Four sets of eyes scowled down into the box of mechanical jumble, wishing with varying degrees of intensity for the evidence to be there. Finally, Lestrade folded up his notebook and took up the piece of string.
“I’ll give it to my lab people, Mr Holmes, with thanks. I don’t think I’ll ask how you came to have the stuff, though.”
“Oh, it’s all quite legal and above board, Lestrade, I assure you, part of a shipment of scrap purchased by a newly formed company called Sigerson Limited. You shall receive the billing invoice in the morning. You may be less happy with my methods of obtaining a certain letter. Do you have it, Russell?”
I had worn the letter in my undergarments most of the day, but now I took it from my handbag and gave it to Lestrade, who raised his eyebrows at its gouged, ink-splattered appearance. His eyebrows nearly disappeared beneath his overly long hair as he read it, and he whistled softly and handed it to Mycroft.
“Seems to me that Colonel Edwards is less and less likely, wouldn’t you say, Mr Holmes?”
“It looks that way, I agree.” His voice was bland, and he did not look at me. I felt another irrational and momentary surge of irritation, as if someone had dismissed my prize thoroughbred as being not quite up to the rest of the field.
“Mycroft’s Arabs strike me the same way,” I said, sounding regrettably peevish. Holmes glanced at me then, amused, and rose to his feet.
“I think that brings us up-to-date. When shall we four meet again?”
“If it’s in thunder and in rain, I’m going to throw Miss Small’s accursed shoes out the window and wear my Wellingtons,” I grumbled. “Not tomorrow—I’ll be back late. Tuesday?”
It was agreed, and we dispersed.
HOLMES AND I drove back with few words. He had to return the cab to its owner, and as it was still raining hard, he stopped in front of the boardinghouse to let me out. I looked out the window at the unwelcoming door, with my fingers on the car’s door handle.
“You won’t be long?” I asked. It would be just like him to disappear again for some days.
“Twenty minutes. If he’s there, I’ll have him drive me back.”
I nodded and moved to open the door. His voice stopped my hand.
“You know, Russell, one of the damnable things about working in partnership is that one has to take the other person’s proprietary feelings into account—Russell proponit sed Holmes disponit. It’s not everyone who will put up with being run roughshod over in the course of the chase and then be willing to brush himself off and set to again as if nothing had happened. It was one of Watson’s most valuable strengths as a partner, his doglike devotion. However,” and here he turned his face towards me, though there was not enough light to reveal his expression, “you will no doubt have noticed that I did not consider this a strength when it came to a permanent partnership.”
It was a generous apology, for Holmes, and I grinned at him.
“Woof,” I said, and ducked out into the rain.
PART FIVE
MONDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER 1923–WEDNESDAY, 5 SEPTEMBER 1923
The poet’s pen…gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name.
—SHAKESPEARE
NINETEEN
tau
I NEVER TIRE of Oxford. Cambridge is stunning, of course. Cambridge is sweet and ethereal, and the air in Cambridge bubbles in the mind like fine champagne, but I cannot imagine getting any work done there. Oxford is a walled city still, and within her black and golden, crumbling, scabrous, aged, dignified, and eternal walls lie pockets of rarefied air, places where, turning a corner or entering a conversation, the breath catches and for an instant one is taken up into…if not the higher levels of heaven, at least into a place divine. And then, in the next moment, there comes an eddy of grit, and the ghostly echo of mediaeval oxcarts is heard rumbling down past Christopher Wren’s bell tower on their way from Robert D’Oilley’s castle to his grand bridge over the river. Even in Oxford University’s holy of holies, the Bodleian Library, there comes an occasional grumble and whiff of the internal combustion engine.
The grit that morning was palpable, for the haze that softened the sunlight of what might otherwise have been a shimmering morning was the result of burning stubble in the surrounding countryside, and even at the early hour of my arrival, the black skeletal remains of the hard stalks rained gently onto the city, forming drifts that swirled up at the passing of motorcars. I saw no washing hung up to dry that Monday morning as I walked into town from the train station, along the sluggish canal, under the shadow of the otherworldly castle mound, looking in its vernal leaf more like a setting for Puck and Titania than it did a hillock for undergraduate picnics overlooking the prison, then past the decrepit slums of Greyfriars and out onto the deceptive everyday face of the most beautiful high street in any city I have seen, dodging carts, autos, trams, and bicycles, the town centre strikingly incomplete without its normal complement of fluttering black gowns, like a friend with a new and extreme haircut. Up the High towards the tantalising curve, but before entering it, at the very foot of St Mary’s wise divinity, I made an abrupt turn north, and there, oddly satisfying in its scorn for a deliberate and formal perfection, was the quadrangle with the rotund earthiness of the Radcliffe Camera in its centre, bounded on its four sides by the tracery of All Souls on my right, the height of St Mary’s at my back, Brasenose College on the left giving nothing away, and before me, where there should rightly have been trumpets and gilt, the unadorned backside of the Bodleian and the Divinity School. I was home.
I had come here for three purposes. The first, I dispatched within two hours: Although modern Egyptian history is not my field, once one knows the basic techniques of research, no field’s fences or unfamiliar terrain make much of a barrier. I skimmed half a dozen books and brought the colonel’s wavering scholarship back to earth, noted two contrary arguments and a nice apothegm I would steal for him, and then abandoned Egypt, to proceed with my own, considerably more appealing projects. I began in Duke Humfrey’s.
My tools were a broad-nibbed pen, an unlined notebook, and a page with twenty words written on it. On a quick tour of the room, I spotted three familiar heads: a good beginning. I gathered up two of my fellow students, approached the third figure, a don whose subject was church history, and explained my need.
“I wonder if I might ask your help with a little project of mine,” I began. “There’s this fairly old piece of manuscript that I think may have come from a woman’s hand. I have a friend who’s something by way of an expert on handwriting—you know, he can tell you whether the person is right- or left-handed, old or young, where and how much he was educated, that sort of thing—and he said that if I were to collect some samples of men and women writing Greek and Hebrew, which is what the manuscript is in, it would give him a paradigm for comparison.”
“What great fun,” the don exclaimed, his eyes sparkling through bottle-glass lenses. “Do you know, just the other day I dug up a sheaf of letters in Bodley, and as I was reading through them, two of them struck me as somehow ineffably feminine. They’re Latin, of course, but if you do come up with anything on your project, you might be interested in seeing these others. Any particular phrase you want written?” he added, reaching for his pen.
“Yes, here’s the list, and do use this pen—it’ll keep the samples uniform.” His eyebrows rose at the selection of words, but he wrote them neatly and handed back the pen and book. The other two did the same. I made note of their identities on each page, thanked them, and left them to their books.
Academia being what it is, the reactions of everyone else I approached during the course of the day’s investigations were quite predictable. Intensely curious and intellectually excited, particularly over my chosen words (which in Greek included Jerusalem, Temple, Rachel, madness, confusion, and Romans, and in Hebrew the words for day, darkness, land, and wilderness), they were nonetheless loath to trespass on my personal research. As a result, all helped, except one ancien
t of days who was having a flare-up of arthritis in his writing hand, and all demanded to see the results of my little project as soon as it was published. By early afternoon, I had a filled notebook. Furthermore, by late afternoon, I had a clear idea of what Dorothy Ruskin had done on the missing Tuesday, and by evening, when I prepared to turn my back on the town centre, I had a vastly renewed sense of vigour and purpose. For all of those things, I felt profoundly grateful.
I made my late supper of a meat pie and half a pint of bitter at the Eagle and Child, and took the train back to London. It was nearly eleven o’clock when I said, “Evening, Billy” into the empty corridor and heard his reply through the door. I was hardly surprised that the room next to mine was empty. It had taken me some days to get back into the rhythm of a case, but I had now remembered it, and I no longer expected Holmes to appear but for brief snatches of consultation, reflection, and sleep.
I went down the hallway to the bathroom and washed away the day’s grime, checked to see that I had an ironed frock for the next day, and settled down at the little window table with a lamp and the notebook. Shortly after midnight, I heard a key in the door of the adjoining room, and a moment later the grizzled, disreputable face of my husband leered at me from the connecting door, one eye drooping and sightless, teeth stained brown and yellow, lips slack.
“Good evening, Russell, hard at work, I see. I’ll be with you in a moment.” He pulled back into his room. I closed my notebook and walked over to the doorway to lean against the jamb with my arms crossed, watching him as he discarded the disguise. There was a lift to his shoulders and a gleam in his eyes that I rarely saw at home, and he looked and moved like a man twenty years younger as he tossed his clothing into an untidy heap in the bottom of the wardrobe, replacing it with his usual spotless shirt and soft dressing gown, then bent over the mirror to remove his eyebrows and scrub off the makeup. He was back in his own proper element.
My face must have reflected my thoughts, for he caught my eye in the mirror and began to smile.
“What amuses you, my wife and colleague?”
“Oh, nothing, Holmes. I was just wondering about the bees.”
He looked startled for a moment, and then he began to laugh softly.
“Ah, the bees, yes, and the pottering beekeeper. Even an old hound occasionally stirs to the sound of a distant horn. I do wish you would not snort, Russell; it is really most unbecoming. I suppose you would like me to shave,” he added, examining his chin thoughtfully.
“I only snort at snortworthy statements, Holmes, and yes, please do. Unless you intend to spend the night on the streets.”
“There has been quite enough of that in the last week, thank you. I have been very cold without my Shunammite.”
I studied him as he stropped the ivory-handled cutthroat, with a jaunty flick of the wrist at the end of each stroke.
“You must have been heartily sick of that snowstorm, Holmes. From Genesis to First Kings, just to escape the missionaries.”
“Oh, no, I only reached the twenty-eighth chapter of Leviticus on that occasion. I appropriated a pair of skis as soon as the snow stopped.” He reached for the shaving mug and began to whip the brush furiously about.
“I didn’t know you could ski.”
“I learnt. It was less hazardous duty than the missionaries.”
“Coward. You might have learnt something from them, such as the fact that Leviticus has only twenty-seven chapters. Now, if you will excuse me, I shall go and warm the bed.”
Sometime later, I thought to ask what he had been doing that day.
“I have been reading my Bible.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Sorry, was my arm over your ear?”
“It must have been—I could have sworn I heard you say you were reading your Bible. You don’t even own one.”
“I did, I was, and I do. Now. Thanks to your friend the colonel.”
“Holmes—”
“Do not ruffle your feathers; I shall explain. I have spent the evening in the company of a number of unfortunate gentlemen who, like myself, are willing to participate in a rudimentary Bible study, provided their stomachs are not empty at the time.”
I sorted this out.
“The colonel’s church runs a soup kitchen.”
“Got it in one. There seems to be a certain degree of affection on the part of the unfortunates towards their benefactors, judging from the way they lowered their voices for the more ribald of statements concerning King David and Abishag, his human hot-water bottle.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. But how did you find him? Did you follow him all day?”
“Hardly. I began in the bookstore-cum-printshop that produced the tract on women you found on the colonel’s bookshelf. In the course of our conversation, the owner told me of a lecture being given in the afternoon on the topic of ‘Women in the Church.’ I went and sat two rows behind Colonel Edwards.”
“Not dressed as one of the unfortunates, I think.”
“By no means. I was a highly respectable gentleman with a neat little beard. A most informative lecture, Russell. You would have found it quite stimulating.”
“No doubt,” I agreed politely. “So, you followed him to the church, changed yourself into that character with the eye, and allowed him to serve you soup and try his best to save your soul.”
“Essentially, yes. It was truly a most amusing day.”
“Amusing, but was it absolutely necessary to douse yourself in the scent of cheap gin? It is very off-putting.”
“I apologise. It was a means of adding corroborative detail and artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”
Before I could decide whether or not to pursue this obvious conversational red herring, he picked up the questioning himself.
“And you, Russell. How was your day?”
“Highly satisfactory, thank you, from beginning to end. Despite the fact that it’s between terms in Oxford, I have sixty-seven writing samples. I also picked up the information the colonel wanted. Bought two books, one of them out of print since 1902. Had a nice chat with a few friends over a pie and a pint, and met an odd man named Tolkien, a reader in English literature at Leeds who has a passion for early Anglo-Saxon poetry and runes and such. And, oh yes, I found where Miss Ruskin was on that missing Tuesday afternoon.”
His reaction was gratifying, and he was no longer relaxing towards sleep.
“Well done, Russell. I hoped you might dig that one out. Wait, let me get my pipe.”
He came back, wrapped himself in his dressing gown, and pulled the chair over next to the bed, settling down like a cat, with his legs tucked beneath him.
“Once I knew her college, it didn’t take long,” I told him. “The dean was in, and I just asked her if there might be any particularly close friends of Miss Ruskin’s about. She knew Miss Ruskin herself and was surprised that I should be asking. ‘Isn’t that a coincidence,’ she said. ‘I saw her only, oh, less than two weeks ago. I happened to be heading down the Cornmarket and I looked up and there she was. I couldn’t stop to talk, unfortunately, but it was she. Her sight is getting very bad, poor thing, isn’t it?’ No, she didn’t know. I told her, and she was rather upset, but not shocked. I suppose hearing that one of the older alumnae had died must be a common enough occurrence for her. At any rate, she gave me the names of five people whom she knew to be friends of Miss Ruskin—three in the Oxford area and two in London. I was lucky—three of the five were on the telephone. One said she had spoken with Miss Ruskin but hadn’t seen her. Another was in Canterbury, and the third was not aware that Miss Ruskin was in the country. That left one in Oxford and one in London. I took a taxi up the Woodstock Road to the fourth friend, but I found her house shut up tight. I stood about scratching my head and looking lost until one of those nosey neighbours with see-all lace curtains at the windows came out to tell me that dear, sweet Miss Lessingham was in hospital with a broken hip, had been for three
weeks now, though she was doing considerably better. So, I backtracked to the Radcliffe Infirmary and found that yes, indeed, ‘dear Dorothy’ had spent some hours with Miss Constance Lessingham, her onetime tutrix and lifelong friend. Had, in fact, spent the entire afternoon there at her side, reading to her and helping her write a number of letters, before leaving to catch the eight-ten to Paddington.
“You should have seen her, Holmes, lying there in that hospital bed in her mobcap, like a thin Queen Victoria, regally accepting the ministrations of nurses, doctors, friends, grandchildren of her old students, you name it. She must be ninety-five if she’s a day, but completely aware, not in the slightest fuzzy. I told her about the manuscript, and she was fascinated. Nothing would do but that I should recite it to her—twice: once in the original, then in translation. I felt like I had just been through a viva voce when she finished with me. It must have tired her, too, because she fell asleep for about ten minutes.
“When she woke up, I told her that Miss Ruskin had died, and how. At first she didn’t say anything, just stared out the window at the clouds, but then two tears came, just two little drops on that tiny wrinkled face, and she said, ‘That makes seventy-one of my students who have predeceased me, and at every one, I’ve thought that it just doesn’t seem right. They were my children, you see, and a mother should never have to outlive her babies.’ She was quiet for a minute, and then she sort of chuckled and said, ‘Well, that’s what I get for being too stubborn to die, I suppose,’ and she returned to the manuscript. I asked her several questions, on the chance that Miss Ruskin had told her something, but so far as I could tell, they had just talked about archaeology and mutual friends. Sorry there wasn’t more to the missing afternoon.”
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