A Letter of Mary mr-3

by Laurie R. King

  It was a large room, totally and unremittingly male: dark wood, undersized bow window, a thick, garish Persian carpet on the polished floor, cabinets— glazed on the top half, panelled below— covering one wall. There were two paintings: one of a man, which looked like a self-portrait by one of Rembrandt's third-rate students, all heavy moodiness and no technique, and the other a huge, gilt-framed, enthusiastically done nude of a remarkably well-endowed young blond woman who was cowering coyly before a thick, glossy, and lubricious snake. Not perhaps my image of Mother Eve, but the leering expression on the face of the snake was cleverly done, given the lack of facial characteristics to work with.

  The cabinets were unrevealing, containing a variety of trophies and awards, family heirlooms (one assumed) and statuettes, predominantly of females in various stages of undress. One minute passed. The telephone rang, and I heard the colonel's voice. I pulled open a few of the wooden doors, to find clothing, no apparent hidden compartments, and enough dust to make it obvious that the housekeeper cut a few corners. I walked around the bed to the well-worn armchair that sat next to the window. It was oddly positioned, I thought, almost as if— ah! It was within arm's reach of a locked cabinet. I dropped next to the door and yanked a pin out of my hair, bent the end of it, and set to work. Two minutes gone. I heard voices downstairs, but not on the stairs yet.

  After an agonising thirty seconds, the lock gave and I pulled the doors open, to find books. Pornography. Damn! I flipped through them quickly, but they were only books, mostly illustrated. I locked the doors again and heard the colonel bidding the caller good-bye. I made to rise, then froze. There, in front of my eyes, was a double row of cheap, well-thumbed pamphlets and paperback booklets. The title that jumped out at me was Emancipation and the Enslavement of the Family. There must have been nearly a hundred of the things, ranging from the inch-thick Cover Their Heads to a four-page Suffragettes: The Devil's Hands. I pulled out Women's Suffrage: Against God's Plan, noted the name and address of the publisher, and slid it back into its place as voices came shockingly loud directly outside the room. I plunged around the bed and closed the bathroom door behind me an instant before the knock came on the hallway door. I turned off the tap and hurried to pat my hair into order and correct the disarray to my person.

  "Are you all right, Mary?"

  "Oh yes, sir, I'll be down in just a moment."

  "I have the files you were working on; you needn't go back into the study. I'll have Alex take you home; it's raining very heavily now."

  "Thank you, sir. I won't be a minute."

  Rapid repairs completed, I took several calming breaths and went downstairs to the loathsome and inevitable sherry.

  "There you are, my dear, drink that. Look, Mary, I'm terribly sorry about the misunderstanding upstairs. Gerry's a bit impetuous sometimes."

  Misunderstanding? Easier to misunderstand the intent of a gun barrel.

  "It's fine, Colonel, really. Is he going to be all right?"

  "Certainly. A bit sore for a day or two, but perhaps you've succeeded in teaching him discretion where I failed."

  "But I didn't mean—"

  "No, I realise you didn't intentionally hurt him. No one could have done that deliberately. Nonetheless ... Look, Mary, I've just had a telephone call from a friend to invite me to a talk Monday afternoon. Would that be a good day for you to go to Oxford? I know it's not much warning, and if you would prefer to work on at the files before starting on another project, I'll understand."

  And leave me alone with Lothario? No thank you.

  "Monday's a good day. I'll take an early train. I'm quite looking forward to it."

  "Good, good. I'm glad about that." He did look pleased, but something else, as well. Actually, I thought, he was acting oddly. Not remarkably so, just small things, such as the way he was fiddling with his glass, the way he looked at me, reserved, somehow, and appraising. Was it suspicion? No, I thought not. If anything, he seemed more confident and less attentive of me. Polite, but dismissive, as well. My speculations were interrupted by the arrival of Alex with my coat. The colonel held it for me, handed me the file of letters and manuscript, and said that he would see me Tuesday morning. No mention of dinner that night or Sunday. Interesting, very interesting. Just what was it that had changed the man's attitude towards me, and why?

  Alex, uncommunicative as always, led the way to the garage. The roadster that Holmes had hypothesised was back now in its place, a very fast and slightly dented (along the sides) sleek, black Vauxhall. I exclaimed over it.

  "Yes, miss, it belongs to young Mr Edwards."

  "It is a beautiful thing. It looks fast, too."

  "I believe he is in the habit of driving it in the high sixties, on the proper roads, of course." Cars were obviously Alex's weak point, as this one made him positively effusive.

  "Cor, stone the crows, as my granfa' used to say," I said appreciatively. This pithy bit of vernacular struck home, and he actually broke down and smiled. I walked over to admire the gleaming enamel and the red leather upholstery more closely, and I thought that perhaps when this case was over, I, too— But then my acquisitive yearnings were stifled by the sight of a jumble of papers pushed into the front pocket, and my curiosity came to the fore. I circled the car under Alex's proud gaze, then, sighing like a love-struck adolescent, climbed reluctantly into the suddenly dowdy saloon car. I opened my bag as Alex went to his door, and I gave an exclamation of dismay.

  "What is it, miss?"

  "I don't seem to have my pen in here. I must have left it in the study. Would you mind awfully just waiting for a tick while I pop up and— oh dear. Mr Edwards will be there. Well, perhaps I'll just wait until Tuesday to retrieve it."

  "Would you like me to fetch it, miss?"

  "Oh, I couldn't ask you to do that."

  "Not to worry. In the study, did you say?"

  "Somewhere around the desk. It's where I was working when ... It's gold," I finished weakly, to his well-hidden, butlerian amusement.

  "Won't be a minute, miss."

  I waited until his footsteps faded, then pushed open the door and leant into the front of the roadster. The corner of one piece of paper looked tantalisingly familiar. Several months before, I had been returning to an urgent appointment in Oxford, trying to coax a modicum of speed out of my amiable Morris, and had collected a summons for my pains. Here in my hand was an identical slip of paper. I turned it over, looked at the date unbelievingly, and felt a foolish grin take hold of my face. Gerald Andrew Edwards had not been in Scotland on the night our cottage had been ransacked, not unless he had spent the next twelve hours driving very fast. The following morning, he had been nabbed for speeding near Tavistock, about as far from Scotland as England went. I took my gold fountain pen from my bag, made a note of the details, and then, clutching the pen in my hand, followed Alex towards the house.

  He was, of course, annoyed at his wild-goose chase after a pen that had fallen into the folds of a notebook, and he drove me in silence to Isabella's boardinghouse.

  I climbed the stairs to my cheerless room and closed the door gratefully behind me. I shrugged off my damp coat and was arranging it over a chair and considering the effort of asking for a measure of coal to make a fire, when I heard a gentle knock. Billy stood there, holding out to me a wad of what looked like used butcher's paper that had been rolled, flattened, and folded.

  "Letter for you, from a gentleman."

  "A letter? Not a telegram?" I was astonished— I had received exactly five letters from Holmes in the eight years I had known him. (Holmes' chief method of distance communication was through brief telegrams, preferably so cryptic as to be unintelligible. One such had contained a deliberate misspelling that was corrected along the way by some conscientious telegraphist, thus rendering the message totally meaningless.)

  "Not for you. A couple for me to send for him— one to Inspector Lestrade about a Jason Rogers, another for Mr Mycroft Holmes, something about sending a brown suit to be cle
aned."

  Which could mean, I realised, some prearranged code— All is known, must fly— or could mean merely that the brown suit wanted cleaning. I took the wad of paper apprehensively. "I'm glad he finally surfaced, if briefly. You saw him, then?"

  "I did, for two minutes as he changed trains. He told me to say he was sorry he couldn't come tonight but that he'd see you tomorrow night."

  "I'll believe that when I see him. How did he look?"

  Billy hesitated, his worn face searching for words. He had begun life on the hardest of London streets, employed and fostered by Holmes, and though he was quick, he was not an educated man. He finally settled for: "Not himself, if you know what I mean. Of course, he was wearin' them old things and hadn't shaved, but he looked tired, too, and stiff. Not all an act."

  "Hardly surprising. I hope he gets a proper bed tonight. Thank you for this." I held up the flattened scroll.

  "He said you might want me to take it to someone else later. If you do, I'll be home." He jerked his thumb to indicate the room across the hall. I thanked him again and closed the door, put hat and gloves and shoes in their places, and poured myself a small brandy, which I took with the letter to the chair next to the window. I raised my eyebrows at his first paragraph.

  My dear Russell,

  I write this hurriedly on, as you will no doubt have noted, a train car whose underpinnings have seen better days. The information it contains may be of use to you, but the presentation of that information is of value to me: I find myself in the singularly vexing position of possessing a series of facts which, as you know, I habitually review aloud and put into order, even if my audience is no more responsive than Watson often was. However, you are off on your own track, Watson is in America somewhere, and I haven't time to wait about for Mycroft or Lestrade. Hence the letter. I should prefer to have the patterns reflected either by your perception or Watson's lack thereof; however, a stub of lead pencil and this unsavoury length of butcher's paper will have to suffice. (From the expressions on the faces of my compartment mates, none of them has ever before witnessed the miraculous generation of the written word. I shall attempt not to be distracted.)

  First to the information: I successfully ingratiated myself into the employ of Mrs Rogers by the approach we had agreed upon— that is, I am an unemployed sailor who knew her husband, and I am as offensive as possible without quite coming to blows. She positively melts in my unshaven presence.

  I was up on a ladder in Mrs Rogers's guest room, cursing the general intractability of inexpensive wallpaper, when I heard a car drive in, and shortly thereafter, without a knock, came the sound of heavy feet in the kitchen below. Murmured conversation followed, and I cursed further the unsuitability of my position for overhearing what was happening downstairs. In a few minutes, however, the feet came up the stairs and a head of thick black hair appeared in the door, then stared curiously at me and my work.

  The owner of the hair, as you can imagine, interested me greatly. I gave him an abrupt greeting, typical of my character, and narrowly avoided dropping a length of paste-sodden paper on him. He commented on the quality of my work. I told him that she was getting what she paid for, that I never claimed to be a paperhanger.

  "What are you, then?" he asked.

  "Jack of all trades, master of none," I replied.

  He reacted to this bit of originality with a sneer.

  "I'd believe that you've mastered none, by the looks of these walls. What are you good at?"

  "Ships. Machinery. Automobiles." This last was after I had seen the grease stains under his nails and the condition of his shoes and trousers.

  "Hah. Probably can't even so much as change a tyre."

  "I've changed a few," I said mildly, and deposited a globule of paste on his shoe.

  "Well, you can do another if you like. There's a slow puncture in the car in the drive outside, and I'm in a hurry. You go take it off and see if you can find the hole."

  I obediently laid down my brush and knife and took up the wrenches from the car's toolbox. It was not his automobile, of that I was certain. Too staid, too expensive, too well kept up. I would have given much to hear what was said during the next fifteen minutes, but short of climbing the wall— in broad daylight, without ivy or a convenient rope— and putting my ear to a window, I could not. I found the hole, patched it, and was putting the wheel back in place when he came out again.

  "Here, don't tell me you've just started?"

  "Oh no, it's all ready to go. Sir, if you'll hand me that pump, I'll finish it."

  As the tyre filled with air, I admired "his" automobile.

  "Is it yours, then?" I asked casually.

  "Nah, it's borrowed."

  "I thought it might be. I'd see you in something a touch flashier, somehow, and faster."

  "Oh, this one's pretty fast."

  "Don't look it," I announced sceptically, so he proceeded to tell me precisely how long it took him to drive from Bath, despite the hay wagons. I whistled appreciatively.

  "You must've had to push it hard on the straight patches. A good friend, to let you treat his machine like that."

  "Ah, he'll never know. Some of these old [censored] own these [censored] great hogs and never use them properly. Does a machine good to be stretched a bit."

  "You ought to charge him extra for it," I jested, and he took the bait.

  "Too right, add it to his bill."

  Much laughter and joviality followed and an exchange of opinions regarding pistons, body frames, and the like. (Many blessings, incidentally, were called upon Old Will's grandson for his tutorials in automotive arcana.) He climbed into the luxurious transport that was not his own, and I stuck my head over the passenger side.

  "Enjoy your drive back, Mr—"

  "Rogers, Jason Rogers."

  "Enjoy the road, Mr Rogers. I hear tell there's a very watchful constabulary round Swindon side, so if you're going through there, you better keep a light foot on it."

  "Thanks for the warning, Basil. Give me a start, my man."

  I obliged, and he slapped the car cruelly into gear and roared off down the way.

  So, as you can see, Russell, I am off to Bath, on a somewhat slower but considerably safer means of transport, to look into the possibility of a motorcar-repair establishment run by a Mr Jason Rogers, grandson of Mrs Erica Rogers, a right-handed, black-haired man of about five feet ten inches, thirteen stone, with rounded shoes, who looks the sort to own a brown tweed suit and a workmanlike folding knife. I hope to have some interesting contributions to add to the discussion tomorrow evening.

  Now as to the pattern into which this information may fit: As I mentioned, Mrs Rogers is a talkative woman, easily steered into one topic and another, with certain very definite exceptions, when a thick window shade is pulled down behind her eyes and she discovers that it is time to make a pot of tea or check on her aged mother. She is not wildly intelligent, but she is very, very canny, and her suspicions bristle whenever the topics of money (particularly inheritance), grandsons, the education of women, childbearing outside of matrimony, and dogs come up. Which of these areas might concern us, and which are merely extraneous remnants of personal history, is as yet difficult to discern, although some of the subjects are highly suggestive.

  Certain oblique statements, gestures, and expressions have caught my interest, buried as they were in the flow of gossip, childhood reminiscences, and explanations of the proper technique by which a job is to be done. I shall not burden you at this point with the details of those conversations, which would exhaust my supplies of paper, lead, and time; however, the following points should be noted:

  First and foremost, Mrs Rogers is possessed of a deep mistrust of close family relationships. Her asides about ungrateful siblings and faithless children do not, however, appear to extend to mothers or male grandchildren. Hence my rapid departure by rail.

  Second, you noted that she seemed fond of that drivel perpetrated by Watson on the unsuspecting public, ye
t when I walked into the house, there was not a single thing more demanding of thought than an old copy of Mrs Beeton's cookery book. A spot of gossip with the neighbour's lad (never underestimate the observational powers of an intelligent child, Russell!) revealed that a load of things were carted off a few days ago, including several tea chests filled with books. Which goes to explain ten linear feet of sparsely occupied and recently scrubbed shelves upstairs. Canny, very canny.

  Third, you were quite correct about the recent departure of household help. This was in the person of a rather dim child of seventeen years who was perfunctorily dismissed on the day Miss Ruskin left Cambridgeshire, sent home to her family with two weeks' pay and no explanation.

  As Pascal says, I have made this letter long because I lacked the time to make it short, but time and paper both are drawing to a rapid close, and I shall have to sprint across town to make the Bath connexion. You might have Billy take this to Mycroft and Lestrade, if he's available.

  Take care, wife.

  Holmes

  Postscript— I had thought to keep the following with me, but perhaps that is not a good idea. If it were found in my possession by the gentlemen I intend to visit, it could be difficult to explain. I do not need to warn you to guard it closely. I found it in a desk drawer in Mrs Rogers's room, inside an envelope which, as can be discerned from the letter itself, was stabbed and gouged repeatedly with an ink pen, leaving pieces of the nib embedded in the paper. The letter was in a prominent spot in the drawer, but it had been returned to its envelope before it was attacked and not removed from the envelope since then. I left the empty envelope behind, lest Mrs Rogers notice its absence. I am quite aware this is not an entirely appropriate means of obtaining police evidence, but really, I could not leave it there. If I have not returned by tomorrow evening, take it with you to Mycroft's and give it to Lestrade.

  H.

  The letter, in the distinctive strong hand of Dorothy Ruskin, read as follows:

  22 November 1920 Jerusalem

  Dear Erica,

  I hope this letter finds you and Mother well and your son's wife recovering after her fall. My return voyage was as uneventful as possible in this day, and I have returned safely, which is all one can ask for.