A Monstrous Regiment of Women (9 page)

“I shall begin with Veronica Beaconsfield, rather than Margery Childe, not only because she led me into contact with Miss Childe but because she can be taken as the foundation upon which Miss Childe’s movement is being built. Without Ronnie, and women like her, there would be no Margery Childe.”

I went over my day, beginning with seeing Veronica’s face through the steamed-up window and ending with being let out into the rain by the night watchman, with considerable attention to detail, seeking to clarify my own thoughts as well as present the history of the matter to Holmes. I told him about Veronica’s charitable deeds and her lost lover, about Margery Childe’s magnetic speaking persona and her interaction with the women who came to her for comfort and strength. I was honest about my own response to the woman, both the attraction and the unthinking, almost visceral aversion to the control she held over her listeners, a reaction which had, in turn, prompted her finally to drop the pretence and give to me, a stranger, what was to all appearances her honest, unadorned self.

It was an indication of the similarity of our minds, or perhaps of the extent to which he had trained me in his techniques, that he did not interrupt me for clarifications during the hour I spoke. He refilled his pipe once and our glasses three times, but he made no remark aside from the occasional grunt and the noises of his pipe. When I finished and glanced at my watch, I was amazed to see that it was after 3:00 a.m.

“You are tired perhaps, Russell?” he asked, his eyes closed.

“Not really. I slept most of the day. Perhaps I’ll have a brief nap before meeting Veronica for lunch.”

“What is it you want of me, Russell? I agree this is all very interesting, from the point of view of the human mind, but why bring it to me?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I thought that telling it to you might help me to clarify it in my own mind. It’s all so— Why are you laughing?”

“At myself, Russell, at a voice from the past.” He chuckled. “I used to say the same thing to Watson.”

“Oh. Well, the parallel is not exact, because I truly do want your opinion, as a judge of humankind.”

“I’m glad you did not say ‘a judge of men.’ ”

“Not in this case. But what do you think, Holmes? Can she possibly be genuine? Or is she a charlatan? On the surface, it has all the earmarks of chicanery, a subtle and high-class dodge. And yet, she herself rings true, despite her obvious manipulation of her followers.”

Holmes packed his pipe thoughtfully, and I reflected that somewhere the room had good ventilation, or we should have suffocated long before this.

“You say there is considerable money involved here?”

“There were fourteen women in that room aside from myself. A third of them were related to men who sit in peer’s stalls, another third have mothers whose surnames came from Boston and Wall Street. The cost of the clothing in the room would keep one of London’s parishes in food for a year; the coiffures alone would feed a family for several months. Miss Childe owns the hall and the two adjoining houses. Her gown was a Worth, several pieces of furniture I saw would cause a Sotheby’s auctioneer to croon, and her skin has been under sunny skies within the past two months. Yes, there is money behind her. A great deal of money.”

“She may have lived in a cold-water flat when she was twenty, but not now, eh?”

“Far from it.”

Holmes tapped his teeth with his pipe and stared into the fireplace.

“In my experience,” he said thoughtfully, “the alchemists were wrong in assuming gold to be incorruptible. Religion and money form a volatile mix. I have had several such cases come my way. There was ‘Holy’ Peters, who put on the face of a missionary to lure lonely ladies and relieve them of their burdensome inheritances. Later, I met a certain Canon Smythe-Basingstoke, who gave such stirring public addresses concerning the poor children of Africa, complete with recordings of their voices singing and lantern slides of their pinched and winsome faces, before accepting donations to his valiant mission outpost. That case was too bald and uncomplicated for Watson to bother with, as I remember. And, of course, the case that brought Jefferson Hope to my door, although on second thought, that concerned a woman as well as money. No, the path of God has often been diverted to lead to a human desire, the word of God twisted to suit human ambition. Were this lady living among the poor, I might be happier, but the tanned face and her silk Paris gown can only count against her sincerity. However, I am not telling you anything new, am I, Russell?”

“No, I had reached the same—hardly a conclusion. It’s sad, in a way. I should greatly enjoy meeting someone who, as it were, talks with God. She is, however, very intelligent, and she is doing some fine work for the women of London.”

“Time will tell,” he said, and then he took his pipe out of his mouth and fixed me with a suspicious gaze. “Unless you were planning on a spot of independent criminal investigation?”

“No, Holmes. I told you, it’s only mild curiosity—in my field, not yours.”

“Another whim, Russell?”

“Another whim,” I said evenly, and as our eyes came together, I was made abruptly aware of how alone we were and of the silence of the building around us. At that moment, something entered the room, a thing compounded of the memory of our argument atop the hansom, of the intimacy of the hour and the place, of my thin and clinging blouse and his long legs stretched out towards the fire and of my growing sense of womanliness. I suppressed a shudder and cast about rapidly for a red herring. “Speaking of criminal investigation,” I said, reaching for my glass, “Veronica asked if there was anything I might do about her fiancé Miles and his drug habit. Have you any suggestions?”

“Nothing can be done,” he said dismissively.

“He seems to have been a good man, before the trenches,” I persisted.

“Most of them were.”

“Surely there’s something—”

He jumped to his feet and circled his chair, ending up back at the fireplace, where he leant down to smack his pipe against the bricks and send the still-alight dottle spraying onto the coal and the hearth. His voice was high and biting now.

“Russell, I am hardly the man to impose sobriety on another, save perhaps by my own wicked examples. Besides which, even discounting my unfitness for temperance work, I refuse to act as the world’s nursemaid. If young men wish to inject themselves with heroin, I can no more stand in their way than I could stand in the way of a Boche shell in the trenches.”

“And if he were your son?” I asked very quietly. “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.

He rotated his head slowly towards me, eyes cold, face rigid.

“That was unworthy of you, Russell,” was all he said, but the intonation of it brought me to my feet and to his side, and I laid my hand on his arm.

“Dear God, Holmes, I am sorry. It was cruel and thoughtless of me. I am so very sorry.”

He looked at my hand, covered it briefly with his own, and turned away to his chair.

“However,” he said, “you are right. It is irresponsible of me to say that I can do nothing, without having reviewed the case. If you would be so good as to give me the information on the young man, I shall think about what possible courses of action might be open.”

“I…” I stopped, at a loss. “His name is Miles Fitzwarren,” I began weakly, but broke off at his gesture.

“I know him,” he said, and corrected himself. “Rather, I knew him. I shall see what can be done.”

I might have been some tediously importunate client being dismissed with a scrap of comfort.

“Thank you, Holmes,” I said miserably, and went back to my chair.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him, slumped down, chewing at the stem of his empty pipe. My red herring had performed its function, but I knew that this particular old hound would not be misled for long before backtracking to the main scent. For the moment, he sat staring blindly past the mended toes of his woollen stockings, into the glowing coals. I knew him, however. I knew every movement and gesture of the man, the lines and muscles of his face that were more familiar to me than my own, the mind that had moulded mine, and I knew that when his thoughts returned from the contemplation of that particular byway, he would fix me with his all-seeing gaze and with a few deft words unearth the topic I’d been trying so desperately to divert him from. It would happen in a minute, and when it did, the peculiar chilling awareness, a presence almost, that had already passed through the room would return tenfold, and it would not be dismissed.

I waited tensely for him to look up, feeling the quivering silence build in the space between us, and it was a shock, as if an adder had appeared in the bathwater between my toes, to realise that for the first time in my life I was uncomfortable in the presence of Sherlock Holmes. He did not look at me, and I took it as a judgement, and I was sore afraid.

But in the end, he did not fix me with a steely eye; he did not even glance at me. Rather, he moved, with a calmness that in another person would have meant a total unawareness of any untoward currents in the room. He bent forward and placed his cold pipe on the table, then reached for the salt-stained boots drying on the hearth and began to put them on.

“I must go out,” he said. “I shall be back in three or four hours. You get some sleep, and I’ll wake you by eight if you’re not up already. It’s good to be out of the building by nine, when the office workers begin to arrive.” He finished tying his laces and stood up.

“Holmes, I—” I stopped abruptly, lost. What he said then made it apparent that he had not been unaware of the silence.

“It’s all right, Russell. I do understand. The bed is in the next room. Sleep well.”

He rested one hand briefly on the back of my chair as he went around it to the ventilation shaft, and one long finger brushed my shoulder. I wanted to reach up and grasp his hand and not let him leave, but I held myself still and allowed him to fold himself out through the wardrobe door. Then I sat and listened as a very different silence lowered itself onto the room.

The walls closed in, and the quiet was loud, and I was far from sleep. I went into the kitchen and did the washing up, wiped down the surfaces, made myself a cup of milkless tea, put his pipe on its rack, took a book from the shelves, and sat staring at the first page as the cup cooled. Sometime later, I remembered it and grimaced at the taste of the cold tannin, took the cup to the sink and dumped it out, washed it, dried it, put it away, and walked across the room to the internal door.

I looked at the bed a long time. In the end, I went back and took the throw rug from the back of the sofa, turned down the lights, curled up under the rug by the low glow of the fire, and wondered what the hell I was going to do.

SIX

Tuesday, 28 December

How can woman be the image of God, seeing she is subject to man and has no authority, neither to teach, nor to be witness, nor to judge, much less to rule or bear empire?

—Saint Augustine (354-430)

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I had met Sherlock Holmes at a time when adolescence and the devastating circumstances of my orphaning had left me with an exterior toughness and an interior that was malleable to the personality of anyone willing to listen to me and take me seriously. Had Holmes been a cat burglar or forger, no doubt I should have come into adulthood learning to walk parapets at night or concocting arcane inks.

Over the years of my informal apprenticeship, I had learnt his trade, while at the same time pursuing my own academic vision. No doubt it made an odder combination than the two topics Margery Childe had remarked on, but if detecting was what I
did
, theology was what I
was
. Chemistry served to take up the slack. There had been clashes between the two disparate demands, but so far a final choice had not been necessary. The two sides of me lived in friendly mutual incomprehension.

That bed, though…

In the course of various investigations over the years, Holmes and I had spent any number of nights within arm’s reach of each other. He had slept in my bed, and I in his. Several times, we had even slept together in one bed, or whatever passed for a bed at the time. Never once had there been awkwardness over this. Two years before, at the beginning and at the end of a tense and terrifying case, we had each made a faint overture in the male-female dance, but later we had made the unspoken decision not to pursue that line of activity. We were intimate friends, but without the intimacy of the body.

Perhaps I ought to mention here that I was at the time not unaware of the entertainment value afforded by the reactions of one’s body. The postwar years had brought large numbers of mature young men into Oxford, and one of them in particular, being possessed of a quick mind, a wry sense of humour, an inexplicable persistence, and an automobile, had taught me a great deal.

However, the mind is a most peculiar organ, and the simple fact was that until the night atop the hansom, I had never drawn a connexion between those bodily reactions and Sherlock Holmes. I had contemplated marriage, had even played with the idea of suggesting it, but until he had himself referred so sarcastically to the marriage bed, I had never actually pictured him in those terms. Now, however, the checks were off, the blinkers removed; since I had seen him emerge from the dark doorway into the rainy street, the physical awareness of his proximity and his being had hammered at me, unrelenting. When he passed behind me, I had felt like the victim of a child’s balloon game, with static electricity causing the hairs on the arm to rise and follow the balloon’s path back and forth above the skin—I had been almost painfully aware of quivering receptors following him about the room.