A Monstrous Regiment of Women (3 page)

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 uneven 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 joke, 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.”

“ ‘When we’ve got our flowing beards on, who beholding us will think we’re women?’ ” I recited. “There’s good precedence.”

“Dear old Aristophanes,” she agreed. “Still, don’t you find it a drawback sometimes, dressing like a man?” she asked. “I thought that man was going to punch you.”

“It’s only happened once, that I didn’t have time to talk my way out of a brawl.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, I didn’t hurt him too badly.” She giggled, as if I had made a joke. I went on. “I had a much rougher time of it once during the War, with a determined old lady who tried to give me a white feather. I looked so healthy, she refused to believe me when I told her I’d been turned down for service. She followed me down the street, lecturing me loudly on cowardice and Country and Lord Kitchener.”

Ronnie looked at me speculatively, unsure of whether or not I was pulling her leg. (As a matter of fact, I was not, in either case. The old lady had been severely irritating, though Holmes, walking with me that day, had found the episode very amusing.) She then shook her head and laughed.

“It’s splendid to see you, Mary. Look, I’m on my way home. Are you going somewhere, or can you come in for coffee?”

“I’m going nowhere, I’m free as the proverbial bird, and I won’t drink your coffee, thanks, I’m afloat already, but I’ll gladly come for a natter and see your WC—I mean, your rooms.”

She giggled again.

“One of the other drawbacks, I take it?”

“The biggest one, truth to tell,” I admitted with a grin.

“Come on, then.”

It was nearly light on the street, but as we turned off into a narrow courtyard of greasy cobblestones four streets away, the darkness closed in again. Veronica’s house was one of ten or twelve that huddled claustrophobically around the yard with its green and dripping pump. One house was missing, plucked from its neighbours during the bombing of London like a pulled tooth. The bomb had not caused a fire, simply collapsed the structure in on itself, so that the flowery upstairs wallpaper was only now peeling away, and a picture still hung from its hook twenty feet above the ground. I looked at the remaining houses and thought, There will be masses of children behind those small windows, children with sores on their faces and nothing on their feet even in the winter, crowded into rooms with their pregnant, exhausted, anaemic mothers and tubercular grandmothers and the fathers who were gone or drunk more often than not. I suppressed a shudder. This choice of neighbourhood was typically Veronica, a deliberate statement to her family, herself, and the people she was undoubtedly helping—but did it have to be quite such a clear statement? I looked up at the grimy windows, and a thought occurred.

“Ronnie, do you want me to remove enough of this costume to make it obvious that you’re not bringing a man home?”

She turned with the key in her hand and ran her eyes over me, looked up at the surrounding houses, and laughed for a third time, but this was a hard, bitter little noise that astonished me, coming from her.

“Oh, no, don’t worry about that, Mary. Nobody cares.”

She finished with the key, picked up the milk, and led me into a clean, uninspiring hallway, past two rooms furnished with dull, worn chairs and low tables, rooms with bare painted walls, and up a flight of stairs laid with a threadbare, colourless runner. A full, rich Christmas tree rose up beside the stairs, loaded with colourful ornaments and trying hard, and long swags of greenery and holly draped themselves from every protrusion. Instead of being infused with good cheer, however, the dreary rooms served only to depress the decorations, making them look merely tawdry. We went through the locked door at the top and came into a house entirely apart from the drab and depressing ground floor.