The Murder of Mary Russell (22 page)

At which time, the only way she could afford the rent would be to go back to work for The Bishop.

She closed the door on flat A and started up the stairs, testing each before committing her weight to it. The carpet was frayed and filthy and the carpet rods were either missing or loose, but the wood beneath seemed in good shape.

On the next floor up, flat B did not even have its letter, merely two holes in a door that was leaning against the wall. Through the empty door frame lay a potentially comfortable suite consisting of two spacious bedrooms at the back and a large sitting room at the front. In this latter, a pair of stingy windows looked ready to dive onto the street. The floorboards were bare, apart from the dust and droppings of vermin, the wood so badly gouged and scraped, it looked as if a pony with loose shoe-nails had been stabled here. The sound of pigeons came from above—and not, she thought uneasily, from out of doors.

Clarissa studied a twisted length of gas pipe protruding from the wall, wondering how much force was required to break a light fixture away like that. “Is the house yours?”

“No. I have no wish to take on the burdens of householder.” His voice echoed from the next room, followed by the ominous thumps and trickle of falling plaster.

“Good thing,” she said, relieved that he was not proposing that she let a room from him.

“Don't you want to see the rest of it? Go ahead up.”

“No, that's quite all right.” She did not want to see what the birds had done to the upper level. “The next flight of stairs looks about to fall in.”

He came back into the sitting room, slapping off bits of plaster from his shoulders. “I shouldn't think the place has got quite that bad.”

“Whose is it?” she asked, meaning,
Why show it to me?

His reply startled a yelp out of her: he grasped her hand, pressing it fervently between both of his. She stepped smartly back, her mind awhirl—
But he said—Is this some mad declaration of affection? His face says nothing of the—
only to realise that what he had been pressing was not his suit, but a physical object. She looked down at her gloved palm.

A key.

“The lease has been purchased in your name,” he told her. “Assuming, that is, you are willing to take on the burden of Sherlock Holmes as a tenant. I intend to live here, although I shall make certain demands as to the rooms. These windows, for one thing, will prove meagrely in winter.”

He was squinting at the window putty, peeling out bits with his finger-nail. “Also, one year ago, I gave you my word that neither of us need mention your previous life. Concerning that agreement, let me say three things. First: your debt to the man known as ‘The Bishop' has been paid in full. Second, lest you wonder, no: you do not actually have a choice as to this arrangement. That is due to my third and final point.” He turned to pin her down with those eyes. “Never, ever, even
begin
to think that your crimes and your father's death have faded in my memory. They will always stand between us. They will echo through every conversation we have, every request I make, my every month's payment of rent. If this is not acceptable to you, I shall put you on the next ship to Sydney. Is that understood?”

A nod was the only motion she could venture, until his cold grey gaze finally let go its hold. She drew a shaky breath, while he frowned up at the twisted gas pipe, shaking his head. “Very well. Although I fear, Mrs Hudson, that you will find me a most troublesome tenant. Also, if I might suggest, concerning your given name? ‘Clarissa' seems a touch frivolous for a Baker Street landlady. ‘Clara' might make the rôle more—oh, for God's sake, woman, don't faint on me again!”

The house renovations were fast—suspiciously fast, particularly when one considered the work-men's preference for night-time deliveries in anonymous carts as they supplied tiles from mixed sources, paint of various shades, and furniture that did not quite match. On the twenty-third of December, Mrs Clara Hudson and her young houseboy, Billy, moved into their near-empty ground-floor rooms, that Billy might have his first, tiny, honest-to-goodness Christmas tree. Four days later, furniture began to arrive. Three weeks after that, Mr Holmes brought home a potential house-mate for 221B, a nervy, limping medical man recently out of the Army who twitched at every shout and crash from the street outside. Dr Watson seemed expressly designed to be Holmes' exact opposite: tidy, Spartan, and (once his nerves calmed somewhat) interested in his fellow man.

And his fellow woman.

The first thing “Mrs Hudson” did upon meeting him was to glare at Billy, forcing him to slip the doctor's watch back into its pocket. The second was to drop into the pace and posture of a woman a decade or more older, lest Dr Watson's appreciative eye come to rest on his new landlady.

And from thenceforth, a landlady she was. Clara Hudson settled into the twenty-four-hour-a-day stage-play with deep misgivings, fearing the closing-in of walls, but in fact, the walls proved generous, and opportunities for escape—temporary and sanctioned escape—came surprisingly often. For her…what was Mr Holmes, anyway? Tenant? Employer? Gaoler? At any rate, his romantic plans to become a detective did in fact come to fruition, and he did indeed work beyond the limitations imposed on the official police. His associates were often members of the criminal underworld, while his clients were as apt to be unconcerned with legality as the detective was.

As Acts went, this one kept her interest.

Clara Hudson never doubted that righteousness was required of her and transgressions would be instantly catastrophic. Nonetheless, as time went by, Mr Holmes relaxed his standards just a little. She was granted brief holidays from virtue (“The seaside” was what they called a trip to Paris; “Mrs Turner” was both a friend and occasional stand-in, as well as a code for Monte Carlo). Even in Baker Street, her special skills found occasional employment: when Mr Holmes needed a woman to provide surveillance or to follow someone on the streets—or into places men were forbidden—he called upon her. She also supervised Billy's army of street urchins that Mr Holmes called his “Irregulars.”

The others—police, clients, even Dr Watson—knew none of this. As far as they were concerned, Mrs Hudson was the landlady, ready with the tea tray and a substantial breakfast at any hour, her stately tread climbing at night past her tenants' door to the spotless rooms where pigeons had once reigned. In the same way, Billy was the page, whose inappropriate friendship with young street Arabs distressed Mrs Hudson down to the bones. She spoke with her mother's native accent, she put on weight, she watched her hair go grey.

And deep in the back of a bedroom drawer, nestled into a threadbare little bag that had once been rich with beads, lay a small, ivory-handled ladies' revolver and its box of tiny bullets.

C
lara Hudson, née Clarissa, occasionally reflected on the number of sharp turns her life had taken. Born ten thousand miles from her father. A transportee before she could walk. At her mother's death, first a surrogate parent, then junior partner in a firm of confidence thieves. Two triumphant Seasons; a foolish love; an arrangement with a crime baron; a finger on a trigger. Then: Baker Street.

Two other sharp turns remained to her. The first came when the Queen died and Sherlock Holmes retired from London. Not that he retired from work: merely, he left Baker Street for rural Sussex.

To her own astonishment, his landlady decided to accompany him.

Once, long ago, during the strange and lonely pair of years when Mr Holmes was presumed dead in the Reichenbach Falls, Billy—a strapping young lad of eighteen by then, and off to University—had come by to read aloud with her in front of the fire, to help obscure the creaking of the empty house.

Dickens had always been a favourite with them. That night it was
Great Expectations
. Billy was reading—his schooling was more solid than hers, his reading smooth—and had come to the following passage:

Put the case, Pip, that passion and the terror of death had a little shaken the woman's intellects, and that when she was set at liberty, she was scared out of the ways of the world and went to him to be sheltered. Put the case that he took her in, and that he kept down the old wild violent nature, whenever he saw an inkling of its breaking out, by asserting his power over her in the old way.

The words sent a chill down her spine, of truth and recognition.
She went to him to be sheltered
…

Clarissa Hudson—Clara, now, that dull and dependable name—had hated the grey-eyed young man who took hold of her freedom. For him and his damnable honesty, she had given up her son, taken sharp scissors to her own wings, exchanged her silks for a landlady's drab, allowed her hair to go grey and unadorned. Her world had shrunk to the supervision of housemaids and the carrying of tea trays. More than once, she had eyed the tin of rat poison, wondering…

And yet, under that iron control, she came to feel strangely free. Clara Hudson acted a lie from the time her feet hit the floorboards in the morning to the moment she blew out her bed-side candle or turned out the electric lamp, but that lie grew increasingly comfortable. A rôle more real, more
her,
than the flirtatious girl at the billiards table ever was. Her few attempts at inhabiting the stage had failed because her partners rang false: here, under the Baker Street roof, every person played his part without lapse.

Well, that was not entirely true: Billy, at first, had chafed and questioned. But Billy was young. When all around him held up their sides, when even she failed to respond to his suggestions of independent fund-raising trips through the city streets or his queries about Mr Bishop, the boy's memories faded. In any event, school rooms and Mr Holmes' band of Irregulars soon took the place of his former excitements.

As for “Mrs Hudson,” the old part of her (that
old wild violent nature
) withered as its sustenance was withheld. At the same time, the new camaraderie, the partnership she found with Mr Holmes and the good doctor—a man who came to share a flat and ended up sharing a life—poured nourishment on a long-forgotten side of Clarissa Hudson.

The process was slow, and uneven, but inexorable. Ten years and four months after pressing the Baker Street key into her hand, her gaoler vanished down the Reichenbach Falls. All the world mourned him. Strangers wore black armbands. The now-married Dr Watson eulogised Holmes as “the best and wisest man” he had ever known.

A week after the death was reported, Billy came to see her, and asked what she intended to do. She knew what he was asking.

“Ah, lad, I'll stay on here for the present. Mr Holmes' brother wants the rooms kept. A sort of memorial.”

“He'll pay?” Billy asked in surprise.

“Apparently so.”

“Funny, he didn't strike me as the soft-hearted type.”

“His way of grieving, I suppose.”

“If you say so. But will that give you…enough?”

“To live on? Certainly,” she answered firmly. It was not the money that she would miss, it was the excitement. But the thought of returning to a life of Cheats after the years of enforced rectitude proved not as enticing as she would have expected. Maybe she was just getting old, but she had come to like feeling a part of something larger than herself. It was satisfying to use her skills in the service of Mr Holmes and his clients. Mad as it sounded, she enjoyed doing good. And if it came right down to it, she could not imagine betraying Mr Holmes' trust.

In any event, she wasn't convinced he was dead.

If her tenant's brother had permitted her to let out the now-empty rooms in a normal fashion, she might have believed. But Mycroft Holmes was one of the most powerful, unreadable, and frankly terrifying men she had ever encountered: the polar opposite of sentimental.

So she kept her peace, and kept the rooms, and she and Billy remained (doing, if truth be told, the occasional Job for a few of Mr Holmes' older clients). When Mr Holmes dropped out of a blue sky one April day in 1894, she managed not to clobber him with some household implement, or to faint dead. She did permit herself a course of hysterics.

He even thanked her the next day for crawling about the floor in Baker Street, adjusting the position of his wax bust, set up to tempt an assassin's bullet. (She was not well pleased when Billy's replacement, a wise little urchin also called Billy, was called upon to perform the same function in the course of a different case. Holmes, somewhat belatedly, was made to question the wisdom of permitting a child to stick his head into danger.)

A new century began, an old Queen died, and something of the heart went out of London. Mr Holmes' announcement that he would retire to Sussex, there to pursue the philosophical occupation of beekeeping, brought about a second course of hysterics, this one as much laughter as astonishment. This most London of gentlemen—moreover, a gentleman who was only forty-two years of age—wandering about the sheep-clotted South Downs with silk hat and ebony cane?

However, he was both adamant and close-mouthed when it came to any explanation, and again, she wondered: Did London have too many eyes, perhaps, for the work he had begun to do for his older brother? Was the anonymity of the city working against him, making a train journey to London the price to pay for the security of open countryside?

He never said, not in so many words. And he made it quite clear that he meant what he'd told her all those years before: 221 Baker Street belonged to her, to do with as she liked.

In the end, what she liked was to sell what remained of the lease. She closed the house and sold most of the furniture. Half her profits went to William Mudd, thirty now and with a family and investigation business of his own. Clara Hudson dropped her key through the Baker Street mail slot and turned her back on twenty-two years, exchanging a landlady's authority and independence for the rôle of housekeeper.

The things she did for this man never ceased to amaze her.

On the even rails of rural Sussex, her life ran for the next twelve years. Her grey hair edged towards white, her step grew stately in fact. In 1914, the Kaiser's war that had been so long a-building finally broke out.

When 1915 turned on her calendar, not even the sound of guns across the Channel made her anticipate much more excitement in her own life. She would turn fifty-nine in May. The previous year had brought what felt like a final grand adventure in a long and tumultuous life, when she had acted an aged servant to a German spy with such finesse, even Dr Watson had failed to recognise her. With that, she was satisfied. Apart from the occasional disruptions that Mr Holmes would bring, she was content that her life would now drift softly towards its final stages.

That was before she met Mary Russell, and her life took one more abrupt turn.

April 8, 1915. Mr Holmes had been in a dreary state for weeks—months—and his housekeeper practically shoved him out of the door that morning into the fresh spring air. “Bees,” she'd ordered. “Go look to your bees.”

To her astonishment, he had.

To her dismay, he did not come back. Hours went by. The sun crept lower, the clock slowed, every tick marking an eternity. She cleaned and scrubbed and tried not to think about how morose the man had been of late, how black his moods, how heavily he had been maltreating his body by starving it and drugging it.

The wave of relief that washed over her on hearing his hand on the latch made her dizzy. The jolt of surprise at seeing his companion made her change.

“Mrs Hudson,” he declared loudly, before even he had cleared the kitchen door, “I've brought one of our neighbours home for tea. I trust you have something to put before her?”

Into her kitchen stepped a child, a girl of no more than fifteen years, thin and tall and peculiarly dressed in a man's hand-me-downs. Her hair was a rich blonde colour beside his grey, her eyes blue instead of his steel, but were one to judge only by posture, the set of the head, and the gaze of the person within, the two might have been blood relations.

To her own astonishment, Mrs Hudson responded as she had not done in years: an Act rose up to claim her, strengthening her vestigial Scots accent, hunching her shoulders into those of a woman well accustomed to a scrub-brush, squinting slightly as if she'd left her glasses somewhere…

Miss Mary Russell walked into their lives, and made them both young again.

Mary Russell, whose blood lay drying across the freshly polished boards of Mrs Hudson's floor.