“Holmes, no!” I cried, appalled.
“You will give me your word?” he repeated.
“You have my word: No harm will come to Miss Russell while she is in my care.”
“No, for God’s sake, Holmes.” My attempt at lying invisibly in wait was shattered. “Why on earth would you believe her? She’d shoot me as soon as you were gone.”
“Miss Russell,” she protested, affronted, “my word is my honour. I paid Mr. Dickson his fee posthumously, did I not? And I support that other worthless family while my employee is in prison. I even sent that messenger lad who delivered the clothing his second sovereign. My word is good, Miss Russell.”
“I believe you, Patricia. Why, I don’t know, but I do. I am going to take my pen from my inner pocket,” he said and, with slow and deliberate movements, did so. I watched in horror as he uncapped it, turned to the last page of the sheaf of papers, and put the pen to the paper. Anticlimactically, the thing refused to write. He shook it, without success, and looked up.
“I’m afraid the pen is dry, Patricia. There is a bottle of ink in the cupboard above the sink.”
There was a moment’s hesitation as she looked for a trick, but he sat patiently with the pen in his hand.
“Miss Russell, you get the ink.”
“Holmes, I—”
“Now! Stop snivelling, child, and get the ink, or I shall be tempted to put another hole in you.”
I stared at Holmes, who looked back at me calmly, one eyebrow raised slightly.
“The ink, please, Russell. Your tutrix appears to have us in a position of checkmate.”
I pushed my chair back abruptly to hide my surge of hope and went to fetch the bottle. I put it on the table in front of Holmes and took my seat. He pushed the paper away, unscrewed the top of the squat ink bottle, drew the ink up into his pen, and cleared the nib of excess ink by pulling it, first one side and then the other, against the glass rim of the bottle. He then laid the pen on the table, screwed down the lid, put the bottle to one side, picked up the pen again, pulled the final sheet of typescript back in front of him, held the pen over the paper, and paused.
“You know, of course, that your father also committed suicide?”
“What!”
“Suicide,” he repeated. He capped the pen absently and laid it on the table in front of him, picked up the ink bottle and fiddled with it for a moment, deep in thought, laid it aside, and leant forward on his elbows.
“Oh, yes, his death was suicide. He followed me to Switzerland after I destroyed his organisation, arranged a meeting at the most solitary spot he could find, and came to meet me. He knew he was no match for me physically, yet he did not bring a gun. Odd, don’t you think? Furthermore, he arranged for a confederate to fling rocks at me afterwards, because he suspected that he would not take me with him into death. No, it was suicide, Patricia, quite clearly suicide.” In the course of this speech his voice had grown harder, colder, and his lips curled over her name as if he were pronouncing an obscenity. The relentless cadence of his words went on, and on.
“You say you have come to know me, Patricia Donleavy.” He spat out her name and wrapped it in scorn, facing her across the table. “I know you too, Madam. I know you for your father’s daughter. Your father had a superb mind, as do you, and as you did he left the world of honest thought and turned to the creation of filth and evil. Your father created a network of horror and depravity that exceeded anything these islands had ever before known, a web woven of all that the world of crime has to offer. His agents, ‘employees’ as you call them, robbed and murdered, drained families through blackmail, and poisoned men and women with drugs. Nothing was too squalid for your father, Patricia Donleavy, from smuggling and opium to torture and prostitution. And all the time—ah, the perverted, filthy genius of it!—all the time the good professor sat in his book-lined study and kept his delicate hands clean of it. Nothing touched him, not the agony or the blood or the stink of terror that spread out from his agents. Just like you, Madam, he was touched only by the profits of all that sordid purulence, and he bought his wife pretty dresses and played mathematical games with his little daughter in the drawing room. Until I came along. I, Sherlock Holmes, with my meddlesome ways. I carved the network into many small pieces and I turned the name Moriarty into a term of derision, so that even his daughter will not carry it openly, and finally, when there was nothing left of his life, when I had driven him into a corner from which he could not escape, I pushed him over the Reichenbach Falls and he died. Your father, Patricia Donleavy, was a festering sore eating into the face of London, and I, Sher—”
With a shriek of animal fury she broke. The gun rose and swung up to face Holmes, and I, my useless right hand lying limp on the table, picked up the heavy bottle of ink and threw it hard and straight at her hand. The room was split again by a flash and deafening report, and the gun flew spinning against the wall. She came out of the dark corner in a dive for the pistol, and reached it a moment, just an instant, before I hit her in a massive, launched tackle that sent us crashing into the shelves, showering us with books and bottles and pieces of equipment. She was immensely strong in her madness and rage, and she had the gun in her hand, but I held her down with my entire body, and my hand hung with all its strength onto her wrist, to turn the weapon away from Holmes, slowly, so slowly against her impossible strength, and then came a confused jumble of impressions, of something slipping and my left hand holding a hot, empty palm just as a third and completely deafening explosion went off beside my head, and the shock of it went through me like a physical jolt. She stiffened beneath me in a curious protest, and coughed slightly, and then her right arm went limp and her left hand came down across my back. I lay stunned in her embrace for a moment until my eyes focussed on the gun, inches away from her arm, and I pushed the gun hard away from me so she could not reach it, and then thought, Oh my God, where had her second shot gone, and turned to see that Holmes was unhurt but something was wrong, something was suddenly very wrong with my right shoulder. And then finally the pain came, the immense, overwhelming, shuddering roar of pain that built and beat at me, and I flung out my hand to Holmes and cried aloud as thunder filled my ears and I slid down into a deep well of black velvet.
Postlude
Putting Off the Armour
19
Return Home
Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love.
ENDLESS HOURS, WHAT seemed weeks, washed in a sea of dark, muttering confusion, a labyrinth of blurred images and disconnected snatches of voices, speech from the other side of an invisible wall. The Dream without end, horror without an awakening, casting about for solid ground only to be caught up again by the pain and flung back into the roaring, hissing blackness. My brother’s rumpled hair framed by the car window. Patricia Donleavy, gaunt and sick, lying in the spreading lake of incredibly red blood. A beaker of liquid copper sulphate, smashed bilious green and dripping slowly from the workbench above me. Donleavy again, standing above my hospital bed and offering to throw me from a cliff. Holmes, so still on the laboratory’s tile floor, one lonely hand curled about his head. Cold and fever burned me, and I lay consumed by a universe of shivering nightmares.
Slowly, stubbornly, my body began to reassert itself. Slowly the fever burnt itself out, flickered, and died; gradually the drugs were cut back; and late one night I swam up towards rationality, to lie on my back looking incuriously up into the room from a point just below the surface. A thin, shimmering film was fixed between me and the painted white ceiling, the white tile walls, the machinery above my head, the pair of grey eyes that looked calmly, quietly at me. I floated closer, bit by bit, and finally the bubble softly burst, the thin membrane collapsed. I blinked.
“Holmes,” my lips said, though no sound entered the room.
“Yes, Russell.” The eyes smiled. I watched them for several minutes, remotely aware that they were s
omehow important to me. I tried to reconstruct the circumstances, and though I could remember the events, their emotional overtones seemed, in retrospect, excessive. I closed my heavy-lidded eyes.
“Holmes,” I whispered. “I am glad you’re alive.”
I slept, and woke again to find the morning sun blazing painfully through the window. The fuzzy glare was broken in several places by darker shapes, and as I squinted at them a figure moved to the source of the light, and there was the swish of curtains being drawn. With the room now at a tolerable level of dimness I could see Holmes standing on one side of the bed and a white-coated stranger on the other. White-coat laid firm, gentle fingers along the inside of my wrist. Holmes bent forward and settled my glasses onto my nose, then sat on the edge of the bed so I could see him. I could not move my head. He had shaved that morning, and I could see in intricate detail the pores of his hollow cheeks, the soft, powdery quality of the skin around his eyes, the slight sag to his features that told me he had not slept in some considerable time. But the eyes were calm, and a faint hint of a smile lay at the corner of his expressive mouth.
“Miss Russell?” I took my eyes from Holmes and looked at the doctor’s earnest young face. “Welcome back, Miss Russell. You had us worried for a while, but you’re going to be fine now. You have a broken collarbone, and you lost a great deal of blood, but other than one more scar for your collection there will be no lasting effect. Would you care for some water? Good. The sister will help you. Just a bit at a time until you get used to swallowing again. Mouth taste better now? Fine. Mr. Holmes, you may have five minutes. Don’t let her try to talk too much. I shall see you later, Miss Russell.” He and the nurse went out, and I heard his voice going down the hallway.
“Well, Russell. Our trap caught its prey, but it nearly took you with it. I had not intended quite such a generous sacrifice.”
I licked my dry lips with a thick tongue.
“Sorry. Too slow. You hurt?”
“By no means, you reacted as quickly as I thought you might. Had you been slower her bullet might indeed have seriously disarranged my insides, but thanks to your father’s ideas concerning women on the cricket field, your good left arm saved me from anything more than a bruised rib and a missing flap of skin the size of your finger. I am the one to apologise, Russell. Had I been faster to my feet the gun would not have gone off at all, and you would have an intact collarbone, and she would be sitting awaiting charges.”
“Dead?”
“Oh yes, very. I shan’t trouble you with the details now, because the white-coated people would not be happy if I raised your pulse, but she’s dead and Scotland Yard is happily rooting about in her papers, finding things that will keep Lestrade busy for years. To say nothing of his American colleagues. That’s right, shut your eyes for a while; it is bright in here.” His voice faded. “Sleep now, Russ, I shan’t be far away.” The hard hospital bed rose up and wrapped itself around me. “Sleep now, my dear Russell.”
LOW VOICES WOKE me in the afternoon. The room was still dim, and my shoulder and head throbbed beneath the stiff dressings. A nurse bent over me, saw that I was awake, thrust a thermometer into my mouth, and started doing other things to various parts of me. When my mouth was free again I spoke. My voice sounded strange to my ears, and the pull of muscles sent twinges into my collarbone. The routine was all too tediously familiar.
“A drink, please.”
“Certainly, Miss. Let me raise the bed for you.” The low voices had stopped, and as she cranked the handle my field of vision gradually dropped from the ceiling above the bed to include the bed itself and my visitors, rising from their chairs in the corner. The nursing sister held the glass for me, and I pulled methodically at the straw, ignoring the hurt of swallowing.
“More, Miss?”
“Not now, thank you, sister.”
“Right-o, ring if you need me. Ten minutes, gentlemen, and see you don’t tire her.”
“Uncle John, your moustache is almost back to normal.” (Doddering old fool…)
“Hallo, dear Mary. You’re looking a sight better than you were three days ago. They’re good doctors here.”
“And Mr. Holmes. I am happy to greet you more civilly than the last time we met.” (Mycroft’s expression of jovial bonhomie seemed faintly menacing.)
“Please, Miss Russell, I hardly think that formality is necessary or even appropriate, what with being welcomed into your boudoir and all.” The fat face smiled down at me, and I felt so tired. What were they doing here?
“Brother Mycroft, then. And Holmes. You have had a rest since the morning, I think. You look not so strained.”
“I have. There is a vacant room next to yours, and I have made use of it. How are you feeling, Russell?”
“I am feeling as though a large piece of lead passed through me and took a considerable quantity of myself with it. How do the white-coats say I am?” (Why didn’t they go? Perhaps it is the painkillers, dulling my interest.)
Watson cleared his throat.
“The bullet passed through the back of your neck, missing the spinal column by—by enough. It did go through your collarbone and nick various blood vessels before leaving the front of your shoulder and continuing on, to lodge finally in Miss Donleavy’s heart. The surgeons have pieced together the clavicle, though there is considerable damage to the muscles in that area. And,” his face prepared me for a feeble attempt at a joke to cheer the patient, “I fear you will never care to dress in anything other than high-necked clothing. Though I think you had already resigned yourself to that. Where on earth did you pick up all that scar tissue?”
“Watson, I think—” Holmes began.
“No, Holmes, it’s all right.” I was so utterly weary, and Watson was peering down into my face with what I supposed was loving concern, so I closed my eyes against the brightness. “It was an accident some years ago, Uncle John. Ask Holmes to tell you the story. I think I’ll sleep for a while now, if you don’t mind.”
They filed out, but I did not sleep. I lay and felt the fingers of my unresponsive right hand, and thought about the walls of Jerusalem, and what my mathematics tutor had taken from me.
I WAS IN that hospital for many days, and a degree of movement gradually returned to my arm and neck. I could not abide the thought of my aunt, and indeed after I was conscious I refused to have her in my room. After some discussion it was arranged that I go home to the spare room in Holmes’ cottage, to the great delight of Mrs. Hudson and the concern of the hospital authorities, who disliked the distance, the remoteness, and the poor road I should have to travel. I told Holmes I wished to go with him, and let him fight it out for me.
Once there I ate obediently, slept, sat in the sun with a book, and worked at restoring strength to my hand, but it was an emptiness. I did not dream, though often during the day I would find that I had been staring off into the distance unblinking for great chunks of time. When I had been in the cottage for two weeks I went to the laboratory and stood looking at the clean floor and the restored shelves. I touched the two bullet holes in the walls, and felt nothing but a vague unease; I could only think how bare and cold the tile looked.
Summer wore on, and my body gained strength, but there were no suggestions that I move back to my own farm. Holmes and I began to talk, short, tentative discussions about Oxford and my reading. He was away a great deal, but I did not ask why, and he did not tell me.
One day I came into the sitting room and saw the chess set laid out on a side table. Holmes was working at his desk and looked up to see me standing there with what must have been an expression of extreme loathing on my face as I stared at those thirty carved figures, the salt cellar, and the nut-and-bolt king on their teak and birch squares. I turned on him.
“For God’s sake, Holmes, haven’t you had enough chess for one lifetime? Put it away, get rid of it. If you wish me to leave your house I will, but don’t ask me to look at that thing.” I slammed out of the room. Later in the afternoon I came b
ack through to see its box and board sitting closed up but still on the table. I said nothing but avoided that part of the room. They remained on the table. I remained in the cottage.
I began to find Holmes more and more irritating. The smell of his pipe and the odours from his laboratory plucked at raw nerves, and I retreated outside or behind the closed bedroom door. His violin sent me on walks into the downs that left me trembling with exhaustion, but I did not go back to my house. I began snapping irritably at him, but his response was invariably reasonable and patient, which only made me worse. Rage began to stir but lacked the consummation of open battle, for Holmes would not respond. In the last week of July I made up my mind to leave the cottage, gather my belongings, and return to Oxford. Next week.
Into this state of mind fell a letter. I was outside, on a hilltop away from the cottage, a forgotten book in my lap as I stared out across the Channel. I did not hear Holmes come up behind me, but suddenly there he was, his tobacco smell and his gently sardonic face. He held out the envelope between two long fingers, and I took it.
It was from little Jessica, addressed in her childish printing. I had a quick image of her bent over the envelope with a pencil in her small hand, laboriously copying my name. I smiled, and it felt strange on my lips. I took out the single sheet of stationery and read the child’s words aloud.
Dear sister Mary,
How are you? My Mama told me a bad lady hurt your arm. I hope it’s all right now. I am fine. Yesterday a strange man came to the house but I held Mama’s hand and I was brave and strong like you. I have bad dreams sometimes and even cry but when I think of you carrying me down the tree like a mama monkey I laugh and go back to sleep.
Will you come to see me when you are better? Say hello to Mr. Holmes for me. I love you.
Jessica Simpson
“Brave and strong, like me,” I whispered, and started to laugh, a sour, bitter sound that tore my throat and sent pain shooting through my shoulder, and then it turned to tears and I cried, and when I was empty I fell asleep in the simple sunshine as Holmes stroked my hair with his gentle, clever hands.