Authors: Laurie R. King
“Thank you.” I tore my eyes from the bomb. “First, your back. How much gauze will I need?”
“A considerable quantity, I should think. Do you have it?”
“One of the girls down the hall is a hypochondriac with a nurse mother. If you can do your lock trick on her door as well as you did on that of my other neighbour we should be well supplied.”
“Ah, that reminds me, Russell. An early birthday present.”
Holmes held out a small, narrow package wrapped in shiny paper. “Open it now.”
I undid the wrappings with great curiosity, for Holmes did not normally give gifts. I opened the dark velvet jeweller’s box and found inside a shiny new set of picklocks, a younger version of his own.
“Holmes, ever the romantic. Mrs. Hudson would be pleased.” He chuckled and stood up cautiously. “Shall we try them out?”
Some time later we were back in front of my fire, richer by several square yards of gauze, a huge roll of sticking plaster, and a quart bottle of antiseptic. I poured him a large brandy, and when he took off his shirt I could see that I was going to need most of that gauze. I refilled his glass and stood assessing the job.
“We ought to let Watson do this.”
“If he were standing here I would. Get on with it.” He swallowed this second brandy neat, so I poured him a third, picked up the scissors, and paused.
“Personally I have found that the mind handles pain best if it is given a counterirritant to distract it. Aha, I have just the thing. Holmes, tell me about the case of the King of Bohemia, and Irene Adler.” Holmes was seldom beaten, but that woman had done it, with an ease and a flair that I knew still rankled. Her photograph stood on his bookshelf, as a reminder of his failure, and telling me about it would very possibly distract him from his back.
At first he refused, but as I continued snipping and pulling off bits of sticking plaster, bandage, and skin, he began speaking through clenched teeth. “It began one night, in the spring of 1888, March I think, when the King of Bohemia came to my door to ask for some—dear God, Russell, leave me a bit of skin, would you?—some assistance. It seems he had been involved with a woman, a totally unsuitable woman from the point of view of a royal marriage, an opera singer. Unfortunately for him she loved him, and refused to return a photograph she possessed of the two of them in a position of obvious affection. This photograph he wanted back, and he hired me to retrieve it.”
The narrative wound on as I doused and snipped and peeled, pausing often as his jaws clamped down and beads of sweat came to his brow. I finished before his account had ended, but he continued as I took his bloodstained shirt to the basin in the corner. With the end of the story, the final description of how she saw through Holmes’ disguises and with her new husband eluded both detective and monarch, he swallowed the last of the brandy and sat staring into the fire, breathing heavily.
I arranged the shirt in front of the coals to dry and turned to the exhausted man next to me.
“You need to lie down and sleep. Take my bed—no, I’ll not hear protest. You need to be on your stomach for a while, and you cannot sleep in a chair in that position. No, I refuse to accept gallant stupidity in place of rational necessity. Go.”
“Defeated again. I surrender.” With a wan imitation of his sardonic smile he stood and followed me. I pulled aside the bedclothes, and he slowly lowered himself forward into my bed. I gently pulled the blankets up over his naked shoulders.
“Sleep well.”
“You will need to wear a young man’s clothing tomorrow. I trust you have some,” he said around the pillow.
“Of course.”
“Take a small knapsack with a few things in it. We will buy clothing if we are to be gone very long.”
“I will pack it tonight.”
“And write a note to Mr. Thomas, telling him you’ve been called away for a few days, that you understand Mr. Holmes has been in an accident. He is in my employ; he’ll understand.”
“In your—You are a devious man. Go to sleep.”
I wrote the note, including a request to ring Veronica Beaconsfield, telling her not to meet my train, and sat before the fire to braid my hair, which was dry at last. (The one drawback to long hair is washing it in the winter.) I studied the flickering coals as my hands slowly bound one-half of the fluffy cloud into a long plait that reached past my waist and tied a cord around the end. I had started on the other side when his voice came again from the dark corner, low and slurred with drink and sleep.
“I asked Mrs. Hudson once why she thought you wore your hair so long. She said it was a vestige of femininity.”
My hands went still. This was the first time in our acquaintance that he had commented on my appearance, other than to disparage it. Watson would never have believed it possible. I smiled down at the fire and continued the plait.
“Yes, she would think that, I suppose.”
“Is it true?”
“I think not. I find short hair too much fuss, always needing combing and cutting. Long hair is much easier, oddly enough.”
There was no answer, but soon a gentle snore reached my ears. I took a spare blanket from the shelf and pulled it around me on the chair. My spectacles I laid on the little table next to me, the room retreated into fuzziness, and I slept.
I awoke once, some hours later, stiff and uncertain of my surroundings. The fire had burnt down, but I could see a figure seated at the window, wrapped in a blanket looking out at the night. I sat up and reached for my spectacles.
“Holmes? Is it—?”
The figure turned quickly toward me and held up a finger.
“No, hush, child, go back to sleep. I’m only thinking, as best I can without lighting my pipe. Go back to sleep for a while. I’ll wake you when it’s time.”
I laid my spectacles back onto the table, reached over to throw more coal on the fire, and settled myself again into the chair. As I drifted back into sleep, I experienced one of those odd and memorable dream-moments that lodge in the mind and, with hindsight, seem precognitive of events that follow. A phrase presented itself to my mind, with such stark clarity that it might have been in print before my eyes. It was a remembered phrase, from the speculative or philosophical introductory chapter in Holmes’ book on bee-keeping. He had written, “A hive of bees should be viewed, not as a single species, but as a triumvirate of related types, mutually exclusive in function but utterly and inextricably interdependent upon each other. A single bee separated from its sisters and brothers will die, even if given the ideal food and care. A single bee cannot survive apart from the hive.”
The surprise of the statement half woke me, or I seemed to half wake, and when I looked over at Holmes I had the oddest impression that there was a drop of rain on his cheek.
Impossible, of course. I am now quite convinced that it was a dream, although the visual impression was vivid, if blurred through myopia. I mention it, not as historical truth, but as an indication of the complex state of my unconscious mind at the time…and, as I mentioned, because of the events it foreshadowed.
We must disentangle, therefore, what now is obscure.
“W
AKE, RUSSELL,” SAID
a voice in my ear. “The game’s afoot!” The room was dark but for the flame of the Bunsen burner, and the air smelt of coffee.
“Cry ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!’” I muttered grumpily to complete Henry’s speech. Once more unto the breach, and all that.
“Indeed. But I fear that the game after whom the greyhounds strain is us. Up, now, drink your coffee. It may be some long time before your next hot drink. And your clothing—everything warm you own, while I return our borrowed goods to your neighbour. Perhaps,” he added, “you might purchase another bottle of this ghastly brandy before your near neighbour returns. No light, now, we must be invisible.”
By the time he returned I was dressed as a young man and held my heaviest boots in my hands.
“I shall put these on at the outer door. Mr. Thomas has excellent hearing.”
“You know the building better than I, Russell, but I had thought to leave from the other end. Your corner here will be under observation from the street.”
I sipped gingerly at the steaming coffee while I thought, and grimaced at the taste.
“Couldn’t you have washed out the beaker before you made coffee in it? It tastes like the sulphur I was using yesterday. It’s a good thing I wasn’t experimenting with arsenic.”
“I smelt it first. A little sulphur is good for the blood.”
“Spoils the coffee.”
“Don’t drink it then. Come, Russell, stop dawdling.”
I gulped half the scalding drink and poured the rest into the hand-basin.
“There is another way,” I suggested thoughtfully, “one that avoids both the street and the back alleyway, and I doubt that anyone who hasn’t studied a medieval map of the area would know about it. It debouches into an absolutely foul yard,” I added.
“That sounds ideal. Do not neglect to bring your revolver, Russell. It may be needed, and it does us no good in your drawer with that disgusting cheese.”
“My lovely Stilton; it’s almost ripe, too. I do hope Mr. Thomas enjoys it.”
“Any riper and it will eat through the woodwork and drop into the room below.”
“You envy me my educated tastes.”
“That I will not honour with a response. Get out the door, Russell.”
We crept noiselessly through passages and hallways, into an attic where I used my new picklocks on the connecting door, and into a kind of priest’s hole that had lain undisturbed for 250 years until the previous summer, when the fiancé of one of my housemates found a reference in a letter in the bowels of the Bodleian, searched it out, and landed a readership for his efforts. At one point we took to the dangerously slick roof, two inches of snow over ice. Finally Holmes hissed at me.
“Are you lost, Russell? We’ve been nearly twenty minutes in this labyrinth. Time is of the essence, I trust you understand.”
“I do. Our other possible route involved hanging by our hands and swinging between the buildings. While I know that physical discomfort is nothing in your eyes, I should prefer to wait until later in the day to have your back opened up, if you don’t mind.” The strain of responsibility was sharpening my tongue, and I bit back further words to concentrate on the route.
We eventually reached the noxious yard and stood before its pristine white surface, which obscured decades of horse droppings, kitchen slops, and other unmentionables. In the summer it rivalled my Stilton for olfactory potency.
We huddled in the door’s recess, and I spoke to Holmes in a whisper.
“As you see, other than this doorway and two others, neither of which could conceal anyone, the yard itself is secure. I see two possible problems: one, that there may be watchers in the street outside the gate, and two, that when they find me gone they may search the area and find two sets of footprints. If you prefer, we could take to the roofs again.”
“Really, Russell, you do disappoint me, allowing yourself to be limited by the obvious options. There is no more time for scaling the heights. They will soon know that you have escaped them; giving them your footprints will do no harm. We will not give them mine. If there are watchers, use your gun.”
I swallowed, put my hand in my pocket, and strode off firmly into the open yard, grateful for the heavy nails on my boots. I looked back to see Holmes mincing within my footsteps, his skirt drawn up to reveal the trousers below. Were it not for the threat hanging over us, I would have given out with a girlish giggle at the sight, but I refrained. I passed the gates with the revolver in my hand, but there was no human there, only a scurry in the dustbins.
We followed this singular method of travel up the alleyway to the main road, where the few early travellers had already turned the snow to mire. Here we could walk abreast, Holmes as a hobbling old lady, myself as a gawky farm boy. His dingy black skirt and cape of yesterday had been reversed to an equally dingy blue, and the mole on his chin had disappeared, to be replaced by a mouthful of rotten teeth. Not an improvement from my point of view, but few eyes would look past the mouth to the face beyond—what face there was between scarves and hat.
“Don’t stride so, Russell!” Holmes whispered fiercely. “Throw your boots out in front of you as you walk and let your elbows stick out a bit. It would help if you let your mouth hang open stupidly, and for God’s sake take off your glasses, at least until we get out of town. I won’t allow you to walk into anything. Do you think you could persuade your nose to drip a bit, just for the effect?”
Soon I was slouching along blindly in the bleak dawn light, stumbling occasionally while appearing to support my aged mother. By the time it was fully light we stood on the Banbury Road going north out of town.
“North, away from London? This is going to be a long day.”
“It’s safer. See if you can persuade that wagon to take us a few miles.”
I clumped off obediently into the road to intercept the farmer returning from town with an empty wagon and glad for thruppence, to “save me old mum a walk to Bamb’ry to see her newest grandchild.”
He was a talkative man and jabbered away the whole time as his horse meandered about the road. It saved us from having to construct a story for him, though by the time he left us in Banbury I was most weary of smiling stupidly out from under my hat brim and trying not to squint. As his wagon pulled away I turned to Holmes.
“Next time we do this, I will play the deaf old woman and you can laugh at rude jests for an hour.”
Holmes cackled merrily and shuffled off down the road.
I
T WAS A
long day’s work that brought us to London, two cold and hungry travellers who kept moving largely through force of habit. We went north and west out of Oxford to reach London to the southeast, and covered a weary number of miles in circling widely across the countryside in order to enter the city from the south, for the Oxford road was the natural target of watchers. From Banbury to Broughton Poggs, Hungerford to Guildford, touching Kent and Greenwich we came; on foot, farm wagons, horse buses, and motorcars we bought, begged, and—once—stole rides to bring ourselves to the great city of London, to which all roads lead, eventually. I could tell by Holmes’ silence that his back was paining him, but there was nothing to do but buy him a bottle of brandy and press on. With Mycroft we would find the assistance we needed.
The snow started up again late in the afternoon, but not severely enough to stop the flow of vehicles. It was half past seven when we numbly stepped from a public omnibus onto Pall Mall, a hundred yards from the doors of the Diogenes Club, of which Mycroft Holmes was a founder and prime member.
Holmes fished out a pencil stub and a grubby, twice-used envelope from a pocket. By the light of the lamp overhead the ends of his fingers looked blue where they stuck out from his fingerless gloves, and he wrote slowly and awkwardly. His thin lips appeared purple in his pale face, despite the shawl pulled up tight to hide his day’s stubble.
“Take this to the front of the Club. They won’t let you in, I shouldn’t think, but they will take this to Mycroft if you tell them it’s from his cousin. Have you a half crown if they’re hesitant? Good. I will stay here. And, Russell, perhaps you should put your glasses on.”
I pushed myself into a heavy trot, the boots which had kept me so dry during the day now seeming to weigh approximately two stone each. The man at the entrance to the Club was indeed reticent about taking my disreputable-looking message to a member, but I persisted and within a minute found myself being escorted into the warm air inside. My glasses promptly fogged up, and when a voice rumbled from before me, “I am Mycroft Holmes. Where is my brother?” I could only thrust out a hand in the general direction of the speaker. It was seized and shaken firmly by what felt like a pillow of warm, raw bread dough. I peered over my glasses at his enormous figure.
“He waits outside, sir. If it is convenient, he needs—we need—a roof for the night and a hot meal. Also,” I added in a low voice, “a doctor might be of some use.”
“Yes, I knew he was injured. Mrs. Hudson telephoned me with a very graphic account, and would have turned me out to bring Dr. Watson to Sussex had I not convinced her that our presence would not be a kindness, and that the doctors in Sussex were quite adequate. In the end she agreed not to inform the good doctor until Sherlock seemed strong enough for visitors. I admit I was surprised to hear from my friends at Scotland Yard that he had disappeared from the hospital. Are the wounds so light, then?”
“Not light. I’m certain they are very painful, but his life is not in danger, if he avoids infection, that is. He needs rest, food, and quiet.”
“And he stands in the cold.” He raised his voice and called for his coat, and we plunged back into the snowy street outside. My spectacles cleared quickly, and I looked down towards the next streetlamp.
“I left him there,” I said, and pointed.
The man next to me was every bit as large as his grip had indicated but surprisingly quick on his feet, and he was first to reach the rumpled figure in dark blue and help it rise from an upturned crate.
“Good evening, Mycroft,” said Holmes. “I apologise for intruding on your quiet reading with my little problem, but unfortunately it appears that someone is attempting to exterminate Miss Russell and myself. I thought you might be willing to be of assistance.”
“Sherlock, you’re a fool not to have called me in earlier. I could have saved you what was obviously a strenuous day’s work. And you know that I am always interested in these cases of yours—apart from those requiring excessively physical activity, of course. Come, let us cross over to my rooms.”
My glasses rendered me blind again as we entered the building across from the Club, so I removed them and stumbled heavily up the stairs behind the brothers. Once inside, the curtains drawn tight, I dropped my laden knapsack to the floor, remembering belatedly the explosive device it contained, and collapsed into a chair before the fire. I was vaguely aware of Mycroft Holmes sending for some food and pressing hot drinks into our hands, but the warmth and the lack of movement were such sheer bliss that I was not interested in anything else.
I must have drifted off to sleep there, for I awoke with a start some time later with Holmes’ hand on my shoulder and voice in my ear.
“I won’t permit you to spend two nights running perched in a chair, Russell. Come and have some food with us.”
I stood up sheepishly and put on the tiresome spectacles. “May I wash first?” I asked to a point halfway between Holmes and his brother.
“Of course,” exclaimed Mycroft Holmes. He ushered me down a hall to a small room with a daybed. “This will be yours while you are here, and the bath and such are through here. I borrowed a few things from a neighbour, if you would like to shed your present attire.” He looked a bit embarrassed at the inescapable intimacy of this offer, but I thanked him warmly, and he looked relieved. He was quite obviously no more accustomed to having to take the needs of a female into account than Holmes had been before I walked into him on the downs.
“Just one thing,” I added hesitantly, and saw the anxiety come back to his corpulent face. “Your brother’s injuries—he really should not be allowed to spend the night in a chair. If he would be better in here…?”
His face cleared. “No, worry not, Miss Russell. I have sufficient space for the both of you,” and he left me for his imminent food.
I washed quickly and dressed in a thick blue robe I found hanging in the wardrobe. My hair I left pinned up on my head, escaping tendrils and all. My feet went gratefully into a pair of slightly too small carpet slippers, and I went to join the brothers at the table.
When I walked into the room, Mycroft immediately scraped back his chair, stood up, and went to pull out a chair for me. Holmes (returned now to his normal self, white teeth and all) watched him for a moment, looked at me, laid his serviette on the table, and slowly stood, smiling curiously. I was seated, Mycroft took his seat, and Holmes sat, a peculiar twist to the corner of his lips. Reminders of my femininity always took him by surprise. However, I could not hold him to blame, for they took me by surprise as well.
The roast capon was delicious, the breads fresh, the wine sparkled on the tongue. We spoke of inconsequentials and finished with a platter of cheese, among which I was pleased to find a piece of old Stilton. Mycroft and I shared it, leaving the cheddar to Holmes. It was a most satisfying meal. I said as much as I pushed back my plate.
“A full stomach, a slightly tipsy brain, and the knowledge of a safe place to sleep. What more could a person ask? Thank you, Mr. Holmes.” We adjourned to the fire, and Mycroft poured out three large brandies. I looked at my glass and wished for bed, and sighed quietly.
“Will you see a doctor tonight, Holmes?”
“I will not see a doctor, no. It must not be known that we are here.”
“What of the Club, and the cook? They must know, surely.”
“The Club is discreet,” said Mycroft, “and I told the cook that I was exceedingly hungry.”
“So, no doctor. Even Watson?”