The Murder of Mary Russell

by Laurie R. King

  “What happened?”

  “Guess the old bugger had more to be scared of than I thought. See, I hid out, then went back after dark, but instead of sitting there drinking himself into a funk, be damned if he hadn’t cleared out his safe and vanished.”

  It sounded to Clarissa a remarkably sensible thing to do, although she wasn’t about to say so to her father. “So why call me in? I honestly do not have that kind of money.”

  “I don’t need your money, girlie. I need you.”

  “Pa, I told you, I can’t go back to the Act, not till you’re square with The Bishop.”

  “I’m not looking to do a Job with you, Clarrie. No: Beddoes only went far as Portsmouth. Seems to be as quick in his head as he is on his feet, because from what his servants were saying the other night—they leave the window open, you can hear them easy—Beddoes left orders with the butler to send a telegram if he caught word of any scandal. None of ’em know what kind of scandal, mind, just that they’re to listen for it.”

  “So Mr Beddoes knows you may have been lying about telling the police, and is waiting to see.”

  “ ’S right. And then I found out where he is. The post still comes regular to the house, and the butler’s been sending it on. Took me a week of sneaking around before I could get a hold of it, but I knew sooner or later the post bag would go unguarded. He’s in Portsmouth, ready to jump on the first ship out when word comes. And Portsmouth is just a quick run from here on the train.”

  “Good. I can give you that much fare if you promise to leave me be after that.”

  “I told you, girl, it’s you I need. As an escort, like. Seems the butler told the police I’d threatened Beddoes or something idiotic, and they’re looking for me. Me, get it? A single man. But a man with a daughter—and even better, his sweet little grandson—why, he’d be safe as houses. All I need’s for you to go with me to Portsmouth. You’d be back in London by bedtime, I’d be off to Sydney first ship. And if things go like I think they will, I’ll send you money for the best berth to Sydney that cash can buy. We could set up in comfort, Clarrie. You, me, and the little one. Get a house near to Allie.”

  Clarissa’s dismissal of her father’s perennial dreams and schemes gave way to a wave of revulsion at the idea of life together. But as the wave retreated, it left behind two pieces of knowledge: first, that her father would like nothing better than to have the boy to raise, and second, she could not let that happen.

  She bent over Samuel, thoughts racing. It was not possible to slip away tonight, but tomorrow—get away from him at the station? Or she could appear to go along with his plan and accompany him as far as the crowds of Portsmouth, then disappear? She had the skills to vanish into any crowded station, step onto a boat for anywhere. America, even.

  Except: Billy. To abandon Billy would be to leave a part of herself behind. Plus, the lad would be the only target left for The Bishop’s rage—and that of the man’s son.

  No. She would have to run a Cheat on her father, though he knew her every trick and gesture. Manipulate him as she did any other Mark: agree with him, flatter his pride, appear to support him, and then…

  She looked up. “I’ll not have my son’s grandfather gaoled, or hanged. I’ll go with you to Portsmouth, but when you go after Beddoes, you’re on your own. If you’re caught while I’m with you, it’s Samuel who will pay. I’ll go back to London.” And then slip away—far, far away, she did not add. “When you’re ready, let me know and we’ll join you. But if you’re caught, I expect you to say nothing about me, ever.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “You swear?”

  “On your mother’s sacred memory.”

  “All right. You’ll need to bathe, and I hope you brought a razor. As for that shirt, I’ll see if—”

  She broke off at a sound from behind her. Hudson had leapt to his feet and was staring at the door. “You?” he said. “What the devil…”

  She spun around—and saw the very last thing she’d have expected: Billy. At his back, hat in hand, was the young man with the funny name.

  Sherlock Holmes.

  The father and son at the station—they hurried off the other way—so I couldn’t see them—but the tumble of thoughts broke off as her father’s words registered. Papa knew this fellow? Puzzled, she looked back—then she was on her feet, too. “Papa—no!”

  He was standing by the long table. Its drawer stood open; the massive pistol in his hand looked suitable for battering down doors. Her mind threw out another wayward thought—a gamekeeper’s revolver if ever I saw one—then her body was in motion, swinging Samuel down to the chair behind her, snatching at the ties of her beaded bag.

  “Papa,” she warned. “If you shoot, it’ll be your last act.”

  Hudson’s gaze flicked sideways—then fixed on the little ivory-handled revolver in his daughter’s hand.

  “You wouldn’t shoot your old man, Clarrie.”

  “Do not try me.”

  She watched him wrestle with the possibility that his own daughter might in fact pull the trigger. The heavy weapon sagged a fraction. She took a quick glance at the doorway—then wondered for an instant what she was seeing. An amorphous black shape, where two people had been standing, but no: it was the back of an overcoat. The tall young man was bent over Billy, hiding him completely. After a long moment, his ill-shaven face appeared, those remarkable grey eyes analysing the room over his shoulder. “Go!” he said, and the ridiculous cuffs flashed as he pushed Billy in her direction. He continued with the turn, slowly, hands empty and outstretched. When he was upright, he tore his eyes from the big pistol, to face James Hudson.

  Billy hit Clarissa’s skirts like an infant monkey thrown at a tree. Her free hand pulled him close but her gaze lingered on the figure in the doorway, that white, composed face.

  Most men, she thought, facing a gun, would snatch any available shield: this young toff turned his back to protect Billy.

  When Holmes spoke, his voice was no higher than its usual pitch. “Good evening, Mr Hudson.”

  “I know you,” Hudson said. “You were in Norfolk, at old Trevor’s place.”

  “We met in Donnithorpe, yes. When you arrived to blackmail my friend’s father.” His voice was calm—except for the word “blackmail,” which he mouthed as if tasting something foul.

  “Him and me, we were old friends,” Hudson protested. “I was on hard times, knew he’d want to help out.”

  “You hounded him to death with your threats.”

  “Man with a heart so weak he can’t take a little pressure, he’d have died of something anyway.”

  “It was murder. And now you aim to do the same with Mr Beddoes.”

  “I never!”

  “You will come with me to the police.”

  Is he mad? Clarissa wondered. Giving an order like that, armed with nothing more than a cut-glass accent.

  Hudson, predictably, laughed.

  “Papa,” she warned again, edging Billy behind her—and only when she’d done so did she realise what the gesture meant. Just what I used to do with Allie—but this is a gun, not a fist. Papa wouldn’t shoot towards a child. Would he?

  Although he might shoot at me…

  The thought staggered her, more than anything else that had happened that night. Papa?

  She tightened her hand on the ivory handle and spoke over her shoulder. “You need to go, Mr Holmes. Take Billy with you. There’s nothing more you can do here.”

  “I will not leave without James Hudson.”

  “Then you won’t leave at all,” snapped Hudson, and with no more warning than that, the room exploded.

  Two gunshots, nearly simultaneous; two high shouts of protest; two harsh cries of pain.

  Smoke whirled through a silent room for a count of two, until Samuel’s indrawn breath gave way to full-lunged screams of terror. Clarissa dropped the little gun to scramble towards her father, leaving Billy to snatch up the infant, holding him close to chant wordless r
eassurances over Hudson’s gasps and Clarissa’s desperate voice.

  Then with an appalling, wet convulsion, the old man went limp. As Clarissa bent over her father, infant wails mingled with the keening sounds of her own abandonment.

  A date with the executioner—Mrs Hudson? Absurd. Obscene.

  So why did I not dismiss it as the ravings of a madman? Samuel Hudson was clearly unhinged, this oily salesman who had slithered his way into my home, held a gun on me, and threatened all I held dear. Nonetheless, I could not doubt the ring of truth in what he said—what he clearly believed. Impossible, to dismiss it out of hand.

  I drew in one deliberate breath, let it out slowly, then drew another. On the third breath, all my confusion and ambiguity drifted away.

  They say that when a soldier flings himself onto a grenade, when a mother drowns in rescuing her child, a greater need has overridden the urge to self-preservation. Until that moment, I would have said those were moments of insanity, when impulse overcame rationality. Accidents, almost, of self-deception.

  They are not.

  Those are moments of grace. Uncertainty is removed. Mind, heart, and body fuse together, and decisions are made without pause for reflection.

  In that moment, standing with the sunlight refracting off the artificial facets in his hand, my past and my future became a simple thing.

  This creature could not be permitted to touch Mrs Hudson.

  The world slowed. I watched his pale eyelashes blink closed, and part again; saw him remember the brooch in his palm. His torso prepared to shift, his left hand to rise, that it might toss away the piece of jewellery. He was speaking again—something about having to see if I’d do—but I was no longer listening. His left shoulder shifted a millimetre forward. I began to move.

  Some minutes earlier, as I squatted before the storage cupboards, my left hand had rested suggestively on a nice heavy book—but my right hand had not been idle. The tips of my fingers had nudged the knife from its sheath on my ankle, holding it out of sight, then slipped it up my left sleeve as I stretched to pick up the crate.

  Still, there had been a cost to holding a scalpel-sharp blade next to my skin. Any moment now, Samuel Hudson would notice the blood dripping off my fingertips. I was out of time, out of hope, out of any options but to move.

  He would not touch Mrs Hudson.

  With my final act, I chose death.

  Clarissa did not know how long she remained on the floor with her father before a hand pulled her back, urged her up, eased her into a chair, put a tin mug in her hand.

  Brandy, this time. Body temperature. Samuel had gone quiet. Billy’s eyes, peering at her over the baby’s head, were wide with shock. Young Mr Holmes took a deep swig from his pocket flask, then picked up the gamekeeper’s gun, laying it gingerly in the table’s drawer, pushing it firmly shut. He then retrieved Clarissa’s smaller weapon and placed that behind the run-down clock on the mantelpiece.

  He swiped his hand hard across the front of his coat, then took the Tartan rug from the chair, draping it over the body of James Hudson. He pulled a stool from under the table, and dropped onto it like a puppet with cut strings.

  “Billy,” he said, his voice oddly hoarse, “if the child is sleeping, set him down and add a log to the fire. Then look around and see if you can find any bandages. Clean rags will do.”

  Clarissa lifted her head to make bitter protest, that her father was beyond need of bandages—then saw his arm. “You’re hurt.”

  “I was prepared for his final declaration before he fired, but I didn’t move quite fast enough.”

  “My father is a good shot.” Was.

  Billy returned with a wooden box containing a variety of medicaments, implements, and bandages, suitable for a man who made a living in the out of doors. He laid it on the table before Mr Holmes, who then asked the boy to take a pan out to the pump for water. Face rigid with pain, he shed his coat and jacket to the floor. His left shirt-sleeve was crimson down to the cuff.

  Using a pair of scissors from the wooden box, he chewed at the bloodied sleeve, ripping the last portions of it free, then sat at the table with the pan of water. The fire crackled, water splashed, and the wound came into view: long but shallow, avoiding the meat of his arm entirely. If he’d moved a split second faster, the only hole would be in his overcoat. Had he been any slower…

  The bloody swath was precisely the level of his heart.

  The young man winced at the bite of iodine, then attempted to get the bandage wrapping started. At his third try, Clarissa rose, to take the roll from his hand, circling it round and round his surprisingly muscular upper arm. When she had tied it off, she carried the pan and lantern outside, finding the pump under a roof around one side of the cottage. She hung the lantern from a hook, and got to work on her father’s blood.

  She scrubbed at her bloodstained hands until they were numb, then reached to unfasten the tiny buttons down the front of her bodice. Since Samuel’s birth, she had done this a dozen or more times a day, but tonight these were endless, tiny, impossible—and revoltingly sticky. Her hands wanted to seize the neckline and rip. She was weeping with frustration before the last button gave way and she could fight free of the clammy, stained garment. She let it fall—it was that, or fling it away into the dark for the rain to purge of stains—and stood, head down, fighting for control.

  It was the thought of Billy that brought her back: left in the cottage with an infant, a corpse, and a wounded stranger. Billy needed her. She forced herself to bend over the pump and work methodical fingers down the bodice’s front and left sleeve, where the worst of it lay. The fabric was dark: once the actual…substance was gone, only she would see the stains.

  That was not the case with what lay beneath. The white cotton of her corset cover bore vivid stains. Fortunately, its buttons were few and larger, its fabric light enough to scrub mostly clean. The corset itself was another matter—and as for the chemise beneath…

  Strip down to her drawers, out here in the gamekeeper’s yard? Clarissa shook her head. If she ever made it back to London, she would burn the lot of it; in the meantime, her skin would just have to crawl.

  She blotted the chest of the chemise as best she could, along with the top of the corset—it was a short nursing corset, so only its upper edges had caught the blood. Pulling the sodden cotton back over it turned her shivers to shudders, and she looked with loathing at the bodice: too heavy to wring out, so wet that putting it on would leave her skirts damp to the knees. I’ll catch pneumonia. She looked at her bare arms. I’d show more skin in an evening dress. The lad would just have to blush and be damned.

  The young man’s eyes came up at her entrance, only to fall rapidly to the side. “Sorry,” she said. “It needs to dry in front of the fire.” She covered herself with the shawl, then arranged the bodice over a stool before the fire, hoping the wood did not spit too many sparks onto it.

  “The boys are upstairs?” she asked.

  “I suggested it.”

  Climbing the ladder-like stairs in long skirts required all the concentration she could summon. At the top, she found the boys asleep on a bed beneath sloping eaves. Billy was curled on his side under a thick blanket; the top of Samuel’s scalp showed within the older boy’s arms.

  She pulled the shawl around her, leaning against the door jamb. Two boys softly breathing; the crackle of fire from below. Papa should have had a son, instead of me. A son would have understood him, gone with him. A son would not have—

  She drew a ragged breath. Why in hell had that boy downstairs risked his life for a child he barely knew? Her father had not hesitated to pull the trigger. Would he have done so if Billy were still in the doorway? Clarissa’s inner eye kept seeing that black expanse of overcoat, covering the boy like a shield.

  She pushed off from the door frame and went to tug the covers a little farther over Billy’s shoulders, then took her ancient bones down the ladder. The kettle was now bubbling over the flame. She walked war
ily towards the tin food-safe, bracing for the sight of her father’s body, but he was not there. Only the burn-spotted little carpet lay on the spot where James Hudson had died.

  The gamekeeper’s pantry contained a packet of tea, two kinds of stale biscuits, and—luxury item, pushed to the back—a tin of condensed milk. What had happened to the man whose provisions these were? Had Beddoes fired him before taking off for Portsmouth? Given the man a holiday? In any event, she was grateful beyond words that he’d left his tea behind.

  She put a steaming mug on the three-legged stool beside Mr Holmes, and lowered herself into the chair across from him. He eyed the drink for a moment, then picked it up, took a formal swallow, and laid it down again.

  “It wasn’t murder, you know,” she said. “Your friend’s father.”

  “Blackmail is despicable.”

  “But it’s not murder. My father would not have hanged for it.”

  “He should have done,” the lad snarled.

  Another night, Clarissa might have laughed at the perennial complaint of youth at the unfairness of life. “Wanting a thing doesn’t make it so. He’d have died in prison, or in Australia, but not from a noose.”

  The thin face worked; he looked away.

  “It’s personal, isn’t it?” she realised abruptly. “You know someone, or knew them. Someone whose life was ruined by blackmail.”

  A year or two older, and he wouldn’t have replied, but he was still boy enough to crave understanding. “My mother. When I was eleven.”

  “She—” Clarissa caught herself. The lad’s marked distaste for guns might have nothing to do with someone blackmailing his mother. And really, she did not wish to know.

  But why did she persist in thinking of him as a lad? He could not be that much younger than she, no more than five or six years. Truth to tell, he looked less like a boy today than a young man in ill-fitting clothes. Perhaps that was an effect of the stubble.

  She pushed away these random thoughts. “What happens now?”

  “Perhaps you should tell me that.”