The Murder of Mary Russell

  Holmes put his head next to mine. “If all proves innocent, run.”

  He was bending down for a marble dryad when two other sounds broke the still night. The first was a motorcar engine, moving fast, that pulled up in the street. The din its brakes made nearly obscured a noise from the doors: a sound like a muffled gunshot. We looked at each other, then lifted the dryad and threw.

  Glass diamonds exploded into the room, followed by Holmes and me—just in time to see two people collapse on the other side of a red settee, the man’s hands around the woman’s throat.

  Even when we pulled the man away, it took my astonished eyes some time to identify the woman on the floor beneath him as my own Mrs Hudson.

  Sussex that night—rather, Monday’s early hours—was a place of mourning, for the best and wisest woman I have ever known.

  “What about the funeral?” I asked my husband. Dawn was more than an hour away, following another sleepless night, and we were sitting at the kitchen table where Mrs Hudson had reigned. “Do you think we should go?”

  Holmes made a rude noise.

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “Our presence could be misconstrued.” I sighed, my mind re-creating yet again the figure sprawled across the Steadworth House floor, a woman unmistakeably familiar, yet completely unknown. “I cannot get over what she looked like. That hair—and those clothes! I still don’t understand. Not just her appearance, but why she didn’t come to us for help.”

  “As herself—or at any rate, as Mrs Hudson—she’d not have got inside the door. And if the Earl had seen her as his old lover Clarissa, he’d have been on his guard. But a pathetic, half-deluded old woman who was clearly not only down on her luck, but had spent most of her life there? As for bringing us in, I don’t suppose she wanted that conversation overheard. Too many sins to be forgiven, every day over the tea tray.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive, only to understand. Oh, Holmes. I don’t know what I’m going to do without her!”

  “Your time would be better spent hunting for a new housekeeper. I do agree: how the devil we’re ever to do without her, I can’t—”

  “Holmes! Mrs Hudson spent the better part of fifty years caring for you—I’d think you could spare her just a bit of sympathy.”

  “She should at least have brought me in earlier. I already knew her secrets. Then she’d never have had to pull that idiotic little revolver of hers.”

  “And if you’d shared your information with her over the telephone,” I retorted, furious, “she’d never have had to set off on her own!”

  Had any of us known Wednesday what we did now…

  I sighed. Sitting here was our first moment of stillness since I’d walked away from Mycroft’s fire, twenty-seven hours earlier. Holmes and I had sent Billy away from Steadworth House with Mrs Hudson, leaving us to scrub any sign of her from the Earl’s drawing room.

  The butler, blessedly, had slept on, and we’d done our best with the crime scene: rinsing her glass and checking the sofa for any giveaway hairs; wiping her fingerprints from the little gun and placing it in Hugh Edmunds’ hand; propping him up on the sofa as if he’d committed suicide with a shot to the heart. The broken door-glass argued against the scenario, but we’d removed a few of the gaudier knick-knacks to give a suggestion that some passing burglar had heard the shot and gone to see…

  Short of surgery, nothing could be done about the bullet itself: the tiny bullet that would match the one from a skeleton in Hampshire. And short of murder, nothing could be done about the butler’s memory of an older woman by name of Hudson, who had called at a peculiar hour.

  Lestrade was clever enough to put it all together.

  Upon our return to Sussex, Holmes and I had embarked on a similar task of obfuscation, to suggest that Mrs Hudson could have spent the key hours of the Earl’s death right here—that, tiring of her constabulary watch-dog, she and Patrick could have conspired to “vanish” her to Mrs Turner’s to regain her privacy. We could not make it a sure thing, but enough to cast doubts on the matter. When we were satisfied—dinner things in the draining rack, damp towel in her bath-room—we set off onto the Downs. As we walked the close-cropped grass, Holmes told me at last about Mrs Hudson’s convoluted history: her crimes, her father’s death, his own willingness to compound a felony for her—as he was doing again now, to protect her. Clarissa the thief: Billy the pickpocket. Good Lord.

  Only after Billy’s car pulled into the drive, well after darkness had fallen, did it occur to me that Holmes had been keeping my hands busy and my mind occupied, so I would not dwell on what I had done to her son, or berate myself over how things might have been. How we should have told her what we knew before she left here on Saturday morning.

  “You may be right,” he said finally, to my surprise. He dropped his elbows onto Mrs Hudson’s soft-scrubbed kitchen table, sinking his fingers in his hair. “That bloody pistol. I should have buried it along with her accursed father. Or taken it to the smithy and had Bertram melt it down.”

  I shook my head sadly, a portion of me agreeing with him. Without that decorative little gun, would Mrs Hudson have dared go after Hugh Edmunds on her own? Never. She’d at least have taken Billy. Only chance, and my own eagerness to stand up against an English Earl (and against Mycroft Holmes) had brought us to Steadworth House while she was still there.

  And yet—

  A voice from the doorway broke into our dark thoughts. “Look, you two: the point of a whistling-kettle is lost if one neglects to put on its whistle.” She turned off the flame below the furiously boiling tea-kettle—and instead of taking down the teapot, she came to the table and looked down at us. “Both of you will have to take care. Kindly don’t burn the place down as soon as I’m gone.”

  We would both, I think, have willingly sat there forever and listened to her scold us. She looked from one woebegone face to the other, and made a tsk noise. “You do realise that most housekeepers retire sooner or later, even without having the police after them?”

  Until that day, I’d have said I knew my housekeeper—my surrogate mother—as I knew few others. But this woman, with her still-brown hair and manicured nails? “Mrs Hudson, I…I honestly do not know what to say.”

  The skin around her eyes crinkled and for a moment, she inhabited her face. Then she was gone, and the woman who pulled out the old wooden chair was a stranger: a person in a perfectly cut dress, made from a fabric that emphasised the gleam of her eyes and the lines of the body beneath. Mrs Hudson, with dark hair—and a figure! She even moved differently, with a sort of arthritic femininity and life-long sophistication. As if this rural setting, that smooth-worn chair, the scrubbed deal table were being seen for the first time, by a woman too polite to reveal her opinion of them. It was all very unsettling.

  Then she reached across the table to take my hand between hers, and my Mrs Hudson was there again, warmth and sadness shining from her dark eyes. Before today, I had never understood the sadness.

  “Mary, for heaven’s sake, it’s still me.”

  “Is it?”

  “Just because most people’s lives run in a single line, beginning to end, does not mean that is the only way. Or even the best. When I was a child, I was one thing; after my mother died, I became another. When…when I took over Baker Street, I was a different person yet, and again when I chose to move to Sussex. Each has been me. With certain, shall we say, shifts in emphasis.”

  “You’ve been living a…” I stopped, to change the word into something less accusatory. “An act.”

  She smiled, as if the word had hidden meaning. “For a lie to become truth, the past need only be rewritten. When Mr Holmes and I came here, we put my past behind us—and to be fair, a great deal of his as well. By the time you walked through that door twelve years later, the history he and I invented had long since become the truth. A truth that—had either of us given you reason to doubt it—would have unravelled and left us adrift. He and I had a long talk that first evening af
ter you left. We agreed that dead history did not serve your needs in the least.

  “But let us be clear about one thing: my affection for you, my considerable respect, has never held the least particle of deceit.”

  To save us from melting down into maudlin tears—we simply did not have the time—I pressed my attack. “It wouldn’t have changed matters. I even knew some of it, from early on. You could have…I could have learned so much from you. Pretending to be someone else that thoroughly, it’s not easy.”

  “Oh, my dear, I’ve never pretended—not since I was very young, at any rate. Pretence is deliberate, and I am a mediocre actress. What I do is instinctive: I read someone’s needs and take on the appropriate shape. Asking me to teach you that would be like a chameleon teaching camouflage to a starling.”

  “So what shape were you taking on, there in London? Why go to Steadworth House looking like—like that?”

  She chuckled. “Like a once-beautiful woman fighting a losing battle with age, do you mean? Powder, paint, hair-dye, and corsetry, in a dress too young in style and too old-fashioned in colour, with a degree of cleavage that was at the same time sad and stimulating?

  “I looked that way because for a short time, Hugh Edmunds knew me very well indeed. Hugh is—Hugh was what I might have been, under other circumstances. A master of understanding with no trace of empathy. Someone who divides the world into taker and taken. Hugh knew I’d owned a gun—and he remembered. When he walked into the room last night, he went immediately to a desk which, to judge by how he stood, held some kind of weapon. He hovered there until I convinced him I was harmless, at which point he came back, sat down, and answered my questions. I wanted him to look at me and see only a victim. To see what he believed he had turned me into: a sad, old failure, the very furthest thing from dangerous. I had to be, literally, disarming.”

  “And that’s the sort of thing you simply…know?” This was both utterly fascinating and deeply disturbing—and not only because it made me suspect my entire relationship with her. Beyond that discomfort lurked the question: What forces had shaped the shape-shifter? How did one turn a little girl into a looking glass?

  “Yes. I suppose I learned early that people are more likely to give you things, and less likely to hit, if they see themselves in you. As I grew older, I learned to do it deliberately, and more or less permanently.”

  “How utterly exhausting!”

  She laughed. “In fact, it’s exhilarating. The challenge of building an Act, and the joy when one hits it spot-on—it’s the closest I will ever come to a musician’s flawless performance.”

  “Addictive,” Holmes remarked.

  “Sadly, yes,” she agreed. “Although it became more difficult after I began to feel sorry for people.”

  “But in 1880, you chose to return to London and…put on a mask.” I found it hard to imagine, a lifetime of artifice.

  “Everyone wears a mask to the world. Some are thin and comfortable, others harsh and impenetrable. But in fact, the one I put on in the autumn of 1880 lay very close to the skin. That’s because Mr Holmes is one of the handful of people who could always see straight through me. Him, and that brother of his.”

  A housekeeper and her employer, as with a landlady and her tenant, do not need to be compatible. However, as noted already, Mrs Hudson was far more than a housekeeper. And the idea of Holmes taking on the rôle of gaoler made me nearly as uncomfortable as the fact of his brother as the world’s puppet-master.

  She read the discomfort on my face—of course she did—and reached again for my hand. “Mary, I murdered my father. No, it’s true: I took my gun with me that day, as I took it last night, knowing I might use it. Both times I believed I was protecting others, and yet both times, it was I who put us all in that situation. And both times, your husband would have been right to give me to the police. He trusts me in a way I doubt I’ve ever trusted myself. I personally believe that without his intervention, I’d have continued along the very path that had led me to murder. Crime is so easy: a wide road smoothed by the knowledge that one can only cheat the greedy. Without innocent victims, I felt, there could be no guilt. Your husband learned at a young age that this was not true. It took him a while to teach me.”

  Holmes stirred. “I did not teach you ethical behaviour, although I may have reminded you. Your mother was a woman of unflinching determination and upright, if somewhat creative, morals. A childhood under her laid a foundation that your father’s tutoring could obscure but not overturn. I merely needed to isolate you, and provide you the time and the tools to chip his influence away.”

  Four and a half decades of chipping away, trapped together under one roof: him never slackening his attentions lest she slip, her never free of his iron rule. “I find it extraordinary that in forty-five years, neither of you killed the other.”

  “Oh, it did not take nearly that long,” Holmes said lightly. “My Reichenbach disappearance came ten years after we began, and she did fine without me. But I should not want you to think it was only a matter of my will over hers.” He was no longer speaking to me. “You know how much Dr Watson helped me understand my fellow man. Mrs Hudson has done the same. Although perhaps for different reasons.”

  She broke in, to jab a stopper into the spilling emotion. “And during those early years you are right: I did take comfort in knowing that poison would go unnoticed in my recipe for curry.”

  The two of them laughed heartily; me less so.

  “Forty-five years ago—forty-six, come September,” she reflected. “And fourteen years before that. Do you know, this may be the first time I have ever just been myself?”

  “Whoever that might be,” Holmes muttered. “Are you ready, then? You and Billy need to be gone before it’s light.”

  “I am as packed and ready as I need to be.”

  I had managed to sponge the blood-stains from her bank passbook, and slipped it into her desk when we returned. And although I could not help noticing that the accumulated savings were substantial, I nonetheless ventured an offer. “Can I—that is, would a cheque…?”

  “Oh, my dear, the thought is kind, but I am sufficiently funded.”

  “You need only ask,” I told her, rather more vehemently than I’d intended. “But where will you go? What will you do?”

  “Well, wherever I end up, I’m probably finished with scrubbing floors. Oh, don’t blush, dear heart! A clean house can be a remarkably satisfying achievement.”

  Any response I may have had was interrupted by a rap at the door. Holmes stood to let Billy in, his stocky figure bundled in a great-coat and bringing in a waft of Downland air.

  He shot Mrs Hudson an amused sideways glance, and told me, “That man of yours gave a flick on his torch, like you said. Nobody’s stirred out there all night. I’ll go warm up the motor.”

  Patrick—that man of mine—had climbed the old smuggler’s path behind the village at sundown, laden with thermos, electric torch, and a great-coat of his own, to spend the night watching for motorcar head-lamps or the beams of approaching hand-torches. However, just because the police hadn’t arrived yet did not mean they weren’t on their way.

  Holmes picked up the suit-case and followed Billy to the door. I bent for the small valise, thinking, Such little baggage to show for a lifetime—then stopped when her arms went around me. She embraced me, long and hard; I in turn clung to her.

  “Mary, Mary,” she said. “Thank you for making my life such a joy.”

  With that, the tears burst forth. “I am sorry.” I’d said it to her earlier; she had merely nodded. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry! When he came—I didn’t mean—I was only trying to protect you, but I should have—”

  She jerked back, eyes blazing, her fingers digging into my shoulders. “You did not do this,” she declared fiercely. “Samuel’s death is on his head alone. If anyone is to blame, it is me. I knew, when my sister’s husband died, that it was wrong to leave Samuel with her, but I did. You paid for my mistake. My son
came here intending to cause any hurt he could: never doubt that. What you did saved me, and your husband, and heaven only knows who else.”

  She studied my face, and continued in a quieter voice. “When things settle, you’re going to drag yourself over the coals, fretting on what you might have done differently. Know this: you had no choice. Samuel took any choice from you when he came here. He surrendered to greed, then let himself be manipulated by two men hungry for money and for power. He was dead the minute he motored away from London.

  “I should be the one to say I am sorry, to you. I am sorry, that you were forced into the burden of taking a life. That will be with you all your days. It will haunt your nights, it will ride your shoulders. It may even slow your hand, if—God forbid—a time ever comes when you find yourself facing a similar choice.

  “But know this: only one small portion of the burden belongs to you. What you did feels like murder. But it was not.”

  She said you, but she was talking about herself—and not of her son’s death, but her father’s. She watched my face until she saw the doubt mingling with gratitude, then embraced me again, until we heard a loud clearing of the throat from the front door.

  She kissed me and stood away. I swiped my eyes beneath my spectacles, and picked up her valise.

  The sky was black and clear, the smoke from Billy’s motor streaming across the light that spilled from the portico. Mrs Hudson pulled her gloves from her pocket. As she worked them on, she spoke to Holmes. “If Mr Lestrade seems to be on the verge of making an arrest—any arrest—let him know that he is to speak to me first. I will return, if you need me.”

  “But where are you going?” I pleaded, sounding like a child. “France? Australia? How will we find you again?”

  The three of us paused as Mrs Hudson worked the buttons on her gloves. When her head came up, she looked young—almost young enough for that brown hair.

  “Do you know,” she said, “I’ve always been fond of Monte Carlo.”