The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4

by Laurie R. King

  He drew the lump from his pocket and removed the piece of oiled paper with which he had wrapped the box. Traces of wax showed where the industrious creatures had begun to incorporate this foreign object into their hive, but the box itself was untouched. He gave it to Lestrade, who turned it around in his hands, following with delight the parade of animals, birds, and exotic vegetation. I let him enjoy it for a while before I reached over to pull up the top and show him the papyrus.

  “I’ll work on finishing the translation and then see if I can find any sort of a code or marks on it. It’s very unlikely, but I’ll try.”

  Lestrade reached out and ran a thumb over the inviting surfaces, then glanced at the papyrus curiously.

  “I can see why you said it wouldn’t fit easily into a book. Good luck with it, Miss Russell. Glad it’s you and not me. I’d like a photograph of it and a couple of the box as well, if you would.”

  “Did the camera appear, Holmes?”

  “It did, but in rather too many pieces to be of any use. Patrick’s should be good enough for the purpose, though.”

  “That reminds me, Mr Holmes, can you give me a list of everything they took? We can send it around to the stolen-goods people, have the shops look out for the things. Probably hopeless, but still.”

  “Quite. I made a list last night, Lestrade. It’s on the table by the door. Be careful not to bump the table,” he added. “One leg is loose.”

  “Right.” Lestrade handed me the box and glanced at his watch. “Good Lord, I must run. I’m meeting someone at one o’clock. I’ll be in touch tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be interested to know what you uncover about Mrs Rogers’s background. And I want to see if your print man finds anything in the hotel room.”

  “In this case, Mr Holmes, it’s a print lady,” he said primly, and with a tip of his hat to me, he closed the door.

  Holmes and I regarded each other, and the noise and the tumult of the last two days gradually settled into the quiet house like dust from a shaken rug.

  “So, Holmes.”

  “So, Russell.”

  He nodded once, as if in agreement, and we returned to our dreary task, in this case the laboratory, where, by great good fortune, none of the broken beakers and jars had combined to form explosives, corrosives, or poisons. We used heavy gloves, but we still had blood on our hands when the afternoon came and Holmes tipped the last dustpan load into the bin. We pulled off our gloves, inspected the damage, and threw gloves, brush, and the pan itself into the bin and slammed down the lid.

  “Lunch al fresco, Russell, is definitely called for. Fresh air and sensible conversation in a place free of broken test tubes, white-haired eccentric ladies, and Scotland Yard inspectors.”

  We removed ourselves from the cottage to a spot notable only for its lack of scenery and difficulty of approach, then applied ourselves to my thick sandwiches (Mrs Hudson had despaired of teaching me to slice bread and meat thinly) and glasses of honey wine. The summer had been a good one, warm enough to dry hay, wet enough to water the fields. In a month, I should return to Oxford for half of each week. We hadn’t much time.

  I lay back and watched one thin cloud hang unmoving in the firmament while Holmes put the things back into his rucksack. Dorothy Ruskin, a strong woman who would find it easy to make enemies. Her sister, a widow, left to care for an old woman in a decrepit house. A retired colonel, his absent son, and whomever else she may have met in London. Then there were the two Arabs and their driver in the black saloon car, and whoever had searched our house. I shifted to avoid the sharp edges of a rock beneath my shoulder blade and was jabbed by one corner of the box, which I had thrust into a capacious trouser pocket. I stretched out my leg and fished for the box. I am not an acquisitive person; indeed, some people would say that the fortune I controlled was wasted on me. However, this artefact captivated me in ways I could not begin to explain. I held it up before my eyes. The peacock’s tail was lapis lazuli and some green stone. Jade? Turquoise? I rested it on my stomach with my hands over it and closed my eyes to the hot sun.

  I must have drifted off, because I was startled when Holmes spoke.

  “Shall I abandon you here, Russell, in the arms of Nature’s soft nurse?”

  I smiled and stretched deliciously on the rocky ground. Holmes caught the box and handed it back to me when I sat up.

  “William Shakespeare must have been an insomniac,” I declared. “He has an overly affectionate fixation on sleep that borders on obsession. It can only have stemmed from privation.”

  “A hungry man dreaming of food? You sound like the jargon-spouting neighbour of Sarah Chessman, with her traumatic experiences and neuroses.”

  “Who better qualified than I for the spouting of psychological jargon?” I muttered, and then sighed and accepted his hand to haul me upright. So much for escapism.

  “What next, Holmes?” I asked, grasping the nettle along with his hand.

  “I intend to go for a leisurely promenade of the neighbourhood and drink numerous cups of tea and glasses of beer. You, meanwhile, will be bent slaving over your scrap of ancient paper. I trust my eyes and spine will be in considerably better condition than yours by evening,” he said complacently.

  “You will bring up the topic of our Friday-night visitors in the course of each conversation, I trust?”

  He flashed me a brief sideways smile.

  “I am relieved to see that your wits are back to their customary state. I admit that on Friday I was somewhat concerned.”

  “Yes. Friday was not a good day,” I agreed ruefully. “Tell me, Holmes, what did you find Saturday morning to produce that exhibitionist display of omniscience you gave Lestrade? Some of it was obvious, the footprints and the hairs you found, and I take it the inferred cashmere scarf and camel-hair coat came from threads?”

  “Where he laid his outer garments across a leg of the overturned kitchen table, which has a rough place on it where that monstrous puppy belonging to Old Will once attempted to eat the table. The dents in the floor came from a loose nail in the heel of the shoe, which does not occur with a quality piece of footwear. That they were both right-handed could be deduced from the pattern of how the objects fell when swept from the shelves, from the angle of the knife blades—two of them—in the soft furniture, from the location of the ladder, so that the right hand would have stretched for the last books, and from the foot that each man led with on climbing the ladder. There was an interesting smudge of mud on the alternate lower rungs, by the way, still damp when it was left there. It is not from around here, but must have been picked up earlier in the day. A light soil, with buff-coloured gravel in it.”

  “You’ll do an analysis?”

  “When the microscope is functioning, yes. However, the stuff is not immediately recognisable, so it will be of value only when we find its source.”

  “And the men? You said the leader had grey hair and stayed in the car?”

  “Yes, that was most remarkable. I could not at first think why the two gentlemen kept going in and out, with much greater frequency than was required for the theft of our few belongings. Then I found the one grey hair, about three inches long, lodged in a sheaf of papers taken from your files. The pages had been dropped near the door, not next to your desk. It looked to me as though several armfuls of papers had been taken out of the room for examination and then brought back.”

  “Sounds pretty thin to me, Holmes. It could have belonged to anyone—you, Mrs Hudson, one of the cleaning women. Even one of my older tutors.”

  “The hair has a wave, and I think that a microscope will reveal an oval cross section. Mine is thin and straight, Mrs Hudson’s considerably thicker and quite round.”

  “Which only leaves several dozen possibilities.” I nearly laughed aloud at the expression on his normally sardonic features, which were caught between sheepishness and indignation.

  “It is only a working hypothesis, Russell.” With dignity, he held the garden gate open for me to pas
s through.

  “It seems perilously close to a guess to me, Holmes.”

  “Russell!”

  “It’s all right, Holmes. I won’t tell Lestrade the depths to which you stoop. Tell me about the knives.”

  “There is no ‘guess’ about those,” he said with asperity. “Both were very sharp, and the one carried by the person with a loose nail in his shoe and an excess of hair oil was shaped to the suggestion of violence. The other was a more workmanlike blade, shorter and folding by means of a recently oiled hinge. It was wielded by the man in the round-toed boots and tweed suit.”

  “The flashy dresser carries a flashy knife. Not the sort one would wish Mrs Hudson to encounter.” I lowered my voice, as we were nearing the house.

  “No,” he agreed dryly. “Mrs Hudson’s talents are many and varied, but they do not include dealing with armed toughs.”

  “We won’t hear from Mycroft today, or Lestrade?”

  “Tomorrow, I should think. We cannot decide our actions until we have news from them, but I expect that we shall find ourselves moving our base of operations into London for a few days and incidentally giving Mrs Hudson a holiday. Sussex is a bit too distant from Colonel Edwards, Erica Rogers, and various mysterious Arabs.”

  “Meanwhile, the neighbours.”

  “And you, the lexicon.”

  “This case is wreaking havoc with my work,” I muttered darkly. Holmes did not look in the least sympathetic, but was, on the contrary, humming some Italian aria as he left the house, walking stick in hand, cap on head, every inch the country squire paying visits on the lesser mortals. I opened my books and got to work.

  Truth to tell, although I would not have admitted it to him, I regretted the interruption not at all. I thoroughly enjoyed that afternoon of immersing myself in Mary’s letter, and I found it immensely exciting to see the lacunae fall before my pen, to turn the first choppy and tentative phrases into a smooth, lucid translation. This was original work in what appeared to be primary source material, a rarity for an academic, and I revelled in it. When Holmes walked in, I was astonished to find that I had worked nonstop for four hours. It felt like one.

  “Russell, haven’t your eyes fallen out yet? Shall I tell Mrs Hudson to leave our food in the oven while we have a swim?”

  “Holmes, your genius continually astounds me. May I have another ten minutes?” There was no need to ask for the results of his interviews—it was in the look of dogged persistence he wore.

  “Take fifteen. I don’t mind climbing that cliff in the dark.”

  “Ten. You get together some towels and the bathing costumes.”

  Forty minutes later, we lay back in the shallow pool left by the receding tide, and I asked him what our neighbours had said.

  “They saw nothing.”

  “That is very peculiar, in the countryside.”

  “Due entirely to a piece of bad luck. There was a “do” on at the Academy that evening, to welcome the new director, and the area was crawling with formal black automobiles, brought in from Brighton to ferry guests from the station. Several of them ended up in impassable lanes and farmyards before the night was through. Ours might have had another county’s registration code on its number plates, but if so, nobody noticed.”

  “You should have—” I bit it back.

  “Yes?”

  “Hindsight. We should have had Old Will or Patrick come and keep watch that night.”

  “I had thought of that, but decided against it. Having enthusiastic amateurs involved is a terrible responsibility, and usually a liability. Neither of them would have been able to resist a confrontation with the intruders.”

  “You’re probably right. Old Will certainly.”

  “I even considered, briefly, asking Constable Perkins to come out and sit in the bushes.”

  “My goodness. Desperate times indeed.”

  “I decided the measure was too desperate. Had I been absolutely certain they would come, I might have resorted to his involvement.”

  “He would have fallen asleep anyway, and we’d be no further along.”

  With which judgement we concluded our conversation, indulged in a vigorous sprint through the dusky waters, which I won, and climbed the cliffs for our late and well-earned supper.

  After we had polished off Mrs Hudson’s supper, down to scraping the bowls of the lemon custard, and after I had helped with the washing up, Holmes lit a small fire to dry my hair, and I told him about the letter. I sat on the hearth rug with my back to the heat, the pages of my translation spread out on the floor, Holmes curled up before me in his frayed basket chair, with his face half-illuminated by the flames, and I read him my translation of Mary’s letter. As I did so, I seemed to hear the woman’s calm, melodious voice through the open French windows, a murmur beneath the distant rumour of the incoming waves on the rocky shore.

  “I have to admit, Holmes, that Miss Ruskin was right. There is something profoundly moving about this document, and I am more than halfway to believing that it could indeed have been written by Mary the Magdalene, a lost apostle of Jesus of Nazareth.

  “The letter begins in the traditional epistolary style, naming both the author and the intended receiver, then a greeting, followed by the message itself. It is in Greek, with a few Hebrew and Aramaic words, two of the latter written in the Greek alphabet, and includes a passage from Joel, in Hebrew:

  “From Mariam, an apostle of Jesus the Messiah [That could be translated as ‘Joshua the Anointed One,’ but it seems awfully noncommittal, somehow] to my sister Judith in Magdala, may you be granted grace and peace.

  I write to you in haste, with little hope for a reply to this, my last letter. Tomorrow we go down from this place, and I think we shall not return. I send this in the hand of my beloved Rachel, for I know you will care for her as her mother’s mother can no longer do. Keep her in the way of God, and teach her well.

  Jerusalem has fallen to the locusts, the Temple is defiled, the exile is upon us once again.

  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,

  for the day of the Lord is coming,

  it comes near,

  A day of dark and of gloom,

  a day of clouds and heavy darkness.

  Fire devours before them,

  and behind them flame burns.

  The land is like Eden before them,

  but behind them a howling wilderness,

  and nothing escapes.

  My heart sickens when I look from my window, and the stink of the soldiers fills my nostrils. I leave at dawn with my husband and his brothers, but Rachel the Romans will not have. Her future lies with you; I will think of the two of you among the pomegranates as I look out across my rocky desolation. I do not know how long the Romans will leave us there, but I think not long.

  My sister Judith, many things lie between us. I do not know how I hurt you more, when I struck at you in my time of madness, or when I turned to the rabbi who healed me and followed him through the countryside. You heard madness in my words as I spoke of him, and I know you will hear only madness now. I will say only that in my deepest heart I know him to be the anointed of God, and I believe that somehow his life among us has transformed the world. Not overnight, as I once thought and some still look for, but nonetheless I believe in the sureness of it. I know that somehow beneath the turmoil and confusion of these times, his message is at work. I go tomorrow with a mind at peace and heart full of love for my family, my friends, and even some of my enemies. I try to love the Romans, as I was taught to do by the Teacher, but I find it hard to look past the blood on their hands. Perhaps if they did not stink so, it would be easier.

  The night is late, and I have much to do before dawn. Say the prayer for the dead over me, when you receive this, and think no more of me. What lives of me is not on a rock overlooking a waste, but stands before you, in Rachel. Love her for me. My husband sends his greetings. Peace be with you.”

  The fire subsided into rustling embers, and Holmes
sat curled up in his chair, sucking at an empty pipe and staring into the glow. I took up my hairbrush and began to plait my hair for the night while the voice of a woman whose bones had long since turned to dust echoed softly in the dim room.

  ELEVEN

  lambda

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING was spent waiting. A singularly frustrating experience, waiting, made more so by the feeling that the labours of others are neither as quick nor as thorough as one’s own. I always envied Holmes his ability to switch off the frustrations of enforced inactivity and turn wholeheartedly to another project. He spent the morning pottering happily in the laboratory, while I turned resolutely to my books. I had intended to produce a first draft of my book (on the concept of wisdom in the Hebrew Bible) before the end of the year, but that was before Miss Ruskin’s letter hit my desk. Something told me that hunting down her murderers was going to take large chunks of time from the coming days, if not weeks.

  Through sheer determination, I managed to focus my mind on the words in front of me, though every time I came across a reference to Sophia, the Greek word meaning “wisdom,” the figure of Mary would stir gently in the back of my mind. Eventually, I was surrounded by journals and books, as I followed a phrase from Proverbs through a recently published religious text from ancient Mesopotamia and tried to recall a similar theme from an Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription. When the telephone rang, my mind was far, far away, and I took up the receiver irritably.