A Monstrous Regiment of Women mr-2 Read online

  “Russell,” he said finally, “it is very good of you to have come up from Sussex and stood on cold street corners for half the night striking up inappropriate friendships and flirting with pneumonia in order to enquire after my health, but perhaps having found me, you might proceed with your intended purpose.”

  “I had no purpose,” I protested, stung. “I finished my paper more quickly than I’d thought, felt like spending the rest of the day with you rather than listening to my relations shrieking and moaning downstairs, and, when I found you missing, decided on a whim to follow you here and see if I might track you down. It was merely a whim,” I repeated firmly. Perhaps too firmly. I hastened to change the subject. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “Driving a cab,” he said in a voice that told me that he was neither distracted nor deceived. “Go on, Russell, you may as well ask your question; you’ve spent seven hours in getting here. Or perhaps I ought to say, six years?”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” I was very cross at the threat of having my nice evening spoilt by his sardonic, all-knowing air, though God knows, I should have been used to it by then. “I am having a holiday from the holidays. I am relaxing, following the enforced merriment of the last week. An amusing diversion, Holmes, nothing else. At least it was, until your suspicious mind let fly with its sneering intimations of omniscience. Really, Holmes, you can be very irritating at times.”

  He seemed not in the least put out by my ruffled feathers, and he arched his eyebrow and glanced sideways at me to let me know it. I put up my chin and looked in the other direction.

  “So you did not ‘track me down,’ as you put it, for any express purpose, other than as an exercise in tracking?”

  “And for the pleasurable exercise of freedom, yes.”

  “You are lying, Russell.”

  “Holmes, this is intolerable. If you wish to be rid of me, all you need do is slow down and let me jump off. You needn’t be offensive to me. I’ll go.”

  “Russell, Russell,” he chided, and shook his head.

  “Damn it, Holmes, what can you imagine was so urgent that I should come all the way here in order to confront you with it immediately? Which, you may have noticed, I have not done?”

  “A question you finally nerved yourself up to ask, and the momentum carried you along,” he answered coolly.

  “And what question might that be?” I did leave myself right open for it, but once launched in a path, it is difficult to change direction.

  “I expect you came to ask me to marry you.”

  I nearly fell off the back of the cab.

  “Holmes! What do you… How can you…” I sputtered to a halt. In front of me, the speaking vent in the roof of the cab was rising, and in a moment I could see two sets of eyes, dimly illuminated by the carriage lights and a passing streetlamp. One set was topped by a bowler, the other by a frippery gobbet of flowers, and they passed over us like two pair of roving spotlights, apprehensively examining the two men who were carrying on this lunatic dialogue above their heads.

  Holmes lifted his hat and gave them a genial smile. I waggled the brim of my own and gave what I felt to be a look of criminal idiocy, but was apparently only slightly disconcerting. They stared between the reins at us, mouths agape.

  “Sumfing Oi can do fer you, sir?” Holmes asked politely, his voice sliding down towards the Cockney.

  “You can explain the meaning of this extraordinary conversation which my wife and myself have been forced to overhear.” He looked like a schoolmaster, though his nose was dark with broken capillaries.

  “Conversation? Oh yes, sorry, Oi’s‘pose it sounded sumfing mad.” Holmes laughed. “Amatoor dramatics, sir. There’s a club of us, rehearses parts whenever we come across one another. It’s an Ibsen play. Do you know it?” The heads shook in unison, and the two looked at each other. “Fine stuff, but taken out of context, like, it sounds summat potty. Sorry we disturbed you.” The eyes studied us dubiously for another long moment, then looked again at each other, and the hats sank slowly back into the cab. Holmes began to laugh convulsively in complete silence, and reluctantly I joined him. Some minutes later, he wiped his face with his filthy gloves, snapped the horse back to its trot, and took up a completely different topic.

  “So, Russell, this gentleman and his lovely wife are going to number seventeen Gladstone Terrace. Kindly search your memory and tell me where it is to be found.” It was an examination, and out of habit, I reviewed my mental picture of the area.

  “Another nine streets up, on the left.”

  “Ten streets,” he corrected me. “You forgot Hallicombe Alley.”

  “Sorry. This is getting far out for my knowledge of the map. I admit that one or two of the areas we’ve been through I’ve never seen before.”

  “I should think not,” he said primly. Holmes tended to recall his Victorian attitudes and my gender at the oddest times—it always took me by surprise.

  Holmes drew to a halt on a deserted side street and our passengers scurried for the shelter of their dark terrace house, not even waiting for the change from their coin. Holmes shouted a thanks at the closing door; his voice bounced off the disapproving bricks and scuttled off into the night.

  “Jump down and get the rug, will you, Russell?”

  When we were settled with the thing around our knees, he flicked the reins and the horse circled us back into the main road. We took a different route for our return to the stables, through streets even darker and dirtier than those we had come by. I was enjoying myself again, half-drowsing despite the continuous jolts, when Holmes spoke.

  “So, Russell, what say you? Have you a question for me?”

  It is difficult to pull away from a man when the two of you are compressed shoulder-to-shoulder and wrapped in a rug, but I managed.

  “Come now, Russell, you are a great proponent of the emancipation of women; surely you can manage to carry out your intentions in this little matter.”

  “Little?” I seized on the word, as he knew I would. “First you place the proposition in my mouth, and then you denigrate it. I don’t know why I even—” I bit back the words.

  “Why you thought of it in the first place, is that what you were about to say?”

  Before I could respond, a fast blur shooting out of a dark alley brought Holmes to his feet, nearly knocking me from my perch. A black shape was at the heels of the horse, snarling and snapping with a flash of white teeth as it dodged into the dim light from our lamps. In one smooth movement, Holmes wrapped the reins around his left hand and hauled back on them as he snatched the long whip from its rest with his right, and with considerable accuracy he turned the yaps into yelps. Sheer brute strength brought the horse back onto its haunches and kept it from bolting, but sheer artistry allowed it just enough of its head to resume progress. The animal’s blinkered head tossed and fretted the reins from its shoe-leather mouth to the driver’s arms, and its heavy and graceless neck gleamed with sweat, but it obeyed its driver. In a moment, still on his feet and with both hands now on the reins, Holmes resumed as if there had been no interruption.

  “So, why did you think of it?” he pressed, his voice calm but with a finely honed edge to it. “Have I given you any reason to believe that I might welcome such a suggestion? I am fifty-nine years old, Russell, and I have long been accustomed to the privacy and freedom of the bachelor life. Do you imagine that I might succumb to the dictates of social norms and marry you in order to stop tongues from wagging when we go off together? Or perhaps you imagine that the pleasures of the wedding bed might prove irresistible?”

  My patience broke. I simply could not sit and listen to another peace-shattering, friendship-threatening, and, yes, hope-destroying phrase. I tossed the rug up over him, pulled both knees up to brace my boots on the top edge of the hansom, then straightened my legs and flipped over the seat backwards, an acrobatic feat I could not possibly have performed had I stopped to think about it first. I staggered on the u
neven stones, a jolt of pain shooting through my bad shoulder, but I was off the cab. Holmes shook his arm free of the rug and started to rein in, but the much-abused horse had the bit in his teeth now and fought him, kicking and heaving in the traces. I took three bent steps to the gutter, seized a gin bottle from the night’s rubbish, and skipped it across the stones to smash at the horse’s feet. It sent him onto his hind legs, the sting of a fist-sized bit of brick brought him down again, and at the third missile he bolted.

  By the time Holmes got him under control again, I was gone, having fled through an alley, over a wall, around two corners, and into a sink of blackness. He never caught me.

  TWO

  Monday, 27 December

  A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,

  Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty,

  And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty

  Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.

  —William Shakespeare (1554-1616)

  It was of no importance; I knew that even as I had gone off the back of the cab. Arguments were a part of life with Holmes—a week without a knockdown, drag-out fight was an insipid week indeed. Tonight’s was hardly a skirmish compared with some of the vicious running battles we had indulged in over the five years I had known him. No, Holmes had been merely venting general irritation through a convenient, if unfortunate, blowhole. I had found him to be particularly irritable when a case was going badly, or when he had been too long without a challenge, and although I was not absolutely certain which was the circumstance that night, I should have put money on the latter. When we met again, it would appear as if it had never happened. On a certain level, it had not.

  Still, just then I had felt more in need of a companion in bohemian abandonment than of a sparring partner, and when faced with intense verbal swordplay, I had decided to bow out. Rare for me—one of the things I most liked about Holmes was his willingness to do battle. Still, there it was, and there I was, walking with considerable stealth down a nearly black street at one o’clock in the morning in a part of London I knew only vaguely. I pushed Holmes from my mind and set out to enjoy myself.

  Twenty minutes later, I stood motionless in a doorway while a patrolling constable shot his light’s beam down the alley and went his heavy-footed way, and the incongruity of my furtive behaviour struck me: Here went Mary Russell, who six months previously had qualified for her degrees with accolades and honours from the most prestigious university in the world, who should in seven—six—days attain her majority and inherit what would have to be called a fortune, who was the closest confidante and sometime partner of the almost-legendary figure of Sherlock Holmes (whom, moreover, she had just soundly outwitted), and who walked through London’s filthy pavements and alleys a young man, unrecognised, unknown, untraceable. Not a soul here knew who I was; not a friend or relation knew where I was. In an extremity of exhilaration, intoxicated by freedom and caught up by the power in my limbs, I bared my teeth and laughed silently into the darkness.

  I prowled the streets all that dreamlike night, secure and unmolested by the denizens of the dark. Two hundred yards from where Mary Kelly had bled to death under the Ripper’s knife, I was greeted effusively by a pair of ladies of the evening. In a yard off what had once been the Ratcliff Highway, I warmed my hands over the ashes of a chestnut seller’s barrel and savoured the mealy remnant I found in one corner as if it were some rare epicurean morsel. I followed the vibration of music and was let into an all-night club, filled with desperate-looking men and slick, varnished women and the smell of cigarettes and avarice. I paid my membership, drank half my cloudy beer, and escaped back out onto the street for air. I stepped over a body (still breathing and reeking of gin). I avoided any number of bobbies. I heard the sounds of cat fights and angry drunks and the whimper of a hungry baby hushed at the breast, and once from an upper room a low murmur of voices that ended in a breathless cry. Twice I hid from the sound of a prowling horse-drawn cab with two wheels. The second time launched me on a long and highly technical conversation with a seven-year-old street urchin who was huddled beneath the steps to escape a drunken father. We squatted on cobbles greasy with damp and the filth that had accumulated, probably since the street was first laid down following the Great Fire, and we talked of economics. He gave me half of his stale roll and a great deal of advice, and when I left, I handed him a five-pound note. He looked after me awestruck, as at the vision of the Divine Presence.

  The city dozed fitfully for a few short hours, insomniac amidst the tranquil winter countryside of southern England. There were no stars. I walked and breathed it in, and felt I had never been in London before. Never seen my fellowman before. Never felt the blood in my veins before.

  At five o’clock, the signs of morning were under way. No light, of course, though in June by that hour the birds would have almost finished their first mad clamour and the farmers would have been long in their fields. Here, the first indications of day were in the knockers-up with their peashooters aimed at the windows of clockless clients, the water carts sluicing down the streets, the milk carts rattling down the cobblestones, and the strong smell of yeast from a bakery. Soon certain areas vibrated with voices and the rumble of carts, wagons, and lorries bearing food and fuel and labouring bodies into London town. Men trotted past, dwarfed by the stacks of half-bushel baskets balanced on their heads. In Spitalfields, the meat market warned me away with its reek of decaying blood, pushing me off into neighbouring areas less concerned with the trades of early morning. Even here, though, people moved, listless at first, then with voices raised. London was returning to life, and I, stupefied by the constant movement of the last hours, light-headed and without a will of my own, was caught up, swept along by the tide of purposeful heavy-booted workers who grumbled and cursed and hawked and spat their way into the day.

  Eventually, like a piece of flotsam, I came to rest against a barrier and found myself staring uncomprehending at a window into another world, a square of furious movement and meaningless shapes and colours, snatches of flesh and khaki, shining white objects bearing quantities of yellow and brown that disappeared into red maws, a fury as far removed from the dim and furtive London I had emerged from as it was possible to imagine. It was a window, in a door, and the slight distortion of the glass gave it a look of unreality, as if it were an impressionist painting brought to life. The door opened, but the impression of a two-dimensional illusion was curiously intensified, so that the rush of steam-thick, impossibly fragrant air and the incomprehensible babble lay against my face like a wall. I stood fascinated, transfixed by this surreal, hypnotic vision for a solid minute before a shoulder jostled me and the dream bubble burst.

  It was a tea shop, filled shoulder-to-shoulder with gravel-voiced men cradling chipped white mugs of blistering hot, stewed-looking tea in their thick hands, and the smell of bacon grease and toast and boiled coffee swept over me and made me urgently aware of a great howling pit of emptiness within.

  I edged inside, feeling unaccustomedly petite and uncertain of my (character’s) welcome, but I need not have worried. These were working men beginning a long day, not drunks looking for distraction, and although my thin shoulders and smooth face, to say nothing of the wire-rim spectacles I wiped free of fog and settled back on my nose, started a ripple of nudges and grins, I was allowed to push through the brotherhood and sink into a chair next to the window. My feet sighed in gratitude.

  The solitary waitress, a thin woman with bad teeth, six hands, and the ability to keep eight quick conversations on her tongue simultaneously, wove her way through the nonexistent gaps, slapped a cup of tea onto the table in front of me, and took my order for eggs and chips and beans on toast without seeming to listen. The laden plate arrived before my sweet orange-coloured tea had cooled, and I set to putting it inside me.

  When she reappeared at my elbow, I ordered the same again, and for the first time she actually looked at me, then turned to my neighbours and made a raucous j
oke, speculating on what I’d been doing to work up such an appetite. The men laughed uproariously, saw the blush on my downy cheeks, and laughed even harder before they hitched up their trousers and left in a clatter of scraped chair legs. I eased my own chair away from the wall an inch or two and devoured the second plate with as much pleasure as the first, though with more leisure. I lovingly mopped up the last smear of yolk with the stub of my toast, raised my fourth cup of tea to my cautious lips, and looked out the window beside me—directly into a face I knew, and one which an instant later recognised me.

  I signalled her to wait, threaded my way through the burly shoulders and backs, thrust a large note into the waitress’s pocket, and fell out onto the street.

  “Mary?” she asked, doubtful. “That is you, isn’t it?”

  Lady Veronica Beaconsfield, a lodgings mate in Oxford who had read Greats a year ahead of me, an unpretty person who guiltily loved beautiful things and invested vast amounts of time and money in Good Works. We had been close at one time, but events had conspired to cool her affection, and to my sadness we had not managed to regain any degree of closeness before she went down from Oxford. I had last seen her seven months before, and we had exchanged letters in September. She looked exhausted. Even in the half-light, I could see smudges under her eyes and a look of grimy dishevelment, foreign to her tidy, competent self.

  “Of course it’s me, Ronnie,” I said, cheerfully ungrammatical. “What a surprise to see a familiar face amidst that lot.”

  I gestured with one hand and nearly hit an enormous navvy coming out of the cafe. He growled at me, I apologised, and he rolled his shoulders and strode off, allowing me to live. Ronnie giggled.

  “You still do that, I see, dressing like a man. I thought it was just undergraduate high spirits.”