The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls

by King, John R.

  There itwas: transfiguration. Herbreath became snowflakes. Some man had tarted her up in this costume and had troweled makeup onto her face and had booted her into the street where her lips were meant to pucker for men, and yet she saved them to kiss the black sky.

  I doffed my coat and whirled it out like a cape and wrapped Susanna in it. She breathed deeply, drawing my scent into her lungs, then sent the essence of me into the air to freeze and sparkle. Her shoulders spread within my coat. Still, she had not looked at me.

  “Come back with me,” I urged her, “to my room.”

  Before she could answer, a man and wife, buttoned up against the cold, waltzed past, arm in arm. The man sneered at us: “The fellow and the slut.”

  I stared defiantly after them. “Announcing yourself, guvnor?”

  The man—a foot taller than I and twice my weight—stopped in his tracks and pivoted smartly about, his brass-headed cane hoisted in one hand.

  I flashed him a fearless smile: “Let’s go, then.”

  His fat face twitched, and he tried to affect an imperious air: “Yes, young man. Do—go!”

  My feet were planted on the pavement, and my smile only grew.

  He and his wife pivoted again and strode rapidly away. At intervals, the man glanced back at me until he and his wife had disappeared beyond Bucks Row.

  I turned to the young woman and saw that her face was still lifted to the sky, still wet with melted snowflakes. “Come back with me, to my room.”

  Only then did I realize she wasn’t looking at the sky. She was looking at me. And it wasn’t snowflakes that wet her cheeks. “It’s like you fell from heaven.”

  “I did.” I raised my elbow toward her. She lifted her hand from within my coat and set her slender fingers on my forearm. With the lady at my side, I turned and set off down the pavement. “And where did you fall from?”

  She blinked, drawing a deep breath. “No great distance.”

  We said little else, she and I, as we strolled along the shopfronts and wended our way past parked cabs and dashed among rolling ones. On the other side of George Yard, I opened the door of the boardinghouse and gestured her within. She climbed the narrow stairs past the flickering gaslight, and I guided her to the wide-open door of my rooms. Glancing within, I suddenly noticed how dismal the place looked.

  “Forgive the squalor,” I said.

  “It’s nice,” she answered, entering. Then, in a different voice, she said, “I’m supposed to ask to see the money.”

  I laughed, closed the door behind us, and slid the coat off her shoulders. “Why? Are you a burglar?”

  “The money’s supposed to be on the dresser before anything happens.”

  “Who says?”

  “My fath—my … manager.”

  I drew her to a settee and compelled her to sit down. Then I knelt before her and held her hands. “Your father sends you out?”

  Her face trembled behind the cracked paint. “I’m supposed to see the money.”

  “All right.” I dug into my pocket, dragged out my last five sovereigns, and smacked them into her palm. “There. Will that be enough?” She tried to slide three sovereigns back to me, but I wouldn’t take them. “Your father sends you out?”

  “I got eight sisters to support—”

  “Isn’t that your father’s job?”

  She shrugged. “This is what he does—”

  “What about your mother?”

  “Mother?”

  I blinked impatiently at her. “You have eight sisters.”

  “None of us have a mother.”

  “Well, where did you come from?”

  “The orphanage,” she said, prying her hands out of mine.

  I sat back on my heels, understanding at last. “You’re all orphans?”

  “A family, now. Some are older. They’re kind of like our mothers. But you don’t get too attached to any of them. They don’t last long. Just Father does.”

  “Just Father does …” I echoed, thinking this through. My heart felt small and cold. “Listen—do you love this man?”

  “What?”

  “Do you love your father?”

  “No,” she said, her eyebrows furrowing. “But he’s … Father.”

  I gently reached to her, taking her hand again in mine. “I don’t have much money—just those five sovereigns until I return to Cambridge—”

  “Cambridge!”

  “Yes, and there, I have a monthly stipend from my father—enough for both of us to live and eat.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Come with me.”

  “What?”

  “Come live with me.”

  “For sex?”

  “No. Not for sex. For life. For learning.”

  She shook her head miserably. “I can’t read.”

  “I’ll teach you.”

  She was beginning to weep. “You don’t even know my name.”

  I smiled fearlessly. “What’s your name?”

  “Susanna,” she said in surrender. “Susanna Peshwick.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Susanna Peshwick.” I kissed the back of her hand. “My name is James Moriarty.”

  She was crying. “Why? Why would you do this?”

  I reached up to catch her tear on the tip of my thumb. “Because … because …” What was I to say? I was doing this because of the third tone, that strange, transformative tone? For a moment, I feared she wouldn’t understand, but then I remembered the snowflakes on her face. “It’s because of the snowflakes,” I said at last, tilting my head back and pursing my lips and letting breath roll into the air.

  Susanna watched me, and the tears stopped coming, and a slow smile cracked the makeup she wore.

  THAT NIGHT, I washed Susanna’s face and shared with her the last of the cheese and bread I had. She slept in the bed, and I slept on the settee. Next morning, we went together to the train station, and we bought two tickets to Cambridge and arrived to set up house together in my apartments.

  I sold a few books from my freshman studies and bought Susanna some new clothes. Otherwise we lived off the money from Father—and the few extra sovereigns I could earn per month by tutoring. Susanna was my main student, though—and my best. She had never learned to read or write, but within a month, she had grasped the basics of letters and words. In two, she could follow along as I read from Milton and Newton. More than letters, though, she had a natural genius for numbers and chemistry.

  In one of our first projects together, we worked out the geometry of snowflakes. Beginning with two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, we mapped the possible molecular combinations and settled on the most stable structure. Then, we modeled that structure in clay and quills and played with the little forms until we discovered the manifold ways that these tiny pieces could fit together. All were hexametric—six sided.

  I wrote up our results in a monograph, and Susanna provided illustrations. We published The Molecular Basis of Snowflake Formation, by James Moriarty and Susanna Peshwick—and it remains the authoritative document on the subject.

  How prophetic those first snowflakes had been.

  And so it went with us. I taught her what I was learning, and Susanna joined me in research and experimentation. We published our findings together, and I soon came to be known as the heir apparent to the seat of Newton. Susanna came to be known as my brilliant and mysterious and beautiful mistress. It was, of course, unfair that she should be eclipsed by me, though I hoped she would be content enough until I could secure a position and pay for her own schooling.

  I had just begun my final year, though, when I realized Susanna was not content. The sweet serenity had drained from her face, and she always wore a look of severe focus. I did what I could—placed her name first on our next monograph, encouraged her to conduct her own research, but nothing could bring back her joy.

  At last, I guided her to a chair beside our apartment window, knelt before her as I had on that first night, and begged to know
: “Susanna, what have I done?”

  She looked quizzically at me. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve tried to be true to my pledge—food and clothing and shelter, learning, life—”

  She nodded. “You have been true.”

  “I’ve never required anything of you except that.”

  Her eyes began to tear. “Yes. You have never required anything of me—”

  “What is it, then? What have I done?”

  Susanna blinked. “I want you to require something more.” She stood, still holding my hand, and led me to the bed. I had, of course, wished for this moment from the start, but my oath as a gentleman had bound me. Susanna unbound me.

  I found a new course of study that year. While I earned a first in maths and physics, I learned even more about the body and heart of a woman. And just after I had accepted a fellowship at Jesus College, Susanna educated me in a new mathematics—that of trimesters.

  “You’re pregnant?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said gently.

  I looked about at that apartment we had shared for a year and a half, and I tried to imagine where we would put a crib. “We’ll need a bigger place.”

  Susanna smiled at me. “We’ll need a bigger life.”

  She was right. No longer would it be just the two of us against the world, but now three. No longer could we stroll hand in hand across Jesus Green, but now would have a pram bumping along between us. I felt grieved. Our new life together would come to an end, and an altogether different life would begin.

  “I suppose I’ll have to marry you,” I murmured, thinking aloud.

  The smile melted from her face, and she said, “For a mathematical genius, you certainly are an idiot.”

  I stared at her. “I won’t have to marry you?”

  “No,” she replied, taking my hand. “You will, but—but what sort of man proposes by saying ‘I suppose I’ll have to marry you’?”

  Of course, she was right. I was a fool—and I nearly compounded the problem by apologizing. Instead, I knelt before her, looked her in the eye, and said, “Susanna Peshwick, will you marry me?”

  “I suppose I’ll have to.”

  WE WERE married on the Bridge of Sighs in St. John’s College, a small ceremony with the rector and two colleagues as witnesses. There, in the sight of God, we were joined in holy matrimony till death us do part.

  Despite her pregnancy, Susanna began her formal studies that very term. Her classmates were appalled that a woman—that a pregnant woman—should be among them. They became even more appalled as they discovered how very much she knew and how rapid her thought processes were. Jabbering tongues were silenced in the first few weeks of her time among them, replaced by gaping mouths and then by smiles. Soon, a number of the fellows were asking for her help with assignments, and a few even had designs that went beyond that—until I disabused them of their youthful ambitions.

  And in time, as slight as Susanna was, her pregnancy was apparent to all. By then it did not matter. Her power as a scholar was matched only by the severe reputation of her husband.

  She began to bring home her own theories and ideas: More monographs lay in our future. She turned her mathematical genius on social issues, creating models of human behavior that were powerfully predictive in large populations. Susanna studied the effect of education on reproductive age, the effect of career choice on life span, the effect of subsistence style on political affiliation, the effect of opiates and alcohol on cognition and performance … .

  Though she began her work with large populations, she refined her models to be increasingly specific. Eventually, she claimed to be able to prognosticate the actions of five strangers to a specific stimulus.

  “I’ll have to see it to believe it,” I said.

  “Come along, then.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  Susanna led me to the banks of the Cam, where we met two of her professors—Drs. Applewight and Green. She asked us all to sit down on the grass. It was a fine September day, the dew just gone from the ground and a gentle mist meandering atop the river. Nearby, a young man sat beside a tree and worked feverishly on a manuscript he was writing. Behind him, two old gentlemen were engaged in a lawn-bowling match. In the distance, a young man poled his punt up the Cam, a young woman sitting within the boat and holding a picnic basket on her lap.

  “If a pregnant woman were to fall into those waters,” Susanna asked us, “which of those five people would leap in to save her?”

  I laughed, fishing a sovereign from my waistcoat and pressing it into Susanna’s hand. “None, I would wager.”

  She glared at me, both affronted and intrigued. “You think no one would save me?”

  “No one,” I replied flatly, “because your husband would not let his wife get near enough to the water for such a thing to happen.”

  Susanna smiled, wrapping her fingers around the coin and lowering it into a pouch at her waist. “One wager lost,” she said. “After all, no good husband would stand in the way of his wife’s work. This is your wife’s work, and you are a good husband, ergo—”

  “Oh, Sue, be serious! I will rescue you.”

  She replied archly. “You cannot swim.”

  “It makes no difference!”

  “And you’re wearing your best suit.”

  I nodded grimly. “Now that does matter.”

  Dr. Applewight let out a roar of laughter and smacked my shoulder, and Dr. Green gave me a sympathetic shrug.

  “I want that coin back when I’m proved right,” I said.

  Susanna turned to the other two. “Well, gentlemen. Place your bets.”

  Dr. Applewight, a rosy-cheeked fellow with muttonchops, looked dubiously at the old men bowling, the young man writing poetry, and the other young man in the boat with his ladylove. He reached into his own purse and clapped a sovereign in Susanna’s hand. “The young woman.”

  I barked, “You must be joking! She’s got twelve petticoats if she’s got one. She’s a walking sponge. She’d soak up the Cam.”

  Though all of us laughed, Applewight said, “Ah, but the physics of sponges do not occur to young ladies, who have especial empathy for their own kind when great with child.”

  Susanna flashed the coin in her hand, smiled, and secreted the thing again in the pouch at her waist. “I can tell you, you are wrong, sir.”

  “What?”

  “I have been a young, single woman recently and can attest that they see pregnant women as creatures altogether different. The one is trying to find a man, and the other trying to keep one.”

  “And both are doomed to failure,” said Applewight cheerily.

  “And what do you say, Dr. Green?” asked Susanna.

  Dr. Green was a round, bald-headed man with a congenital squint that might have been confused with a smile. “Clearly, it will be the brown-haired lawn bowler.”

  “Clearly?” Susanna repeated, holding out her hand for the coin.

  “Well, yes. The poet would like to believe he would save a girl, but he is a poet—all dreams and no action. He is sitting alone for a reason. And he is poor—a poet with perhaps two sets of clothes. He’ll think twice before wetting them.”

  Susanna laughed, a scintillating sound that always scoured away the gloom. “You are right on every count about the poet—just as I would have said it—but what of the punter and the two bowlers?”

  “The punter wouldn’t abandon a girl he himself is hoping to impregnate—if you pardon my candor—”

  “Nothing to pardon—”

  “—to save a girl that”—he gave me a sheepish grin and blurted—“that someone else has impregnated.”

  “True.”

  “So that leaves the two bowlers. Now, the astute observer will see the lurching step of the gray-haired one and will glimpse beneath the fold of the pant knee a rounded hinge, and will know that the man has a wooden leg.”

  “Excellent!”

  “Which, coupled with his age, m
akes him incapable of saving a pregnant woman—whereas the brown-haired man is hale and whole and younger, too. If anyone saves her, it would be he.”

  Susanna took his coin, spun it between finger and thumb, and tucked it into the pouch at her belt. “I’m sorry to say that you, too, are wrong. The man who will save me is the man with the wooden leg.”

  The professors and I all spoke at once: “Bosh!” “Preposterous!” “What nonsense!”

  “I’ll show you.” Susanna undid the purse and tossed it to me. “For safekeeping.” Then she rose and strode away from us, her black skirts swaying back and forth. She walked along the path until she had come to a point equidistant between the subjects—the poet at the tree, the lawn bowlers, and the punter and his date. Then, with theatrical flare, she slipped on a stone and went tumbling down to crash into the Cam.

  The punter stood tall, staring into the brackish water and prodding with his pole. The young woman with him wailed quietly and pushed the water gently aside as if she was clearing sand from the lid of a treasure chest. She apparently could not catch a glimpse of the drowning woman.

  Meanwhile, the poet leaped up and screamed, and a rogue breeze riffled the pages of his epic poem and bore them away. The poet gave chase.

  Last of all, the two lawn bowlers stared at the spot where the young girl had fallen. The brown-haired one ran to the riverbank and stood with hands wringing as he said, “I can’t swim.” The gray-haired one ambled down beside him, paused a moment to unscrew his wooden leg, and handed it to his friend. Then, grabbing the wooden toe, the one-legged man hopped into the river. He extended the leg out across the water, and in moments, caught hold of Susanna’s shoulder. He hoisted her up from the water.

  Only now did I run for the bank (I had not wanted to destroy her experiment) and clambered down beside the one-legged man, who towed my wife to the side. I grasped her shoulders and pulled her farther up from the muddy water and said, “How’d you know?”

  She pointed at the Royal Navy medic pin on the man’s lapel, and the wooden leg that had been his lifeline to the side. With a simple smile, she said, “Reach, throw, row, and go.”