A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Most of the passengers left the train in Reading. We sat for a few minutes in the station, carriage doors opening and closing several times, and then the train gave a shudder and we started up. I settled back with my book, eyelids heavy, although I was aware of a not-unpleasant blend of anticipation and apprehension as Friday’s public presentation approached.

Ever since I had met Margery Childe, I had been torn, mentally and physically, and above all spiritually, between the London that she shared with Holmes and my own comfortable Oxford. For nearly four weeks, I seemed to have shuttled back and forth, in my mind and on this train, increasingly aware that a choice was being prepared for me to make. Now, however, whether because of the assertiveness I had shown to Holmes or the irritation I had felt with Margery, I felt considerably distanced from the problems the two of them represented. As the miles clicked by, I even began to reflect that, actually, one could almost look on the entire period since Christmas as a sort of holiday, an interesting and piquant interlude, possessed of an intellectual challenge, picturesque natives, a murder for spice, and the whole business tied up neatly before it threatened to trespass onto real life. I had renewed an old friendship and now cherished the addition of Margery Childe to my circle of acquaintances. Even the prickly state of affairs with Holmes had shown signs that the prickles were losing their more threatening points. Given time, and perhaps distance, that friendship might yet be maintained.

However, it was finished now—intoxicating feminists, doers of Good Deeds, and tutors with disturbingly male characteristics—an episode to be pulled out and remembered with fond amusement in the distant future. But now, Friday: a clear goal, known obstacles, all opponents out in the open, a hard challenge, but one I had been preparing myself for since I entered Oxford at the age of seventeen. Margery Childe, Veronica Beaconsfield, Miles Fitzwarren, and Sherlock Holmes were in a box labelled LONDON, and this short train journey should serve to close the top on it and place it, albeit temporarily, on a shelf.

Truly, honestly, I must never think these things. .

Hubris was shattered without warning when my compartment door was calmly opened by a medium-sized man wearing a tweed ulster and an obviously false black beard, a disguise that effectively concealed the lower half of his face but could not hide the eyes. I did not need the gun barrel pointed at my chest to tell me what the man was, for I had seen such eyes before: This was a killer. Worse, there was intelligence there, as well as a distinct gleam of liquid pleasure. I sat very still. He closed the door behind him.

“Miss Russell,” he said, very businesslike. “You have two choices: I can shoot you here and now, or you can swallow a mixture I have with me and become my prisoner for a few days. Obviously, the fact that I have not already used my gun indicates that I prefer the latter; bullets are unimaginative and do distressing things to human flesh, and the noise they make increases my personal risk of capture. That may appeal to you, but I assure you that you will be in no condition to feel satisfaction at my arrest. I suggest you choose the sleeping draught.”

The unreality of his entrance and the melodrama of his words robbed me of speech. I sat gaping at him for a long minute before I found my tongue.

“Who are you?”

“If I told you that, Miss Russell, I could hardly let you free again.”

“Free me? I should drink your poison quietly and save you the trouble?”

“You choose the bullet, then? So very final, that choice. No chance of escape, of subverting or overcoming your gaolers, of changing my mind.” He cocked the gun.

“No. Wait.” It is very difficult to think with the end of a revolver in one’s face. He was, quite clearly, a thug, with a heavy veneer of sophistication over an uneducated accent. Only a man who feared calloused hands spent time at a manicurist’s. Still, there were brains alongside the brutality: not a pleasant combination. “What is in the mixture?”

“I told you: a soporific, standard medical issue, suspended in brandy. It’s a decent brandy, too, if that matters to you. You will smell as if you were drunk, but you will sleep three or four hours, perhaps a little longer, depending on your sensitivity to the drug. You have one minute to decide,” he said, and stood calmly just inside the door of the compartment.

“Why?” I asked desperately.

“We need you out of the way for a bit. We had thought merely to kidnap you, drop a bag over your head or put chloroform to your face, perhaps a needle in a crowd. However, your little demonstration yesterday night made us a bit wary of your skills at defending yourself. It was decided that the only options were those that kept us at a distance from you, while we were in public places where a prolonged struggle might draw attention.”

Lies and truth mixed together. I thought he was telling me the truth about what the mixture contained; I thought he was telling the truth when he spoke of keeping me prisoner; I thought he was lying when he said he would turn me free. I also felt I knew who he was—not that I had set eyes on him before, but Ronnie had described just such a man. Although he did not strike me as “gorgeous” under the circumstances, I had no doubt that this was Margery Childe’s dark, Mediterranean gangster. I had never felt so alone.

“Thirty seconds,” he said, without looking at a watch.

Perhaps, if I might get him to come closer… I nodded coldly and held out my hand.

His left hand went into an inner pocket and brought out a small decorated silver flask. He did not, however, bring it to me as I’d hoped, but tossed it onto the seat beside me. I put down my book and took up the flask, which was slightly warm from his body heat. I removed the stopper, sniffed it deeply: brandy, and something else. No bitter almonds, at any rate, or any of the other poisons that had an odour. I raised it to my mouth and wetted my tongue—again, no immediate taste of poison, but there was a familiar bitter undertaste, reminiscent of hospitals. I knew the taste; everything in me, body and mind, screamed against swallowing it. The thought of becoming unconscious in the hands of a man like this was intolerable, impossible. But would he use the gun, or was it a bluff? I looked into his eyes, and I knew with a certainty that it was no bluff. To fight in this small compartment would be suicide. Which, then, was it to be: a bullet or the chance of poison? I knew enough about poisons to be certain that the flask did not contain arsenic or strychnine, but that left a hundred others, from aconitine, which would kill with an imperceptible amount, to—

“Ten seconds.”

It would have to be a poison that acted very quickly, because this train ended its run in Oxford, and if I were found alive, I might be saved; at the least, I would be capable of setting the police on his trail. The decision made itself, prompted, I think, less by logic than by the irrational conviction that he was telling me a degree of the truth, and that being a prisoner was preferable to death. I raised the flask at the same instant his arm was beginning to straighten out, then drank deeply.

“Drink it all,” he said, and I did, coughing and eyes watering, then held it out upside down to demonstrate that it was empty. One drop fell to the floor, but his eyes remained on me.

“Put it on the seat and relax. It takes a few minutes.”

He continued to stand with his back to the door. I continued to sit and stare at him, feeling after some miles as if this were one of the more avant-garde of the French plays that had recently become popular among the arty set. Perhaps this is the moment for me to make a forceful remark about my left toenail or the age of the sun, I thought flippantly, and then I felt the first quivers of impending unconsciousness as the drug began to descend on my nervous system.

A movement behind my would-be captor sent my heart thudding in wild anticipation, until I realised that the man looking in the door over the tweed shoulder also wore a false beard. Swooping disappointment made me peevish, and I opened my mouth to complain at the lack of imagination in their disguises, but to my consternation, what came from my mouth bore little resemblance to English. The newcomer looked at me and spoke from a great distance.

“She ain’t asleep yet?”

“In a minute. She’s not far—” And at his words, the compartment began to close in on me. My field of vision narrowed, from luggage racks and seats to the figures crowding the doorway, to two heads and a torso, and finally to the small scar that emerged from the false moustache and puckered the first man’s lip, and the word far reverberated in my brain as FARFARFarFarfarfarfarfar and erased me.

When I woke, I was blind.

I was also violently and comprehensively ill onto the cold, hard surface I lay on, and when eventually I turned with a groan to escape the noxious stuff, I found that most of my body was in direct contact with the stones. Blind, stripped to my underclothing, and ill, I thought muzzily. Mary Russell, this is going to be very unpleasant. I laid my hot face back onto the cool stones and thought no more.

The second time I woke, I was still blind, still nearly naked, and felt just as ill. I did not vomit, although the sharp stink in the air made it a temptation and my mouth tasted unspeakably foul. I clawed my swarming hair out of my face, ran an automatic knuckle up the bridge of my nose to shove my absent spectacles into place, and then with an effort pushed myself upright. I wished I had not. My head pounded, my stomach quivered, and the darkness seemed to become denser, but I stayed sitting, and slowly I recovered.

I was alive. There was that. In the dark, in an unknown place, held captive for an unknown reason by an unknown number of enemies, clothed in nothing but knickers and camisole, without so much as my glasses and hairpins as weapons, but alive.

That I had lived was not in itself terribly reassuring. I sat on the stones, my head in my hands, and tried to think through the throbbing. After half an hour, I had come up with two small conclusions: First, my captor was a man of no mean ability, a remarkably intelligent, efficient, and daring individual who showed no signs of the gaol-bird in his manner and who was, therefore, among the more successful criminals. If one knew where to look, it should not prove difficult to find him—assuming I should happen to escape his clutches. Second, my mind seized on one chance remark: He had said that bullets were unimaginative. I could not help but reading into that choice of word the idea that he had something in mind for me, not just locking me in a hold. Not at all a nice thought.

He was no one I knew, personally or by reputation, which made for another question: Whom was he working for, or with? Who had arranged to pick me up so efficiently and ruthlessly and had me dumped into this hole? I assumed that it had something to do with the Temple, but I had to admit that there was no concrete reason for that assumption, that my life was sufficiently complicated to offer other possibilities. A voice from the past, taking revenge for something Holmes and I had done long ago? Or was I merely a pawn, captured to bring Holmes into a trap? My thoughts ranged and snatched at threads, meandering their way into the more remote reaches of reality. Marie hated me sufficiently to do this, although I had to wonder if she would not rather have merely crushed me beneath a lorry or had me shot. Perhaps I had been kidnapped by one of the Berlin-bound Americans, to keep me from presenting my paper. An academic rival, of Duncan’s perhaps, set to ruin us both? Or—my aunt! Breaking the will by driving me mad, proving me to be incompetent, putting me and my father’s fortune back into her hands…

That snapped me down to earth. My aunt was mercenary, but she had neither the brains nor the acquaintances to do this, and if I had seriously considered that, well, my mind was indeed in a fragile state. I shook my head to clear it, swore at my hag’s mat of hair, and forced myself to my feet. Best to concentrate on the escaping side of things. Time to find out where I was.

The place I was in, other than being as black as a cow’s stomach, was cool, but not dangerously so, paved in big uneven stones, and, I thought, large. To confirm it, I cleared my throat and said a few experimental words, more for the sake of the echoes than because I expected an answer.

“Hello? Hello? Is anyone here?”

The ceiling was not too high and the walls, some of them, not too distant. I got to my feet cautiously, found the pressure inside my skull receding, and began to shuffle forward with my hands waving about in front of me. I had no idea how much ground I had covered, with the dark pressing in on my face and eardrums like a silent cacophony, filled not only with mundane horrors such as cobwebs and rats (silent ones) but with lurking presences as well, hands reaching out to touch me. When my fingers finally stubbed against cold stone, I threw myself up against its upright bulk like a shipwrecked sailor on a beach and felt like embracing it.

The walls were fitted stone, my exploring fingertips told me, not brick: large, finely textured blocks. I turned left, changed my mind and turned right, and set out with my left hand bumping along the stone, my right hand out in front, literally inching forward until I came to another wall, joining the first at what seemed like a right angle. I patted this new wall for a bit as if it were a friendly dog and then turned my back on it, retracing the way I had come in order to pace the boundaries of my prison. My feet were just over ten and a half inches long, so that measuring my first wall toe-to-heel thirty-two times made this side a shade over twenty-eight feet. I continued left, and at seven and a half feet, I was nearly sent sprawling by a pile of something soft on the floor. It was not a body, to my mixed relief, but two large half-rotten sacks stuffed with straw. Cautious, searching fingers brought me to an odd, squat, smooth sphere that swayed when I touched it. I picked it up, explored it with my left hand, and removed the top. It was a gourd, filled with stale and infinitely sweet water. I stopped myself from gulping, but sipped, clutched it to my chest, and reached out again. After a couple of sweeps, my hand caught another smooth shape with a more familiar feel: a small loaf of bread. I settled back against the wall, my backside cushioned, nursing my riches in my arms.

After a few minutes I began to feel ridiculous. I drank another swallow and broke off a bite of the bread (heavy and tasteless, made with neither salt nor sugar) and forced myself to put down my treasures and resume the circumambulation. It was not easy to walk away from them.

When I had circled my prison, I found to my vast relief that my bed and supplies were precisely where I had left them, seven and a half feet from the second corner. My prison measured twenty-eight feet by sixty and a bit. There were no windows, even ones that had been filled in, as far up as my hands could reach, no breaks other than a door in the wall directly opposite my bed, a door as stout and immovable as the rocks into which it had been set. The ceiling overhead seemed to vary in height and was, from the echoes, stone or brick. A wine cellar fit my mental image of the room, with its constant temperature, lack of vibrations, and convoluted roof arches.

A wine cellar meant a large house, and I thought that if it were in the city, even a small city, the rattle of wheels and hoofs against paving stones would penetrate, if not as sound, then at least as low vibrations. So, I was locked in the cellar of a country house. Not much help, perhaps, but it was nice to know.

I also knew that I had not been locked here to starve. Food and water were not habitually given to a prisoner who was being walled up and forgotten. They would come for me,

Whoever “they” were.

Whatever “imaginative” torture they had in mind.

I curled up on the sacks, with one hand resting on my water gourd and the other clutching the bread, and slept for a while, and when I woke, still blind, the claustrophobic terror of being buried alive hit me.

I scrambled to my feet and groped my way to the nearest corner. I was becoming more accustomed to the blackness, because my ears told me when I was nearing the wall. Is this what Holmes had meant when he had practiced being blind in opaque glasses? With great deliberation, I squared myself against the wall and set off into open space, one foot’s length at a time. Overhead, nothing; in front, nothing; on the floor, dust and grit. I straightened up and took the next step, felt around, then took the next.

When I reached my straw pallet again, I stopped for breakfast. I had found a half a dozen small pebbles, some chips of wood, and a couple of shards of porcelain and glass. These, I tucked against the head of my bed. I had also found the first of the pillars I had known must be there, supports to the ceiling over my head. There ought to be two or three of them—without interest other than for their possible use to hide behind. More interesting was the way in which my fingers had known the massive pillar was there a moment before I had touched it: For a vivid instant Holmes was leading me with sure steps through the fog.

I ate more of the tasteless bread, drank some water, continued my back-and-forth sweep. I found the second pillar, though no third one, and when I turned back to the bed, I found I had a sense of where it lay. Not precisely, and I did not have enough faith to drop my hands, but I could tell roughly where it was, and I went to it. My findings had accumulated, including now two walnut-sized knobs of rock, a handful of smaller ones, a horn button, and—treasure of treasures—a bent and rusty nail, about two and a half inches long. I tucked everything under my bed, then on second thought removed half of it and carried it over to one of the corners, pushing it into the lee of a slightly raised stone on the floor. I stood, pushed back my nonexistent glasses, and returned to my mat.

How long had I been in this place? The bearded killer had said the drug lasted three or four hours, but there was no way of knowing how many had been spent in transporting me here. Say, four hours drugged, and half an hour sleeping after I had been sick, then approximately four and a quarter hours in mapping out my surroundings. Between eight and ten hours, I thought, since I had drunk from the silver flask. It was Sunday morning; it felt much later.

How long before they returned?

I reached for the water gourd and felt a twinge, not from the knife cut, which seemed to have been given a fresh dressing, but from the inside of my left elbow. As I was fairly comprehensively bruised and aching, I had not taken much notice before this, but now I explored it with the fingertips of my right hand, and in a moment I knew that if the lights were to come on, I should see in the soft area over the veins a red welt with a pinprick in the centre—or rather, a needle prick.

Someone expert with a needle had either given me an injection, directly into the vein, or else drawn a blood specimen. The latter did not seem likely, but with what had I been injected? A second dose of sleeping potion? And if so, why into the vein? How long had I slept? What in hell was going on?

I was blind, in more ways than the one. It was something to do with Margery Childe—that much I could see; after that, the light faded. Was Margery herself doing this? Or was it part of another attempt on her life, removing me from hindering it? That could not be—I had already removed myself, by boarding the train for Oxford. Was I to be freed, as my abductor had told me, only to appear responsible for her death, or would there be two dead bodies, with blatant clues for the police force? Or, yet a third possibility: that I was to be freed but rendered harmless.

Unable, perhaps, to identify my captor?

Blinded perhaps?

The horror of the dark crawled over me then, and I knew that I was indeed blind, that my little farce of feeling all over the walls was lit clearly by an overhead bulb while observers in high windows watched the antics of a wretched, half-naked girl-woman with a madwoman’s matted hair and scars all over her body, skirting not very successfully the pool of her vomit, hugging to herself a jug of water and a piece of stale bread, secreting a pathetic collection of stones in the corner of her—

I heard nothing, but there were vibrations where there had been stillness, in the stones beneath my feet and the air against my cheeks. I rapidly arranged the gourd where it had been, put near it the remainder of the loaf with the intact section of crust turned to the door, and threw myself on the floor in an attitude meant to suggest death.

A lock turned, then a bolt, and another bolt. Hinges groaned open and—light! Gorgeous, wavery, bouncing, blinding light. And an oath. I tried to ready myself to spring up, without visibly breathing. Tiny, quick breaths. Several feet at the door, entering.

“Close it.” That was my abductor’s voice, restricted still by the false beard.

Hinges groaned again; the door thudded; boots scuffed the stones. The light came closer, my eyelids reddened as it neared my face, and I came up running, hit the lamp from the man’s hand and sprinted for the door, and had my fingers on the handle before my head jerked back painfully and I went down on my knees. I hit out and the man grunted, but he did not let go of the hold on my hair, and in a second they were all on me, and I was caught.

“Don’t hit her,” said the leader, and they did not, merely slammed me up against the wall. I winced away from the dazzle of his electric torch in my eyes.

“Hold her.” I thought at first the obvious, but it quickly became apparent that it was a very different sort of invasion they had in mind. The man holding my left arm pulled it away from the wall, stretching my wrist out from my body while his other hand pinned my shoulder against the stones.

“Bring the other lamp.” When I saw what my abductor was pulling out of his pocket, I went berserk. I nearly freed myself, and it ended only when three burly men, bruised, bitten, and bleeding all, held me down on the floor and their leader put his hand over my nose and mouth and cut off my air. My frantic attempts to bite the man or free myself from his fingers exhausted my air; the room began to fade. When my air and my panic had both run out, he took his hand away, and as I gulped great draughts of air, he got to work.

I had never before experienced the sheer inexorable power of strong men. In utter humiliation and near abject terror, I could only look on as That Man knotted a silk scarf cruelly tight around my upper arm, took out a dark velvet case containing an already-filled hypodermic syringe, probed the hollow of my arm with knowledgeable fingers, and injected me directly into the vein. He slid his blunt fingers under the knot, loosed the scarf, and stood away.

And my body exploded. My every cell woke up and shouted in recognition of the substance being pumped through my veins, and a rush of pure, raw sensation flooded over me like a huge, slow electrical wave, leaving me quivering from the soles of my feet to the back of my head in what I can only describe as ecstasy. As it went through me, it seemed to shear my mind straight down the centre and split it, so that for perhaps a minute I experienced a sort of palimpsest of consciousness, a simultaneous awareness of events as they were now and as they had been six years and three months before.

I was aware of the stones at my back, the sharp smell of spilt paraffin, and the moan that issued from my twenty-one-year-old throat, a sound obscene even to my own ears and which caused the men pinning me down to cackle and joke among themselves as they stood away from my body and set about cleaning up the broken lamp and the old vomit.

At the same time, and every bit as vivid, was the hospital bed beneath me, the medicinal hospital stink of cleaning fluid and ether, the rustle of clothes moving, and voices: American voices. A man’s authoritative American voice, but it was not my father’s voice; never again my father’s voice.

Mama? But the word was too far down in my throat to find its way out. Words around me, weighty words that surfaced like bubbles from a murky pool from the vague noise I lay in: doctor, infection, fever, dosage, weak.

Someone was ill in this clean, bright room. Someone began to groan, a wavering sound that instantly cut off the words and replaced them with a more urgent rustle, a few curt commands. There was too much light in this room, terrible and harsh and white, and white shapes moving around me, topped with darker blobs—hair, heads, hands, touching me, a face coming into focus, emitting furry noises. I closed my eyes, felt the pain build like a demon, possessing me, hip and chest and head, building, and then another groan, higher in pitch, and hands, these ones cool and deft, and a brief flurry of angry sounds followed by a sharp jab in my upper arm, and then a wavering sensation as if the room were a celluloid film beginning to melt in front of the projectionist’s bulb before it rippled and faded from view.

Back in the darkening cellar, I was sick again, this time into a canvas bucket I found in my hands. The clang of bolts echoed long in the cellar, leaving me on the cold and lonely stones in the darkness. When the echoes had faded, it was immensely quiet, apart from my laboured breathing and the heavy reverberations within my skull. I patted around me until I came across the straw pallet, moved over to it, and tried to grasp something that was me in the maelstrom. All I came up with was, appropriately enough, Job.

“I have made my bed in the darkness,” I said aloud, and began to giggle dangerously. After a while, I put my head down, and I wept.

I was not at the time certain what He had injected me with, but it was similar enough to the painkillers I had known that I thought it might be morphine, or more probably the stronger derivative, heroin. His plan gained dimension in my mind: sure signs of drug use, the marks of the needle in my arm, the drug in my bloodstream. However, the same doubts as before still applied: Were these signs to be used to discredit some testimony of mine, or to explain my death? A third possibility occurred to me: Might He possibly believe that by a systematic exposure to heroin I would become inescapably addicted to the stuff, permanently corrupted to his nefarious purposes? Even in my muzzy state this seemed to me sheer romantic claptrap, a Victorian fancy akin to white slavery, but it was just possible that He might believe it. I should encourage the idea in his mind, I decided.

All this took some time to sort itself out. At first, I just lay and shivered and was sick again, into the bucket, but after a time my reasoning faculties began to return to me, although my body felt very peculiar.

Opiates leave one with a profound disinclination to do much of anything. It is not exactly difficult to go through the motions of life, or to think (other than the first half hour or so following an injection), but it is difficult to want to move, or eat, or think. One feels so very satisfied with life, the only improvement is actual slumber.

My only hope of salvation lay in my will, lay in contradicting the almost overwhelming desire to sit, and nod, and sleep, in refusing to submit to Lethe’s seductive charms. I staggered to my feet and demanded that my disinterested limbs carry me around the walls of my prison, once, and again, and again, until I began to feel that my legs were my own again. The movement helped. Finding my way deliberately in the darkness helped. Thinking about the number of steps in a circuit and the number of circuits in a mile helped. Thirty circuits to the mile. I did two miles, ending at a jog trot and barely touching the walls, so that by the time I quit, my right shoulder hurt where I had scraped the wall a few times, and one of my toes was bleeding, but the soles of my feet knew the smoothness of the stones at the door, the slight rise that indicated the northeast corner (the door, I had decided, for the sake of argument, was to the south) and, had I been dropped down into the room, I could have differentiated the buckle in the stones beside my bedding from the one at the western wall.

I dropped onto my mat, feeling strange still, but not impossibly so, and drank some water and made myself eat, and felt the myriad of cells in my body return slowly to equilibrium.

The gears in my mind began to mesh again, and I sat back against the wall, and I thought.

I thought about Margery Childe’s sermon on light and love. I thought about Miles Fitzwarren and what his true nature must be to inspire such loyalty in Veronica.

I thought of the odd and long-forgotten fever I had run all those years ago after the accident, the muscle cramps and the illness that had seized me after the healing was well under way and the medications were withdrawn.

I thought of Margery, and wondered if it were possible that she spent her love on this man, my captor; whether she quenched the thirst she had spoken of with this clever, brutal man who so obviously enjoyed causing pain.

I wondered about the rapture of mystics and the cost of that ecstasy, and how it compared to the everyday passion of simple human beings.

I thought of my early childhood, and of what my mother would think, seeing her daughter in the cellar, and how my father would rage, and how my brother would calculate methods of escape.

I thought of Patrick and Tillie, until the smell of Tillie’s chicken cooking overcame the stench of paraffin.

I thought of Mrs Hudson, and her scones, and about how she had taught me to arrange my hair.

I drank again, deeply, ate half the bread, and found to my pleasure that a small and withered apple had been added to my cache, along with a second canvas bucket containing several inches of cold water and a scrap of face flannel. I ate the apple down to the stem, made good use of the water, and I began to feel like myself, strong and purified.

Two hours later, my captor returned, and it all began again.

Such was the pattern of my life for a long, long nine days, begun that Sunday and repeated some four dozen times. It became difficult to keep track of time. I knew just how many injections I had been given, from the growing pile of chips and stones I placed as markers in the southeast corner, but after a dozen had accumulated, I thought that my captor’s visits were becoming more frequent, from approximately every six hours the first days down to five, or even four.

There was no telling the hours. My natural time sense, normally quite clear, was muddied along with everything else by the increasingly frequent and, I thought, increasingly powerful doses of the drug. Occasionally, his thugs brought with them definitive odours—eggs and bacon on the breath meant it was morning outside; beer defined the latter end of the day—but it was uncertain, and the variations in my own meals—the apple was sometimes a tough carrot, an onion, three dried apricots, twice a knob of cheese, and several times a cold boiled egg—followed no pattern.

Only once was I aware of the passage of time, and that was after some two dozen stones had accumulated, and it came to me with conviction and bleak resignation that in the meeting room in Oxford gowned men and women were coming together, and I was not there. After that, it no longer seemed so vital to keep the clock in my head ticking. It became more of an effort to do my sixty circuits after each injection, to keep my hair bound and my body clean. It became less of a pretence to hold my arm still for Him to inject me. Had He ever let down his guard and arrived without his three thugs, I should surely have attacked Him, but He did not, and I did not. The bread that was left for me soon lost all small interest it once had had, and I lived on water and the extras.

The only variations were in the food I ate and the thoughts I occupied myself with. At first, I drove myself to mental gymnastics, verb forms and recitations, mathematical problems and exercises in logic. I doubt that lasted more than a couple of days, however, before the engine began to run down. After that, I thought of many disjointed things. I recalled with crystalline clarity the first meal I had taken with Margery, the robe she wore. I tasted the honey wine Holmes had served me on a spring day in another lifetime. I thought of the way Watson beheaded his boiled eggs, and Lestrade drinking his beer, and the tea I had sipped with the maths tutor who had tried to kill me. Eventually, hunger, too, passed, and I thought mostly of Holmes.

Of Holmes, whom I loved. Stripped of dignity, sight, and probably life itself, I was stripped as well of self-delusions. I loved him, I had loved him since I met him, and I doubted not that I should love him with my dying breath.

But, was I “in love” with him? Ridiculous thought, instantly dismissed. The doubts and frenzies of a grand passion had by their very nature to wither under the cold, illuminating light of daily knowledge.

Love, though. Comfortable, interested, concerned, reciprocal love; was that perhaps a different matter?

And what rôle the physical? What place the body’s passion?

I could never, I knew then, lose myself “in love.” Margery had accused me of coldness, and she was right, but she was also wrong: For me, for always, the paramount organ of passion was the mind. Unnatural, unbalanced, perhaps, but it was true: Without intellect, there could be no love.

Since that moment on top of the hansom when the last lingering bubble of romanticism had burst, I had been looking for an alternative: freedom, academia, a régime of women.

Oddly enough, the very considerations that had made marriage impossible for him were mirrored in my own being: a rabidly independent nature, an impatience with lesser minds, total unconventionality, and the horror of being saddled with someone who would need cosseting and protection—the characteristics, come to that, that would have made it difficult for me to join Margery Childe, even without the rest of it.

Perhaps, though, the resemblance was not odd. Holmes was a part of me. Because of my age when we met, neither of us had erected our normal defences, and by the time I came to womanhood, it was too late: He had already let me in under his guard, and I him. Holmes was a part of me, and to imagine myself “in love” with him was to imagine myself becoming passionately enamoured of my arm or the muscles in my back. Yet in the same vein, it is not a part of Judaism to practice bodily mortification, to deny God’s gift of a physical body. One accepts and appreciates this act of creation; one loves one’s body, clumsy, inconvenient, and untidy as it may be. It was in this sense that I could love Holmes: Irritating as he could be, he was a part of me, and yes, I loved him.

Neither of us were domestic creatures. Holmes, by his nature and by the demands of his profession, had remained unfettered by domesticity, had never knowingly given a hostage to fate. The only woman he had allowed himself to love had been as jealous of her independence as he: Irene Adler had loved him for a time and then sent him away. And what of Mary Russell, a young woman as violently opinionated and as fiercely protective of her freedom as Holmes himself, and as competent as he at looking after herself?

It was, intellectually speaking, a pretty problem, and it occupied me for several days. By this manner, continuously interrupted by drugs and sleep and increasing befuddlement, I came tentatively to a point of balance with Holmes in his absence.

When thirty chips had gathered in the corner, I became aware of a new element in the cycle: anticipation. In another day or two, it degenerated into overt restlessness before his entrance, and there was distressingly little acting in the eagerness with which I stood, blinking and cringing at the light, to greet Him.

In the end, there came a third state, between the sweet horror of the poison flooding my veins and the body’s craving for the next, a state of—I can only use the Christian concept— grace. For a brief time as the drug ebbed, I was granted a few minutes’ respite. I ate, and to my mild surprise, one day I found myself speaking aloud the traditional Hebrew blessing over bread. After that, I used the time deliberately to do those things that returned me to myself. It was my nerves’ calm eye, between the gale of quivering and the wind shift to restlessness, and after I had found it, Holmes was usually there, as a companion, beside me in the black and endless night. I strode up and down in my cellar, scorning the walls and avoiding the pillars as if I walked in the clear light of day, debating and arguing and reviewing the moves of chess games with Holmes, reciting psalms and the ritual prayers taught me by my mother, biding my time beneath a veneer of madness.