A Monstrous Regiment of Women

That silly demonstration seemed to convince Holmes that I was at the ragged edge, either physically or mentally. On reaching my flat, he insisted that I undress, bath, and take Mrs Q’s breakfast in bed, where he sat scowling horribly at me until I had pushed the last of it down. I was taken aback, as Holmes normally treated my infirmities as his own—that is, he ignored them. Perhaps, as Q had hinted, the previous days had been as hard on him as they had been on me, if for different reasons. I looked at him over the rim of my cup and dutifully recited all I had done and found within the Temple buildings. He sat on a pink satin boudoir chair, his labourer’s boots propped on the foot of my Brobdingnagian bed, his fingers steepled, his eyes shut. I reached an end, then waited, but there was no response. I suspected he was asleep. I put the cup noisily on the tray, and his eyelids flashed open.

“I never asked you, Holmes. How did you find me… in that house in Essex?”

He leant forward and busied himself with the coffeepot, and I thought at first he was not going to answer. However, renewing his scowl and transferring its focus to his cup, he said. “My career has been sprinkled with glittering examples of incompetence, Russell, normally buried under the verbiage by Watson, but rarely has my stupidity had such potential for truly calamitous disaster. I did not even realise you were missing until Friday morning.”

“When I didn’t show up for the presentation. But didn’t Duncan miss me sooner than that? We had planned to spend Wednesday together—Holmes! You went there, to the presentation?”

“I was there, properly gowned—my own gown, too, mind you, not from a costume box. I walked into the hall, to find utter panic, of the Oxford variety: tight voices, careful polysyllables, a certain amount of wringing of hands. Margery Childe was there, too, incidentally. I found your colleague Duncan and he controlled himself long enough to tell me that no one had seen you that week. I sought out Miss Childe and she confirmed that you had not come to the Temple during the week, as you had halfway promised, but she had assumed that you were busy. After your landlady assured me that you had indeed not been in your rooms for nine days, it took me the remainder of Friday to confirm that you had been on the late Saturday train and to assemble an investigatory team, half of Saturday to locate a stationmaster who remembered a party of drunken Londoners, which included a totally unconscious woman, and then the trail went dead. Your abductor took to the minor roads in a Ford automobile, and the number of farmers who remembered hearing a Ford go by in the wee hours of Sunday, in opposite ends of a county at once, could not be believed. By Monday, I was reduced to quartering the countryside, with—”

He broke off at the sound of the telephone. I obediently allowed Q to answer it, then waited until he came to the doorway to pick up the instrument at the side of my bed (installed there, no doubt, for the convenience of ladies who sleep until noon). When I put it to my ear, all I heard was a wild gabble of male voices.

“Stop!” I ordered. “I cannot understand you. Who is this?”

“Miss Russell, oh Miss Russell, it’s Eddie here, she’s off, is Mr ’Olmes there, he said I should ring if she came-out onto the street, my cousin’s following her, but he said to tell you and Mr ’Olmes, is he there—”

“Eddie, where are you?” I said loudly. Holmes went rigid.

“Around the corner from the Temple building, miss, she’s making for the river, Billy’s on her tail, she and that maid of hers came out and had a blooming row and she ended up shoving the old grouch on her backside in the street, and then she just took off.”

“Stay where you are, Eddie. We’ll be there in five minutes.” I slammed the receiver down, cracking off some of the gilt decoration, and threw myself out of bed. Holmes was already at the door.

“Russell, you’re in no condition to—”

“Oh do shut up, Holmes. Fetch us a taxi,” I said, and began to remove the few clothes I had on. He made haste to disappear.

Instead of a taxi, I found Q behind the wheel of the car, Holmes beside him. I jumped in and the car was moving away before the door had shut. We were soon driving past the Temple, deserted on the Sunday morning, and around the corner a lanky sixteen-year-old waved us down from the door of a newsagent’s. I held the door for him, and he climbed cautiously in. He bobbed his head at me and greeted Holmes with the same excitement he had demonstrated on the telephone.

“Mornin’, Mr ’Olmes, sir. Billy said he was doin’ just like you said. There’s a string of us left behind where she goes. He’s stayin’ with her,” and then he began to repeat himself in slightly different words, several times. There were indeed a string of them, the youngest a girl of six, the oldest a gaffer bent over a cane, each of whom we gathered up into the car. I had shaken the hands of eight of Billy’s multitudinous relatives when Holmes’ sharp order came from the front seat.

“Down!”

Ten of us collapsed onto the floor and seat while the car drifted sedately past first Billy and his current cousin and then Margery Childe, turned into a side street, and pulled up to the kerb. Holmes and I extricated ourselves.

“Q,” I said, “I want you to return these good folk to their homes. If you can find a tea shop open, give them breakfast first. I’ll reimburse you.” Despite protests, I closed the door firmly in all those faces and Q drove off. Holmes and I pressed ourselves into a doorway and waited for Margery to pass on the adjoining street; then we walked out to intercept Billy and tell him to drop back.

She was making for the river, that was clear. She looked back twice, but both times Holmes seemed somehow to anticipate her, and she did not see us. Other than those two backwards glances, there was no attempt at subterfuge, no urge to take to wheeled transport, and she went straight south to Tower Bridge. We followed her over the greasy, cold river, staying well back until she had gone off of it going east, when we trotted to catch her up. She took to the dockyards on the south bank of the river, the dirty warrens where the sun never penetrates, and we alternately strolled and sprinted in her wake.

We were, it seemed, nearly to Greenwich when, hurrying up to a corner, we peered forward and caught the glimpse of a disappearing cloak.

“Gone to earth, by God. I thought she’d walk to Dover,” muttered Holmes. “You stay here. Follow if she reappears. Drop crumbs or something. I’ll place Billy on the corner back there, in case of a back door.” He faded into the background.

A conscientious bobby can be one of the most irritating things on the face of London. One such found me after less than five minutes, took a look at my young man’s clothing and long henna hair, and began to give me a hard time. I took my eye off the street, fixed him with a condescending stare, and spoke down my nose in my most imperious of plummy tones.

“My good man, I should inform you that you are speaking to Margaret Farthingale Hall. Lady Margaret Hall. What you see before you is the tail end of a long and not terribly amusing party that Jeffie Norton—the American film star?—held yesterday night. A costume party, as you can see. I suppose I ought to be gratified that you find my costume so intriguing, but I am beginning to find the game just the least bit tedious, and I fear the costume is proving less exotic than I had anticipated. My escort for the evening, when last I saw him, had the more interesting costume, a nineties number with feathers and sequins—too, too Folies Bergère, don’t you know? You haven’t seen him, I don’t suppose? No, that’s too much to hope for. Knowing him, he is waiting around the corner until you leave. He’s a dear boy, but so conservative without champagne to keep up his nerve. So, if you’ll just run along, I shall see if I can coax him out of the woodwork.” I turned a dismissive back.

An older constable might well have persisted, but I had intimidated this one into believing the voice and the attitude rather than the clothing, and after issuing a stern warning, he left me to my vigil.

After ten minutes, I was beginning to wonder how long my constable’s rounds took him. After fifteen, Holmes’ head appeared unexpectedly, protruding from the doorway into which Margery had gone. I hurried forward and slipped inside.

There was a body just inside the door, bound and gagged.

“The only guard?” I whispered.

“There was another at the back. Help me carry this one out of the way.”

I picked up his feet, then nearly dropped him as I saw his features.

“Holmes, this was the other man from the house in Essex.”

“Good,” was his only remark; but he showed no gentleness when we dumped the body in an adjoining office room.

“She’s upstairs,” Holmes whispered. “Second floor, by the sound of it. The place seems almost deserted.”

“Perhaps they’ve all gone to church.”

The building was a warehouse, which seemed to contain little but great coils of rope and bales of rag. Two lorries stood near the gates, but as a business, it seemed none too prosperous. There were voices coming from upstairs, wordless but angry. As we went carefully up, they sorted themselves out into a man’s rumble and a woman’s shrill, and closer still, I knew them both. The woman was Margery, although I’d never heard her sound like this. The male voice was that of Claude Franklin: my captor; Margery’s husband.

I flushed, hearing him, and felt abruptly how very ill and tired I was. I must have sagged slightly, because Holmes’ hand was on my elbow.

“Take the revolver,” he said, holding the thing out to me. I reached for it automatically, then pushed it back into his hand.

“You keep it, Holmes,” I whispered. “I’d shoot my own foot.”

He slid it back under his belt and we began to creep up the stairs until we were on a level with the arguing voices. They didn’t hear any of the creaks the old stairs made, and there seemed to be no other people in the building.

“—could you possibly think I wouldn’t find out, Claude?” Margery was saying. “I suppose I’ve been incredibly stupid, but when I heard Friday that Mary was held captive, and then her will— That’s why you’ve been away, all this time, isn’t it? Were you planning on… Would you actually have killed her? For her money?” Her voice rose with incredulity.

“You stupid bitch. Why do you think I married you? Why do you think I wait around in this godforsaken hell-hole every Thursday night? For your bloody conversation?”

Had we heard any movements from the room during the lengthy silence that followed, we should have moved to intervene, but there was nothing but silence. Finally Margery spoke, calmly, in a voice I’d heard her use during our lessons.

“That boy with the knife; he was from you, wasn’t he? I thought for a moment he might be, that you’d decided the beating wasn’t enough, but I couldn’t believe it. But he was. And he died. Did you arrange that, too? You must have. You wanted me dead so you could have the Temple’s money. My God, what kind of an animal are you?”

I glanced at Holmes, and knew that the look of strain on his face was duplicated on my own. “He’s going to kill her,” I whispered.

“That may be what she’s after,” he said.

“Which means,” Margery continued, slowly putting together an incomprehensible picture in her mind, “that you would have killed Mary, once you heard about her will. Why are you laughing?”

“Jesus, you really are stupid.”

“Why?”

“She didn’t write a will. I had it written for her.”

This silence was shorter, as if she were becoming accustomed to a new and foreign mechanism. “You decided to kill me for my money. She saved my life. You then kidnapped her, forged a will, and would have killed her if the police hadn’t found her. I assume you would have then made another effort to have me killed. You aren’t human, Claude. Your own wife, in order to inherit—” She stopped, and when she spoke again her voice, for the first time, was low with horror. “Iris. My God, you killed Iris. Is that what gave you the idea? Her leaving me some money?”

“Margery,” he said, with what could only be affection in his voice, “I’ve been putting this together for months now, since last summer. Long before I married you.”

“Delia?” She groaned. “Oh, no, no.”

“Look,” he said, and I heard the sound of a chair scraping back. “I have to leave. I don’t want to hurt you, Margery. I liked you, I really did. It’s all gone to hell now, anyway. A year’s worth of work and that Russell female will have the police on me, damn her eyes. I’ll have to lie low for a couple of years at least—I could never risk making a claim on your estate.”

“I’m not going to let you walk out of here, Claude.”

“You don’t have any choice, Margery.”

“If you shoot me, Claude, you will die.”

Conviction rang out in her voice, not fear, but Holmes and I were already moving, and we hit the door a split second before the shot rang out. The old wood crashed open before our joined weight and we entered fast, Holmes high with the gun in his hand and me rolling low, as pretty a joint effect as if we had rehearsed it. Franklin was standing behind a heavy oak desk, with the gun still pointing at Margery. He brought it around and got off two quick shots that overlapped with a third from behind me. I came to my feet in a crouch, in time to see Franklin stagger and go down. There was a swish and a heavy thud behind the desk. Holmes, holding the gun out, took three quick steps to the side, and then his jaw dropped and he gave vent to a brief oath.

Franklin had vanished.

I stared briefly at the floor, empty but for a smear of blood, before I gathered my wits and turned to Margery. Holmes began to run his hands over the floor, feeling for the hidden panel.

“How is she?” he asked over his shoulder.

“She’ll do. It went through her below the shoulder joint, but it looks clean.”

“There’s no hope here,” he said, getting to his feet. “He bolted it from the back.”

“I should have known there would be a secret passage here, too.”

“Would have made no difference if we’d known,” he said briefly. “Can you leave her?”

“Yes.”

We thundered down the stairs, leaving all doors open, circled the corner at a run, and swept straight into the arms of the constable.

“What’s all this now?” he said predictably. Holmes dodged his hands and flew on; I danced out of the constable’s reach.

“There’s a woman on the second floor wounded; she needs medical attention. We’re after the man who shot her. Can’t wait.” He was, naturally enough, not pleased, and he followed heavily on my heels. Unfortunately for Billy, Holmes’ assistant chose that moment to join the chase, and he was captured while I continued, despite leaden legs, to gain slowly on Holmes. I finally caught him up when he ran out of land; I found him standing beneath a crane on a pier surrounded by coal barges. He pointed out into the river, chest heaving and momentarily speechless.

A small skiff with its oars shipped, empty and drifting free, was being pulled by the current from the side of a sleek launch that lay slightly upriver. As we watched, the boat coughed and emitted a ragged burst of smoke. I looked grimly about for a boat we could steal, but Holmes threw off his coat with determination and bent to his bootlaces. Arguing all the while, I began to do the same.

“I see a boat up on the next wharf, Holmes. We can have the police telegraph ahead and have him cut off before he reaches the sea. Holmes, we can’t hope to swim it in time.”

“You will swim nowhere. In your current condition, you’d probably drown, and then where should I be?”

“Of course I’m going with you,” I said, and bent to my second boot. My vision faltered for a moment and then recovered. Holmes stood still at my side, watching my efforts.

“You’re not,” he said, and then something immensely hard hit my head and I collapsed instantaneously into the darkness.

I came to in stages, as if I were hitching myself up the side of a cliff. I finally gained the top and raised my spinning head from the boards that stank of tar and horse dung and rotted fish. I had been stunned only for a minute or two, for the launch was still there, running smoothly now and beginning to turn downstream as its mooring came free. A stocky figure with black hair moved back down the deck towards the wheel. As the boat continued to turn, a second figure came into view, a long, thin man clinging like a spider to the side of the hull, his lower half in the water. The stocky figure walked by the second one without noticing, and the instant he was past, Holmes hauled himself up and over onto the deck and lunged at him. He was a split second too late, or too slow; perhaps Franklin was simply too fast. Holmes did manage to get his hand on Franklin’s gun, and the two figures stood grappling on the deck while the boat continued to turn lazily and the other boats working the river came and went unawares. With the boat facing downstream and the two men invisible, there came a shot across the water, and another, but when the launch turned again, they were still there, still upright and grappling. Franklin was strong, but Holmes was taller, and the barrel of the revolver was now facing the deck. A third shot echoed across the water, and then the boat turned again, only now there was a sailing barge in its way, heavily laden with horse dung. I heard shouts as the crew tried to warn the launch off, but it was too late. The launch hit her broadsides.

I never knew if the third bullet punctured the launch’s petrol tank, or whether something ruptured the tank when the smaller boat hit the barge, but when I looked at the launch in the instant following the collision, the smoke from its stack had already changed character. In another instant there were sparks coming out, and then flames. Soon there was a dull crump; in thirty seconds, the launch was engulfed in flames, and the voices of the barge crew could be heard even above the roaring in my ears. They succeeded in pushing her off with poles and holding her there.

It only took two or three minutes for her to burn to the water, and then she sank.

I had not realised I was on my feet and at the very edge of the pier until my knees collapsed beneath me and left me sitting on a great mound of rope, watching the sudden scurry of activity before me, men on boats of all kinds, shouts, people running, cursing, gesticulating, a police boat. The men on the barge were standing in a row, staring down into the water over their side, subdued, with the attitude of those who have witnessed death.

I stared at the fragments of burning planks and unidentifiable smouldering things, the remnants of what had been an expensive launch, and I felt nothing. There was nothing inside me to feel. How curious. I watched the boats gather, waited for the horror to overwhelm me, waited for the urge to fling myself howling into the river, or into insanity, but I felt nothing but emptiness.

After a long, long time, a stir came in the water below my feet. I looked down and saw floating there a white oval topped by a scrawl of iron grey and coated with scum and débris. It spoke to me in the drawl of a Cockney.

“Give us an ’and, laidee.”

“Holmes?” I whispered. I knelt. I put a hand down to the water and hauled back a dripping, scorched caricature of a man in shirtsleeves, barefoot, missing half the hair on the back of his head, covered in oil and filth, and exposed to half the diseases of Europe. When he was upright, I flung my arms around him and put my mouth to his. For a long minute, we were one.

Rational thought returned in a flood. I pulled back, and I hit him—nothing fancy, just a good, traditional, lady’s open-handed slap that had all the muscles of my arm behind it. It rattled his teeth and nearly sent him back into the river. I glared furiously at him.

“Never, never do that again!”

“Russell! I did not—”

“Knock me out and leave me behind—Holmes, how could you?”

“There was no time for a discussion,” he pointed out.

“That is no excuse,” I said illogically. “Never even think of doing something like that again!”

“You’d have done the same, if you’d thought of it.”

“No! Well, probably not.”

“I do apologise for making your decision for you, Russell.”

“I want your word that you’ll never do anything like that again.”

“Very well, I promise: Next time, I will allow the villain to escape while we stage a debate on who is to do what.”

“Good. Thank you.” He stood fingering his jaw; I reached up to explore the knot on my skull. “My head hurts. What did you hit me with?”

“My hand. I think I’ve broken a bone in it,” he added thoughtfully, and, turning his attentions to that part, he flexed it gingerly.

“Serves you right.” I reached out and brushed a strand of rotted straw from the side of his face, peeled a scrap of oil-soaked newspaper from the charred remnant of his collar. He pulled a dripping handkerchief out of his trouser pocket, wrung it out, and unfolded it, then ran it over his face and hands and hair. He held it out and glanced at its transformation into a mechanic’s rag, then dropped it over the side of the pier and turned back to me, his face unreadable.

“A bath and some inoculations are called for, Holmes,” I said, or rather, started to say, because on the third word he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around me and his mouth came down on mine with all the force that the side of his hand had used earlier on my skull, and with much the same effect on my knees.

(How could he have known? How could he know my body better than I did myself? How could he foresee that a thumbnail run up my spine would—)

“By God,” he murmured throatily into my hair. “I’ve wanted to do that since the moment I laid eyes upon you.”

(—arch my body against his, close my eyes, stop the breath in my throat? That his lips on the inside of my wrist and on the hollow of my jaw would concentrate my entire being, every cell in my body—)

“Holmes,” I objected when I could draw breath, “when you first saw me, you thought I was a boy.”

(—on that point of joining? That his mouth at the corner of mine was so excruciating, so tantalising, that it would arouse me more—)

“And don’t think that didn’t cause me some minutes of deep consternation,” he said.

(—than a direct kiss, would ring in my body the desire for more?)

When he held me away from him, it was fortunate he left his hands on my shoulders. He spoke as if continuing a discussion.

“You do realise how potentially disastrous this whole thing is?” he said. “I am old and set in my ways. I will give you little affection and a great deal of irritation, though heaven knows you’re aware of how difficult I can be.”

“And you smoke foul tobacco and get down in the dumps for days and mess about with chemicals, but I don’t keep a bull pup.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Holmes, is this a proposal of marriage?”

He blinked in surprise.

“Does it need proposing?” he asked. “Would it please some obscure part of your makeup if I were to get down on one knee? I shall, if you wish, although my rheumatism is a bit troublesome just at the moment.”

“Your rheumatism troubles you when convenient, Holmes,” I remarked, “and I think that if you’re going to propose marriage to me, you’d best have both your feet under you. Very well, I accept, on the aforementioned condition that you never again try to keep me from harm by hitting me on the skull, or by trickery. I’ll not marry a man I can’t trust at my back.”

“I give you my solemn vow, Russell, to try to control my chivalrous impulses. If, that is, you agree that there may come times when—due entirely to my greater experience, I hasten to say—I am forced to give you a direct order.”

“If it is given as to an assistant, and not as to a female of the species, I shall obey.”

These complicated negotiations of our marriage contract thus completed, we faced each other as a newly affiancéd couple, reached out, and shook hands firmly.