A Monstrous Regiment of Women (34 page)

In six steps, I had found my confidence. After ten, I stopped abruptly. Something? I put out my hands, felt only air, squatted, and my fingers came into contact with cold metal: a large tin bucket and a mop beside it, waiting for me to put my foot in it like some vaudeville turn. I exhaled, edged around them, and scuffled more cautiously towards the light.

A full-sized safe is not an easy thing to conceal. Freestanding, it tends to buckle floorboards, and hidden, it reveals its presence by the unnatural thickness of the wall. I was looking for something smaller, for personal items such as jewellery or, I hoped, deeds, contracts, or correspondence. I thought Margery would not have it in the ground floor, the public rooms; however, I hoped it would not be in her bedroom. Although I had once had a tutorial from a bona fide (and never caught) cat burglar who claimed, I think truthfully, that he had once varnished a sleeping man’s fingernails, I did not relish the idea of examining a room with a sleeping occupant.

This house in which Margery lived and where downstairs the business of the Temple went on was a deep brick structure wedged in between the corner house next door, now the Refuge, and the Hall, originally built as a theatre. As with the Refuge, the top storey was used mostly for storage. Margery’s quarters took up the first floor, and the ground floor and basement were given over to the Temple’s offices, meeting rooms, and soon-to-be library. The stairs were at the back of the building; a wide corridor connected them with Margery’s bedroom and dressing room, at the street end, and the other rooms: on the left side, the meeting room where the Circle gathered and then Margery’s chapel; on the right side, first a small lumber room, then Margery’s study, where she and I met for our tutorials, and finally the gorgon Marie’s room, just before Margery’s pair of doors at the end of the corridor.

I thought Margery would want her private safe in one of two places: the study or her dressing room. I considered the dressing room somewhat more likely, and although in cowardice I wanted to investigate the study first, I should have to go past that door and pray that neither Margery nor Marie were insomniac tonight. A light burnt directly over Margery’s two doors, and the only escape, if someone came into the corridor from the stairs, would be through Margery’s dressing-room window onto the street below.

The building was silent, but nothing in London is ever, entirely still. There was movement, but not close, perhaps even on the street outside. I eased down a few stairs and peered into the still, bright corridor, with its apricot wool carpet on the floor, the watercolour landscapes on the walls. The paint gleamed quietly in the brightness spilling from the pieced-glass lamp shade, colours of apricot and orange in a twining pattern that reminded me vaguely of Margery’s wineglasses. I walked down a few more steps and around the newel post, then stood for a long moment with my heart in my throat and fifty feet of waiting corridor stretched out in front of me, looking like the maw of a carnivorous plant, waiting for me, its insect prey.

My soles scrunched immensely on the deep pile, and as the doors of Margery’s rooms approached, I was made aware of how very bad my nerves were: I was convinced that both Margery and her Marie stood waiting, to leap on me the moment I turned my back.

It seemed a very long time, but was less than half a minute, before I was beneath the light. Without turning my back to the opposite doors, I reached down for the knob to the chapel door and found it open. The eternal candle burnt over the altar, lighting my way to the connecting door into the dressing room. This one was locked.

It was not, however, a very good lock, and it gave way to my probes in a short time. That alone warned me what further scrutiny confirmed: The room contained nothing more valuable than the clothing in the wardrobes (admittedly expensive enough, mostly Worth and Poiret, with a few Chanels adding a modern note). The prices of these clothes would make the elves’ place look like a pawnshop.

A slow, intense circuit of the room revealed nothing, except that Margery’s taste in underclothing was remarkably exotic and that she snored. I let myself out through the chapel, locking the dressing room door behind me, and went back out into the light.

The study door was locked, and this lock was a good one. By the time it opened, I was blinking sweat from my eyes and muttering silent but emphatic imprecations against all the locksmiths I knew and Mr Yale in particular. It took me twelve minutes to conquer it, and for every one of those 720-odd seconds, I fully expected Marie’s door to fly open and send me sprinting for my life. The damned thing finally clicked, the wire pick rattled slightly against the brass, and the knob in my greasy palm squeaked minutely when I turned it. I slipped inside, closed the door, eased the knob to and flipped the simple latch I had remembered from this side, and waited, breathless, counting off three long minutes before I relaxed into an irritating shakiness. The gorgon slept.

When my eyes had adjusted to the light easing in from under the door and the low glow from the fire, I could see that nothing much had been moved since my last tutorial with Margery. I reached out to the back of the sofa, picked up the thick cashmere shawl kept there, and went back three steps to lay it along the bottom of the door. The shawl would block any light from inside the room, and I then stuffed the end of my handkerchief into the keyhole. It was now safe to turn on the electric lights.

The familiar room came into view. There were three good possibilities for hiding a safe, as I remembered, and I found it at the second one: a block of the decorative supporting cornice at the fireplace. It slid away, revealing a solid eight-inch-square slab of iron with a handle on one side and a combination dial in the centre—a combination dial, not a key.

I sat down on the arm of the sofa and stared at it bleakly. I was a fool not to have let Holmes do it. This safe was of the best quality; it would not fall for any of the clever tricks taught me by Holmes’ pet safecracker
(not
the one who had opened a restaurant on his release). Despite the popular image of a burglar with a stethoscope, safes are broken not by hearing, but by touch. Steady nerves, infinite patience, and slow, painstaking, concentrated labour results in what our Eton-and-Balliol cracksman had called “that moment of indescribable giddiness” when the tumbler falls into place. However, steady nerves and slow concentration were precisely the qualities I lacked most just at the moment. Five days before, I had been locked in a cave, half-starved and stupefied with drugs: I could not do this. The safe was not going to open for me, not in the time I had.

Tell it to Holmes, nagged a voice. Watch his brief flare of irritation give way to sympathy, understanding. Live with that, will you? If you don’t get it open tonight, there’s tomorrow, isn’t there?

I carried a chair over, flapped my hands about vigorously to wake them up, rubbed my fingertips firmly against the brickwork to increase their sensitivity, and then bent my entire body and mind to the problem of opening that safe.

I was soon dripping wet, more from the tension than from the coals at my knees. In half an hour, the quivering of my back muscles had spread to my hands, and I had to break off and do a series of noiseless calisthenics.

An hour crept past, then two, and still I bent with my cheek against the fireplace, my eyes shut, my whole being concentrated on the square inch of skin that caressed the dial. By this time, I could work only for ten minutes before the trembling of my muscles made it impossible to continue, and for two minutes I would stand, stretch, lie limp on the sofa, exercise violently, and then return to my work. The thought of Holmes’ sympathy drove me back at first, but later it was simply mindless determination, and I suppose I should have still been sitting there when Margery walked in, but that at 5:20, three hours and six minutes after I had begun, the giddy sweetness seized the dial and the mechanism opened itself to my shaking hands.

I sat back and scrubbed my face with both hands, and neither face nor hands felt connected to the rest of me. I took my spectacles out of my pocket and put them on, then carried the contents of the safe over to the desk to examine them.

Margery Childe’s secrets were few, but they were potent. My visual memory is normally excellent, but I could not trust my mind in its present state, so I took a piece of paper from the desk and, using Margery’s pen, wrote down the details of her hidden life. In chronological order they were:

• A marriage certificate, to a Maj Thomas Silverton, 23 May 1915.
  
• A Military Cross with its purple and white ribbon.
  
• A telegram beginning,
  WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU
  , dated 3 November 1916.
  
• A second marriage certificate, this one in French, dated 9 December 1920—just less than two months ago. Margery was listed by her maiden name alone, no mention of Silverton. Her husband was named Claude de Finetti, with an address in London. His given occupation was the French equivalent of our
  gentleman
  .
  
• A will, autograph by Margery and witnessed, on 19 December 1920, by Marie and another whose name was unfamiliar but whose writing was that of an uneducated woman. In it, Margery left one half of everything she owned to her husband, the other half to the maintenance of the New Temple in God.
  
• Another will, written by the same hand that had signed the wedding certificate as Claude de Finetti, dated and witnessed as Margery’s was, leaving everything to his wife, Margery.
  

I looked long at the man’s writing, at the signatures of a name that was not his own, at the script of an opportunist and a sensualist and an expert at deceiving the world, at the amorality in his m’s and the deception in his t’s, at the cruelty and the self absorption in his upswings and his loops, and I knew, without a fragment of doubt, that I was looking at my captor. Claude, I thought, we have you now.

There were also four brief letters addressed to “My darling wife” and signed just “C.” I glanced at the first, and jerked back as if burned. My immediate impulse was to throw them onto the fire, my second to put them away unread, but I obviously could do neither, and so I reluctantly ran my eyes across his pen strokes. They were, one might say, love letters, were one to grant the word
love
the broadest possible definition. I made dutiful note of what few pertinent details they contained (“last Thursday”; the name of a play; a restaurant) and folded them up with hands that felt dirty. They did, however, serve to explain Margery’s oddly fervent references to self-abnegation and discipline.

It was now 5:37, and I made haste to tidy up. I put everything back as it had been, wiped my fingerprints from the safe, on the remote chance I had disturbed something without noticing, replaced the chair, and placed her pen back in its holder. I needed to be gone, but the opening of the safe had restored a small degree of life to my brain, and another question had presented itself: How had Margery entered this room, bleeding and disheveled, without being seen on the street?

On earlier thought, I had tentatively decided that it must be the wall of bookshelves that gave way to a hidden opening, but on closer examination, there was no seam. I looked at the cornice that hid the safe.

Marie’s room. I stood up quickly and stared at the adjoining wall on the side of the fireplace opposite the safe. Only Marie would say nothing, were she to notice an odd chunk out of the floor space between the rooms.

Beside the fireplace was a series of shallow fitted shelves, holding an assortment of photographs and bric-a-brac. On the stray chance that the man who had fitted the secret compartments was as symmetrical as his fireplace surround, I prodded at the decorative bit that matched the safe’s covering. There was a low click, and the wall moved.

As I stood looking proudly at my handiwork, there came another noise down the corridor. I reacted instantly. I dove for the door, undid the lock, slapped the light switch off, ripped the shawl from the floor, yanked my handkerchief from the keyhole, tossed the shawl over the back of the sofa, ran silently to the secret door and pulled it open, stepped in, and then leapt out again and retrieved my notes from Margery’s desk, turned off the desk light, and groped my way back to the door. Once through it, I pulled it closed on its well-oiled hinges, and it clicked shut just as the light went on in the room. A pinpoint beam cut a path through and split onto my shoulder. I put my eye to the peephole.

Margery came in the study door, tousled and puffy with sleep. The way she moved inside the shimmering dressing gown confirmed her forty years; nonetheless, she was, if anything, more beautiful than her formal self. Feeling like a
voyeuse
, I watched her go to the fire and scrabble some coals onto the remains, then scratch her scalp and drop onto the sofa. After a moment, she tucked her legs underneath her, and to my great relief, she reached absently behind her and pulled the shawl across her shoulders, without noticing its disarray.

I was safe, for the moment at any rate: Margery was not about to follow me into the passageway (for the breath of air on the backs of my legs informed me it was not merely a hole), nor was she about to begin work at her desk, where the heat of the light could hardly fail to alert her that it had recently been on.

She sat and stared blankly into the fire. I could hear movement behind me in the room Marie occupied: water running, a door closing. In a few minutes, she came in, combed and starched in her grey uniform dress, carrying her tray. She greeted Margery formally, then laid out the tea things, built up the fire properly, and left Margery to her thoughts, and me to my dilemma.

I had originally thought to go downstairs and slip past the night guard through the front door, trusting that the mystery of an unbolted door, without signs of burglary, would soon be dismissed. Now, however, I was trapped.

Unless…

No. I’d had quite enough of dark places. I was happy to wait.

Until Holmes tires of watching for me and comes in? Oh, curse the man. Why choose now to become a solicitous male? He would rescue me, if I wished it or not.