A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Sunday dawned clammy and grey without, but it mattered not. Inside my head, the sun shone bright and hot. Birds sang. Today was the twenty-first anniversary of my birth, and I was free.

It cost me several expensive gifts to recompense my solicitor and the executors of the estate for going to the law offices of Gibson, Arbuthnot, Meyer, and Perowne of a Sunday morning, but the extravagance was worth it to me, and as they were all very familiar with my feelings concerning my guardian, and hers toward me, they were happy enough to oblige. They liked me, for some reason.

In deference to their sensibilities, I wore the sedate navy dress rather than one of my father’s suits, and took a taxi. Upon reaching the gleaming door on the deserted street, I emptied the entire contents of my small purse into the cab-driver’s hands. The last of my bridges having thus been burnt behind me, I reached past the spotless brass plaque for the equally spotless door handle, and entered my majority.

I walked out three hours later a wiser woman and a richer one, slightly tipsy from the goodwill showered on me and the glass of champagne somewhat subdued by the deluge of words and a precise knowledge of the responsibilities involved by my inheritance. I walked a short distance up the street and was hit by the realisation that I was also quite literally penniless. Feeling exceedingly sheepish, I went back and borrowed a few pounds from my solicitor. I also borrowed his telephone, but no message from Holmes had come to the Vicissitude in my absence.

I caught the next train to Sussex, and later that afternoon I supervised the gutting of my house. My aunt had left, at my instructions, taking her servants with her. Now on her heels, every stick of furniture, every carpet and curtain, every pot, pan, and picture was carried out and loaded onto an odd assortment of carts and motor lorries, some of it to be cleaned, some sold, but all to be purified: Of the entire house, cellar to attic, only my bedroom’s furnishings remained untouched. When the last heavy boot climbed into its lorry and drove away, I flung open all the windows and doors to the night and let the sea mist scour the past six years from my house. My home.

Mine.

Half an hour later, chagrined for the second time that day, I was cursing myself for an utter fool and an idiot and hunting for something to boil water in, when I heard a voice calling from the front door.

“Miss Mary?”

“Patrick!” I clattered the coal scuttle back onto my bedroom hearth and ran downstairs to greet my farm manager. He was looking around the stark, freezing rooms dubiously, and I had to admit that the house had a ravaged look to it, all bare bones and flocked wallpaper. “Hello, Patrick.”

“Evening, Miss Mary,” he said, touching his cap. “They’ve made a clean sweep of it, I see.”

“Precisely the words for it. The decorators come tomorrow and strip off the wallpaper, and then they’ll start painting— top to bottom, front to back, everything clean and new. Except the outside, of course—that’ll have to wait until the spring.”

“It’s going to be a different house.”

“It is,” I said in grim satisfaction. “Entirely different.”

He looked at me, deliberate, phlegmatic, a friend. He nodded twice and pursed his lips.

“Struck me, though, what with everyone leaving yesterday, you might be a bit lacking tonight. Can I offer you a bowl of soup? Tillie sent it over, with a chicken and some of her cheese bread, if you’re hungry.” Tillie was Patrick’s lady friend and the owner of the village inn, and her kitchen attracted patrons from Eastbourne and even London. I accepted with enthusiasm and walked with him down to his snug little house near the barn.

Later that night, warmed through and well fed, I reentered my house and stood without turning on the lights, listening to the faint shifting of 250-year-old beams, the whisper of the breeze from the kitchen window, the faint sensations of an old building adjusting itself to emptiness. I had loved this house as a child, our summer cottage before my entire family had died, killed by a car accident in California the year before I had met Holmes. I stood in the dark, wondering if I might coax back the shades of my mother and my father and my little brother, now that my aunt was gone, then walked up the stairs to stand in the door of what had been my parents’ bedroom, a seldom-used guest room during my aunt’s reign. It felt warmer in there, despite the swirls of mist. I smiled at my fancies, closed and latched the window, and went to bed.

In the morning, I rang Holmes, but Mrs Hudson had not seen him in some days. The house was miserably cold and damp and reproachful, and I abandoned it to the mercies of the decorators by returning to London.

Patrick drove me to the station in the old dogcart. When he had reined in, he dug into the pocket of his greatcoat and brought out a small wrapped parcel, which he thrust out in my general direction.

“Meant to wish you many happy returns, Miss Mary. Forgot to last night.”

“Patrick, you didn’t need to do that.” Indeed, he never had before. I undid the wrappings, which looked as if they had been used a number of times before, and found inside a fine lawn handkerchief with my initials twining in one corner and a row of tiny purple-and-blue flowers chasing one another around the border. It was impractical, pretty, ridiculous, and touching. “How absolutely lovely.”

“You like it, then. Good. Good. M’sister does ’em. Asked me what kind of flower you liked. Told her those what d’you call ’em, pansy things. Did I get it right?”

“Completely. I shall take it out and wave it in front of people all day and touch it delicately to the tip of my nose, and all of London will admire it. It’s the nicest birthday present I’ve had.”

“Get many, did you?”

“Er, no.” Excluding the pounds, dollars, and francs, three houses, two factories, and a ranch in California, but those did not count as presents. “But I’m sure Mrs Hudson will have something for me when I see her.”

“Mr Holmes not bein’ one for gifts and all.”

“The last present he gave me was a set of picklocks. This is immeasurably nicer,” I said, waving it about. I leant over and kissed him on his bristly cheek, ignoring the furious blush this brought on, and dashed for my train.

I was outside the elves’ shop when they put up the shutters, and I spent several hours there—expense I had expected, but I’d never have believed that clothing one’s self could be so time-consuming! The two of them seemed oddly apprehensive when they ushered me into the room used for displaying the finished product (they used no live mannequins—in fact, the only people they seemed able to put up with having under foot were the two grandsons who tidied up after them, refolding the patterns, rerolling the strewn bolts of fabric, and sweeping up the pins and snippets). One glance explained their apprehension—the elves, confronted with a rail-thin woman nearly six feet tall in her stockinged feet who walked like a woodsman and hated frips and frills, had opted for drama, plain and simple.

The first piece, the only finished one, was not too bad, a suit of soft grey-blue wool with a wide band of Kashmiri-style embroidery, white and a darker blue, set into the jacket and the skirt. The fit was nearly as comfortable as my father’s old linen shirt, for which I was grateful.

Then I caught sight of their idea of an evening gown suited to me.

One of the problems I have in clothing myself is a concern that never would have come up in my mother’s day, but since the war, with dresses becoming ever more skimpy, evening wear was nearly impossible, and I had tended simply to avoid those few formal affairs I might have been tempted by. On Thursday, I had been forced to strip to the skin before Mrs Elf to demonstrate just why low necklines are not suitable: I do not care to have my fellows at table or on the dance floor offended by, or speculating on, my scar tissue. The automobile accident that killed my family when I was fourteen had left me just able to wear a cautious degree of décolleté, but five years later the bullet through my right shoulder put an end to any thoughts of bare flesh below the neck.

This dress, though—as a piece of pure engineering, it was fascinating; as a piece of evening wear, even in its present incomplete state, it transformed the padded torso on which it hung. High on the right shoulder, it dropped down to expose the left and continued down and yet farther down, the fabric barely meeting at the waist before it began a slit up the left side, where the hem angled down in a mirror image of the bodice line. The ice blue silk made it aloof—in any warmer colour, it would have been an incitement to riot.

I gulped, smiled feebly at Mrs Elf, declined her eager invitation for me to try it on, and turned to the other two half-formed outfits. One was a rich brown with slashes of crimson that looked as if they would appear and disappear with movement; the other was an intense eau-de-nil sheath with lots of little tucks and ruches that made the dressmaker’s dummy look like the representation of a woman considerably more voluptuous than I. I clutched the fronts of my new overjacket and told them that I should have to return for a fitting soon, but I was not allowed to escape so easily. First I had to choose a pair of shoes from a huge stack they had caused to be delivered (I think they did not trust me not to wear mud-spattered brogues beneath their creation) and then Mrs Elf insisted on arranging her small cloche hat (matching embroidery, of course) on my hair, and even then I had to reassure them that I would remove my overcoat whenever possible.

I achieved the street, feeling like some child’s costly doll. My toes were indignant about the unfamiliar shape they were being pushed into, and cloche hats always made me feel as if I were wearing a soft chamber pot. I was hungry and ruffled and not in the best mood to approach Margery and her Temple of women, and I stood on the street and said aloud the first thing that came to my tongue: “Holmes, where the hell are you?”

I was immediately abashed, particularly as neither the organ-grinder nor the pie-seller metamorphised into him, and even the man on the delivery wagon merely glanced at me and flipped the reins.

I had to admit it: I wanted to see Holmes, who, although one of the most peculiar individuals I had ever met, was nonetheless the sanest and most reliable of men. Beyond that, I wanted to know what had been done with Miles Fitzwarren, four days ago. I had expected Holmes to be in touch before this. I stood undecided, until my eye caught on a post office sign, and then I knew what I would do. I used their telephone, but no, the Vicissitude was holding no message for me, so, before I could reconsider, I wrote out a telegram and had it sent to five separate places, including his cottage in Sussex, if by some remote chance he had landed there. Each one said:

AM UNEASY NEED CONSULT

RUSSELL

I regretted it immediately the message had irrevocably left my hand. Perhaps he will not answer, I comforted myself, then took myself to Selfridges for something to eat.

My tutorial with Margery was for half-past four. Upon my arrival at the Temple, I sat down at a table and took out my chequebook, then handed the completed cheque to the startled secretary.

“This is for the library fund, which I believe Miss Beaconsfield is in charge of. Would you kindly give it to her when she comes in?”

Communication within the Temple was excellent. Margery greeted me with all the naughts of my cheque in her eyes, although of course she did not mention it, and when she saw my clothing, the transformation was complete. I regretted it, but to have continued with her thinking me a bluestocking forced to mend the ladders in said stockings would have been too painful. I returned her greetings evenly, sat down, and prepared to teach her about her Bible.

We were interrupted only once, by a telegram for me, which read:

EIGHT OCLOCK DOMINICS

SH

It cheered me greatly. I folded it and made to thrust it into my pocket, only to discover that I had none. I put it instead into my handbag, turned back to Margery with a smile, and continued my brief overview of the history of Judaism and Christianity.

“So, we have the Hebrew Bible, roughly what you would call the Old Testament, composed of the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings; we have the intertestamental literature, or Apocrypha; and we have the Greek, or New Testament, composed of the four life stories of Jesus, called Gospels, the Acts of the early church, various letters and writings, and the Revelation of John.

“None of this was written in English. Now, that may sound ridiculous, but one gets so into the habit of thinking the Authorised Version as the direct word of God, that one needs to be reminded that it’s only three hundred years old and was the work of men.” I reached into my bag and took out two sheets of paper I had prepared earlier.

“I want you to commit these two alphabets to memory. This is Greek, for your purposes more necessary perhaps than the Hebrew. The letters are alpha, beta, gamma.” I continued on to omega. “And these are the sounds they make, in this column. You’ll see the similarities; that’s because the alphabet we use in English grew in part from this one. Now, using the chart, sound out these three words.”

She did it laboriously, but correctly. “Anthropos; anēr; gunē.”

“Good. In English, we use the word man to translate both anthropos, “human being,” and anēr, a “male person.” Gunē is woman, the counterpart of anēr. Most of the time it is obvious which is meant, and occasionally one finds in Greek anēr when one might expect anthropos, and vice versa, but it is good to keep in mind, for example, the fact that Jesus is called the Son of Humanity, not the Son of a Man.”

We worked on this for a while and I gave her a Greek Testament to use. We talked briefly about the difference between gender and sex, but since she was fairly fluent in French, I could pass lightly over that issue.

It was a stimulating ninety minutes, and I found, as I had expected, that Margery had a quick mind and an acute ear for theological subtleties, as well as having the determination necessary to overcome her lack of training. She might never compete with an Oxford scholar, but she might communicate with one.

That first session unavoidably served largely to point out to Margery her ignorance. She watched me slide my books into my case, a subdued and almost wistful look on her face.

“It’s quite hopeless, isn’t it, Mary?” she said with a rueful laugh. “I feel like a child who’s just discovered sweets, standing at the sweet-shop window. I’ll never have it all.”

“It’s hardly an all-or-nothing proposition, Margery. And remember Akiva—you can at least read.”