The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor (42 page)

A door closed behind us and the cacophony shut off abruptly. The rough workaday backstage setting was left behind, and we walked through what looked like the corridor of some high-class hotel. A huge flower arrangement occupied a niche, dramatic orange-and-brown lilies and white roses, and Veronica paused to break off two of the latter, handing one to me without a word. Around a corner, she knocked at a door. Muted sounds came from within—several voices—but no answer. She fiddled shyly with her flower, shot me an embarrassed glance, and knocked again more loudly. This time, it opened, to a stout, suspicious woman of about fifty in a grey maid’s uniform, complete with starched white apron and cap.

“
Bonjour
, Marie,” Veronica chirped merrily, and stepped forward in expectation of the door being opened, as indeed it was. The woman looked as if she wanted to shut it in my face but did not quite dare.

Margery Childe was holding court. At first glance, it seemed that she was having tea with a dozen or so women friends, but when the eye took in the sitting-at-her-feet attitude and the openmouthed smiles on the faces, waiting for the blessing of a word, tea was the very least of what these women were drinking in. She looked up at our entrance and a smile came over her face as her eyes raked me from head to feet with the thoroughness of the doorman but in a fraction of the time, and then she was greeting Veronica with genuine warmth and affection. Ronnie handed her the flower, laying it into her hand like an offering at an altar, and the tiny blonde woman held it to her nose for a moment before placing it with a tumble of other delicate blossoms that spilled from a low table at her side.

“I’m glad you came, Veronica,” she said, her voice sweeter than in public speech but still remarkably low and throaty. “We missed you on Saturday.”

“I know,” Veronica said eagerly. “I tried to get here, but one of my families—”

“Yes, your families. I was thinking just this morning about that problem you were having with the young girl, Emily was her name? Would you come and talk to me about how she’s doing?”

“Certainly, Margery. Anytime.”

“Find out from Marie when I’m free in the next day or two; she knows better than I. And you’ve brought a friend tonight?”

Veronica stood aside and held back her arm for me to come forward into the circle.

“This is Mary Russell, a friend of mine from Oxford.”

The eyes that looked up into mine were a curiously dark blue, almost violet, deep and calm and magnetic, and the only truly beautiful element in her face. She lacked the currently fashionable high bones, her lightly tanned skin was ever-so-slightly coarse beneath the professional makeup, her teeth, though not protuberant, were a fraction overlarge, and her nose had at some distant time been broken and inexpertly set. Her looks, however, served only to increase her appeal, to make her seem vital and interesting, where a conventional beauty would have seemed insipid. It was a face to watch and to live for, not one simply to adore. She was calm and sure and filled with a power beyond her years and, I had to admit, enormously compelling. The room waited for me to lay my rose at her feet and do my obeisance so it could get on with its courtly rituals.

Without taking my eyes from hers, I raised the flower with great deliberation and threaded it into a buttonhole, then stepped forward and extended my hand to her.

“How do you do?” I said, and smiled with noncommittal politeness.

There was the briefest fraction of a pause before she sat upright, and her eyes gleamed as she leant forward and put her neat, strong, manicured little hand into mine. Her shake was by nature of an experiment, marginally longer than was necessary, and she sat back with something that might have been amusement in her eye.

“Welcome, Mary Russell. Thank you for coming.”

“Oh, that’s quite all right,” I said blandly.

“I hope you enjoyed the service.”

“It was interesting.”

“Please help yourself to tea or one of the drinks, if you like.”

“Thank you, I will,” I said, not moving.

“I think we may be seeing something of you,” she said suddenly, a sort of pronouncement.

“Do you?” I said politely, making it not quite a denial. Our eyes held for a long moment, and suddenly hers crinkled, though her mouth was still.

“Perhaps you might stay on a bit after my friends have left? I should like a word.”

I inclined my head silently and went to sit in a corner, much amused at the skirmish. This one might be as much fun as Holmes.

The next hour would have been excruciatingly boring had it not been for the undercurrents and interplay that I found absolutely fascinating. She played this room with the same ease that she had played the hall, though to very different purpose. Before, her aim had been exhortation, inspiration, perhaps a bit of thought provocation. Here, she was acting as spiritual counsellor, mother confessor, and guiding light to this, her inner circle, drawing them out and drawing them together into a cohesive whole around herself.

Fourteen women (excluding myself), all of them young (the oldest was thirty-four or thirty-five), all reasonably attractive, all obviously wealthy, intelligent, and well-bred, and all of them with that ineffable but unmistakable air of women who had not sat still during the war. I found out later that of the women present, only two had done nothing more strenuous than knit for the soldiers, and one of those had been saddled with invalid parents. Nine had been VAD nurses at one time or other, three of them from 1915 until the end, nursing convoy after convoy of dying young men in France and southern England and the Mediterranean, sixteen-hour days of septic wounds and pus-soaked
bandages, a baptism of blood for carefully nurtured young ladies. Several had spent months as land girls, backbreaking peasant labour for women accustomed to jumping hunters across hedges rather than wrestling with a plough horse, twisting elaborate paper spills for the fireplace rather than planting potatoes in heavy soil. These were women who had lost brothers and fiancés in the mud of Ypres and Passchendale, who had seen childhood friends return armless, crippled, blind, destroyed, women who had joined their lovers in the glory of a right war, the pride and purity of serving their country at need, and been beaten down, one ideal at a time, until in the end they had been reduced merely to slogging on, unthinking. Fourteen blue-blooded, strong, capable women, the kind of people who invariably made me feel gauche and clumsy, and all of them willing, eager even, to lay the inbred authority and absolute self-possession of their kind, along with the hard-earned maturity of the past years, at the feet of this woman as they had their flowers. She questioned them in turn, she listened with complete attention as each spoke, she elicited comments from specific individuals, and she gave judgement—suggestions, but with the authority of divine power behind her. Each received her share of words with gratitude, clutching them to her with the hunger of a child in a bread line, and when Childe finally stood to indicate that the evening was at an end, each went away with something of the same attitude of skulking off to a corner to gnaw. Finally, Veronica and I were left with her. I was still slumped into my chair, watching. Veronica turned to me.

“Mary, do you want to come back with me tonight? Or you could take a cab later . . . ?” The evening had done her a world of good, I would give Childe that. She was again calm and sure of herself, though she, too, had something of the crust-in-the-corner look to her that made me think she might rather be alone.

“No, Ronnie, I’ll go along to my club later, if that’s all right with you. They’ll give me a room, and I keep clothes there. I’ll send these things back tomorrow—or shall we meet for lunch?” I offered. It
amused me to ignore the woman standing in the background, as it had amused me in our earlier exchange to deny her the last word. I looked only at Veronica, but I was very aware of the other figure, and furthermore, I was conscious of her own awareness of, and amusement at, the undercurrents I was generating.

“Oh, yes, let’s,” Ronnie enthused. “Where?”

“The Elgin Marbles in the British Museum,” I said decisively. “At midday. We can walk around to Tonio’s from there. Does that suit?”

“I haven’t been to the BM in donkey’s years. That’ll be fine. See you then.” She took a deferential leave of Margery Childe and fluttered out.

  4  

MONDAY, 27 DECEMBER

The female sex as a whole is slow in comprehension.

—
CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA
(376–444)

T
HE DOOR CLOSED
behind Veronica, and I was half-aware of her voice calling out to Marie and then fading down the corridor as I sat and allowed myself to be scrutinised, slowly, thoroughly, impassively. When the blonde woman finally turned away and kicked her shoes off under a low table, I let out the breath I hadn’t realised I was holding and offered up thanks to Holmes’ tutoring, badgering, and endless criticism that had brought me to the place where I might endure such scrutiny without flinching—at least not outwardly.

She padded silently across the thick carpet to the disorder of bottles and chose a glass, some ice, a large dollop from a gin bottle, and a generous splash of tonic. She half-turned to me with a question in her eyebrows, accepted my negative shake without comment, went to a
drawer, took out a cigarette case and a matching enamelled matchbox, gathered up an ashtray, and came back to her chair, moving all the while with an unconscious feline grace—that of a small domestic tabby rather than anything more exotic or angular. She tucked her feet under her in the chair precisely like the cat in Mrs Hudson’s kitchen, lit her cigarette, dropped the spent match into the ashtray balanced on the arm of the chair, and filled her lungs deeply before letting the smoke drift slowly from nose and mouth. The first swallow from the glass was equally savoured, and she shut her eyes for a long minute.

When she opened them, the magic had gone out of her, and she was just a small, tired, dishevelled woman in an expensive dress, with a much-needed drink and cigarette to hand. I revised my estimate of her age upward a few years, to nearly forty, and wondered if I ought to leave.

She looked at me again, not searchingly as before, but with the mild distraction of someone confronted by an unexpected and potentially problematic gift horse. When she spoke, it was in an ordinary voice, neither inspiring nor manipulating, as if she had decided to pack away her power from me. I wondered whether this was a deliberate strategy, putting on honesty when confronted by someone upon whom the normal techniques had proven ineffective, or if she had just, for some unknown reason of her own, decided to shed pretence. My perceptions were generally very good, and although it did not feel like deception, she did seem watchful. Hiding behind the truth, perhaps? Anticipation stirred.

Her first words matched her attitude, as if blunt honesty was both her natural response to the problem I represented and a deliberately chosen tactic.

“Why are you here, Mary Russell?”

“Veronica invited me. I will go if you wish.”

She shook her head impatiently, dismissing both my offer and my response.

“People come here for a reason, I have found,” she said half to herself. “People come because they are in need, or because they have something to give. Some come because they want to hurt me. Why have you come?”

Somewhat unsettled, I cast around for an answer.

“I came because my friend needed me,” I finally admitted, and she seemed more willing to accept that.

“Veronica, yes. How did you come to know her?”

“We were neighbours in lodgings in Oxford one year.” I decided I did not need to tell her of the elaborate pranks we had joined forces on, opting for a dignified enterprise instead. “Ronnie organised a production of
Taming of the Shrew
for the wounded soldiers who were being housed in the colleges. She also hired a hall for a series of lectures and debates on the Vote”—no need to specify which Vote!—“and dragged me into it. She has a knack for getting others involved—but no doubt you’ve discovered that. Her enthusiasms are contagious, I suppose because they’re based in her innate goodness. She even succeeded in getting me involved in one of the debates, and we became friends. I’m not really sure why.” I was astonished, when I came to a halt, at how wordy I had been and how much of the truth I had given this stranger.