A Letter of Mary

"Ah. Have you also been on duty since yesterday morning?"

"Yes, but he drove last night. Don't worry, I won't fall asleep at the wheel."

"I was not worried, though if you wish me to take over at any point, I'm quite a decent driver." I made the offer, although he did not seem the sort who would care to be driven by a woman.

"Miss Russell— is that what I should call you, by the way?"

"Yes, that's fine."

"I wonder if you'd mind telling me the whole story from your point of view, to cover the, er, gaps left by Mr Holmes?"

"Certainly. Where would you like me to begin? With her letter to me?"

"Tell me about her. What was she like, how did you meet her, what do you know of her work in Palestine? Anything along those lines."

"Miss Ruskin was one of those odd women this country occasionally throws out, like Gertrude Bell or Mary Kingsley. Fascinated by the exotic, oblivious of comfort or convention, largely self-educated, an incongruous mixture of utter, inflexible certainty and immense insecurity around her peers, so that in normal social intercourse, she usually spoke in brief, brusque phrases. Left off pronouns. Loud voice. In writing or when she was involved in explaining her work, she could be very eloquent. Devastatingly observant. Dauntingly vital. Immensely intelligent, and wise, as well. It's hard to think of her as dead, even having seen her body. I shall miss her."

Lestrade was a good listener, and his questions were apposite. I talked; he prompted. We stopped in Southwark to push Tony Ellis out at the terrace house he shared with his three brothers, then drove on to Scotland Yard, where Lestrade left the photographic film to be developed. He also made what seemed to me a feeble attempt to abandon the automobile, but when a consultation with the schedules revealed a nearly two-hour wait at King's Cross, he decided not to descend to forms of transport less demanding of constant attention, and despite the lack of a driver, he kept the car. A motorphile who cannot afford a machine of his own, I diagnosed with resignation.

There was a pause in conversation as he steered between the carts, drays, lorries, taxis, omnibuses, trams, and the thousand other forms of moving targets, but when eventually we had fought free, unscathed, of the greater concentration of traffic, he resumed as if without interruption.

"This manuscript, what did you call it?"

"It's called a papyrus. We should have shown it to you, but it's in a safe place and Holmes thought it best to leave it hidden. The manuscript itself is a little roll of papyrus, which is a kind of thick paper made from beaten reeds, very commonly used in ancient Egypt and the whole Middle East, apparently, though very little of it has survived. Miss Ruskin consulted authorities on it, but they decided it was not an authentic first-century document, partly because there's so little extant Palestinian papyrus. However, she thought that as it was sealed inside a glazed figurine, it could have resisted wear that long. I haven't had a chance to examine it closely, but there were definite signs of red pottery dust embedded in the fibres. It was put into the box quite recently, in the last twenty years."

"Tell me about the box."

I described it, the animals, inlay, date, and probable origin.

"I'd like to take it to the British Museum to have a friend look at it, but it's undoubtedly quite valuable. It's in excellent condition, though how it got to a Bedouin tribesman from Italy will take some figuring."

"And the manuscript itself, what's it worth?"

"I have no way of knowing."

"Guess."

"Surely you know better than to ask that of a student of Sherlock Holmes," I chided.

"Miss Russell, I am asking for a rough estimate of the thing's value, not a bid at auction. What is it worth?"

"Half a million guineas?"

"What?" he choked, and nearly had us in the ditch.

"The road, please, Inspector," I said urgently, and then: "You're certain you don't want me to drive? Very well. The thing could as easily be worth ten pounds, I have at present no means of evaluating it. But you asked two questions— one of its worth, and the other of its value. The two are related, although not the same. If it is not authentic, as merely a curiosity, the manuscript is nearly worthless and of little value. If, however— and it's a very large if— if it is authentically what it appears to be, whoever owned it could set the price. Only a handful of individuals in the world could afford it. And its value ... Its value as an agent of change? Good Lord, if the papyrus came to be generally accepted as a voice from the first century, the repercussions would be ... considerable."

My voice drifted off, and he glanced at me in surprise.

"Perhaps you had best tell me about it. It's a letter, you said?"

I sighed and tried to arrange my thoughts as if I were presenting an academic paper to a colleague. That this particular colleague knew not the first thing about the topic and that I was struggling in far over my head with it did not make the presentation any easier.

"I must begin by emphasising that I am not a qualified judge. I am no expert in Greek or in first-century Christianity. If," I was forced to add parenthetically, "you can even call it Christianity at that point. Miss Ruskin gave me the manuscript knowing this, on, as near as I can gather, a personal whim combined with annoyance at the experts, who rejected it out of hand. She thought it worth more than that, and thought, rightly, that I would find it as tantalising as she did." I took a deep and steadying breath.

"It is a letter, in Koiné rather than classical Greek, with one passage of Aramaic, a form of Hebrew that was commonly spoken at the time. The letter is purportedly written by a woman who calls herself Mary, a common enough name, but she refers to herself as an apostle of Jesus and is writing to her sister in the town of Magdala."

It took several seconds to sink in, but when it had sorted itself out in his mind, he took his astonished gaze off the road again and turned it on me for a disturbingly long time before remembering to steer the car. It was another long moment before he could choose an appropriate reaction, which was, predictably enough, a roar of laughter.

"A letter from Mary Magdalene?" he spluttered. "Of all the ... Leave it to Sherlock Holmes to come up with something as crazy as that. Next thing, he'll be finding the Holy Grail in a pawnshop. Mary Magdalene! That's a rich one, that is."

I looked out the window at the scenery, row upon row of recently constructed Homes for Heroes that gave off abruptly to fields and cows. Let him wrestle with it, I thought, and set out to count the varieties of toxic wildflower in the passing hedgerows. I had reached eleven before his laughter finally dribbled to a halt, and three more (or should the aquilegia, a garden escapee, be allowed? I debated) before his next question came, spoken like a joke waiting for the punch line.

"What does this letter say?"

I answered as if he had asked a serious question.

"Actually, not an awful lot. There's a section in the middle I'm having difficulties with, partly because of some stains across the script but also because the Greek itself is unclear. It begins with a fairly straightforward greeting, such as the various New Testament letters start with, except that rather than being from 'Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God,' for example, it's from 'Mariam, an apostle of Jesus the Messiah,' and it's written to 'my sister Judith in Magdala.' She is apparently writing from Jerusalem in the last weeks before the city was conquered by Rome and laid waste in the Jewish revolt of the years 68 to 70, when the Temple was last destroyed. She's sending her grandchild to Judith and is herself going away to the south, something about a 'rocky desolation.'

"The rest of it I've only glanced over, but it looked to me like an explanation of why she followed 'the rabbi.' I was planning to tackle that section Friday morning when Holmes saw the notice in The Times about Miss Ruskin's death. I'm hoping it gives a hint on why the author should be writing in Greek, since one would rather expect it to be all in Aramaic. It's a nice little puzzle."

Lestrade looked at me, then back at the road.

"Is that so?" he said, and then held his peace for at least five miles. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see his face screw itself up over this utterly foreign dilemma, and suddenly I found myself liking him. Eventually, he gave it up, shook his head, and turned to those parts of the problem that lay within his ken.

"This box. Would you say it's valuable enough to kill for?"

"Insufficient data, as Holmes would say. To an extremely corrupt collector, perhaps, or to a madman, but I shouldn't have thought that the point was merely possessing whatever it was they were after. They must have wanted to be rid of Miss Ruskin as well, or else they would have simply broken in, or held her up, and taken whatever it was they wanted. Either she knew who they were and could identify them to the police or she knew the details of whatever they were wanting and could duplicate the information. Besides, it's not the box itself they were after, as we told you; it was something flat and small, like a piece of paper."

"But you still don't think it could have been the— what d'you call it?"

"Papyrus. I did wonder. Only a lunatic would fold it in half and stick it into a book or behind a framed photograph, but it's possible they didn't know precisely what it looked like. If so, it's not a collector. If it is the manuscript they're after, then we've either got a mad academic on our tails or else someone who wants it suppressed, if not destroyed. Holmes thinks it's more likely that someone believes that Miss Ruskin gave us some other paper entirely, either for safekeeping or investigation. It could be a will or a codicil, or a secret treaty— she was thick with the political types over there, an ideal courier. Even a letter. We don't have it, of course, but I suppose it's a case of Holmes' name causing a dramatic overreaction. Someone had to be very worried in order to risk murder and breaking into an hotel room and then driving to Sussex to ransack a house."

He did not respond to this, and I shifted to look over at him. His rather ferretlike features were without expression as he concentrated on the road ahead.

"But I was forgetting, you have yet to see any tie between her death and our house. Will you go with me later to her hotel room and to the corner where she was killed?"

"Certainly." He took a deep breath. "Miss Russell, let me make myself clear. You know that my father was with Scotland Yard and that he worked with Mr Holmes a number of times. You may not realise it, but he was greatly influenced by the way Mr Holmes worked. He really worshipped Mr Holmes, used to tell us kids stories about how he solved crimes against all odds, just by using his eyes and his head. Even now, he never misses an issue of the Strand when it has one of Dr Watson's stories in it. I'm not a child anymore, Miss Russell, but I know how much Scotland Yard owes to Mr Holmes. Things he did that looked crazy thirty, forty years ago are now standard procedure with us. Some of the men laugh at him, make jokes about his pipe smoking and violin and all, but they're laughing at all those stories Dr Watson wrote, and they don't like to admit that their training in footprints and the laboratory's analysis of bloodstains and tobacco ashes comes straight from the work of Sherlock Holmes. Even fingerprints— he was the first in the country to use them in a case. Miss Russell, when he says there was murder and a burglary was connected with it, then I for one believe him. I just have to find a way of laying it in front of my superiors. I must have some firm evidence to connect an apparent hit-and-run accident with your sitting room. No doubt we'll find it eventually, but I'd rather it be sooner than later, when the trail is cold."

This lengthy speech drained him of words for another two miles; then he stirred.

"Sounds to me like your friend handed you a right hornets' nest," he commented.

"My life was full enough without it," I agreed obliquely.

"Not that she could have known," he hastened to add, nil nisi bonum.

"I'm not sure. Oh, not the current ... business, not her death, but she must surely have known that the manuscript would prove a major headache. Owning a thing like that, it's no small responsibility."

"Do you mean you think it's real?" he asked cautiously, unsure whether he had a madwoman in the car beside him or if I was launched on some elaborate Holmesian leg-pull.

"Dorothy Ruskin thought it might be."

"Would she have known?"

"I trust her judgement."

"Oh." I could almost hear the whirs and whine of the desperate reevaluation process going on in his mind. "Responsibility"— his flailing grasp latched onto my word. "What kind of responsibility do you mean? That it's worth ... so much?" He could not bring himself to vocalise the sum I had only half-facetiously suggested.

"Not the money, no. If the thing were to convince me that it is real, then, you see, I am faced with a decision: Do I spend the rest of my life fighting to convince others of its truth? I told you that if it is what it appears to be, the repercussions would be considerable, but that is putting it mildly. The sure knowledge that one of Jesus' apostles was a woman would shake the Christian world to its foundations. Logically, there's no reason why it should, but realistically, I have no doubt that the emotional reaction would set off a bitter, bloody civil war, from one end of the church to the other. And smack in the centre of it, holding a scrap of papyrus in her hand like a child keeping her dinner from a pack of hungry dogs, would be Mary Russell Holmes. A Jew, to boot."

He looked at me sideways, evaluating the profound distaste in my voice.

"And you call her a friend?"

I had to smile. "Yes, I suppose I do. Not that she expected me to do anything with it— she made it quite clear that she did not mind if I sat on it. It's waited almost nineteen hundred years, after all. What's another fifty? She just wanted me to appreciate it and to keep it safe. That in and of itself seems enough of a problem, at the moment," I added to myself, but he picked it up immediately.

"So you think that your manuscript might be at the bottom of it after all? That someone is trying to get his hands on it?"

"I can easily envisage any number of people who might want to possess such a thing, but at this point, Chief Inspector Lestrade, I am keeping a very open mind," I said firmly. That kept him silent until we entered the village and asked directions of a woman pushing a pram.

NINE

iota

The house to which we were eventually directed was a small two-storey brick building with a front garden composed of weeds and unpruned roses, a broken front step, and sagging lace curtains at the windows. The bell seemed not to work, but loud knocks brought a shuffling in the hallway and an eye under the door chain.

"Who is that?" The accents were those of Miss Ruskin, but the voice was weak and sounded old.

"Pardon me, I'm looking for Miss Erica Ruskin."

"There's been no Miss Erica Ruskin for nearly forty years, young man. What do you want?"

Lestrade was not daunted.

"I am Chief Inspector Lestrade from Scotland Yard. I'd like to speak with the sister of Miss Dorothy Ruskin, and I was given this address."

Silence fell. The faded blue eye travelled over us, and then the gap narrowed, the chain was slipped, and the door opened.

Dorothy Ruskin had been short, but she would have towered above her sister in both stature and personality. This woman barely cleared five feet, and though she had her sister's erect spine, there was none of her authority and purpose. For an instant, the ghost of Dorothy Ruskin looked at me from the eyelids and nose before me; then it faded and there was only a stranger.

"I am Mrs Erica Rogers, Chief Inspector. Dorothy's sister. Is she in some sort of trouble?"

"May we come in, Mrs Rogers? This is Miss Russell, my assistant." We had agreed that I would take notes and use my eyes, as his "assistant."

"Come in?" She examined us suspiciously head to toe, and I smothered an impulse to check my buttons and pat my hairpins. However, we apparently met her standards and were admitted. "I suppose you can come in. In there, the first door."

The door opened into a small, crowded sitting room, thick with gewgaws and whatnots, sepia photographs, reproductions of popular trite Victorian paintings, porcelain figurines, and souvenirs of Brighton and Blackpool. The air was musty and stale, dim despite the window, and the once good Chinese carpet was worn thin and colourless. There was little dust, and the windows were clean, and it could not have been further from the dirty, mad, and infinitely appealing dwelling inhabited by the sister in distant Palestine.

Mrs Rogers followed us into the room and retrieved a knitting project from one of the pair of heavy leather armchairs, their arms and headrests draped incongruously with delicate lace antimacassers, that occupied either side of the tiny fireplace. She waved Lestrade into the other chair, then looked somewhat helplessly about, as if expecting a third armchair to materialise. I solved her dilemma by moving to a hard wooden stool that sat next to the window, out of her line of sight if she faced Lestrade, and took out my notebook with an air of efficiency. I uncapped my pen and prepared to take my unintelligible notes, the perfect silent partner. Mrs Rogers sank into her chair and looked expectant. Lestrade cleared his throat.

"Mrs Rogers," he began, "I'm afraid I have some unfortunate news for you concerning your sister. She was killed in London on Wednesday night, by an automobile. She had no identification on her, and it took us some time to determine her identity and to find your address."

To my astonishment, she did not react at all, other than a slight tensing of the fingers on her knitting. As if reminded of what her hands held, she withdrew a needle from the ball, pulled loose some yarn, and began absently to knit.

"Thank you for telling me, Chief Inspector," she said calmly.

Lestrade shot a startled glance at me and leant forward slightly in his chair.

"Mrs Rogers, did you hear me?"

"Yes, of course I heard you. I may be falling prey to the infirmities of age, but hardness of hearing is not one of them. You said that my sister was hit by an automobile on Wednesday night. I knew she was dead. I did not know how she died. Thank you for telling me." She looked up then from her work, though the rhythm of the needles remained unchanged. "Will you arrange to have the body sent here for the funeral? I'm afraid I don't know how that should be done."

"Mrs Rogers—" Lestrade stopped. I reflected that it was probably quite rare for his face to be given the opportunity to form an expression of complete incredulity, if only for an instant. She faced him calmly. "Mrs Rogers, how did you know your sister was dead?"

"I knew. I woke up shortly after midnight, and I knew she was dead. I felt her go."

After a long moment, Lestrade snapped his mouth shut and sat back into his chair. He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. "Mrs Rogers, there is some indication that your sister's death may not have been an accident."

I had my head bent over the notebook, but I watched her hands and the muscles of her face as my pen scratched over the paper. Her fingers faltered for a moment, then resumed their odd, disembodied movements. She said nothing.

"There are certain indications that someone wanted something that was in your sister's possession, Mrs Rogers. Have you any idea what that might have been?"

The old lips twitched and again Dorothy Ruskin passed through the face.

"No, Chief Inspector, I have no idea. I have had little contact with my sister for many years now, and I would have no way of knowing what of her possessions would interest another person."

"I understand that she was here several days ago. Did she say anything to you that might have referred to it, comments about something of value, for example, or a trip to a bank vault?"

"No."

"Did she receive any letters or visitors while she was here?"

"There was a letter from London, a Colonel something. She was planning to meet with him in order to discuss her proposals for an archaeological project, after returning from a meeting with Mr and Mrs Sherlock Holmes in Sussex. Dorothy was—" She stopped suddenly and drew a sharp breath, then whirled to look at me, accusation and— was it fear?— on her old face. "Russell? That's the name that was on a telegram she had."

"Yes, Mrs Rogers," I said, watching her politely. "I am assisting Chief Inspector Lestrade. He also thought my presence might be of use to you, that you perhaps would like to know how your sister had spent her last day."

Her eyes held mine for a long moment, then turned to Lestrade, and finally went back to her hands, which then resumed their work. Her mouth twitched angrily.

"Spying on me, that's what you were doing. Sneaking in here pretending to be sympathetic and asking questions."

"Why should we want to spy on you?" I asked innocently. Her fingers paused, and she went on as if I had not spoken.

"I don't know what Dorothy was doing there in the Holy Land. She never told me, just went off and left me to care for Mama, never a thought for helping out. I am sorry she's dead, but I'm not surprised, and I can't say I'll miss her all that much." She came to the end of the row, jabbed her needle into the ball of yarn, and pushed herself up from the chair. "Now, if it's all the same to you, I have to be checking up on my mother and getting her something to eat. Thank you for coming. I'm not on the telephone, but you know where to reach me when you want to send the body here."

The body.

"Mrs Rogers, I'm sorry, but I must ask you a few questions." She stayed on her feet, so Lestrade was forced reluctantly to stand, as well. I remained where I was. "About the two men who came here on the Wednesday. What time was that?"

"Tuesday. It was Tuesday, in the afternoon. Maybe five."

"She left here on Tuesday morning, then?"

"Monday night," she corrected him. "She took the seven-forty into London. Wanted to have a full day in town, she said. Not like some of us, who can only get free for a few hours."

"Er, yes. And the two men. What did they look like? How old were they?"

"Fiftyish," she said promptly. "They were Arabs, I suppose. Not that I've seen any up close, but Dorothy used to send photographs sometimes. Had funny names."

"Can you remember the names?"

"No, gone clear out of my head. Long, they were— the names."

"And the car they came in? Did you see the registration plate?"

"Not that I remember. It was parked along the side of the house, where your car is. All I could see was that it was long and black."

"And that it had a driver."

"I saw that when they pulled out, from upstairs. There were two heads in the back. Either that or the car was driving itself." She was telling us in no uncertain terms that she was fed up with our presence, and Lestrade gave up. I put my notebook and pen away and walked over to the chair she had occupied. The knitting lay in the chair again, an eight-inch length of fine dark blue wool, ribbing and cables, the bottom of what seemed to be a cardigan.

"You do lovely work, Mrs Rogers. Did you knit the cardigan you have on?" She pulled the front of it together across her thin chest as if to defend herself against my friendly voice.

"Yes. I knit a lot. Now please, I have work to do."

"Of course," said Lestrade. "We will let you know when your sister's body will be released to you, Mrs Rogers. This is my card. If you think of anything more about the two men, or if you have any questions, my telephone number is on it." He laid the white rectangle on the polished table in the hallway, retrieved his hat, and we walked slowly down the grey stones to the car.

"I suppose there must be a wide variety of reactions when a person is told of the death of someone close to them," I suggested without much confidence.

"Oh yes. Tears, hysteria, silence, anger, I've seen all those. Never one quite like that, though."

"An odd woman."

"Very. Odd behaviour, at any rate. You hungry?"

"Not terribly. I could use something to drink, though."

* * *

In the end, Lestrade drove back with me to Sussex and spent the night on the floor of our guest room. It was a quiet drive down. I sporadically produced topics of conversation to keep him from falling asleep, lapsing back between times into the contemplation of our visit to Mrs Rogers, the marks of the trip wire (the kerbstone had been washed since yesterday), and the hotel room (which Lestrade left sealed for his prints-and-evidence team).

Holmes was waiting for us, with hot drinks and a remarkably transformed room, tidier than it had been in perhaps ten years. He had even lit a small and not entirely necessary fire, which glowed cheerfully from the grate. Lestrade looked grey with fatigue, and he was given a hot brandy and rapidly dispatched to his rather bare quarters. I was pleased to find feathers contained and new beds in place and said as much to Holmes as I joined him in front of the fireplace.

"Yes, Patrick and Tillie were most helpful. He brought a load of essentials over from your house."

"So I see. These chairs are certainly more comfortable than the seat of Lestrade's car. One of his springs is working its way loose, and I kept expecting to be impaled by it." I sipped my drink, closed my eyes, and sighed in satisfaction. "How can a day spent merely sitting be so tiring?" I mused.

"Don't fall asleep, Russell. Tell me what you found, just an outline, and then I will allow you to retire."

I told him, and though it was hardly an outline, it took no more than half an hour to give a summary of my day. Holmes filled his pipe thoughtfully.

"She was not surprised or upset at the news of her sister's death?" he asked.

"No, just that odd statement that she had felt her sister go shortly after midnight. What do you make of that?"

"I wish I had been there. I find it difficult to work with secondhand information, even when it comes from you."

"So why didn't you go?" I said irritably.

"I am not criticising, Russell. There is nothing wrong with the way you gather information— far from it, in fact. It is only that I still find it difficult to accustom myself to being half of a creature with two brains and four eyes. A superior creature to a single detective, no doubt, but it takes some getting used to."

This easy and unexpected declaration shook me. For more than a third of my life, I had been under the tutelage and guidance of this man, and my existence as an adult had been shaped by him, yet here he was easily acknowledging that I, too, was shaping him. I did not know how to answer him. After a long moment, without looking at me, he went on.

"I found some interesting things here today, Russell, but that can wait until tomorrow. To answer your question, I do not know what to make of Mrs Rogers's claim to a revelatory experience. Once, I would have discounted it immediately, but now I can only file it away, as it were, under 'suspicious.' You said that she seemed nervous, rather than upset?"

"She dropped one stitch— not when Lestrade told her that her sister had died, but when he said that the death was not an accident— then another one after she realised who I was, and finally she turned a cable the wrong way round before telling us to leave. She'll have to pull it all out to return it to her normal standard of workmanship."

"Suggestive. Anything else?"

"Interesting little things. Trifles, as Sergeant Cuff would say. For one thing, the lady's a fan of yours. There were three copies of the Strand tucked into a basket next to her chair, two of them, I'm tolerably certain, were issues with Conan Doyle articles in them— one of the Thor Bridge case from last year, and the Presbury case from this spring. For another, I'd say she's had some sort of a maid until recently. Maybe just day help, but there was a fine layer of dust on top of the polished wood and metalwork. Perhaps two weeks' worth. Finally, her attitude toward her sister was not perhaps as affectionate as her letter might have indicated. There were whatnots on every surface, covering the mantelpiece, the tables, even the windowsills, but only four of them might have come from the Middle East, and those were all pushed behind something else. A very nice Turkish enamelled plate was under an aspidistra, for example, and I saw a lovely little Roman glass scent bottle behind the most disgustingly garish coronation cup I've ever laid eyes on."

"Indicates a certain lack of affection, I agree. Or a severe lapse in taste."

"And, of all the photographs and portraits— there must have been fifty, all in gnarly silver frames— there were only two which might have been of Miss Ruskin. One was a child of about six, and the other was one of those fuzzy romantic photographs of a girl of about eighteen. She was very pretty, by the way, if it was Miss Ruskin."

"I thought she might have been. However, disapproval of one's sister hardly indicts one for her murder."

"Particularly when the person is a frail woman in her sixties, I know. Nevertheless—"

"As you say. We shall set Lestrade on the trail in the morning, and set ourselves to casting about in an attempt to find another trail or flush out a few suspects."

"I believe you're mixing up two quite distinct methods of hunting, Holmes."

"I often do, Russell. It doesn't do to restrict oneself until one is certain of the nature of the game. To bed with you now, before I have to carry you. I have some smoking to do."

I rose wearily. His voice stopped me at the door.

"By the way, Russell, how do you come to know anything about dropped stitches and the method of turning a cable?"

"My dear Holmes, the good Mrs Hudson has instructed me in the rudiments of all the so-called womanly arts. The fact that I do not choose to exercise them does not mean I am in ignorance."

I turned with dignity to my bed, smiling to myself at the soft laughter that followed me up the stairs.

TEN

kappa

In the morning, the ambrosia of bacon frying heralded Mrs Hudson's return. By the time I dressed (in the day's clothes rather than a dressing gown, in deference to our guest's sensibilities), Lestrade was up, deep in conversation with Holmes outside on the flagstone patio. It was a magnificent morning, with the heat of late summer already in the sun. Somewhere I could hear the sound of farm machinery.

"Good morning, Russell. Coffee or tea?"

"As the coffee's here, I'll have that. I hope you slept well, Inspector, despite the lack of such luxuries as a bed and clean blankets?"

"I could've slept on the bare boards in my car rug last night, but I was most comfortable on the mattress, thank you."

"Russell, you will be pleased to know that your labours yesterday had the desired effect: The Chief Inspector is convinced. The marks on post and pillar box, plus the marks on Miss Ruskin's boots, equal justification for an investigation. Bacon and eggs are in the chafing dishes. I'll fetch more toast."

"I'd like to see the box she gave you before I go, though, Mr Holmes," called Lestrade at his host's disappearing back.

"So you shall, Lestrade," said Holmes as he took a rack of fresh toast from the hand of Mrs Hudson. "So you shall. I need to check the hives today anyway." He did not explain this apparent non sequitur to Lestrade, and I had my mouth full.

After breakfast, Holmes went down to the hives with his tin smoker and a bag of equipment. Lestrade stayed with me at the table, finishing his coffee, and we watched Holmes make his methodical way up the row of hives, stunning each community into apathy with the smoke and reaching gloveless inside. At one hive, he paused to fix another frame for the honeycombs onto the existing ones. He did the same to the hive in which he had secreted the box, then spent some time bent over its innards with his pocketknife. Lestrade shook his head.

"The best detective England has produced, and he spends his time with bees."

I smiled, having heard this a number of times before.

"He finds that the society of bees helps him understand the society of human beings. I think it's also a bit like the violin— it keeps one level of his mind occupied while freeing up other levels. More coffee?"

I left him to his contemplation of life's oddities and took the plates inside to help Mrs Hudson with the washing up. Soon the men reappeared at the door, a small bulge in the pocket of Holmes' coat and a bee clinging dopily to his hair.

"Kindly leave your lady friend outside, Holmes. She's next to your left ear."

He brushed her off and came inside.

"Let's take it into the laboratory, away from the windows. Lestrade," he said over his shoulder, "are you aware of the presence of three classes of bees in a hive? There are the workers, the females, who, appropriately enough, do all the work. The drones are the lowly males, who keep house and stand about gossiping and occasionally wait upon the queen. And finally, there is the queen herself, a sort of superfemale who is the mother of the entire hive. She spends her life laying eggs and killing any other queen who might hatch out, until she weakens and is herself killed, either by a new queen or by being smothered by a huge clot of her daughters when they see her growing old. If she dies accidentally, and if there are no unhatched queen cells, a worker can lay eggs, but she cannot make a new queen. A very educational society, Lestrade, if a bit daunting for a mere male. By the way, Russell, that new queen we got from your friend in Marston is doing very well. I may weed out a couple of the other hives and try replacing their queen cells with hers. Well, here is Miss Ruskin's little present, Lestrade, for what it's worth."

He drew the lump from his pocket and removed the piece of oiled paper with which he had wrapped the box. Traces of wax showed where the industrious creatures had begun to incorporate this foreign object into their hive, but the box itself was untouched. He gave it to Lestrade, who turned it around in his hands, following with delight the parade of animals, birds, and exotic vegetation. I let him enjoy it for a while before I reached over to pull up the top and show him the papyrus.

"I'll work on finishing the translation and then see if I can find any sort of a code or marks on it. It's very unlikely, but I'll try."

Lestrade reached out and ran a thumb over the inviting surfaces, then glanced at the papyrus curiously.

"I can see why you said it wouldn't fit easily into a book. Good luck with it, Miss Russell. Glad it's you and not me. I'd like a photograph of it and a couple of the box as well, if you would."

"Did the camera appear, Holmes?"

"It did, but in rather too many pieces to be of any use. Patrick's should be good enough for the purpose, though."

"That reminds me, Mr Holmes, can you give me a list of everything they took? We can send it around to the stolen-goods people, have the shops look out for the things. Probably hopeless, but still."

"Quite. I made a list last night, Lestrade. It's on the table by the door. Be careful not to bump the table," he added. "One leg is loose."

"Right." Lestrade handed me the box and glanced at his watch. "Good Lord, I must run. I'm meeting someone at one o'clock. I'll be in touch tomorrow."

"I'll be interested to know what you uncover about Mrs Rogers's background. And I want to see if your print man finds anything in the hotel room."

"In this case, Mr Holmes, it's a print lady," he said primly, and with a tip of his hat to me, he closed the door.

Holmes and I regarded each other, and the noise and the tumult of the last two days gradually settled into the quiet house like dust from a shaken rug.

"So, Holmes."

"So, Russell."

He nodded once, as if in agreement, and we returned to our dreary task, in this case the laboratory, where, by great good fortune, none of the broken beakers and jars had combined to form explosives, corrosives, or poisons. We used heavy gloves, but we still had blood on our hands when the afternoon came and Holmes tipped the last dustpan load into the bin. We pulled off our gloves, inspected the damage, and threw gloves, brush, and the pan itself into the bin and slammed down the lid.

"Lunch al fresco, Russell, is definitely called for. Fresh air and sensible conversation in a place free of broken test tubes, white-haired eccentric ladies, and Scotland Yard inspectors."

We removed ourselves from the cottage to a spot notable only for its lack of scenery and difficulty of approach, then applied ourselves to my thick sandwiches (Mrs Hudson had despaired of teaching me to slice bread and meat thinly) and glasses of honey wine. The summer had been a good one, warm enough to dry hay, wet enough to water the fields. In a month, I should return to Oxford for half of each week. We hadn't much time.

I lay back and watched one thin cloud hang unmoving in the firmament while Holmes put the things back into his rucksack. Dorothy Ruskin, a strong woman who would find it easy to make enemies. Her sister, a widow, left to care for an old woman in a decrepit house. A retired colonel, his absent son, and whomever else she may have met in London. Then there were the two Arabs and their driver in the black saloon car, and whoever had searched our house. I shifted to avoid the sharp edges of a rock beneath my shoulder blade and was jabbed by one corner of the box, which I had thrust into a capacious trouser pocket. I stretched out my leg and fished for the box. I am not an acquisitive person; indeed, some people would say that the fortune I controlled was wasted on me. However, this artefact captivated me in ways I could not begin to explain. I held it up before my eyes. The peacock's tail was lapis lazuli and some green stone. Jade? Turquoise? I rested it on my stomach with my hands over it and closed my eyes to the hot sun.

I must have drifted off, because I was startled when Holmes spoke.

"Shall I abandon you here, Russell, in the arms of Nature's soft nurse?"

I smiled and stretched deliciously on the rocky ground. Holmes caught the box and handed it back to me when I sat up.

"William Shakespeare must have been an insomniac," I declared. "He has an overly affectionate fixation on sleep that borders on obsession. It can only have stemmed from privation."

"A hungry man dreaming of food? You sound like the jargon-spouting neighbour of Sarah Chessman, with her traumatic experiences and neuroses."

"Who better qualified than I for the spouting of psychological jargon?" I muttered, and then sighed and accepted his hand to haul me upright. So much for escapism.

"What next, Holmes?" I asked, grasping the nettle along with his hand.

"I intend to go for a leisurely promenade of the neighbourhood and drink numerous cups of tea and glasses of beer. You, meanwhile, will be bent slaving over your scrap of ancient paper. I trust my eyes and spine will be in considerably better condition than yours by evening," he said complacently.

"You will bring up the topic of our Friday-night visitors in the course of each conversation, I trust?"

He flashed me a brief sideways smile.

"I am relieved to see that your wits are back to their customary state. I admit that on Friday I was somewhat concerned."

"Yes. Friday was not a good day," I agreed ruefully. "Tell me, Holmes, what did you find Saturday morning to produce that exhibitionist display of omniscience you gave Lestrade? Some of it was obvious, the footprints and the hairs you found, and I take it the inferred cashmere scarf and camel-hair coat came from threads?"

"Where he laid his outer garments across a leg of the overturned kitchen table, which has a rough place on it where that monstrous puppy belonging to Old Will once attempted to eat the table. The dents in the floor came from a loose nail in the heel of the shoe, which does not occur with a quality piece of footwear. That they were both right-handed could be deduced from the pattern of how the objects fell when swept from the shelves, from the angle of the knife blades— two of them— in the soft furniture, from the location of the ladder, so that the right hand would have stretched for the last books, and from the foot that each man led with on climbing the ladder. There was an interesting smudge of mud on the alternate lower rungs, by the way, still damp when it was left there. It is not from around here, but must have been picked up earlier in the day. A light soil, with buff-coloured gravel in it."

"You'll do an analysis?"

"When the microscope is functioning, yes. However, the stuff is not immediately recognisable, so it will be of value only when we find its source."

"And the men? You said the leader had grey hair and stayed in the car?"

"Yes, that was most remarkable. I could not at first think why the two gentlemen kept going in and out, with much greater frequency than was required for the theft of our few belongings. Then I found the one grey hair, about three inches long, lodged in a sheaf of papers taken from your files. The pages had been dropped near the door, not next to your desk. It looked to me as though several armfuls of papers had been taken out of the room for examination and then brought back."

"Sounds pretty thin to me, Holmes. It could have belonged to anyone— you, Mrs Hudson, one of the cleaning women. Even one of my older tutors."

"The hair has a wave, and I think that a microscope will reveal an oval cross section. Mine is thin and straight, Mrs Hudson's considerably thicker and quite round."

"Which only leaves several dozen possibilities." I nearly laughed aloud at the expression on his normally sardonic features, which were caught between sheepishness and indignation.

"It is only a working hypothesis, Russell." With dignity, he held the garden gate open for me to pass through.

"It seems perilously close to a guess to me, Holmes."

"Russell!"

"It's all right, Holmes. I won't tell Lestrade the depths to which you stoop. Tell me about the knives."

"There is no 'guess' about those," he said with asperity. "Both were very sharp, and the one carried by the person with a loose nail in his shoe and an excess of hair oil was shaped to the suggestion of violence. The other was a more workmanlike blade, shorter and folding by means of a recently oiled hinge. It was wielded by the man in the round-toed boots and tweed suit."

"The flashy dresser carries a flashy knife. Not the sort one would wish Mrs Hudson to encounter." I lowered my voice, as we were nearing the house.

"No," he agreed dryly. "Mrs Hudson's talents are many and varied, but they do not include dealing with armed toughs."

"We won't hear from Mycroft today, or Lestrade?"

"Tomorrow, I should think. We cannot decide our actions until we have news from them, but I expect that we shall find ourselves moving our base of operations into London for a few days and incidentally giving Mrs Hudson a holiday. Sussex is a bit too distant from Colonel Edwards, Erica Rogers, and various mysterious Arabs."

"Meanwhile, the neighbours."

"And you, the lexicon."

"This case is wreaking havoc with my work," I muttered darkly. Holmes did not look in the least sympathetic, but was, on the contrary, humming some Italian aria as he left the house, walking stick in hand, cap on head, every inch the country squire paying visits on the lesser mortals. I opened my books and got to work.

Truth to tell, although I would not have admitted it to him, I regretted the interruption not at all. I thoroughly enjoyed that afternoon of immersing myself in Mary's letter, and I found it immensely exciting to see the lacunae fall before my pen, to turn the first choppy and tentative phrases into a smooth, lucid translation. This was original work in what appeared to be primary source material, a rarity for an academic, and I revelled in it. When Holmes walked in, I was astonished to find that I had worked nonstop for four hours. It felt like one.

"Russell, haven't your eyes fallen out yet? Shall I tell Mrs Hudson to leave our food in the oven while we have a swim?"

"Holmes, your genius continually astounds me. May I have another ten minutes?" There was no need to ask for the results of his interviews— it was in the look of dogged persistence he wore.

"Take fifteen. I don't mind climbing that cliff in the dark."

"Ten. You get together some towels and the bathing costumes."

Forty minutes later, we lay back in the shallow pool left by the receding tide, and I asked him what our neighbours had said.

"They saw nothing."

"That is very peculiar, in the countryside."

"Due entirely to a piece of bad luck. There was a "do" on at the Academy that evening, to welcome the new director, and the area was crawling with formal black automobiles, brought in from Brighton to ferry guests from the station. Several of them ended up in impassable lanes and farmyards before the night was through. Ours might have had another county's registration code on its number plates, but if so, nobody noticed."

"You should have—" I bit it back.

"Yes?"

"Hindsight. We should have had Old Will or Patrick come and keep watch that night."

"I had thought of that, but decided against it. Having enthusiastic amateurs involved is a terrible responsibility, and usually a liability. Neither of them would have been able to resist a confrontation with the intruders."

"You're probably right. Old Will certainly."

"I even considered, briefly, asking Constable Perkins to come out and sit in the bushes."

"My goodness. Desperate times indeed."

"I decided the measure was too desperate. Had I been absolutely certain they would come, I might have resorted to his involvement."

"He would have fallen asleep anyway, and we'd be no further along."

With which judgement we concluded our conversation, indulged in a vigorous sprint through the dusky waters, which I won, and climbed the cliffs for our late and well-earned supper.

After we had polished off Mrs Hudson's supper, down to scraping the bowls of the lemon custard, and after I had helped with the washing up, Holmes lit a small fire to dry my hair, and I told him about the letter. I sat on the hearth rug with my back to the heat, the pages of my translation spread out on the floor, Holmes curled up before me in his frayed basket chair, with his face half-illuminated by the flames, and I read him my translation of Mary's letter. As I did so, I seemed to hear the woman's calm, melodious voice through the open French windows, a murmur beneath the distant rumour of the incoming waves on the rocky shore.

"I have to admit, Holmes, that Miss Ruskin was right. There is something profoundly moving about this document, and I am more than halfway to believing that it could indeed have been written by Mary the Magdalene, a lost apostle of Jesus of Nazareth.

"The letter begins in the traditional epistolary style, naming both the author and the intended receiver, then a greeting, followed by the message itself. It is in Greek, with a few Hebrew and Aramaic words, two of the latter written in the Greek alphabet, and includes a passage from Joel, in Hebrew:

"From Mariam, an apostle of Jesus the Messiah [That could be translated as 'Joshua the Anointed One,' but it seems awfully noncommittal, somehow] to my sister Judith in Magdala, may you be granted grace and peace.

I write to you in haste, with little hope for a reply to this, my last letter. Tomorrow we go down from this place, and I think we shall not return. I send this in the hand of my beloved Rachel, for I know you will care for her as her mother's mother can no longer do. Keep her in the way of God, and teach her well.

Jerusalem has fallen to the locusts, the Temple is defiled, the exile is upon us once again.

Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,

for the day of the Lord is coming,

it comes near,

A day of dark and of gloom,

a day of clouds and heavy darkness.

Fire devours before them,

and behind them flame burns.

The land is like Eden before them,

but behind them a howling wilderness,

and nothing escapes.

My heart sickens when I look from my window, and the stink of the soldiers fills my nostrils. I leave at dawn with my husband and his brothers, but Rachel the Romans will not have. Her future lies with you; I will think of the two of you among the pomegranates as I look out across my rocky desolation. I do not know how long the Romans will leave us there, but I think not long.

My sister Judith, many things lie between us. I do not know how I hurt you more, when I struck at you in my time of madness, or when I turned to the rabbi who healed me and followed him through the countryside. You heard madness in my words as I spoke of him, and I know you will hear only madness now. I will say only that in my deepest heart I know him to be the anointed of God, and I believe that somehow his life among us has transformed the world. Not overnight, as I once thought and some still look for, but nonetheless I believe in the sureness of it. I know that somehow beneath the turmoil and confusion of these times, his message is at work. I go tomorrow with a mind at peace and heart full of love for my family, my friends, and even some of my enemies. I try to love the Romans, as I was taught to do by the Teacher, but I find it hard to look past the blood on their hands. Perhaps if they did not stink so, it would be easier.

The night is late, and I have much to do before dawn. Say the prayer for the dead over me, when you receive this, and think no more of me. What lives of me is not on a rock overlooking a waste, but stands before you, in Rachel. Love her for me. My husband sends his greetings. Peace be with you."

The fire subsided into rustling embers, and Holmes sat curled up in his chair, sucking at an empty pipe and staring into the glow. I took up my hairbrush and began to plait my hair for the night while the voice of a woman whose bones had long since turned to dust echoed softly in the dim room.

ELEVEN

lambda

The following morning was spent waiting. A singularly frustrating experience, waiting, made more so by the feeling that the labours of others are neither as quick nor as thorough as one's own. I always envied Holmes his ability to switch off the frustrations of enforced inactivity and turn wholeheartedly to another project. He spent the morning pottering happily in the laboratory, while I turned resolutely to my books. I had intended to produce a first draft of my book (on the concept of wisdom in the Hebrew Bible) before the end of the year, but that was before Miss Ruskin's letter hit my desk. Something told me that hunting down her murderers was going to take large chunks of time from the coming days, if not weeks.

Through sheer determination, I managed to focus my mind on the words in front of me, though every time I came across a reference to Sophia, the Greek word meaning "wisdom," the figure of Mary would stir gently in the back of my mind. Eventually, I was surrounded by journals and books, as I followed a phrase from Proverbs through a recently published religious text from ancient Mesopotamia and tried to recall a similar theme from an Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription. When the telephone rang, my mind was far, far away, and I took up the receiver irritably.

"Russell. Yes, this is she." Where was that? I racked my brains. It was a reference to the goddess Ma'at, surely. Budge's book on— "Yes? Who? Oh, yes, certainly, I'll wait. Holmes!" I shouted, books forgotten. "Holmes, it's Mycroft." I listened hard for a minute over the sound of his descending footsteps, the earpiece glued to my ear. "He wants to see us, and could we get to London for dinner tonight? What's that?" I shouted into the telephone, then strained to hear across the distance and the numerous exchanges the call was coming though. "Oh. He says he has some grouse and a new port he'd like you to try," I told Holmes. "At least, I think that's what he said. Either that or he's in the house and has a few darts he'd like to let fly. In either case, perhaps we ought to go? Right." I drew a deep breath and readdressed the mouthpiece. "We'll be there by seven o'clock. Seven! Right. Good-bye."

In the typically contrary nature of the beast, the telephone, which had sat obstinately silent all morning, rang again almost immediately. I picked it up and the operator informed me that it was another London call, would I please wait a moment, dear, so I did, until the line crackled into life. I bellowed my name into it, and that must have come near to rupturing Lestrade's eardrum, for his voice when it came was as clear as if he were standing in the room beside me.

"Miss Russell?" He sounded a bit tentative. I hastily lowered my own voice.

"Good day, Inspector. Sorry about that. I've just rung off from a very bad connexion, but this one is all right. Have you any news?"

"A few things have come in, and I'm expecting more this afternoon. Shall I give it to you over the telephone, or send it to you? I'm tied up here, unfortunately."

"Look, Inspector, we're coming into Town ourselves later today. Will you be at the Yard around, say, six o'clock?" Holmes, who had turned and come back downstairs at the second ring, gestured at me. "Just a moment, Inspector, Holmes is saying something."

"Invite him for dinner with Mycroft. There's sure to be enough grouse for a regiment," Holmes suggested.

"Inspector Lestrade? Are you free for dinner tonight? About eight o'clock, at Mycroft Holmes' rooms? Good. And you remember where he lives? That's right. You what? Oh yes, certainly, he would be flattered. Right. See you tonight, then."

I rang off, then got the operator back to place a call to Mycroft. While waiting, I spoke to Holmes.

"Lestrade would like a bottle of your honey wine to present to a lady friend of his on the occasion of her birthday."

"I am honoured."

"I thought you might be. He even promises not to tell her where it came from. He wants the substance for its own true self."

"Good heavens. Am I to become a rival to France? A honey wine to make you weep?"

"Weak, perhaps," I said under my breath, but I was saved from repetition by the call coming through. Mycroft was more audible this time, and when I told him he'd have to pluck another bird for Lestrade, he replied that he should be happy so to do, even if it meant performing the task with his own pale hands, which I doubted. I hung the earpiece back on its rest.

"I'll go pack," I volunteered. Leaving such a thing to Holmes could mean some interesting outfits. "Anything in particular you want?"

"Only the basic necessities, Russell. Anything undamaged is likely to be unclean, and we will be making purchases in London for our personae. I shall go tell Mrs Hudson of the change in plans— she had thought to leave tomorrow, but we can take her with us to the station."

"What about the box? Back in the beehive?"

"I think not. That was a temporary measure and would hardly stand against a concerted search. I recommend either putting it in a place they've already searched or else taking it with us."

"To Mycroft? Of course! If anyone could keep it safe, Mycroft could." I stood up and began to put away my papers and books, then paused. "Holmes, I should hate to have this mangled again; a good many hours have gone into it. What do you think of our chances of being invaded a second time?"

"Take anything precious with you. I don't think there's much risk, but there's always the chance. I did ask Old Will and his grandson to keep an eye on the place this time. The boy understands that he is to keep the old man out of trouble, even if it means sitting on him."

"They'll be thrilled." I grinned at the thought. Will was the gardener, but during the reign of Victoria he had also been an agent of what would now be called "Intelligence." Sessions in the herbaceous border or amongst the runner beans were invariably filled with anecdotes of spying behind the lines during "the War" (which was more likely to be the one on the North-West Frontier or the Crimea than the recent engagement in Europe). The boy, now sixteen, had been infected with his grandfather's enthusiasm, and he positively ached to be asked for such tasks by Sherlock Holmes himself. "Have you spoken to Mycroft yet about the lad?"

"I have. He was interested but agreed to wait until the lad has finished his schooling."

"Mycroft's people would pay for university, wouldn't they?" Whoever his "people" were, I added to myself.

"They would. They prefer gentlemen spies, or educated ones, at any rate. Look, you finish up here while I move up the arrangements with Mrs Hudson and Will. Don't take too many books, though. You may have to leave everything with Mycroft."

My brother-in-law, Mycroft, was much on my mind as I packed my papers and a few books and a toothbrush. I was very fond of that fat and phlegmatic version of his brother but had to admit that at times he made me nervous. He was possibly the most powerful individual in the British government by then, and power, even when wielded by such a moral and incorruptible person as Mycroft Holmes, is never an easy companion. I was never unaware of it, and always there lurked the knowledge that his power was without checks, that the government and the people lay nearly defenceless should he choose to do harm or, an appalling thought, should his successor prove neither moral nor incorruptible. I was fond of Mycroft, but I was also just a bit afraid of him.

His exact position in the governmental agency into whose offices he walked daily was that of a glorified accountant. It amused him to think of himself that way, though it was quite literally true: He kept accounts. The accounts he kept, however, seldom limited themselves to pounds, shillings, and pence. Rather, he accounted for political trends in Europe and military expenditures in Africa; he took into account religious leaders in India, technological developments in America, and border clashes in South America; he counted the price of sugar in Egypt and wool in Belgium and tea in China. He kept account of the ten thousand threads that went to make up the tapestry of world stability. He had a mind which even Holmes admitted to be his own superior, but unlike Holmes, Mycroft preferred to sit and have information brought to him rather than stir himself to gather it. He was, in a word, lazy.

* * *

I had heard him correctly, despite the telephone: He did have grouse and a superb port for us, although the heat and humidity of London took the edge off the appetites of at least three of us. By unspoken agreement, we ate without discussing the Ruskin case, and we took our port to his sitting room. The windows were opened wide in the hope of a breath of air, and the noise of the Mall at night poured in as if we were seated on the pavement. I put my wine to one side and brushed the damp hair from my forehead, wishing I could wear one of the skimpy new fashions without revealing parts of myself I did not care to reveal— automobile accidents and gunshot wounds leave scars.

"So," purred Mycroft, "you bring me another interesting little problem. Do you mind if we smoke, Mary?" The invariable question, followed by my customary permission. Mycroft offered cigars, and I settled myself into the chair that I calculated would be clearest of the drift of smoke. After the interminable fuss of clipping and lighting, Mycroft nodded at the Scotland Yard inspector, who was looking a bit stunned with the food and drink and, I think, with the august company.

"Chief Inspector Lestrade, if you would begin, please."

His small eyes started open, then blinked rapidly as he fumbled in an inner pocket for his notebook. As I watched him awkwardly holding the big cigar in one hand and trying to manipulate the pages with the other, I wondered how a man with such structurally unappealing features could manage to possess a certain degree of charm. His suit was ill-fitting, he needed a shave and a haircut, his collar was worn, his eyes were too small and his ears too large, but I warmed to him nonetheless. Suddenly, it occurred to me that my feelings towards the little man were distinctly maternal. Good God, I thought, how utterly revolting, and I turned my mind firmly to the problem at hand. Lestrade cleared his throat, looked doubtfully at the cigar, and began his report in official tones and a formal manner.

"In conversation with Mr Holmes on Saturday and Sunday, and subsequently confirmed by my superiors, we agreed to extend our investigations in three directions, each representing one area of known contact Miss Ruskin had in this country since she arrived. These areas are, first of all, Miss Ruskin herself, and any bank accounts, wills, et cetera, which she may have established while she was here. Second is her sister, Mrs Erica Rogers, and third is the gentleman she dined with just before she died, Colonel Dennis Edwards. We agreed that, for the moment, the possibility that people from outside the country were involved would be left in the hands of Mr Mycroft Holmes."

"I should like to say a few words when you have finished, Chief Inspector," said Mycroft.

"I'll be as brief as possible. Miss Ruskin herself creates something of a problem. She entered the country from France on Friday, reached Town just before noon, checked into her hotel at two-ten, and stayed there until the following morning, when she went up to Cambridgeshire to see her mother and sister. She remained with them until Monday evening, when she checked back into the same hotel. Tuesday morning, she went out and was not seen again until after ten o'clock in the evening. As yet we've no idea where she went."

"Two hours from Victoria Station to the hotel, you say?" murmured Holmes with a brief smile touching his lips, but did not elaborate.

"You've looked at the museums, for the missing Tuesday?" I asked.

"I have a man on it, working his way through a list of the more likely museums and libraries. I don't suppose she mentioned anything to you?" he asked without much hope, and I answered.

"No, she didn't, sorry. Did you try Oxford? She did say something in a very general way about being there."

"I haven't been able to spare a man for it yet, but I did direct the local force to begin enquiries. Nothing to date."

"If it would help, I could give you the names of some people in Oxford who might know if she'd been in town. There's an old man in the Bodleian Library who's been there forever and a day; he's sure to know her. It might save a few hours if you could reach them by telephone. Not that the old man would talk on the infernal machine."

"Couldn't hurt." Lestrade flipped to a blank page in his lined notebook, and I wrote down several names and where they might be found. He looked in satisfaction at my scrawl, then turned back to his place.

"Wednesday, she reached you at midday, which means she had very little time in the morning to see anyone, though the hotel was not certain just when she left. She came back to the hotel for a very short time Wednesday night, apparently to change bags, but not clothes, and met the colonel for dinner at nine o'clock."

"Tell us about the colonel," suggested Holmes, who looked deceptively near sleep in the depths of his armchair. Lestrade flipped pages, dropped ash onto his trouser leg, and cleared his throat again.

"Colonel Dennis Edwards, age fifty-one, retired after the war— a widower with one son, aged twenty-one. He was in and out of Egypt before the war, and in 1914 he was posted to Cairo. Went into Gallipoli in March of 1915, and stayed until the end, the following January. Given a fortnight's home leave and then was shifted to the Western Front. Decorated in 1916 when he pulled three of his men out of a collapsed trench under fire. Wounded in March of '17, spent six months in hospital, and returned to active service until the end of the war. There seems to have been some unpleasant business about his wife, though the exact story is hard to pin down. She died in York in July of 1918— he was in the thick of things at the Marne— though why York, nobody seems to know, as she had no family there. The boy, by the way, didn't go to her during the school holiday— he'd been sent off to an aunt up in Edinburgh."

"What did she die from?" I asked.

Lestrade rumpled his hair absently, thus adding another endearingly unattractive characteristic. "Funny thing, we haven't been able to find out. The hospital moved their offices three years back, and some of the records went missing. All they've been able to come up with is one of the older nurses, who remembers a woman by that name dying either, she says, of pneumonia or childbirth fever; she can't remember which. She thinks the woman was brought in by a handsome young man but couldn't swear to it. Don't know if I'd trust her if she could, anyone who can't even remember whether a patient was in the maternity ward or in with the respiratory diseases. However, it does seem that Mrs Edwards was brought in by a man, according to the one piece of paper the hospital found relating to her admission, but he signed his name as Colonel Edwards. The real colonel was, as I said, in France, had been for more than eight months, and the signature was not his."

"There are distinctly unpleasant overtones in all of this." Mycroft's distaste spoke for us all.

"Nothing conclusive yet, but I'd have to agree. Seems the colonel found the circumstances of his wife's death too much to take, too, on top of everything else. He was demobbed in February of 1919, and five months later he spent seven weeks in hospital, with a diagnosis of severe alcoholic toxaemia. They dried him out and sent him home, and after that he straightened out. He got himself involved with the local church and from there met this same group of retired Middle East hands who were about to provide the backing for Miss Ruskin's excavation— the Friends of Palestine."

"I've been wondering, Inspector," I interrupted, "how did the colonel miss the fact that it was a woman who was in charge of the project? Holmes said the man was surprised at that."

"Yes, that was odd, wasn't it? I spoke with two of his friends on the committee that recommended the project, and according to them, Miss Ruskin always signed herself as D. E. Ruskin and never corrected their form of address."

I had to smile. "Her articles were all published under that name," I admitted. "She was, after all, a realist and very anxious to get her dig. I doubt that it was deliberate to begin with, but she probably knew the sort of men she was dealing with and therefore allowed them to continue in their false assumption until they were in too far to back out."

"I imagine it appealed to her sense of humour, as well," commented Holmes.

"That, too. Can't you just hear her laugh?"

"Nothing else about Colonel Edwards?" asked Mycroft.

"We're still looking at bank accounts and family connexions. The son is still away, expected back this weekend."

"And the driver?"

"The colonel's man and the man's wife are the only permanent household servants. They've been with the family for thirty years, and the man's father served the colonel's father before him."

"Any change in their account of Wednesday night?" asked Holmes.

"No, we went over it again, and he says he left the restaurant around midnight, was driven home, and went to bed."

"Did you ask him about the telephone call he made from the restaurant?" Holmes asked.

"That I did. He says he was trying to reach the friend who arranged the meeting with Miss Ruskin, but he couldn't get into contact with him. We talked to the man— name of Lawson— and he agrees that he was not at home that night."

"No way of finding where the colonel phoned, then?"

"Afraid not. All the exchange can tell us is it wasn't a trunk call."

"A London number, then."

"Must've been. If, indeed, he actually made the call. Any road, there were no notable inconsistencies between his story and his servant's, not yet anyway. I'll question them both again tomorrow."

"Does he know yet that this is a murder investigation?"

"We left it as a death under suspicious circumstances, but he's not stupid. He may have guessed it's more than routine."

"Well, it cannot be helped. What about Mrs Erica Rogers?"

"I was up there again this morning, but I can't say we have too much on her yet. The neighbours say she was at home both Wednesday and Friday, as far as they can tell. However, Miss Russell will have told you that the house is peculiarly difficult to overlook— it is near the main road, but bordered by woods on one side and a high privet hedge between it and the nearest neighbour. Her lights did go off as usual around ten-thirty, both nights, and nobody noticed any car arrive after that. She lives alone with her mother; a day nurse comes in Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. Doctor regularly, too."

"What's wrong with the old lady?"

"Just age, I think. Lots of small things, arthritis, bronchitis, heart— nothing quite big enough to carry her off. Must be a stubborn old thing. Totally useless trying to question her, by the way— hearing like a fence post and pretty near gaga to boot."

"It must be expensive, caring for an invalid. What income is there?"

"Investments by the father, for the most part— not big, but steady. He's been dead for twelve years. Two-thirds of the income goes to Mrs Rogers and her mother, one-third to Miss Ruskin."

"And the will?"

"Mrs Rogers directed us to the family solicitor, who showed me the will Miss Ruskin drew up ten years ago. It left everything to her mother and sister, aside from a few specific items, which she wanted sent to various individuals, some to the British Museum. A codicil added five years ago specified additional items, but that did not change the will itself."

"Any other family?"

"Now, that was an interesting thing. Mrs Rogers was most cooperative when it came to questioning the mother, and she came across with the solicitor's name, but as soon as we branched off onto the rest of the family, she seemed to lose interest in the conversation. She mentioned that she has two sons, and then it seemed we would have to leave, it was time for Mama's bath."

"Any idea what colour hair the sons have?" Holmes murmured.

Lestrade looked up at the question, then started to shake his head.

"There were two men among the photographs in Mrs Rogers's house," I remembered. "Nothing to give a reference for their height, but both of them had very dark hair."

"Ah. Lestrade, when you find them, if you can get a sample of their hair without being too obvious, it might be useful. Was there anything else?"

Lestrade had to admit that until such a time as the enquiries concerning wills and safe-deposit boxes began to come in, there was nothing else. However, I thought it was a tremendous amount to have pulled together in such a short time, and I said so. He blushed and looked pleased.

"I agree," said Holmes dutifully. "Well done. All right, I shall go over what I have learnt, though you've all heard parts of it already." He then touched his fingers together in front of his lips, closed his eyes, and reviewed the results of his work in the laboratory, the mud and the hairs left by the intruders, the examination of the papyrus. I brought out the box and allowed it to be handled and admired while I read my translation of the letter. I then gave box and manuscript to Mycroft for safekeeping. He took them off to the other room, then returned with four glasses and a bottle of brandy.

"It is becoming late, and I believe the good inspector has been short of sleep lately," Mycroft began. "I shall try to make this brief." He paused and turned his glass around in his massive hands, gathering our attention to himself— he was as much of a showman as his brother. He broke the tension by shooting Lestrade a hard look. "You understand that some of what I will tell you is not common knowledge and must under no circumstances make itself into any written record, Chief Inspector."

"Would you prefer that I leave?" Lestrade said stiffly.

"Not unless you prefer not to be put in the awkward position of having to withhold information from the official record. Your word is sufficient assurance of that for me."

"I have no real choice, have I?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Very well, I agree."

"Good. My information concerns Miss Ruskin herself. Like most of the English in the Near East, she was connected with Intelligence during the war, and in fact she worked for some months in an unofficial, but nonetheless vital, capacity for His Majesty in 1916 and 1917. It is mildly surprising that she and Colonel Edwards seem to have never crossed paths, but at the time he was in Cairo, she was a small and private cog, in addition to being for the most part, as they say, 'in the field.' A curiosity, perhaps, that they never met, but hardly sinister. Her work began with translation, first of documents and then in interviews and interrogations. She acted as a guide on a handful of on-the-quiet occasions, and several times as a courier. By late 1916, she had gained a certain level of independence in her activities and had befriended a number of leading Arabs. They were fascinated by her, as their brothers to the east were by Gertrude Bell, and gave her the freedom of movement and speech that normally only men are allowed in that society. Plus, of course, having access to the women's quarters.

"However, in 1917 a small thing happened. History is often made by small things, which is why it can be useful to maintain a person such as myself to take notice of them. The small thing that happened to Miss Ruskin was that her car broke down near one of the new Zionist settlements, and while she was waiting for the driver to return with a part, she ate a boiled egg that had sat too long in the heat. She became very ill. The Zionists took her in, their doctor cared for her, and she spent several days recuperating amongst the gardens they were calling into existence from out of the bare earth. She saw their commitment, the strength and pleasure they drew from the land and from their children, and by the time she drove away, she was a Zionist. A Christian still, perhaps even more of a Christian than she had been before, but a Zionist.

"She was a highly intelligent woman from all indications. I believe I should have enjoyed meeting her. It did not take her long to decide that Zionism and Arab self-rule were fundamentally incompatible. There are many people who would not agree with her, but Miss Ruskin became convinced that Jews and Mohammedan Arabs could not easily be neighbours in the same small country, and so she gradually withdrew herself from her former work and returned to archaeology. Her work for the Zionist movement has gone on, but quietly, so as, I think, not to oppose directly her Arab friends and not to burden the movement with an apparent turncoat.

"Inevitably, there were some members of the Arab faction who were angered by what they saw as her desertion of their cause, her betrayal. There was one family in particular with cause for bitterness. She had been supporting them in a land dispute before her, shall we say, 'conversion,' and afterwards she backed away. They lost their claim and were forced to move into town. Last year, the Zionists established a settlement on that piece of land."

"And equally inevitably, there are at least two young men in the family who are well educated, and they were in this country last Wednesday, and they naturally have black hair," I groaned. "Oh, why couldn't this be a simple case?"

"Don't complain, Russell," said my unsympathetic husband. "Just think how pretty it will look when you get around to writing your memoirs."

"I would settle for writing my Wisdom book, thank you."

"Well, you'll not have time for either just yet. There remains much to do. Lestrade, shall we meet tomorrow night to discuss tactics?"

"Here?"

"Mycroft?"

"Certainly. I cannot promise grouse again, but my housekeeper is always happy to oblige."

"Eight o'clock, then, Lestrade."

Good nights were given all around, glasses were cleared away, Mycroft excused himself, and I went off to our rooms to wash the late-night grit from my eyes. I came back, to find Holmes where I had left him, curled into a chair with his pipe, glowering fiercely at the scoured, empty tiles of the fireplace. I turned down the lights, but he did not move. The threads of smoke surrounding his head looked like the emissions of some hard-pressed engine, smoking with the fury of its labours. I turned at the doorway and watched him for a long minute, but he gave no sign of feeling my eyes on him.

Normally when Holmes was in this state, I would slip away and leave him to his thoughts, but that night something pulled me over to his chair. He started when I touched his shoulder, and then his face relaxed into a smile. He uncurled his legs, and I wedged myself next to him in the chair, which, being fitted to Mycroft, held the two of us with ease. We sat, silent, aware of the occasional clop of shod hooves, the growl of motors, the slight shift of the building around us going to bed, once the call of a night vendor wandered away from his home territory. The lace curtains moved faintly and brought in a much-adulterated hint of a change in the weather.

Holmes and I had met when I was fifteen, and I became, in effect, his apprentice. Under his guidance, I harnessed my angry intelligence, I found a direction for my life, and I came to terms with my past. When I was eighteen, we worked together on a series of cases, which culminated with finding ourselves the target of one of the cleverest, most deadly criminals he had ever faced. After that case, I was an apprentice no longer— I was, at the age of nineteen, a full partner.

I was now twenty-three, though considerably older internally than the calendar would suggest. However, for the last year and a half the partnership had been, in some ways, in abeyance. We had worked together on only two serious cases since our marriage. Instead, I had immersed myself in the rarefied air of Oxford, where I was beginning to make a name for myself in the more abstruse divisions of academic theology. My only real contact with the art of detection for some months had been in its theoretical aspects as I helped Holmes with his magnum opus on that subject. Holmes had, I realized now, been waiting, and now his world had come again to lay claim upon me.

As if to underscore the point my thoughts had reached as I lay back in the chair with my eyes closed, half-drowsing, I felt my left hand taken up. In the silence of our breathing, he began to explore my hand with his, in a slow, almost impersonal manner that left me unaware of anything else in the universe. He ran his smooth, cool fingertips along each of my fingers, exploring the swell of the knuckles and the shape of my nails, teasing the tiny hairs, probing the soft webs between the fingers and the joint of the thumb and the tendons and the large vein up to the wrist, arousing the skin and the hand itself to a most extraordinary pitch of awareness. He ended, at the point when the exquisite sensations threatened to become unbearable, by raising my hand almost formally to his lips, lingering there for an instant, and then restoring it to me.

I sat for a long moment, eyes closed as before, but glowing now and no longer in the least drowsy, and said what was foremost in my mind.

"What is troubling you, husband?"

I thought he would not answer me. Eventually, he disentangled himself and reached forward to knock his pipe out with unnecessary violence into the pristine fireplace.

"Data," he said, sounding like a man pleading for water in a desert place. "I cannot form so much as an hypothesis without raw material."

I waited, but no more was forthcoming. He sucked at the empty pipe stem and squinted at the mantelpiece as if there were words to be deciphered in the grain of the wood. I finally broke the silence.

"Yes, we need more information. Neither Lestrade's information nor Mycroft's has changed that. Assuming that I followed your train of thought this evening, this means that you will have to go to Mrs Rogers, while I ingratiate myself to Colonel Edwards. I ask you again, why does this trouble you?"

"I don't—" He stopped, then continued more quietly. "I do not know why, and I realise it is unreasonable, but I find that the idea of your being in the colonel's house makes me profoundly uneasy. It brings to mind the day we returned from Palestine all those years ago, when I stood on the boat and watched you walk away, completely exposed, while I knew full well that the trap we were setting might catch you instead. It was, I think, the hardest thing I have ever done."

"Holmes," I said, startled into speech, "are you going all sentimental on me?"

"No, you're right, that would never do. What I am trying to say in my feeble male way is that I cannot think why the idea troubles me. I cannot see any signs of a trap, I could detect no threat in his manner when I met him, and I cannot put my finger on any one piece of data that makes me mistrust him. It is a totally irrational reaction on my part, but nonetheless, the thought of placing you within his reach disturbs me greatly."

I sat speechless. In a minute, he went on, his voice muffled by my hair. "My dear Russell. Many years ago, in my foolish youth, I thought I should never marry. I was quite convinced that strong emotion interfered with rational thought, like grit in a sensitive instrument. I believed the heart to be a treacherous organ which served only to cloud the mind, and now ... now I find myself in the disturbing position of having my mind at odds with— with the rest of me. Once I would have automatically followed the dictates of the reasoning mind. However." I could feel his breath warm on my scalp. "I begin to suspect that— I shall say this quietly— that I was wrong, that there may be times when the heart sees something which the mind does not. Perhaps what we call the heart is simply a more efficient means of evaluating data. Perhaps I mistrust it because I cannot see the mechanism working. Perhaps it is time for me to retire once and for all. Do not worry," he said in response to my brief stir of protest, "I shall see this case to its end before I turn to learning Syriac and Aramaic and spending my days correcting your manuscripts. Until then, however, we must assume that the old man still possesses his full wits and that his nerviness is not unjustified. Take care in that house, please, Russ. For God's sake, don't be absentminded."

Holmes, although as energetic and scrupulously attentive to detail in the physical aspects of marriage as ever he was in an investigation or laboratory experiment, was not otherwise a man demonstrative of his affections (a statement which will come as no surprise to any of Dr Watson's readers). His proposal of marriage was less a proposal than a challenge flung, and expressions of affection tended towards the low-key and everyday rather than the dramatic and intermittent. I believe the reason for this was that I had become by that time too much a part of him to be the focus of the great alternating sweeps of manic passion and grey despair that had been characteristic of his earlier life. At any rate, I answered him lightly, but acknowledging his serious intent.

"You have succeeded in setting my nerves on edge, I assure you. At the slightest creak of a floorboard, I'll be out of there like a shot."

PART THREE

Tuesday, 28 August 1923-

Saturday, 1 September 1923

In a man's letters his soul lies naked.

— Samuel Johnson

TWELVE

mu

Tuesday was a day of preparation, a time of backstage hustle and the anticipatory discord of instruments tuning. I spent the better part of the morning in the shops, assembling a wardrobe appropriate to a salesgirl or a colonel's secretary, and most of the afternoon rendering my purchases down into a state of shabby gentility by the judicious use of too-hot water and an overheated iron, and by replacing the odd button with one that almost matched. Shoes were a problem, but in the end I settled on a good pair, for the strength of the heel and the relative comfort of the toe, and added a patina of age with grit and a poorly matched polish. The effect I was aiming for was someone who understood quality but couldn't quite afford it. Beyond this, my character's clothing needed to be innocently seductive, with the emphasis on innocence. Young, naïve, unprotected, determined, and a bit scared— that was the image I held in front of me as I tried on white lawn blouses, looked at embroidered collars, and studied the effects of different sleeves. I even bought six lacy handkerchiefs embroidered with the letter M.

Holmes came in at three o'clock. He had left immediately after breakfast, dressed in a singularly Lestradian brown suit (the sort that is obviously purchased with an eye to shoulder seams and the amount of wear the knees will take), a soft brown hat that looked as if it had shrunk in the rain, a new-school tie, and sturdy shoes, sporting a moustache that resembled a dead mouse and a tuft of whiskers in the hollow of his left jaw that the razor had missed. He returned smooth of chin and sleek of hair, gloriously resplendent in an utterly black City suit cut to perfection and a shirt like the sun on new snow, a tie whose pattern was unfamiliar to me but which evoked immense dignity and importance, cuff links of jet with a thread of mother-of-pearl, shoes like dancing pumps, a stick of ebony and silver, and a hat ever so slightly dashing about the brim but of the degree of self-assurance that guarantees there will be no label inside. Under his arm, he carried a bulky, roughly entwined brown paper parcel that reeked of mildew and the cleansing solution used in gaols and hospitals.

"Natty duds, Holmes," I commented deflatingly, and turned to hang another maltreated, over-ironed blouse from the door frame. Mycroft's rooms smelt like a bad laundry, all steam and scorched cotton, and now the added aromas from Holmes' bundle. "What is the tie from?"

He tossed his load down on a chair, where it burst open and began to leak garments that looked as unsavoury as they smelt. He fingered the scrap of silk on his breast.

"The Royal Order of Nigerian Blacksmiths," he said. "I am actually entitled to wear it, Russell. For services rendered." He eyed the dress I was systematically attacking, looked at it more closely in disbelief, and threaded his way past me and under my finished garments to our rooms. I heard the door of one of the phalanx of wardrobes click open, followed by the clatter of clothes hangers. I raised my voice a fraction.

"You know, Holmes, if Lestrade finds you've been impersonating a police detective, he'll be furious."

"One cannot impersonate what one is in fact, Russell," came his imperious and muffled reply. "Is anyone more a citizen of this polis than I? Is anyone more a detective? Where then lies the falsehood?" He reappeared, fastening the cuffs of a less dramatic shirt. "The pursuit of justice may be the trade of a few men, but is the business of all," he pronounced sententiously.

"Save it for the warders," I suggested, and bent down to rip out some threads from the back seam of a sleeve. "Did you find us rooms?"

"I found many things this day, including, yes, rooms. Two adjoining, ill-furnished and underlit rooms with a bath down the hall and back windows five feet above a shed roof. No bedbugs, though. I looked."

"Thank you. What else did you find?"

"An uninspired kitchen and mends in the curtains."

Very well, if he wanted to tantalise me, I would allow him to prolong the telling of what he had discovered while masquerading as a Yard detective.

"How did you find them? The rooms, I mean. Mycroft?"

"No, actually, the house belongs to a cousin of Billy's."

"Billy! I should have known. How is he?" Billy had come into Holmes' employ from the streets as a child and, as far as I could tell, remained willing to drop everything to serve his former master. A thought occurred to me, and I interrupted the description of Billy's ventures into the retail trade and his convoluted family life.

"Is he going to be keeping an eye on me?"

"Do you mind?"

With the morning's shopping successfully behind me and the knowledge of a husband who was no longer bored, I was willing to be benign.

"I don't want him following me about, no, but if he wants to loiter in the hallway listening for gurgled screams, he's quite welcome." I threaded a needle and started to mend the seam I had just picked out.

"He won't be following you, just available if you need auxiliary troops or messenger boys. He has turned into quite a sensible person." High praise indeed.

"That's fine, then. And you— you won't be coming back from Cambridgeshire every night, I take it?"

"I doubt it. It would look exceedingly odd for a member of the nation's great unwashed and unemployed to board the nightly five-nineteen for St Pancras. Too, I hope to worm myself into Mrs Rogers's affections to the extent of dossing down in her toolshed. I shall return Friday night. If you need to reach me before that, send Billy, or have Lestrade send a constable around to pick me up on a vagrancy charge."

"I assume Lestrade will have to agree to all this?"

"Oh yes. Unofficially, of course, but thanks to Mycroft, that will not pose a problem. Lestrade will take care that any police investigator who comes to one of the houses will either not know us or else be warned we're there and not to take any notice."

"Is there a telephone at the house of Billy's cousin?"

"You sound like a poor translation out of the French, Russell. But yes, there is a telephone at the house of the cousin of my friend. Utilize chez, feminine singular, masculine singular."

"And to his wife the unwashed tramp will telephone, is that not so?"

"But yes, with regularity the tramp his wife in the boarding house will telephone."

"Merci, monsieur."

"De rien, madame."

He walked over to where I stood, took my free hand, and ceremoniously slipped off the gold band I wore. "Mad'moiselle." He examined my fingers and tapped the pale shadow of the ring. "Put some dye on that," he ordered.

I dropped my stitching abruptly.

"All right, Holmes, what is it? What did you learn today?"

His eyes flared with gratified amusement, and he wandered over to the fireplace to fill his pipe from the tobacco cache Mycroft kept there.

"Your Miss Ruskin had something of value when she entered the country. Or at any rate, something she valued highly. It took her two hours to negotiate the distance between Victoria Station and her hotel, which could hardly have taken a full hour if she'd walked, dragging her suitcases behind her. Inspector Jack Rafferty, one of Lestrade's unrecognised Irregulars, discovered that the distinctive figure of Miss Dorothy Ruskin had deposited two leather valises with the left-luggage gentleman at Victoria, then reclaimed them nearly two hours later. He furthermore discovered, pursuant to his aforementioned investigation— do you know, Russell, I believe I shall write a monograph on the obfuscating peculiarities of constabulary vocabulary and syntax— that said Miss Ruskin had subsequently paid visits to no fewer than three banking establishments in the immediate vicinity— is it as difficult to listen to as it is to produce?"

"It is certainly tedious," I agreed, my head bent again over the seam.

"Good. Miss Ruskin was looking for a bank that would allow her access to its safety-deposit boxes outside of the normal bankers' hours. The first two seemed to consider her some sort of eccentric, I cannot think why, but the third bank was quite happy to oblige— it is owned by Americans, who are notoriously willing to cater to any behavioural oddity if the customer is willing to pay. She let a box for one week only, and into it she put a small parcel, wrapped in a checked cloth, and a thick manila envelope."

"They revealed all this to Inspector Jack Rafferty, the man with the dead mouse on his lip? I'd have thought even my fellow Americans would have some standards when it came to professional discretion, much less their employees."

"My dear child, what do you take me for? As soon as I realised what she was about, I nipped around the corner to change my persona." To one of his bolt-holes, I interpreted, those scattered and invisible hideaways that served as combined retreats and dressing rooms. I finished the seam and bit off the thread, admired the puckered stitching, and hung up the blouse.

"Holmes, I admit your infinite appeal in that gorgeous suit, but was that sufficient to crack the reserve of a senior bank official?"

"Ah, well, no. It happened that the bank manager is a sort of distant family connection. Second cousin twice removed sort of thing." I looked at him in surprise.

"Good Lord. I'm always forgetting that you have a family. You and Mycroft seem to have sprung full-formed from the brow of London."

"I haven't seen the man in twenty years and probably would not have recognised him had it not been for his nameplate. He certainly did not recognise me, but after a few of these gruesome cocktails everyone's tossing back these days, he became quite the old gossip. I fear I shall have to open an account there and demand the odd service at inconvenient hours to justify the curious slant of my questions."

I wondered if any blood tie had actually existed before that morning but decided not to press the matter.

"I take it that the cloth-wrapped parcel was the box. Was there any indication what the envelope contained?"

"No. But she returned to the bank twice: once early Tuesday, and again just before opening on Wednesday. At which time, unfortunately, she closed out her account and declared she had no further use for the deposit box."

"Oh dear."

"Yes. I had hopes in that box. It might have held documents, or treasure, or at the very least a will. But— nothing."

"So she only used it on Tuesday to fetch whatever was in the envelope and on Wednesday to remove the box and bring it to Sussex."

"So it would appear."

"Where, then, did she take the envelope on Tuesday?"

"Indeed. The other question being ..."

I paused for a brief moment in my abuse of another defenceless frock in order to think.

"Did she wish to protect the envelope and the box in general, or did she envisage some specific threat to them during her trip to Cambridgeshire?"

"Excellent," he said.

"Elementary," I replied, and ripped off another button.

* * *

Lestrade rang up as we sat down to tea, to say that he had no further information and that he was being called off to Shropshire. Did we want him to send another inspector to take his place? he asked. Holmes settled himself next to the telephone with his cup and told Lestrade how we intended to obtain information concerning Colonel Edwards and Mrs Rogers. Their conversation took up an excessive amount of time, but there was never really any doubt about the outcome. Lestrade's objections were finally worn down against the grit of Holmes' determination and the hard fact of his authority, unofficial though it might be, and he submitted to Holmes' suggestion that we meet again on Friday. The field was cleared for our hunt.

When I came into the dining room the next morning, following my lengthy toilette, Mycroft choked on his coffee and Holmes' face turned dark.

"I knew I should have left before you," he muttered. "Good Lord, Russell, is all that really necessary?"

"You told me what he was like, Holmes, so you have only yourself to blame."

He stood up abruptly and picked up the greasy rucksack that lay near the door. His unshaven cheeks and bleary eyes matched the clothes he wore, and I had absolutely no desire to embrace him with a demonstrative farewell. He paused at the door and looked me over, his expression unreadable even to me.

"I feel like father Abraham," he said, and my astonishment was such that it took nearly two seconds before the penny dropped. I began to laugh.

"If I am Sarah, I don't believe any Pharaoh on earth would mistake me for your sister. Good heavens, Holmes, shall I never get your limits? I didn't know you'd ever read the book."

"I was once snowed in with a group of missionaries near the Khyber Pass. It was either the Bible in my cubicle or their conversation in the common room. Good-bye, Russell. Take care of yourself."

"Until Friday, Holmes."

He left, and as I walked over to pour myself some coffee, the bemused expression on Mycroft's face caught my eye. I stirred the cup and said casually, "We said our fond good-byes earlier." He went blank for a moment, then flushed deeply, scarlet up into the reaches of his thinning hair, stood up, and bustled his way out the door, leaving the field to a thin young woman in a skimpy frock, laughing silently into her cup.

After breakfast, I went back and stood in front of the full-length mirror to study my reflection and to assume my rôle. The clothing, hair, and makeup went some long way towards the personality of Mary Small, but my normal stance and movements inside those clothes would create a glaring incongruity. The dress I wore was a light and frivolous summer frock, white cotton sprigged with blue flowers, a touch of lace at the Peter Pan collar and along the lower edge of the sleeves. The fabric and lace gave it an old-fashioned air, but the thin body-revealing drape and the length of the skirt (hemlines had dropped that year, and the shopkeeper had been irritated when I insisted that she raise mine to the extremes of the previous year) would have been considered inappropriate even for a child in Edwardian times. My arms looked thin and long beneath the short puffed sleeves, my legs even longer, and I reflected idly that my currently fashionable outline would no doubt have been someone's despair twenty years ago, when corsets and bustles filled in nature's wants. The heels on my shoes were higher than I was accustomed to and turned my stride into an indecisive wobble. I hoped I would not break an ankle. I bent around to examine the seams on my stockings. I had bought several pairs of sheer silk stockings, an extravagance for Mary Small, but if the colonel was a man who admired extremities, as I suspected he would be, the effect would be well worth it. My eyes told me that my ankles and several inches of calf were quite appealing, but then Holmes' reaction had already confirmed that.

I studied my reflection, starting at the top: cloche hat drawn to my eyebrows, hair beneath it in a prim bun which would soften as the day went on. I coaxed a few wisps to lie across my cheek and touch the neck of my frock. No earrings. I retrieved my makeup box, with which I had already lightened my brown skin, and added to the faint shadow under my cheekbones, to help me look slightly underfed. Taking off my spectacles, I rubbed a tiny smudge of purple into the skin under my eyes. The eyes were the hardest thing to disguise, always. One flash of intelligence at the wrong time could undo all my work. The horn-rimmed glasses with lightly tinted lenses I pulled on helped, and they made my face seem even more ethereal behind them. They would also serve to make me look naked when I removed them.

My chin was too strong. I practised dropping it, and my eyes. Shoulders drooping, as if the world was just a bit too heavy. Back and hips were already rearranged because of the shoes. I spent nearly an hour walking up and down in front of the mirror, refining the hang of my arms, the awkwardness of my hands in their demure white gloves, and the angle of my head. I sat in various chairs to practise until the seduction of my silken legs was completely unconscious. I lit a cigarette and coughed violently until I recalled the knack of diluting the smoke with air. Mary Small would definitely smoke, half-defiant, half-guilty. She also bit her nails— off came the gloves and I got to work with the nail scissors.

Finally, I could think of no other preparation— the rest of Mary Small would make herself known to me as the day went on. I stood in front of the mirror, and there she was, a young woman with my features but bearing almost no resemblance to Mary Russell in all the essentials. The doorman did not recognise me as he let me out of Mycroft's building. Cheap suitcase in hand, I went to stalk my prey.

I ran him to ground that evening, though I had known for some hours precisely where he was. At two in the afternoon, the omnibus had let me off at the bottom end of what had once been a village high street. I stood for a moment to survey the ground (without the suitcase, which lay in the wardrobe of the boardinghouse room Holmes had let) and was well pleased by what I saw.

It was ideal for my purposes, an area of London that yet preserved the social structures of the village it had been in the not-too-distant past, before London in one of its spasms of growth had surrounded it, found it impossible to incorporate due to a scrap of canal and the slightly inconvenient angle of its high street, and then, like an oyster with a piece of grit, had smoothed the foreign object's uncomfortable edges with a couple of thoroughfares and a bridge, and moved on, leaving the village, its two pubs and a post office, its church, shops, and teahouse, engulfed but more or less intact.

Some hours later, from my table in the front window of that same teahouse, I watched Col. Dennis Edwards walk through the doors of the Pig and Whistle public house. I had taken the table an hour before and had spent the time eating sandwiches and chatting with the waitress-owner. She now knew that I was new to the area and looking for work. I knew that she had corns, five children (one of whom was in trouble over a small matter of removing from a store an item of clothing for which she had neglected to pay), and a husband who drank when he was at home, that her mother had piles, her elderly Jack Russell terrier had become incontinent and she was afraid he would have to be put down, and that she had an appointment the following week to have the last of her teeth out. I also had somewhat less thorough but equally intimate biographies of half the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, including the occupant of "that great ugly house behind the wall up there," Col. Dennis Edwards. That gentleman, whom she seemed to think almost was but wasn't quite, had shown himself to be a parsimonious customer on the rare occasions that he ventured into Rosie's Tea Shoppe, had difficulties keeping female servants ("not that he's improper, mind, it's his temper, don't you know, specially when he's been at the bottle"), had a "real looker" of a son with roving hands, whose drinking habits were similar to those of the father, though he was happy rather than mean-tempered when in his cups. A fountain of information was our Rosie. She told me happily about the colonel's wife, who had died of pneumonia during the war, about his servants and his cars, his dogs and visitors, what he ate and how much he drank, where his clothes came from and her estimate of his net worth. I listened until she began to repeat herself, and I then commented on the young couple who walked past the window holding each other upright and listened with equal interest to ten minutes of their personal habits. Finally, I rose, thinking that the half hour he had been in the pub should have softened him and knowing that if I had to listen to Rosie's tumbling monotone for another minute, I should go mad. I left her a decent tip and took my sore feet off to the Pig and Whistle for something more fortifying than Rosie's tea.

I walked slowly, studying the contents of shop windows, until I stood looking in through the wall of small panes that formed the front of the pub, as if attracted by the warmth within. Two nights before, it would have been stifling inside, but the temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees in the past twenty-four hours, and most of the clientèle who would have been standing on the pavement were now inside. It did look warm and comforting, with its wooden walls, polished bar, and even a patch of orange-and-brown carpet on the floor. At the far right, I saw a boisterous party in a booth, the table littered with bottles and empty glasses. Two young women sat laughing uproariously at the antics of one of the men, who was hurling darts with exaggerated fury towards a frayed-looking target on an equally frayed wall. A man in a crisp black suit sat with his back to the window, watching the darts players. Two greying ladies whom I had seen earlier that day sat with a pair of strangely coloured drinks, vaguely green and unpleasant. Had I seen them in the knitting-wool shop? No, it had been the stationers, where I had purchased a lined notebook. A man and a woman stood behind the bar, the man pulling a pint for a second black-suited man and talking sideways to the woman in a way that spoke of a long, comfortable marriage. And there, halfway between me and the bar, was the object of my interest, a sturdy, moustachioed man nursing a glass of what I took to be whisky, watching the darts game.

I straightened my thin shoulders, summoned up a nest of mouselike thoughts, and walked in. The man in the dark suit stood with two glasses on the bar in front of him while he counted out a handful of coins. He slapped them down on the bar, made a remark to the owner, who laughed, and picked up the two brimming glasses. He ran his eyes across me, then, to my relief, he walked past the colonel's booth to join the similarly dressed man at the front window. I needed the colonel alone.

"Get you something, miss?" I turned to the publican, who smiled encouragingly to keep me from bolting out his door. I fiddled with the clasp on my handbag, then took a few steps towards him and opened my mouth to speak, but a great burst of laughter from the dartboard brought me to a stop. I glanced over at that side of the room, and on their way back, my eyes were caught by those of the colonel, who had turned around at the publican's question. I twitched him a shy smile, then looked back at the man waiting behind the bar.

"Yes, yes, please. May I have— oh, let me see, a sherry perhaps? Yes, a sherry. Oh, sweet, I think. Oh, yes, that would be fine, thank you." I counted the money from my little purse and picked up the glass, thanked the publican again, smiled at his wife, eyed the room indecisively, smiled again briefly at the man with the moustaches, and made my hesitant way past him to a chair at a table next to the window, a location that just happened to put me ten feet from him, at an angle that I could not see him without moving my chair, yet where he could hardly miss having me in full view at all times. I settled myself, and, since a goat tethered out in the jungle is of no use if it simply stands there quietly, I began my routine of helpless bleating, calling the tiger in to me.

I started by removing my gloves, shunning for the moment the obvious ruse of dropping one on the floor, and tucking my hair back into place. I sipped at my drink without gagging on the cloyingly sweet stuff, took a magazine from my handbag, and then let it fall shut after two minutes. I slipped my shoes off under the table and surreptitiously leant down to massage my feet, stared out the window at the receding tide of foot and vehicular traffic, froze in apprehension when the voices of the darts players erupted into anger, then gradually relaxed when the publican's wife put herself into the middle of it, turning it into a joke. After ten minutes, my glass was nearly empty, my eyes were smarting from the smoke and the fumes, and I was beginning to wonder how I could put myself any closer to Colonel Edwards without being obvious. I pulled off the heavy spectacles and folded them carefully on the table, then sat rubbing the bridge of my nose. There came a movement from behind me, male voices at the bar. I held my breath. If he decided to leave, I should have to play this all over again tomorrow. A dreary thought.

A large moving object came to a halt next to my left elbow. I took my face from my hands to look up, startled, at the man beside me, into a face ruddy with whisky and weather, a wide nose over a trimmed moustache, sand beginning to grey, that gave way to a full mouth and an ever so slightly weak chin. His expression was half-paternal, half-interested male. Ideal, I thought, if only he didn't look so much like Uncle John. Actually, it was the moustache that brought John Watson to mind, but I cautioned myself that I would have to beware of the affection I felt for Holmes' longtime partner and biographer. This man was not Uncle John.

He was holding out a glass, of the same sweet stuff I had been drinking. His smile broadened at my confusion, and I reached for my spectacles.

"I thought you might like a refill."

"Oh, well, yes, thank you. It's most kind of you, but I don't usually drink more than one."

"Well, you can't refuse a gift, can you? Besides, you looked all alone over here, and we can't have that, not at the Pig and Whistle."

"Oh no, I'm not all alone. I mean, I am alone, but not— oh dear, that's not coming out right, is it? Please sit down." I fumbled my shoes back on and straightened my back.

He placed his glass on the table and took possession of the chair across from me. He was a big man, not tall, but with broad shoulders and a bit of a belly to show for his intemperate habits. Erect bearing, still the military man.

"Colonel Dennis Edwards, at your service, miss." His hand sketched a humorous salute, and he grinned. Oh dear, I thought, what a very nice smile.

"Mary Small," I said, and held out my right hand to have the fingers shaken. Instead, he took my hand and raised it to his lips. I blushed. Yes, truly I did, although the wine helped. He was greatly amused.

"Miss Small— it is Miss, I trust?" I inclined my head. Direct lies were the most difficult, although Mary Small was not a married woman. "Miss Small, I don't believe I've seen you here before, have I?"

"No, I'm new to the area, Colonel Edwards."

"I thought as much. I didn't think I could overlook such a flower as yourself."

I did not know quite how to respond to this, and I decided that Mary Small did not know, either. I smiled awkwardly and sipped my sherry, grateful for the sandwiches I had eaten to absorb the alcohol. The colonel soon fetched yet another round, which left me feeling quite warm and seemed not to affect him, beyond stepping up his volubility. He talked about this neighbourhood as if it were his personal possession, told me about the process by which it was being swallowed by greedy London town, told me about his army career. He talked; I listened. Mary Small seemed very good at listening, first to Rosie, now to the colonel. In fact, people responded to her shyness with words, pouring out their life stories. By eight o'clock, two of the darts players had joined us, the publican's wife, and the publican himself occasionally, all apparently set on thrusting their personal histories on this tall, quiet, pale young woman in the tinted glasses. I have no great head for alcohol, and although I had managed quietly to rid myself of almost half of what was brought me, I had drunk more in the last couple of hours than I normally drank in a week. I felt flushed all over, my hair was coming down, the loud voices battered my senses, and a high and nagging voice spoke in my ear, warning me that I was going to make an awful mistake if I was not careful.

I rose abruptly, and five sets of eyes looked up at me uncertainly. I faced the wife and asked, with immense dignity, for the use of her facilities.

When I returned a few minutes later, considerably cooler and my hair under control, the party had broken up, but the colonel remained, and he stood when I entered.

"Miss Small, it occurs to me that neither of us have dined. Would you care to join me? Just a simple meal. There's a nice restaurant up the street."

This is really too easy, I thought happily.

"Oh, Colonel, it would be lovely, but I have to be up early tomorrow. I have an interview for a position at eight-thirty on the other side of town, and I really mustn't miss it, I'm getting— well, the situation is becoming a bit urgent. I must find work by the end of the week, or— well, I must, that's all. So I'd enjoy having dinner with you, but—"

"But of course you'll have dinner with me. Just a quick dinner, nothing fancy, and we'll have you in early. Where are you living?"

I told him where the boardinghouse was located and protested weakly, but of course he overrode my objections, and so we went to dinner. It was a pleasant-enough meal, and the wine was superb, causing me to regret the earlier alcoholic treacle that I had swallowed. The colonel drank my share, however, and seemed to enjoy it. I heard more of his story, his love for hunting, the book he was writing, his cars. Finally, over coffee, he fell silent, and as I looked down at my cup, I felt his eyes on me for a long minute.

"Don't go to that interview tomorrow," he said. I raised my eyes in surprise.

"Oh, but I must. I can't afford to miss the chance. I have to find work, I told you. If I don't, I shall be forced to go home." I made it sound most unpleasant.

"Where is home?"

"Oxfordshire. Outside Didcot." Not too far from the truth.

"And what do you do, that you interview for?" Here it came.

"Oh, anything, really. Except cooking," I had to add in all honesty. "I'm hopeless in the kitchen. But anything else. The interview tomorrow is for a personal secretary, which would be ideal. Correspondence, typing, a bit of research— she's a writer— driving. All things I can do, and it pays well. I can't let it go by," I repeated.

"Certainly you can. Come work for me."

The jackpot. O frabjous day! I thought, but I put on a face full of distress and embarrassment.

"Oh, Colonel, I couldn't do that. It's terribly nice of you to be concerned about me, and I do truly appreciate it, but I couldn't possibly take advantage of your kindness."

"It's not kindness; it's a job offer. My own secretary left several weeks ago," (slammed out of the house after the colonel had emptied a desk drawer over her head, according to Tea Shoppe Rosie) "and the work's been piling up ever since. And, as I said, I'm writing a book, and you say you can do research. I've never been much for libraries. Plus that, you drive. I don't. I get tired of taking taxis on my chauffeur's days off. What do you say?"

"Are you serious, Colonel Edwards?"

"Absolutely. What was the pay at the other job?"

I told him a figure, he increased it 10 percent, I protested that he didn't know my qualifications, said I refused to accept charity, so he lowered it to 5 percent, with the other 5 percent to come after review in a month. As I had no intention whatsoever of being with him in a month, I accepted, with the proper degree of gratitude and confusion. This pleased him greatly, and a bit later, after much brandy and talk, he accompanied me to Billy's cousin's boardinghouse with a proud, almost possessive set to his jaw and shoulders. As I closed the door and heard the taxi drive off, I couldn't help wondering if he thought he had bought me or won me, and further, if he would see a difference in the two.

I unbuckled the straps of my oppressive shoes and walked in stockinged feet through the still house, through the odours of tinned curry powder and stale cabbage and underwashed bodies, up the worn stair runners to my room. I turned up the gas with an irrational pang of hope that Holmes (with that customary disregard of his for agreed-to plans that made it impossible to depend on his whereabouts) might be revealed in a corner, but I saw only a slip of paper that someone had pushed under the door. It was from my landlady, to inform me that a gentleman had rung twice and would telephone again tomorrow night.

Tonight, really, I saw from my watch. So much for an early dinner. The realisation of the hour and the sudden contrast of stillness and solitude after the long, tense day made me feel dizzy, but I knew I could never sleep, not until my brain slowed down. I undressed mechanically, brushed out my hair at the leprous mirror, and thought.

I had to admit, grudgingly and to myself, that a part of me liked this man Edwards. The part of me that was closest to Mary Small responded to him and thought how very pleasant the evening had been. He was intelligent, if not particularly brilliant, and had an easy way of understanding how to make people relax and enjoy themselves. He had probably been a very good commander of men, with that ability. He had made me laugh several times, despite my (and my character's) anxiety.

Physically, he was the complete opposite of Holmes. Scarcely my height, he was heavily muscled and gave the impression of power. Even his expensive suit rode uneasily on his shoulders, but my mind skittered away from the thought that he would look most natural with few clothes on. His hair was still full and only beginning to show grey at the temples and ears. He seemed to be a hairy man, for in the restaurant the light had reflected from a dark copper fur on the backs of his broad hands and thick fingers, and his cheeks had shown stubble by midnight. Odd for a man with hair of that colour, I thought absently.

Yes, Mary Small had liked him, had, in fact, found him attractive. Sweet, protected virgin that she was, she found his attention and authority flattering. Russell, however— that was another matter. As Mary Small began to fade in the mirror and I continued to analyse the evening's currents, I found that I was, underneath, distinctly annoyed. What another woman might find appealingly masculine, I reflected, was also just plain boorish. From the first glass of sherry, unasked for and unwanted, to the dinner menu, ordered without consultation, the evening had been one of not-so-subtle manipulation and domination. It was, admittedly, the usual thing, but I did not like it one bit.

I studied my face and asked it why this was troubling me. Was it not precisely how I had planned it, down to my worn lace collars and crippling shoes? He had responded in exactly the way I had wanted. Why, then, was I not sitting here gloating? Part of the problem, I knew, was the sour feeling that comes with practising deceit on an innocent, and after all, he might be completely without blame in Miss Ruskin's death. That was compounded by the fact that I liked him as a person, but it was not all.

I sat enfolded by the boardinghouse, silent but for a rumbling snore from somewhere above me, and knew that I was apprehensive— no, to be truthful, I was almost frightened, by the man's strength. I had laughed at his jokes, even the ones I would normally find tasteless, and I had acquiesced to his decisions, completely, naturally. There was no doubt in my mind that this was a contest, but we were each playing a different game, by different rules, and I suddenly felt very unsure of myself, as inexperienced as Mary Small in the ways of dealing with men. I felt ill from the food and the drink and the smoke, and most especially from the words, the spate of words that had pushed and prodded and battered me all evening. I ached for Holmes, for the sureness of his hands and his quiet voice, and I wondered where he was sleeping that night.