A Monstrous Regiment of Women (19 page)

Your basic dictum in an investigation is, if faced by the impossible, choose the merely improbable. However, what does one do when faced with a choice between two impossibilities? I
saw
her face, Holmes, from a distance of less than a foot; I saw it afterwards up close, when she gave me my coat: There was not so much as a bruise, and she wore no more makeup than she had for previous performances: Furthermore, I am certain it was she, not a twin or double: She has two tiny flecks in the iris of her right eye, which cannot be duplicated. Either I have been the subject of a subtle, skilful, and powerful mental manipulation or I have been witness to what I should have said to be an impossibility: in short, a miracle.

I shall wait until tomorrow to post this, when I have seen Margery. Is it possible that she was moving under a deep hypnotic trance (prayer-induced?) which, when it breaks, will leave her with her cracked ribs and sore face? Will she show me a way to hide swollen flesh and cuts with invisible makeup? If so, I shall destroy this and feel exceedingly foolish. Still, I cannot help but wish that someone other than Marie had seen the damage, as well.

Yours, R

Postscript, Friday: I saw MC briefly this morning; by the mere fact that you have seen this, she is obviously in perfect health. Holmes, is this possible, or have you seen previous signs of madness in me and not mentioned them?

—MR

I was, as the letter reveals, badly shaken. I sent it to Holmes via his brother Mycroft, whose all-seeing eyes and octopus fingers would surely find him more quickly than the post office. Indeed, I received a reply the next day, a telegram that followed me from the Vicissitude to the Temple, where I was helping Veronica lay out shelves for her library. I opened the flimsy envelope with my dirty hands, read the brief note, then gave the boy a coin and told him that there would be no reply.

“What was it, Mary?”

I held it out for Veronica to make of it what she could.

“From Marseilles. ‘
Ab esse ad posse
.’ ‘From “it is” to “it is possible,” ’ ” she deciphered, sounding none too sure of herself. “What on earth does that mean? Who sent it?”

“A wandering expert on early Rabbinic Judaism,” I extemporized. “Someone at the British Museum came across a first-century inscription that seems to indicate that a woman was head of a synagogue in Palestine. I wanted to know if it was possible. Not a terribly informative reply, though.”

“Odd,” she said, studying the paper for hidden meaning. I distracted her.

“A better translation might be, ‘If it happened, then it is possible.’ A good slogan for the feminist movement, don’t you think?”

“Surely not, Mary. The possibility must come first.”

I plucked the sheet from her hand and pushed it into the pocket of my trousers.

“History is littered with odd happenings that were allowed to fade away into nothing, instead of being seized on as a new beginning.”

The discussion moved away into Jean d’Arc, Queen Elizabeth, the women of the New Testament, George Sand, and on into the trackless wastes of theory.

That afternoon, I had a tutorial with Margery. Marie showed me in and then carried in the tea things, and without speaking or meeting my eyes, she managed to convey an attitude of scorn, superiority, and profound dislike. She had contrived to forget the state of her mistress’s face, remembering only that I had tricked her and maltreated her and made a fool of myself. I sat and studied my hands until she had unloaded the tray and the door clicked shut behind her. I then looked across at Margery.

“What happened, Margery? How did you heal yourself?”

Amazingly, she laughed.

“You, too? Marie seemed to think I was on death’s door the other night—why, I can’t think. I’d have thought you have more sense.”

“And you weren’t.”

“Of course not! I cut my finger on a broken glass and must somehow have rubbed it against my face.” She held out her left hand. There was a plaster around the middle finger.

“Your dress was torn,” I noted.

“Yes. I caught the lace on a rough spot on the bookshelf,” she said evenly.

“Why did you burn it?”

“You are very inquisitive, Mary. I find the sight of blood repugnant, and bloodstains make me quite faint.”

“May I see your finger, please?”

With a tiny shrug, she held out her hand. It was cool and quite calm in mine as I unfastened the plaster. The slice it concealed had been deep, had undoubtedly been made by a piece of broken glass, and had not been there on Thursday night.

There was nothing I could do, no one I could talk to. The only other person who had seen Margery’s injuries was Marie, and she was firmly set on forgetting. If only I had allowed Ronnie to enter the chapel. With her as a witness, I might force an answer from Margery. As it was, mine had been the only eyes, and I was beginning to doubt them. I let loose her hand and she began to do up the plaster.

“It’s very nice of you all to be concerned about me, but do save it for something serious like the ’flu.” She turned her hand palm up to see that the plaster was neat, then paused, looking, I was certain, at the skin over her soft wrist that on Thursday night had shown a welt dotted with blood, where a ring worn by a clenched fist had slid across the ineffectual defence of the small hand. She stared at the spot as if mesmerised, and then she said, in a voice so low I could scarcely hear, “Occasionally, grace is given to the undeserving.” After a moment, she turned her hand back, patted the plaster, and looked up at me, her eyes clear of anything but a slight amusement. “Now, Mary, you take your tea white and without sugar, is that right?”

We spoke that afternoon of one of her guide words:
love
. I talked about the earthy roots of the Hebrew
ahev
and
hesed, hashaq, dōd, rdham
, and
rea’
, and the more ethereal Greek
agapē
and
phileos
(as well as
eros
, although it is not a part of the New Testament vocabulary).

I lectured, and she responded, but there was a distance between us. All I could think about was the ease with which she had lied.

As I gathered my books together, Margery stood up to fetch one we had left on her desk, and when she handed it to me my eyes were drawn again by the plaster on her finger. I decided to try one more time for an answer.

“You won’t tell me what happened?”

“I did tell you, Mary. Nothing happened.”

“Margery,” I blurted out in a passion of frustration, “I don’t know what to make of you!”

“Nor I you, Mary. Frankly, I cannot begin to comprehend the motives of a person who dedicates a large portion of her life to the contemplation of a God in whom she only marginally believes.”

I felt stunned, as if she had struck me in the diaphragm. She looked down at me, trying to measure the effect of her words.

“Mary, you believe in the power that the
idea
of God has on the human mind. You believe in the way human beings talk about the unknowable, reach for the unattainable, pattern their imperfect lives and offer their paltry best up to the beingless being that created the universe and powers its continuation. What you balk at is believing the evidence of your eyes, that God can reach out and touch a single human life in a concrete way.” She smiled, a sad, sad smile. “You mustn’t be so cold, Mary. If you are, all you will see is a cold God, cold friends, cold love. God is not cold—never cold. God sears with heat, not ice, the heat of a thousand suns, heat that inflames but does not consume. You need the warmth, Mary— you, Mary, need it. You fear it, you flirt with it, you imagine that you can stand in its rays and retain your cold intellectual attitude towards it. You imagine that you can love with your brain. Mary, oh my dear Mary, you sit in the hall and listen to me like some wild beast staring at a campfire, unable to leave, fearful of losing your freedom if you come any closer. It won’t consume you; I won’t capture you. Love does not do either. It only brings life. Please, Mary, don’t let yourself be tied up by the bonds of cold academia.”

Her words, the power of her conviction, broke over me like a great wave, inundating me, robbing me of breath, and, as they receded in the room, they pulled hard at me to follow. I struggled to keep my footing against the wash of Margery’s vision, and only when it began to lose its strength, dissipated against the silence in the room, was I seized by a sudden terror at the nearness of my escape.

I made some polite and noncommittal noises, and quickly drew the session to a close. As I left the Temple precincts I tried to tell myself that Margery had not answered my question; however, I knew that she had.

TWELVE

Sunday, 9 January-
Thursday, 13 January

Man for the field and woman for the hearth:

Man for the sword and for the needle she:

Man with the head and woman with the heart:

Man to command and woman to obey;

All else confusion.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

«
^
»

I left the next morning for Oxford with a strong sense of brushing the dust from my boots. I would push it all from me, all the upset and confusion of Margery’s apparent duplicity and, behind it, the impossible occurrences of Thursday night. Not for me the tugs and pulls of Right Action, the flattery of being Margery’s personal tutrix, the courtly intrigue of the Inner Circle, the plotting and animosity of Marie. I did not feel any urge to take up my copy of
Mysticism
and find what Miss Underhill had to say about the physical side effects of mystical rapture, the bodily manifestations that could occur when the soul joined the Divine in a state of ecstasy. Like a child sick on too much chocolate, I wanted nothing more to do with it, and so I turned my back on London and returned to my own country.

The truth of it struck me as soon as I saw the spires of Oxford beginning to glimmer into solidity through the mist. This was, indeed, my home, as no other place was, or had been, or would be. I would buy a house here, I thought. What did I need with London? Or with Sussex, for that matter? Sussex could be for me what it had been for my mother, a summer cottage where I might play at farmer, but here, in this fold of earth between the rivers, this collection of buildings at once ethereal and human, was where my heart lay. Boar’s Hill, perhaps, or Marston. Holmes did not need me; far better to take the initiative and remove myself from his irritated, and irritating, presence. I would speak to an estate agent—after the twenty-eighth.

I crawled into my books and pulled the pages up over my head, emerging only when I was thrown out of Bodley in the evenings. It was too dark to read by the light of the street-lamps, so I had a quarter hour or so of simple, mindless movement in the cold, wet, dark air to my rooms. In the mornings, I carried an umbrella, that I might read while walking back to the Bodleian, and each day I slipped into the library’s miasma of old leather and damp wool with the incredulous relief of a caught fish being put back into its pool.

Even a fish must eat, however. On Wednesday, I rose briskly from my table to check a reference and was swept by a wave of nausea and dizziness. I grasped the edge of the table until it passed, and it dawned on me that I had not had a proper meal since—when, Saturday, Friday? And then, as if my body had been waiting for one sensation to push its way through to the surface, I was made immediately aware of dire thirst, the need to visit a WC, a stiff back, an incipient headache, and a corpselike sluggishness of all the muscles in my legs and arms. I dropped my pen and took up my coat and made straight for the nearest pub that served decent bar food: I couldn’t even bear to wait while a proper meal was cooked.

The crowded pub was sprinkled with black gowns. I pushed my way in with determination, until halfway across the room a hand came up from the level of my waist and imperiously bade me stop. I focused on the people at the table and saw three familiar faces looking up at me with amusement at the grim set of my features, as well as with a flattering amount of welcome and bonhomie. I do not make friends easily, but these three were more than acquaintances.

“Mary, just the person! Reggie, go get her a pint,” said Phoebe. The two of them were an unlikely pair, she big, brusque, and horsey, he small, neat, and quiet, but they were both brilliant in their shared field, which was cellular biology. I had met them two years ago in an anatomy lecture.

“Half a pint, thanks, Reggie,” I said, reaching into a pocket for some coins. “And take these and get sandwiches, as well. Many sandwiches—I’m starving.”

That half-pint was replaced by several more, and the sandwiches, though plentiful, did not go far in absorbing the alcohol. It was a merry lunch and a noisy one. Phoebe goaded me to the dartboard (which some tasteless undergraduate, if that is not a tautology, had stuck with a cardboard label printed Absalom) and after I had beaten every arm in the house, I played to the audience that had gathered, and I collected nearly two pounds in wages. An accurate throwing arm is perhaps the only truly remarkable skill I possess. It has, I admit, saved my life, but its chief benefit is parlour (and pub) tricks. I took in my winnings, used them to buy a round for the house, and sat down, glowing.