"Colonel, I— the whole thing sounds most delightful. Considerably better than Kew. I only might wish I had worn more practical shoes, so that I might take advantage of the grounds."
That distracted him, and we both peered down at my fashionable and therefore impractical heels, topped by the sleek sheen of my silk stockings. He cleared his throat and glanced out the window.
"Perhaps Mrs Westbury could help you. I say, do you ride?"
"I do, but not in these clothes."
"Oh, that would not be a problem. Westbury's is always prepared for that kind of thing. Course, the riding's nothing like before the war, but the few nags they manage to scrape together are usually sound. Wrong time of year for a hunt, sorry to say."
"That's just as well. My sympathy would be entirely with the fox."
He chuckled patronisingly, as if he had expected my reaction, then changed the subject. Actually, I am not against the killing of foxes, being a farmer myself and having lost numerous poultry to them over the years. What I dislike is the unnecessary glorification of bloodthirstiness. We no longer execute our criminals with the prolonged agony of stoning or torture, and I cannot see why we should grant a wild creature any less dignity. When we have a fox, Patrick and I take turns sitting up with a gun until it shows up, and we kill it cleanly. We do not run it to ground in terror and turn the dogs loose to tear it to pieces. Such a process demeans both hunted and hunter. But I digress.
It was indeed a magnificent house, and circling past the playing fountain to the portico, I could well imagine that it would be an appallingly expensive establishment to maintain. Two acres of roof? Three? I said a short prayer of thanksgiving that my own inheritance was too nouveau to have been bogged down in stone, glass, marble, and lead. Oak, plaster, and tile were more to my taste. Besides, a house like this means a plethora of servants, and I prefer freedom.
We were greeted by music and a gentleman who could have been a butler of long service or an hotel manager, a figure both subservient and authoritative.
"Good day, Colonel Edwards, it's good to see you again. I'm sorry I was not informed that you were coming, or I should have arranged something for you." There was just the slightest hint of reproach in his voice.
"No, Southern, I didn't know myself until we got into the car an hour ago. We're not here for dinner, just the afternoon, if there are a couple of spare mounts. However, I think Miss Small here would appreciate a crust of bread first and a change of clothing. Do you think the missus could help us?"
"Certainly, sir. I'll take her in now, if you like, and then bring her around to the terrace buffet."
"That's grand. You go with Southern, Mary; his good wife will fix you up with something to ride in."
The riding jacket I ended up wearing had been designed for a woman with less in the way of shoulders and height and considerably more in the way of breast and hip, but the breeches were long enough and the boots fit. Mrs Southern assured me that I need not dress for the terrace luncheon, and when I saw the gathering, I understood why. The guests wore everything from dazzling white linen and twenty-guinea sandals to egg-encrusted waistcoats and boots that Patrick would have scorned for mucking out the cow barn. I stood in the dark shadow of a portico and enjoyed the multicoloured crowd of perhaps sixty people, equally matched between men and women, eating and drinking and talking in the glorious sunshine all along the magnificent flower-blazoned terrace. Halfway down the terrace, stones cast out a triangular shelf into the formal flower beds, and on this platform a string quartet was playing gamely.
The colonel was standing with a group of three other men, a stemmed glass small in one hand and a delicate sandwich in the other. I made to step out into the light, then stopped dead as my eyes lit on the group coming up the terrace behind him. Damnation, just what I had feared all morning, someone who knew me well enough to see through the façade: the sister and cousin of a housemate from my undergraduate days, with whom I had gone to a rather poor ballet and spent a dreary weekend in Surrey. They moved up to the colonel's party and rooted themselves there.
The quartet swirled to an end, which reminded people of its presence, so that everyone turned and applauded politely. The cellist wiped her brow prettily and went to greet the colonel. Mrs Westbury, I decided, and pressed back into the building as the colonel looked vaguely towards the house. I should just have to wait until he came to find me and then insist I was not hungry, though I did not care much for the idea of a long ride on nothing more filling than two pink biscuits. There was no choice, however; I couldn't go out there now. I ducked back into the house, wondering hopefully if I might come across an untended pantry.
My path took me by the drawing room, which I had glimpsed on my previous journey down the hallway, and as I passed, there came a sweet, sharp burst of notes from a clavier. The scales tripped up and down the keyboard for a minute or two before settling competently down into a Scarlatti sonata I'd heard before. I edged my head around the door and saw an unmistakably familiar elegant back, all alone in a vast, ornate hall of mirrors and gilt, seated before a double-keyboard instrument whose rococo intricacy set off the performer's exquisitely simple grey suit and sleek towhead with startling perfection. I sank into a knobbly chair that might have come from the same workshop as the clavier, watching him with the pleasure that comes from witnessing one of nature's rare creatures in its own habitat.
The sonata came to what I remembered as its end, but before I could make up my mind either to slip out silently or to shuffle my chair noisily, the trailing notes gathered themselves again and launched into an extraordinary piece of music that sounded like a three-way hybrid of Schubert's "March Militaire" performed as a Goldberg Variation by Bach with Scott Joplin occasionally elbowing in. Nearly two minutes went by before I could sort out the central theme: He was improvising a musical jest on "Yes, We Have No Bananas." I snorted in laughter.
The clever hands jerked in discord, and he whirled around and off the bench to face me, but before I could feel remorse, the tense control in his shoulders and the taut line of his jaw had relaxed into pleased recognition.
"Good Lord, it's Mrs Sherlock!" The foolish, slightly lopsided face with the too-bland eyes registered amazement at seeing me in this setting.
"No, it is not," I corrected him severely. "It's Miss Mary Small, whom you've never set eyes on in your life."
His grey eyes flared with interest and amusement even as his face and posture lapsed instantaneously into the silly-ass act he did so well. "Miss Small, of course, so pleased to make your 'quaintance. Reminded me for a tick of someone I know— don't know her well, of course, only met her— a party somewhere, I s'pose. Come to think of it, you don't look the least like her. Maybe something around the eyes? No, must be the shape of the spectacles, and as I remember, she had brown hair. A short little thing, too. Nothing like you. Mary Small, you say? How d'you do, Miss Small?"
His high voice burbled to a close, and he held out a deprecating hand, which I took with pleasure and a laugh. "How are you, Peter? You're looking well." Despite his violent reaction to being startled, he did appear less strained and not so thin as when I had last seen him, some months before. He had had a bad war indeed, and he was only now beginning to crawl out of the trenches.
"Not so bad," he said, and then, probing politely, asked, "Is there anything I might do to assist, Miss Small?"
"Thank you, Peter, but ..." I paused, struck by a thought. "I might, actually, ask a small favour."
"But of course— gallant is one of my overabundant middle names. What dragon does milady wish slain, what chasm spanned? A star pluck't from the heavens, a cherry that hath no stone? Some shag for your pipe, perhaps?"
"Nothing so simple as dragons or bridges, I fear. I need two young ladies removed so that I might get at the groaning board, where they stand waiting to recognise me for whom I am not and address me loudly by a name I had rather not have heard."
"You wish me to murder two women so you can eat lunch?"
he asked with one politely raised eyebrow. "It seems just a bit excessive when there are servants willin' and able to bring you a tray, but I dare say, any friend of Sherlock Holmes—"
"No, you idiot," I said over the giggles he always managed to draw from me. "Just remove them for twenty minutes. Take them to view the peacocks, or see the etchings, or bring them in to hear you play something horrid and dissonant on this machine."
"Please, don't insult the poor thing. It can't help how it looks, and its inner parts deserve better than the twentieth century." He patted the encrusted inlay of the top reassuringly.
"Play them Bach or Satie, I don't care, just so I have time to eat and escape into the grounds. In those dresses, they can't plan to venture far from the house."
"Deep waters, Holmes, and no small danger, from the peacocks if nothin' else. But your faithful Watson is ready as always to plunge into the fray, all enthusiasm and no wits. Who are these two delectable creatures awaitin' my seductive wiles, and if I may be so bold, on whose ears is not to fall the name of Holmes?" He held the door for me, and we entered the dark corridor.
"The ladies are silly but sweet, and you won't have to think of topics of conversation. The ears belong to a Colonel Dennis Edwards, who currently employs Miss Mary Small as his secretary."
"Edwards, you say? You do move with strange fish, my dear. I will demand payment for this onerous deed, you know. Which are my victims?" he added, peering alertly through the open door. I pointed them out to him, and he sighed. "Yes, we have met. A policeman's lot is not an 'appy one. Adieu, my lady, and if I do not survive this day, tell my mother that I loved her."
He screwed his monocle into place with a gesture of buckling on armour, then glided smoothly out into the crowd. I watched with amusement as he greeted his hostess, kissed the fingers of a matched brace of dowagers, shook various hands, greeted the colonel and said something that made him laugh, scooped up three glasses of champagne from a passing tray, and finally, with the ease of a champion sheepdog, cut out his two victims from the flock. Within four minutes from leaving my side, he was strolling down the terrace stones, one fluttering female on each arm, and I stepped out to take a plate. Rule, Britannia, with an aristocracy like that.
I applied myself industriously to a plate of assorted foodstuffs, drank thirstily several glasses of the excellent champagne, nodded politely to the bits of conversation that came my way, and watched warily for other familiar faces. The colonel seemed taken aback by my brusque manners, so after slapping my empty plate down onto a nearby tray, I made an effort to smile ingratiatingly at him before urging him to lead me to the stables.
Inside that dim and fragrant environment, I managed to avoid both the sidesaddle and the placid mare the colonel would have chosen for me, settling instead on a rangy gelding with a gleam of equine intelligence in his eye and airily brushing off the colonel's worried fussing that it was too much horse for me. Mary Small was slipping away fast, and I was fortunate that the horse had already been out that morning and was therefore less interested in bolting or scraping me off under a branch, situations that our Miss Small might have found trying.
Once away from the house, I began to breathe more easily, and I settled down to the business of enjoying myself. During the shakedown canter through the shady lane, the horse and I had a discussion about our partnership's chain of command, and when that had been settled to my satisfaction, I gave him some rein and aimed him at a fence. Despite his looks, his legs had springs like a Daimler, and when he recognised that he had a rider who appreciated his skills, he settled his ears with a nod of prim satisfaction and happily set about proving his worth.
A couple of miles later, I belatedly became aware of my escort and employer on my heels, and half-turning, I shot him a grin of pure enjoyment. He came alongside with a grin of his own, and we rode under the hot Kentish sky in something very like companionship. He was different mounted on the horse in his borrowed coat, more sure of himself, yet paradoxically less assertive. I thought he would be the same when engaged in any physical activity, hunting or rugby, closer to his essential nature than when in his too-large house in the city. He sat the horse well and took the hedges and walls smoothly, and he politely allowed me to win the race to the far edge of Capability Brown's compulsory lake. We dismounted and I unpinned my hat, unbuttoned my gloves, and rinsed out a handkerchief in the rather muddy water to cool my face. I spread my borrowed jacket out on the grass and lay back on it to let the sun work at increasing my freckles, listening to far-distant voices and birdcalls and the occasional slight jingles of the grazing horses.
"You ride well, Mary. Where did you learn?"
"I am a farmer." I came to myself with a start. "That is, I grew up on a farm in Oxfordshire."
"What does your family grow?"
"A bit of everything, really. Hay, market vegetables, a few horses, cows."
"That's where the calluses on your hands come from?"
I held them up against the sky and studied them.
"Not a city girl's hands, are they? Too many cows to milk." The musculature was much too generalised for that, but I doubted that he would notice my lack of the milkmaid's characteristic bulging carpal muscle. I flexed my fingers, then dropped my arms down at my sides and closed my eyes.
Moments of pure relaxation were rare for me. There was always the nagging of books unread, work undone, time a-wasting. For this brief slice of an afternoon, though, the choice was taken from me; the only alternative to relaxation was fretting. But the sun was too warm and my muscles too pleasantly loosened to fret, so I stretched out my long legs, crossed them at the boots, folded my glasses onto my stomach, and gave myself over to the sheer debauchery of simply lying in the sun. I was vaguely aware that I was presenting a sight shocking to the eyes of an Edwardian gentleman, long jodhpur-clad limbs and thin blouse, bare head and naked face and hair awry, giving herself over to a shameless and unafraid snooze. I smiled at the thought.
In the arms of Nature's soft nurse, I half-dozed, aware of the sun on my eyelids and a fitful breeze across my cheeks, the food in my stomach and the good air in my lungs and the faint remnant of wine in my blood, the odours of cleaning fluid and cedar from the coat under my head and the clean smell of horse moving off and the aroma of a warm male human nearby. I held the awareness of all these things of the day and the birdsong in a compartment, a light place into which I could reach at any instant, and allowed the rest of myself to sink away into the silent, warm, dark place that lies within.
Mary Magdalene. I had not thought of her in days, and yet a week ago, reading her letter aloud to Holmes, I should have said she would remain before my eyes for the rest of my days. Mary of Magdala, one vital link between the ministry of Jesus the Nazarene carpenter, the crucifixion of Jesus the political criminal, and the resurrection of Jesus the Son of God— a link who, having brought the news of the resurrection to the male disciples, vanishes utterly on Easter afternoon. I reflected, not for the first time, on the irony that this woman, later called a harlot, traditionally identified with John's "woman taken in adultery," this mere woman and her vision of the empty tomb was the foundation stone on which two thousand years of Christian faith was laid, and at that moment, lying there in the sun, I knew in my heart that, despite the difficulties, I accepted her authorship of my papyrus. I was filled with admiration for the pure, distilled strength of the woman with her simple, deadly decisions— and for the first time I wondered what had become of the granddaughter, Rachel, how old she had been, if she made it safely to Magdala. "I look out across my rocky desolation," the woman had written, in that flowing and spiky hand that gave the impression of hurried calm even before I knew her words, a rocky desolation and fleeing the coming wrath of the conqueror that would turn the holy place that was the heart of Judaism into a ruin where jackals would howl and soldiers empty their bladders, the same soldiers who carried pikes and swords and who stank of garlic and stale sweat in that land of sun and little water, a smell very
unlike the cedar and the tobacco and the fresh male smell that was in my own nostrils now, which combination was evocative of Holmes. I lay limp, part of me drifting on a hillside in a long-off age under a different sun, and a bit of me aware of Mr Brown's cultivated natural landscape, and gradually a third part of me becoming aware of a series of distinctly arresting sensations that slowly transformed my state of torpid dreaminess into hypnotic attention, a third point of awareness that kept me frozen and divided, the awareness of lips exploring the exquisitely sensitive tracery of veins that ran up the inside of my wrist.
It was overwhelmingly erotic, the feather touch and dreamlike movement of his breath and mouth and moustache in my palm, on the swell and hollow of my thumb, up the line of my tendons, the amazing, unexpected, electrifying gentleness and sensitivity of his mouth taking possession of my right hand, and I arched my fingers to him and took one deep, shuddering breath, and an instant later I was on my feet, stumbling away from him, seeking the safety of my horse.
I scrubbed my palm and the inside of my wrist hard across the bristle of the animal's coarse hip, and as I yanked at the girth with unnecessary violence, I cursed my stupidity, my carelessness, my— yes, damn it, my absentmindedness— and I cursed as well my overreaction, for the second time in twenty-four hours, to an Edwards male. He came up behind me and held out glasses, gloves, hat, and jacket, and I clothed myself and mounted the horse without looking at him or taking his offer of a hand up.
"Mary, I—"
"No, Colonel. No." My rough voice was pure Russell. "I am sorry, but no. It's time to be getting back." I drove the hat pins roughly home, buttoned the gloves, and then forced myself to look down at him, but he only looked puzzled and a bit hurt, then slightly amused.
"Very well, Mary, if that's how you want it." He turned away to catch his own horse, but I couldn't leave it at that.
"Colonel? Look, I am sorry. It has nothing to do with how I want it, but it's how it has to be. I can't explain, not just now. I am sorry." And for a moment, with the tingle still warm on my wrist, I was truly sorry, and he saw it, and he smiled crookedly.
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