The Mary Russell Companion Page 12

  “You must help me,” the stranger said. For some peculiar reason, my ears added a slight lisp to his pronunciation, which was not actually there.

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” I began to say, and then my eyes went back to the darkness on his temple that in the shadowy doorway I had taken for hair oil. “You are hurt!” I exclaimed, then turned to shout over my shoulder, “Holmes!”

  “You must come with me,” the man demanded, his command as urgent as the fist on the wood had been. Then to my confusion he added a name I had not heard in nearly five years. “Amir,” he murmured. One shoulder drifted sideways, to prop itself against the door frame.

  I stared at him, moving to one side so the interior light might fall more brightly on his features. I knew that face: beardless as it was, its missing front teeth restored, the hair at its sides conventionally trimmed, and framed by an incongruous suit and an impossible hat, it was nonetheless the face of a man with whom I had travelled in close proximity and uneasy intimacy for a number of weeks. I had worked with him, shed blood with him. I was, in fact, responsible for that narrow scar on his wrist.

  “Ali?” I said in disbelief. “Ali Hazr?”

  His mouth came open as if to speak, but instead he stumbled, as if the door frame had abruptly given way; his right hand fluttered up toward his belt, but before his fingers could reach his waistcoat, his eyes lost their focus, then rolled back in his head, his knees turned to water, and fourteen and a half stone of utterly limp intruder collapsed forward into my arms.

  (For more background and a longer excerpt, see this book’s page on the Laurie R. King website.)

  The Game

  Beginner’s Luck, (Kimberly Pollard)

  Russellisms

  Where Holmes learnt to arrange a woman’s hair I never knew–never wished to ask–but he was remarkably proficient at it.

  **

  A sari is not a carefree sort of garment.

  **

  The pig looked the size of a bear, murderous little eyes over a cluster of curved razors; I half expected the thing to rip out my throat.

  All the world’s stage: places Russell goes in this Memoir

  England: Sussex, London, Kent, Dover

  France: Calais, Paris, Marseilles

  Suez Canal; Aden

  India: Bombay, Delhi, Simla, Khalka, Khanpur

  (See the Maps chapter for details, particularly of the princely states of India.)

  Laurie’s Remarks

  Six brief years after he introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world, Conan Doyle killed him. His Last Bow describes how Holmes tumbled into the Reichenbach Falls, sacrificing himself to save the world from the wickedness of Professor Moriarty.

  Holmes and Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls

  For ten long years, the world mourned, until finally Conan Doyle revealed that Holmes had in fact lived, and returned to London (scaring poor Watson into a faint) in the spring of 1894. During what Sherlockians call “The Great Hiatus” (not ten years, but three, from 1891 to 1894), as Holmes recounts to Watson:

  I traveled for two years in Tibet...and amused myself by visiting Lhasa, and spending some days with the head Lama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend.

  William King with the 13th Dalai Lama, 1922 (see Addendum 2)

  This was years before Tibet was opened by the Francis Younghusband expedition in 1904. Before then, Westerners were not permitted in the holy city of Lhasa…but Holmes was travelling in disguise.

  Imagine the intoxication of freedom, after years of keeping his nose down on the trail of the criminal world. Imagine India after the cold, grey Victorian crowds of London. The smells, the sounds, the texture of life—Holmes would have been swept along the arterial flow of the Grand Trunk Road, that river of humanity flowing across the north of India from Calcutta to Peshawar. On that road, he would have met merchants and thieves, horse dealers and merchants, British soldiers and Bengali babus and… spies.

  Grand Trunk Road

  Espionage permeates The Game as it permeates the north of India—and has since before Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay. Kipling’s Kim, written at the end of the nineteenth century, concerns a half-British lad pulled between joyous native freedom and the satisfactions of living up to one’s duty; torn between his beloved Tibetan red-hat lama and the English spymaster, “Colonel Creighton”, who draws him into the greater world (by way of “survey” work—based on that of Thomas Montgomerie, whose “pundits” paced off distance with their prayer beads).

  Thomas Montgomerie and “pundit” Nayin Singh of the Indian Survey

  Is it extraordinary to imagine that Holmes’ path might have crossed that of the boy Kim and his lama, on their way to Tibet?

  Conan Doyle knew Kipling, and his work. All the same, it does not seem to have occurred to Watson, or Conan Doyle, or indeed to Rudyard Kipling himself, that Sherlock Holmes might have encountered young Kimball O’Hara, Creighton’s apprentice into the Great Game.

  Excerpt

  "What has happened, Mycroft?" Holmes asked, drawing my attention back to the until-now overlooked fact that, if Mycroft, in his condition, had been consulted on a matter by whichever government, it had to have struck someone as serious indeed.

  By way of answer, the big man reached inside the folds of his voluminous silken dressing-gown and pulled out a flat, oilskin-wrapped packet about three inches square. He put it onto the linen cloth and pushed it across the table in our direction. "This came into my hands ten hours ago."

  Holmes retrieved the grimy object, turned it over, and began to pick apart the careful tucks. The oilskin had clearly been folded in on itself for some time, but parted easily, revealing a smaller object, a leather packet long permeated by sweat, age, and what appeared to be blood. This seemed to have been sewn shut at least two or three times in its life. The most recent black threads had been cut fairly recently, to judge by their looseness; no doubt that explained the easy parting of the oilskin cover. Holmes continued unfolding the leather.

  Inside lay three much-folded documents, so old the edges were worn soft, their outside segments stained dark by long contact with the leather. I screwed up my face in anticipation of catastrophe as Holmes began to unfold the first one, but the seams did not actually part, not completely at any rate. He eased the page open, placing a clean tea-spoon at its head and an unused knife at its foot to keep it flat, and slid it over for me to examine as he set to work on the second.

  The stained document before me seemed to be a soldier’s clearance certificate, and although the name, along with most of the words, was almost completely obscured by time and salt, it looked to belong to a K- something O’Meara, or O’Mara. The date was unreadable, and could as easily have been the 1700s as the past century—assuming they issued clearance certificates in the 1700s. I turned without much hope to the second document. This was on parchment, and although it appeared even older than the first and had been refolded no less than four times into different shapes, it had been in the center position inside the leather pouch, and was not as badly stained. It concerned the same soldier, whose last name now appeared to be O’Hara, and represented his original enlistment. I could feel Mycroft’s eyes on me, but I was no more enlightened than I had been by the certificate representing this unknown Irishman’s departure from Her Majesty’s service.

  Holmes had the third document unfolded, using the care he might have given a first-century papyrus. He made no attempt to weigh down the edges of this one, merely let the soft, crude paper rest where it would lest it dissolve into a heap of jigsaw squares along the scored folds. I craned my head to see the words; Holmes, however, just glanced at the pages, seeming to lose interest as soon as he had freed them. He sat aside and let me look to my heart’s content.

  This was a birth certificate, for a child born in some place called Ferozepore in the year 1875. His father’s name clarified t
he difficulties of the K-something from the other forms: Kimball.

  I looked up, hoping for an explanation, only to find both sets of grey Holmes eyes locked expectantly onto me. How long, I wondered, before I stopped feeling like some slow student facing her disappointed headmistress? "I’m sorry," I began, and then I paused, my mind catching at last on a faint sense of familiarity: Kimball. And O’Hara. Add to that a town that could only be in India. . . . No; oh, no—the book was just a children’s adventure tale. "I’m sorry," I repeated, only where before it had connoted apology, this time it was tinged with outrage. "This doesn’t have anything to do with Kim, does it? The Kipling book?"

  "You’ve read it?" Mycroft asked.

  "Of course I’ve read it."

  "Good, that saves some explaining. I believe this to be his amulet case."

  "He’s real, then? Kipling’s boy?"

  "As real as I am," said Sherlock Holmes.

  (For more background and a longer excerpt, see this book’s page on the Laurie R. King website.)

  Locked Rooms

  Russellisms

  “Why does it not surprise me that the sound of a pistol would herald the arrival of my wife?” Holmes drawled.

  **

  The American retrieved his wallet, looked at the open hand, and slowly extended his own. “The name’s Hammett, Dashiell Hammett. And I guess we might as well have a drink.”

  **

  “Come Russell - the game’s afoot!”

  “He actually says that?”

  “Only to annoy me.”

  All the world’s stage: places Russell goes in this Memoir

  Japan: Tokyo

  Hawaii

  California: San Francisco, Los Angeles

  (See the Maps chapter for details.)

  Laurie’s Remarks

  Q: When is a reliable figure not reliable?

  A: When she is too close to the subject.

  One night, Laurie R. King had a dream: I was giving a tour of a house—my house, a dark, wood-built, many-leveled structure among trees. I showed my guests one room, then another, and the open spaces between them, but all the while I knew that there were rooms that I was not showing them, large, lovely rooms hidden behind invisible doors.

  The dream is not the book. The dream is not even in the book, but Laurie’s images of hidden rooms worked itself into the fabric of Russell’s story. The dreams that have plagued Russell since leaving India, the firm memories of her past that begin to soften, the trust in her own mind that begins to….

  A memoir told by an unreliable narrator is tricky. After all, the reader knows only what that narrator chooses to tell. If she is keeping things hidden, either inadvertently or deliberately, how is the reader to know who to trust?

  Sometimes one needs to hear an alternative version of the narrator’s truth, one that echoes the central version, but in another key, its notes forming a counterpoint. As a memoirist, Mary Russell has sufficient self-awareness to anticipate the problem, with this book at least. Thus, when she describes an event, she then permits Holmes to add his own, often very different, description. What she may not anticipate is how the reader begins to suspect some trouble deep within the young woman long before Russell herself does.

  First person ought to be the most intimate form of storytelling, but in fact, it is oddly distancing: How does one come to know a person while looking through their eyes? Even a mirror reverses reality.

  And to add to the confusion, Locked Rooms blends all sorts of real-life people and verified events with those previously unknown to the world. Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, did visit San Francisco in 1923. (A plaque at 2151 Sacramento Street declares that it was “occupied by” Doyle, which is true, although the occupation was brief. More intriguing, the house is a stone’s throw away from Russell’s childhood home, just across Lafayette Park.) Later, Doyle did write a book about his world tour promoting Spiritualism (Our American Adventure). It was even published during the time Russell and Holmes were in San Francisco, when it was reviewed in the Chronicle. But if Sherlock Holmes was in San Francisco to read the review, how on earth did the newspapers not catch on?

  Arthur Conan Doyle plaque, San Francisco

  Similarly, Dashiell Hammett was certainly living in San Francisco at the time, but not one of his previous biographers so much as intimates that he met Holmes, far less worked with him. An oversight, or a deception? Only time will tell…

  Excerpt

  Japan had been freezing, the wind that sliced through its famous cherry trees scattering flakes of ice in place of spring blossoms. We had set down there for nearly three weeks, after a peremptory telegram from its emperor had reached us in Hong Kong; people kept insisting that the countryside would be lovely in May.

  The greatest benefit of those three weeks had been the cessation of the dreams that had plagued me on the voyage from Bombay. I slept well—warily at first, then with the slow relaxation of defenses. Whatever their cause, the dreams had gone.

  But twelve hours after raising anchor in Tokyo, I was jerked from a deep sleep by flying objects in my mind.

  ***

  “Terra firma,” I said. “A week in California, tying up business, and then we can turn for home. By train.” I don’t get seasick on trains.

  “A week will be sufficient, you believe?”

  “To draw up the papers for selling the house and business? More than enough.”

  “And that is what you have decided to do.”

  This noncommittal, pseudo-Socratic dialogue was beginning to annoy. “What are you getting at, Holmes?”

  “Your dreams.”

  “What about them?” I snapped. I should never have told him about them, although it would have been difficult not to, considering the closeness of the quarters.

  “I should say they indicate a certain degree of anxiety.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, Holmes, you sound like Freud. The man had sex on the brain. ‘Rooms in dreams are generally women,’ he declares. ‘A dream of going through a series of rooms indicates a brothel, or a marriage’—I can’t imagine what his own marriage could have been like to equate the two so readily. And the key—God, you can imagine the fraught symbolism of playing with a key that lies warm in my pocket! Innocent dreams can embody crudely erotic desires.’ The faceless man he’d no doubt equate with the male organ, and as for the objects that spurt wildly into the air—well, I’m clearly a sick woman. What does it say about my ‘erotic desires’ that reading the man’s book made me need a hot bath? Or perhaps a cold shower-bath.”

  “You sound as if you’ve researched this rather thoroughly.”

  “Yes, well, I found a copy of his Interpretation of Dreams in the ship’s library,” I admitted, then realised that I was also admitting to a greater degree of preoccupation than I thought sensible. To lead him away from the admission, I said, “I wouldn’t have thought that you of all people would fall for the Freud craze, Holmes.”

  (For more background and a longer excerpt, see this book’s page on the Laurie R. King website.)

  The Language of Bees

  Russellisms

  I had no wish to be arrested in a raid. Holmes’ rivals in Scotland Yard would never let either of us live it down.

  **

  Beekeeping would appear to be a hobby for the tin-pot god, the man who seeks to keep an entire race under his control.

  **

  “Russell, you are the expert in religion, I merely pursue crime.”

  All the world’s stage: places Russell goes in this Memoir

  Britain: Portsmouth, Sussex, London, York, Edinburgh, Inverness, Orkneys

  (See the Maps chapter for details.)

  Stone circle, England

  Laurie’s Remarks

  Silence begets speculation. There has long been speculation concerning a possible offspring of Sherlock Holmes, from Nero Wolfe (just look at the e/o/o/e arrangement of vowels in both names!) to the elaborate Wold Newton universe chronicled by Philip José Fa
rmer. In the second of the Russell memoirs (Monstrous Regiment) Russell first mentions Sherlock Holmes’ son:

  ...something in his hands reminded me of Holmes, and of Holmes’ lovely, lost son.

  Later in the same volume, when she is trying to convince Holmes to help a troubled young Army officer, she says to him:

  “And if he were your son? Would you not want someone to try?”

  It was a dirty blow, low and unscrupulous and quite unforgivably wicked. Because, you see, he did have a son once, and someone had tried.

  Seven books later, we finally get around to meeting the son he had with Irene Adler, formerly (former to Russell, that is) “The Woman”.

  One of the great pleasures (certainly from the writer’s point of view) of a long series of books about a group of people is that one can keep discovering them. Nine books in, and something enormous and new comes along, something that flings open all kinds of unimagined doors: Sherlock Holmes as a father.

  An entirely new language for the beekeeper.

  Sherlock Holmes (in disguise), witness to Irene Adler’s marriage

  (A Scandal in Bohemia)

  **

  Scopes monkey trial and Sister Aimee in America; Naturalists and Spiritualism; Houdini and fairy photographs and Ouija boards.

  The Twenties are a long way from the world Holmes was born into. A man his age has gone from gas lamps to neon lights; lantern slides to moving pictures; hansom cabs to aerial bomber planes: Victoria’s stiff upper lip has a joke moustache drawn on it. In the Twenties, world has learned to speak the language of Surrealism—a language with roots in confusion and a vocabulary forged under the trauma of the Front.