Dreaming Spies

by Laurie R. King

  I had to agree, that when it came to Duke Humfrey’s library, a tinderdry piece of architecture filled with priceless and irreplaceable paper, I would probably opt for the conservative view, even though the lack of lighting made for short hours, particularly during the winter. At least by my time, there were radiators—early generations of scholars had been a hardy lot, shivering at their desks until the library had figured a way of heating the place that did not involve the kindling or bringing-in of flame.

  I thanked Mr Parsons again and made my way past the hunched shoulders and straining eyes, through the comforting aroma of old paper to the stairway, and thence out of doors. In the shadow of the Sheldonian, I stepped down onto Broad Street, only to see a gentleman in a bowler hat walking in my direction, his eyes playing constantly up and down the streets and buildings. I nodded as he went past, causing him briefly to touch the brim of his bowler, and I wondered what he would say were I to congratulate him on having a colleague who had bested a trained Japanese spy-assassin, however inadvertently.

  Fortunately, my smile did not reach my face until after he was past, or his constabulary suspicions would have been raised in an instant.

  On the other side of Broad Street, beside the comforting portal of Blackwell’s, I took the slip of paper out of my pocket. Go on, or go back? Perhaps I should check on Haruki. And if Holmes had arrived, bring him up to date on what Mr Parsons had said.

  On the other hand, both of them would want to join me. And I had, after all, come prepared for this eventuality.

  Mr Parsons’ handwriting gave the name Bourke, with an address in Jericho, a neighbourhood just outside of the old city walls. Jericho was now a working-class area near the Oxford Canal, a short walk from the railway station, or the Covered Market—or from me.

  Surely, a visit to a book restorer was something I could manage on my own?

  Innocent young man:

  Indigo’s face has no blue

  Deep as summer dusk.

  I found Mr Bourke the book restorer at the far end of a cobbled mews. His door was in need of paint and the brass name-plate had not been polished since before the War, but a light burned in the depths of the building, so I went up the step and pushed at the door.

  No bell tinkled, although a glance overhead showed that there had been a bell at one time. I was standing in a small shopfront cluttered with books, a stairway leading up to the left, a half-open doorway to the right. I called a tentative greeting, waited, and called again, slightly louder.

  There was a thump, an oath, and the sound of movement accompanied by grumbling. A man in his late sixties came through the inner door clutching a wad of damp, tea-stained rags. “Yes?” He scowled from beneath wildly jutting white eyebrows.

  “I, er, that is, I wonder if—”

  “What is it, gel?”

  “I have a picture,” I blurted out. “Two pictures, in fact, but they’re in rather bad condition, and I was told, that is, the Bodleian recommended—”

  Again, his impatience shoved my flustering aside. “What’ve you got?” He threw the rags into an overflowing bucket, wiped his hands on the sides of his trousers, and lumbered over to the equally cluttered tall wooden display cabinet, shoving aside six pens, three paper sample-books, a wickedly sharp knife, and an accounts ledger that dated back to Victoria’s youth.

  I laid my book bag on the wood and reluctantly took out the heavy paper envelope. In it were the two prints I had told Mr Parsons about, but decided not to show him yet. I held on to the manila, reluctant to entrust my ladies to this clumsy oaf—they really were quite charming. I hoped I would not have to break his grubby wrist to keep him from smudging them with tea.

  But to my astonishment, the moment the prints emerged from the envelope, he bent down and whipped out a jeweller’s velvet display tray from beneath the wooden surface. Next, from somewhere about his person, he conjured up a pair of pristine white cotton gloves, tugging them on with a gesture of long practise. He separated my two ladies, holding them tenderly by their very edges, and in a series of deft moves shifted over a swivel lamp, switched it on, and summoned up a large magnifying glass.

  He bent over the prints, muttering to himself. “Eighteen hmm. Utamaro hmm mumble. Toyogrumble. Where have you ladies been to?”

  “They were like that when I bought them,” I hastened to say, lest he think I had been responsible for the wear on one lady’s collar and the little tear in the corner of the other print. “I got them in Japan a year ago.”

  He put down the glass—to one side of the prints—and fixed me with a hard look. “They need work.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “I can.”

  “What, er, what is it exactly, that you do?”

  “Repair, restore, get them ready for your walls. Don’t frame them. Don’t like framing. And for God’s sake, don’t hang them in the sun!”

  “I promise. But I wonder, do you by any chance have, well, an example of what they’ll look like? Just so I can see? Because I thought I’d give them to my sister-in-law as a wedding gift, but not if they’re still … worn.” I did not have a sister-in-law.

  He glared out from under the shrubbery of his eyebrows, then wheeled to head back through the doorway from which he had come. Hesitantly, I followed—and stepped into another world, this one the spotless, tightly organised realm of a master artisan. Shelves of neatly stacked supplies, three presses ranging from petite to massive, a magnifying glass eight inches across, mounted on a hinged arm for hands-free examination. The work benches gleamed in the sunlight through the windows. Bourke stopped before a table against the wall, and lifted his chin at what lay there. “This fellow was in worse shape than yours, when he came.”

  The print showed a young man with a book and a flat Renaissance cap; its lines were as crisp as the day it had come off the press. His expression was uncertain, as if ordered to look pensive when all he could think about was breakfast. “Francesco Bartolozzi,” the restorer said, but more than his easy expertise, it was his hands that decided me: one glove had come off, that he might touch the very edges of his work with pride and affection.

  The man might be a crook and a forger, but as a restorer, I could trust him with my ladies. “Do you do all this yourself?” I asked.

  “Why?” The scowl was back.

  “Oh, nothing—I just thought, there’s so much here, and it’s just, well, the wedding is in July.”

  “Can’t promise. I’ll try.”

  He turned to the door, our business finished. I followed slowly, my eyes probing every corner for any evidence of duplication, as opposed to restoration. Of course, anything here could be used to produce a new version of the pieces on display, nonetheless, I could see no sign of a forgery in progress.

  But as I turned to go, my eye was snagged by a splash of a familiar deep indigo colour.

  Prussian blue: new from Europe in the 1830s, this was the blue Hokusai used for the deep sea and deeper skies, for his giant waves and calm bays and the trim on a geisha’s kimono. Here it was on a pinned-up sheet of watercolour paper, a competent but unimaginative rendering of the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. The ships were model yachts rather than junks and exotically-sailed fishing boats. Coincidence?

  Mr Bourke’s head reappeared in the doorway.

  “Sorry!” I said, as if his entrance had wakened me from a dream. “I just—that’s a lovely little piece, there.”

  He saw where I was looking, and gave a nod. “Not bad.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “No, not me. My son tries his hand, time to time.”

  “Your son’s an artist!”

  “He’d like to think so,” Mr Bourke muttered sourly, and withdrew again into the untidy storefront.

  This time, I followed.

  I gave him a deposit on his work, and an address Holmes and I used when we did not want people to find us. In return, he handed me a receipt for the two prints and an estimate of the final bill. I attempted further conve
rsation, but Mr Bourke was not forthcoming when it came to his living situation or where his son might be, so I bubbled my way out of the door and away from the mews, through the bustle of Jericho towards north Oxford.

  When I opened my front door, I knew that Holmes had come. Either that or Haruki had taken up smoking.

  My partner’s face appeared from the kitchen door, and went from mistrusting to relieved. “It’s you,” he noted unnecessarily, and vanished again, followed by a clatter of dishes.

  “Who would it have been?” I called.

  “I saw your neighbour out in front.” I almost laughed at the wary edge in my husband’s voice.

  Not everyone held my same respect, even affection, for my combination housekeeper–guard dog. Without Miss Pidgeon, my habit of picking up and departing would become cumbersome, and my every return would be milkless, breadless, and cold. Moreover, without her, my name would have to appear on land registry and telephone lists, for all the world to see.

  There was a cost for this, and not simply the “housekeeping fees” I paid her each month. Those who knew her, and knew that she and I shared closely-adjoining houses behind a single gate, no doubt made amusing assumptions about our status. Those assumptions bothered Holmes less than they did most males; however, he, like most other men, had discovered that Miss Pidgeon was not a Sapphite who befriended male persons easily, and that she saved the razor edges of an already sharp wit for the male of the species.

  Men walked cautiously around Miss Pidgeon, lest she take notice of them. Even Holmes drew in, just a fraction, when he saw her approach. I was grinning as I hung up my coat and book bag. “I hope you settled the Turkish problem?”

  “I made my contribution and left.”

  I shut the door to the hall closet and walked back to the kitchen. Holmes had his hands in dish-water, while Haruki sat against the windows in the last patch of midday sun, clearly having decided to take my word for the invisibility of the house from outside. Her face was pink, which could mean either fever or the sun. I greeted her, and asked how her arm was.

  “Healing nicely. Does the Bodleian have the book?”

  “Well, it has a book.”

  All motion in the kitchen stopped, except for mine. I was hungry, and I wasn’t about to be trapped in the upcoming conversation without some bread and the wedge of Stilton Miss Pidgeon had left in the pantry.

  In between mouthfuls of brown bread and butter, chunks of the Stilton with Mrs Hudson’s pickle, and swigs of the tea (English) that Holmes set before me, I gave them the results of my morning.

  At the end of it, Haruki looked tired, Holmes thoughtful. He examined the end of his pipe, and reached for my table knife—one of my mother’s silver table knives. I snatched it away, replacing it with a metal skewer. While I was standing, I went to get the first-aid box—noting that I was going to need more gauze very soon.

  “That’s not necessary,” Haruki protested.

  “It is, actually. We need to see what condition you are in.”

  “I told you, I am fine.”

  “Haruki, unless you plan on dismissing us from the case, your health is a prime consideration. You’re free to walk out of here and stumble through unfamiliar ground, as you did when you first got here. You may have more success this time.”

  She was not pleased, but if she didn’t want medical treatment, she shouldn’t have introduced her arm to a wrought iron spear. She gave a brusque nod. I rolled up her sleeve and slipped the scissors between gauze and arm.

  Holmes set a steaming bowl down beside me on the table. The dressings had stuck, but not too badly, and when I eased them away, I thought that, despite my amateur efforts, she was indeed healing.

  “This will probably be all right if you rest it,” I said. Holmes grunted at the likelihood of her resting. “But there’s one part of it looks nasty. Holmes, what happened to that—ah, that’s the stuff.”

  The pot he unearthed from the lower reaches of the medical box might have come from an Egyptian burial chamber, so encrusted with dark substances was it. The pot contained a remarkably disgusting yet equally remarkably effective poultice. Haruki winced back as the smell hit her.

  “I know, it’s pretty rank,” I told her. “But it is the best thing in the world for drawing infection. Holmes gets it from the gipsies, or maybe from the lascars down at the docks. It may even be a recipe from our local witch—all I know is that if you can bear the stench, it works.”

  I often suspected that Holmes actively preferred his nostrums disgusting, in a childlike belief that when it came to medicines, the nastier, the stronger. But I could not argue with the result.

  The stitches themselves were holding, and most of the holes were only pink, not red and weeping. There was no sign of blood poisoning, no indication that the infected areas would make for the heart. I slopped on the gipsy goo and loosely wrapped her arm in a clean towel, and then dug out a hot-water bottle and filled it, propping it against the poulticed arm.

  Later that afternoon, I renewed the poultice, re-heated the rubber bottle, and led her, only mildly protesting, to the bed in the next room. Even a ninja had to admit that rest was restorative.

  She did make me promise on my very life that we would not leave without consulting her, before permitting me to shut the sturdy door.

  Holmes had cleaned away the detritus of both meal and medical procedures, and replaced the tea pot with a jug of coffee. I described in more detail what I had learnt at the restorer’s workshop, including the painting on his wall.

  Holmes sat back in his chair and resumed his pipe. I stretched out an arm to open the window.

  “You are thinking we need to look at the son,” he said after a while.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “It would simplify matters if we could ask Lestrade about the man’s criminal records.”

  Chief Inspector Lestrade was one of the cleverer members of New Scotland Yard. This quality was ideal in a partnership, but could be a liability when one merely wanted to use the Inspector as a source of information.

  “We can’t risk it,” I decided.

  “Of course, there’s Mycroft.”

  “No.”

  “Russell—”

  “Absolutely not. Once Mycroft gets his hands on a piece of information, it’s his forever.”

  “I would trust Mycroft with my life.”

  “As would I. But would you trust him not to make use of an Emperor’s secret, if the day came when he needed to manipulate Japan?”

  He scowled into his pipe, and prodded it a few times. A year ago, I would not have hesitated to bring his brother into the matter. Since then, I had witnessed the scope of Mycroft’s actions, and the troubling questions they raised.

  “I trust my brother’s decisions,” he reiterated, but there was a thread of too much protest in his voice, and no further insistence on bringing Mycroft in.

  “We’ll have to take a more direct approach,” I said.

  “You said you thought your Misters Bourke lived over their shop?”

  I smiled.

  Buoyant spring flowers

  In the winter of a life:

  Vincent’s geisha smiles.

  That evening, Haruki’s face was more flushed than ever, and I thought we would have to shackle her to the bed. Not that any locks would hold a woman with her skills, but they might delay her long enough to let us escape.

  In the end, we made an exchange of promises: she would remain here with her hot poultices, and we would come back before acting on whatever we discovered.

  And she vowed, if we were not back in four hours, she would come looking for us.

  Holmes and I might have lacked the mythic passing-through-walls invisibility of the classic shinobi warrior, but our skills were adequate for Oxford. And as the ninja costume is simply that of an everyday worker and the weapons variations on farming implements, in the same way did Holmes and I dress in the modern English equivalent: old, dark suits, dark overcoats and hats, our p
ockets full of everyday tools. Well, the everyday tools of some professions—and in Oxford, what would be considered odd, anyway?

  At the entrance to the mews, Holmes paused on the pavement while I turned inside, edging along the walls to a pile of crates beneath the only overhead light. I waited, cobblestone hunk in hand, for the grumble of a passing lorry to echo through the enclosed yard. The tinkle of breaking glass went unnoticed, and I moved to Mr Bourke’s door.

  Holmes came up a minute later, and stood in growing impatience as I worked with my steel picks at the lock. It was not a complicated mechanism, and should have been easy, but with dripping rain and Holmes’ breath down the back of my neck—then I had it.

  He reached up as the door drifted open, but the bell was still missing. Inside, we stood, counting off ninety seconds, letting our eyes adjust and our ears listen for any surreptitious presence: few people can remain motionless and unbreathing for ninety seconds while their home is being invaded.

  I took out my tiny pen-light with the red cloth around the end, and led Holmes back to the workshop. There were windows along the back, so we should have to take care with our lights.

  I turned the glow on the wall where I had seen the Prussian-blue lake—and saw only plaster.

  Correction: plaster and a nail, with a fragment of paper fibre, as if someone had jerked the watercolour off the wall. Interesting. I told Holmes what was not there, and felt him nod. He flicked on his own light, and we turned our attention to the workshop itself.

  In half an hour, we were satisfied that no forgery was done here.

  However, nor was watercolour painting done in this room—none but the minimal application of pigments necessary to the restorer. We left Mr Bourke’s workshop, and made for the stairs.

  The northern end of the mews had been rebuilt, its roofline raised for another level of flats, but this end still had three storeys, and looked much as it had since the days of George III. The inner stairs suggested that the upper levels were a part of the Bourke realm, not those of a different business or residence.