I had come up with two small conclusions: First, my captor was a man of no mean ability, a remarkably intelligent, efficient, and daring individual who showed no signs of the gaolbird in his manner and who was, therefore, among the more successful criminals. If one knew where to look, it should not prove difficult to find him—assuming I should happen to escape his clutches. Second, my mind seized on one chance remark: He had said that bullets were unimaginative. I could not help but reading into that choice of word the idea that he had something in mind for me, not just locking me in a hold. Not at all a nice thought.

  He was no one I knew, personally or by reputation, which made for another question: Whom was he working for, or with? Who had arranged to pick me up so efficiently and ruthlessly and had me dumped into this hole? I assumed that it had something to do with the Temple, but I had to admit that there was no concrete reason for that assumption, that my life was sufficiently complicated to offer other possibilities. A voice from the past, taking revenge for something Holmes and I had done long ago? Or was I merely a pawn, captured to bring Holmes into a trap? My thoughts ranged and snatched at threads, meandering their way into the more remote reaches of reality. Marie hated me sufficiently to do this, although I had to wonder if she would not rather have merely crushed me beneath a lorry or had me shot. Perhaps I had been kidnapped by one of the Berlin-bound Americans, to keep me from presenting my paper. An academic rival, of Duncan’s perhaps, set to ruin us both? Or—my aunt! Breaking the will by driving me mad, proving me to be incompetent, putting me and my father’s fortune back into her hands . . .

  That snapped me down to earth. My aunt was mercenary, but she had neither the brains nor the acquaintances to do this, and if I had seriously considered that, well, my mind was indeed in a fragile state. I shook my head to clear it, swore at my hag’s mat of hair, and forced myself to my feet. Best to concentrate on the escaping side of things. Time to find out where I was.

  The place I was in, other than being as black as a cow’s stomach, was cool, but not dangerously so, paved in big uneven stones, and, I thought, large. To confirm it, I cleared my throat and said a few experimental words, more for the sake of the echoes than because I expected an answer.

  “Hello? Hello? Is anyone here?”

  The ceiling was not too high and the walls, some of them, not too distant. I got to my feet cautiously, found the pressure inside my skull receding, and began to shuffle forward with my hands waving about in front of me. I had no idea how much ground I had covered, with the dark pressing in on my face and eardrums like a silent cacophony, filled not only with mundane horrors such as cobwebs and rats (silent ones) but with lurking presences as well, hands reaching out to touch me. When my fingers finally stubbed against cold stone, I threw myself up against its upright bulk like a shipwrecked sailor on a beach and felt like embracing it.

  The walls were fitted stone, my exploring fingertips told me, not brick: large, finely textured blocks. I turned left, changed my mind and turned right, and set out with my left hand bumping along the stone, my right hand out in front, literally inching forward until I came to another wall, joining the first at what seemed like a right angle. I patted this new wall for a bit as if it were a friendly dog and then turned my back on it, retracing the way I had come in order to pace the boundaries of my prison. My feet were just over ten and a half inches long, so that measuring my first wall toe-to-heel thirty-two times made this side a shade over twenty-eight feet. I continued left, and at seven and a half feet, I was nearly sent sprawling by a pile of something soft on the floor. It was not a body, to my mixed relief, but two large half-rotten sacks stuffed with straw. Cautious, searching fingers brought me to an odd, squat, smooth sphere that swayed when I touched it. I picked it up, explored it with my left hand, and removed the top. It was a gourd, filled with stale and infinitely sweet water. I stopped myself from gulping, but sipped, clutched it to my chest, and reached out again. After a couple of sweeps, my hand caught another smooth shape with a more familiar feel: a small loaf of bread. I settled back against the wall, my backside cushioned, nursing my riches in my arms.

  After a few minutes I began to feel ridiculous. I drank another swallow and broke off a bite of the bread (heavy and tasteless, made with neither salt nor sugar) and forced myself to put down my treasures and resume the circumambulation. It was not easy to walk away from them.

  When I had circled my prison, I found to my vast relief that my bed and supplies were precisely where I had left them, seven and a half feet from the second corner. My prison measured twenty-eight feet by sixty and a bit. There were no windows, even ones that had been filled in, as far up as my hands could reach, no breaks other than a door i
n the wall directly opposite my bed, a door as stout and immovable as the rocks into which it had been set. The ceiling overhead seemed to vary in height and was, from the echoes, stone or brick. A wine cellar fit my mental image of the room, with its constant temperature, lack of vibrations, and convoluted roof arches.

  A wine cellar meant a large house, and I thought that if it were in the city, even a small city, the rattle of wheels and hoofs against paving stones would penetrate, if not as sound, then at least as low vibrations. So, I was locked in the cellar of a country house. Not much help, perhaps, but it was nice to know.

  I also knew that I had not been locked here to starve. Food and water were not habitually given to a prisoner who was being walled up and forgotten. They would come for me.

  Whoever “they” were.

  Whatever “imaginative” torture they had in mind.

  I curled up on the sacks, with one hand resting on my water gourd and the other clutching the bread, and slept for a while, and when I woke, still blind, the claustrophobic terror of being buried alive hit me.

  I scrambled to my feet and groped my way to the nearest corner. I was becoming more accustomed to the blackness, because my ears told me when I was nearing the wall. Is this what Holmes had meant when he had practiced being blind in opaque glasses? With great deliberation, I squared myself against the wall and set off into open space, one foot’s length at a time. Overhead, nothing; in front, nothing; on the floor, dust and grit. I straightened up and took the next step, felt around, then took the next.

  When I reached my straw pallet again, I stopped for breakfast. I had found a half a dozen small pebbles, some chips of wood, and a couple of shards of porcelain and glass. These, I tucked against the head of my bed. I had also found the first of the pillars I had known must be there, supports to the ceiling over my head. There ought to be two or three of them—without interest other than for their possible use to hide behind. More interesting was the way in which my fingers had known the massive pillar was there a moment before I had touched it: For a vivid instant Holmes was leading me with sure steps through the fog.

  I ate more of the tasteless bread, drank some water, continued my back-and-forth sweep. I found the second pillar, though no third one, and when I turned back to the bed, I found I had a sense of where it lay. Not precisely, and I did not have enough faith to drop my hands, but I could tell roughly where it was, and I went to it. My findings had accumulated, including now two walnut-sized knobs of rock, a handful of smaller ones, a horn button, and—treasure of treasures—a bent and rusty nail, about two and a half inches long. I tucked everything under my bed, then on second thought removed half of it and carried it over to one of the corners, pushing it into the lee of a slightly raised stone on the floor. I stood, pushed back my nonexistent glasses, and returned to my mat.

  How long had I been in this place? The bearded killer had said the drug lasted three or four hours, but there was no way of knowing how many had been spent in transporting me here. Say, four hours drugged, and half an hour sleeping after I had been sick, then approximately four and a quarter hours in mapping out my surroundings. Between eight and ten hours, I thought, since I had drunk from the silver flask. It was Sunday morning; it felt much later.

  How long before they returned?

  I reached for the water gourd and felt a twinge, not from the knife cut, which seemed to have been given a fresh dressing, but from the inside of my left elbow. As I was fairly comprehensively bruised and aching, I had not taken much notice before this, but now I explored it with the fingertips of my right hand, and in a moment I knew that if the lights were to come on, I should see in the soft area over the veins a red welt with a pinprick in the centre—or rather, a needle prick.

  Someone expert with a needle had either given me an injection, directly into the vein, or else drawn a blood specimen. The latter did not seem likely, but with what had I been injected? A second dose of sleeping potion? And if so, why into the vein? How long had I slept? What in hell was going on?

  I was blind, in more ways than the one. It was something to do with Margery Childe—that much I could see; after that, the light faded. Was Margery herself doing this? Or was it part of another attempt on her life, removing me from hindering it? That could not be—I had already removed myself, by boarding the train for Oxford. Was I to be freed, as my abductor had told me, only to appear responsible for her death, or would there be two dead bodies, with blatant clues for the police force? Or, yet a third possibility: that I was to be freed but rendered harmless.

  Unable, perhaps, to identify my captor?

  Blinded perhaps?

  The horror of the dark crawled over me then, and I knew that I was indeed blind, that my little farce of feeling all over the walls was lit clearly by an overhead bulb while observers in high windows watched the antics of a wretched, half-naked girl-woman with a madwoman’s matted hair and scars all over her body, skirting not very successfully the pool of her vomit, hugging to herself a jug of water and a piece of stale bread, secreting a pathetic collection of stones in the corner of her—

  I heard nothing, but there were vibrations where there had been stillness, in the stones beneath my feet and the air against my cheeks. I rapidly arranged the gourd where it had been, put near it the remainder of the loaf with the intact section of crust turned to the door, and threw myself on the floor in an attitude meant to suggest death.

  A lock turned, then a bolt, and another bolt. Hinges groaned open and—light! Gorgeous, wavery, bouncing, blinding light. And an oath. I tried to ready myself to spring up, without visibly breathing. Tiny, quick breaths. Several feet at the door, entering.

  “Close it.” That was my abductor’s voice, restricted still by the false beard.

  Hinges groaned again; the door thudded; boots scuffed the stones. The light came closer, my eyelids reddened as it neared my face, and I came up running, hit the lamp from the man’s hand and sprinted for the door, and had my fingers on the handle before my head jerked back painfully and I went down on my knees. I hit out and the man grunted, but he did not let go of the hold on my hair, and in a second they were all on me, and I was caught.

  “Don’t hit her,” said the leader, and they did not, merely slammed me up against the wall. I winced away from the dazzle of his electric torch in my eyes.

  “Hold her.” I thought at first the obvious, but it quickly became apparent that it was a very different sort of invasion they had in mind. The man holding my left arm pulled it away from the wall, stretching my wrist out from my body while his other hand pinned my shoulder against the stones.

  “Bring the other lamp.” When I saw what my abductor was pulling out of his pocket, I went berserk. I nearly freed myself, and it ended only when three burly men, bruised, bitten, and bleeding all, held me down on the floor and their leader put his hand over my nose and mouth and cut off my air. My frantic attempts to bite the man or free myself from his fingers exhausted my air; the room began to fade. When my air and my panic had both run out, he took his hand away, and as I gulped great draughts of air, he got to work.

  I had never before experienced the sheer inexorable power of strong men. In utter humiliation and near abject terror, I could only look on as That Man knotted a silk scarf cruelly tight around my upper arm, took out a dark velvet case containing an already-filled hypodermic syringe, probed the hollow of my arm with knowledgeable fingers, and injected me directly into the vein. He slid his blunt fingers under the knot, loosed the scarf, and stood away.

  And my body exploded. My every cell woke up and shouted in recognition of the substance being pumped through my veins, and a rush of pure, raw sensation flooded over me like a huge, slow electrical wave, leaving me quivering from the soles of my feet to the back of my head in what I can only describe as ecstasy. As it went through me, it seemed to shear my mind straight down the centre and split it, so that for perhaps a minute I experienced a sort of palimpsest of consciousness, a simultaneous awareness of event
s as they were now and as they had been six years and three months before.

  I was aware of the stones at my back, the sharp smell of spilt paraffin, and the moan that issued from my twenty-one-year-old throat, a sound obscene even to my own ears and which caused the men pinning me down to cackle and joke among themselves as they stood away from my body and set about cleaning up the broken lamp and the old vomit.

  At the same time, and every bit as vivid, was the hospital bed beneath me, the medicinal hospital stink of cleaning fluid and ether, the rustle of clothes moving, and voices: American voices. A man’s authoritative American voice, but it was not my father’s voice; never again my father’s voice.

  Mama? But the word was too far down in my throat to find its way out. Words around me, weighty words that surfaced like bubbles from a murky pool from the vague noise I lay in: doctor, infection, fever, dosage, weak.

  Someone was ill in this clean, bright room. Someone began to groan, a wavering sound that instantly cut off the words and replaced them with a more urgent rustle, a few curt commands. There was too much light in this room, terrible and harsh and white, and white shapes moving around me, topped with darker blobs—hair, heads, hands, touching me, a face coming into focus, emitting furry noises. I closed my eyes, felt the pain build like a demon, possessing me, hip and chest and head, building, and then another groan, higher in pitch, and hands, these ones cool and deft, and a brief flurry of angry sounds followed by a sharp jab in my upper arm, and then a wavering sensation as if the room were a celluloid film beginning to melt in front of the projectionist’s bulb before it rippled and faded from view.

  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.