The Murder of Mary Russell

by Laurie R. King

  As Billy’s motor crested the road out of East Dean, Mrs Hudson spoke. “You’ll take care of them for me, won’t you?”

  “I will,” her old friend promised.

  “This will wear on Mary’s mind.”

  “But not on yours?”

  “Oh, Billy, it’ll have to find room with all my other sins.”

  Halfway to Newhaven, the sky began to grow light. When it was bright enough to see, Billy pulled out his watch, then tucked it away and put his foot more firmly onto the accelerator pedal.

  “The boat will wait for me,” Mrs Hudson reassured him.

  “I know that. I just want to get you on board before the harbour inspectors come on duty.”

  “It’ll be fine, Billy. Unless we get into an accident on the way.”

  He eased his foot back a fraction.

  “What am I going to do without you?” he lamented.

  “Ah, Billy, we’ve had such a good run of it, haven’t we? Who’d have guessed, that day at The Bishop’s den, where the two of us would end up?”

  “It’s not over,” he insisted. “Things’ll die down, you can come back. This is just a holiday.”

  “I don’t think things are going to fade, my dear. If it was just Hugh, perhaps: a struggle, the gun going off accidentally. But the police have the earlier bullet. The one from my father. And Mr Lestrade is a very clever copper.”

  “We might be able to disappear one or the other of ’em,” he suggested.

  “That would only make matters worse. No, Billy, I think I’m finished with England. You’ll just have to bring the family over for holidays.”

  His hand shot out to seize her fingers and lift them to his mouth. He kissed her hand, long and hard, then gave it a squeeze and let it go.

  “You were always a sweet boy, William Mudd,” she said, not far from tears. If only, she thought. Oh, Samuel…

  But Billy’s fingers had felt something when he took her hand. “What’ve you got there?”

  She held the thing up, and he glanced briefly away from the road for a look. “A dolly?” An ancient and much-chewed dolly.

  “My father made it, on board the Gloria Scott, when my mother was pregnant with me. He posted it from Gibraltar, and told Mother that she could make a dress for it if I was a girl, or a sailor suit if I was a boy. My sister, Alicia, took it over when she was young. As she took over most of my things. After she died, Samuel included it with a load of what he regarded as rubbish. Something in one of my father’s letters yesterday brought it to mind.” As she spoke, she had been digging through her handbag, and now came up with a pair of nail-scissors. She bent over the misshapen, dirt-coloured manikin, snipping with care.

  As the stitches holding the doll’s spine together parted, kapok welled, and she made a sound of irritation. “May I borrow your handkerchief?”

  He kept a clean one in his breast pocket. She arranged it across her skirt, and began to dig at the packed kapok with a finger-nail.

  It did not take long to come across something that was not fibre.

  It looked like an oversized commercial cigarette, a tight roll of cream-coloured paper some five inches long with a length of fine linen string around it. Mrs Hudson worked the cord off, then spread open the near-rigid paper.

  Billy caught a glimpse of ornate writing—then the roll snapped shut, shooting kapok fibre in all directions. She made the sound again, and pulled off her other glove to separate the roll’s outer layer.

  In the end, one cylinder turned into five somewhat looser spirals. She picked one up and stretched it between her hands. Billy took his eyes off the road for a glance, which went on…

  Deliberately, slowly, Billy steered into a nearby farm lane, shut down the engine, and took a shaky breath.

  When he looked again at the object in her hands, he felt as if he were still headed for a tree.

  “What the bloody hell is—Sorry,” he said. “What is that?”

  Clara Hudson cleared her own none-too-certain throat. “That, my dear friend, is what they call a bearer bond. Designed to be paid out to whoever holds it.”

  “Fifty—that can’t be real.”

  “I think it may actually be.”

  “Fifty thousand pounds?”

  The second was identical, and the third. At the fourth, Billy let out the breath he’d been holding, and reached out tentatively for one of the water-stained, long-furled pieces of official paper. Gingerly, he stretched it open, trying to make sense of the ornate writing.

  “These are old,” he said.

  “A bit older than I am,” she told him. “Which means they are either worthless, or they have decades of interest accrued on top of their face value.”

  The fifth piece of paper was a different size and texture. No official document, this, but a letter, undated, from a hand she knew well—from, most recently, the letters Mary had found in Samuel’s hotel room. In this case, the writing was tiny, the paper onionskin. It was dated two days before she and her father had left Sydney for London.

  My dearest Allie,

  I hope this surprises you one day, or if it dont, it comes as something I show you in person. I’m leaving it hidden here until I can figure out if these mean anything at all. Knowing my luck, they probably wont. But once upon a time they were the work of a very clever man, and thow even now just looking at them reminds me of some things Id rather not remember, and makes me feel a little sick, I’ve always thought there was just a chance they’d be worth something. But I never wanted to get arrested for trying to hand them over.

  I came across them fair enough, the day the ship that I was on going to Sydney went down. Her name was the Gloria Scott. On board was a cove named Jack Prendergast who pulled a bank dodge in London and stole a whole stack of money. He had a partner on the old boat, and when she went down that day and I was waiting to drown, I kept my mind off the sharks under my feet and the bodies of all those men—mates, they were, men I’d worked with and played cards with for weeks—by talking to anyone who floated by and going through their pockets. Sounds mad, I know, but I think talking to dead men kept me from just letting go of the spar I was hanging to. Anyway, I found some letters that I mailed later on, and not much cash or anything, but when the so-called chaplain’s body floated by, I found a waterproof pouch around his neck, and put it around mine.

  Later, when I looked, I found these. I’m not sure just what they are, and I never quite nerved myself up to trying to cash one in. What happened on that ship, well, I never done nothing wrong, Allie, I promise—but if anyone got wind of your father being on that ship, I’d hang for sure. But just in case, when Clarrie and I are in London, I’ll see if I can find somebody to tell me about these things. If I do, and if I can be sure it’s safe, I’ll send for you (and the dolly!) and we’ll all do London in a big way then.

  Nobody knows about this but you, Allie dear, not even your sister. Let it be our surprise.

  Your Loving Pa

  She handed the letter over to Billy, who read it twice.

  “The Bishop was right,” he said in awe. “The money didn’t end up nibbled by fishes.”

  “So it would appear.”

  “But these couldn’t possibly be good anymore, could they? Do bonds expire?”

  “That remains to be seen.” She fitted the five pages together, and began to re-roll them into their tight cylinder.

  “Don’t you get arrested over them.”

  “No.”

  “Would you like me to take them to Mr Holmes?”

  She did not reply. His head came around. He bent down to stare into her face. “You…” He studied her expression, a look of mischief that he hadn’t seen since—when? Since he was a child, and she had rescued him. Long enough to forget she was capable of looking like that. He shook his head in wonder, and felt his mouth begin to lose control. “You’re not going to tell him, are you? Oh, you wicked woman.”

  She tore her gaze from his and concentrated on returning the roll to its manikin
exterior, her own lips wearing a demure smile. “You know, when it comes to women, Mr Holmes has always been just the teensiest bit naïve.”

  “Ha!” Billy pounded his fist on the wheel, grinning hugely. He slapped the car back into gear and pulled merrily out, chuckling like a cooling percolator. Clara Hudson, meanwhile, took the little sewing kit from her handbag and set to work closing up the doll.

  Yes, she thought. Monte Carlo would do nicely, to begin with.

  The chronology of the Conan Doyle stories makes for a perpetually delightful conundrum, keeping generations of Sherlock Holmes scholars occupied. The story at the root of this current volume, “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott,” contains few internal dates, and those it does have are often contradictory: the sailing of the Gloria Scott is firmly stated as 1855; however, the following years of gold fields and settled life in England are more than a touch slippery. Conan Doyle furthermore failed to enlighten the reader as to the precise year when Holmes himself was introduced to the story. According to Mary Russell’s memoirs, that took place in the summer of 1879, with Dr Watson being introduced to the young detective eighteen months later, in January, 1881. Many will disagree with her.

  Similar problems occur with names: nowhere does Conan Doyle suggest that the sailor Hudson of the Gloria Scott case is related in any way to the Baker Street landlady (nor, indeed, the Hudson mentioned in “Five Orange Pips,” or even Morse Hudson of the “Six Napoleons”). Nor is there the merest hint that Billy the page might be the same person as Wiggins, the “dirty little lieutenant” of Holmes’ Irregulars, much less that there were two separate boys named Billy in the life of Baker Street.

  Some might take these problems as proof that Miss Russell’s memoirs are fiction. Certainly, her stories can be problematic. However, the same may be said of the Conan Doyle canon itself: Dr Watson could be a remarkably unreliable chronicler of life in Baker Street.

  For my sister, Lynn Difley, who devotes her life to encouraging white-haired folk to find their strength.

  I owe eternal gratitude to my editor, Kate Miciak, and her omni-competent and long-suffering right hand, Julia Maguire. And to the rest of my own personal team of Random House improvers—Libby McGuire, Jennifer Hershey, Lindsey Kennedy, Allison Schuster, Kim Hovey, Scott Shannon, Matt Schwartz, Kelly Chian, and Carlos Beltrán—you people are nothing short of amazing, time and again. If you, dear Reader, are looking at these words now, it’s thanks to them.

  Thanks also to the community that loves me, lends a hand, and urges me on with verbal whips even when I threaten their beloved characters with murder: my agents, Zoë Elkaim, Mary Alice Kier, and Anna Cottle; my conjuror of everyday magic, Robert Difley; and my Devoted Readers Alice Wright, Merrily Taylor, Vicki Van Valkenburgh, Erin Bright, and John Bychowski. The staff of the McHenry Library continue to work wonders, and Linda Allen continues to nurture my career. As for the details of Sherlockian life, Leslie S. Klinger and Lyndsay Faye caught some of my mistakes, and can’t really be blamed for anything I’ve got wrong herein.

  LAURIE R. KING is the New York Times bestselling author of fourteen Mary Russell mysteries, the Stuyvesant & Grey historical mysteries, and five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, as well as the acclaimed novels A Darker Place, Folly, Keeping Watch, and Califia’s Daughters. She lives in Northern California.

  LaurieRKing.com

  Facebook.com/​LaurieRKing

  @mary_russell

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