In other words, I thought, scrubbing my nails, if the Yard knows owt, they’re saying nowt.
I did my hair with more care than usual, dropped the plain dark dress over my head, and examined the result. The elves would tut-tut, I thought, but at least it was better than Veronica’s jumble-sale clothes. I checked at the desk, but there was nothing for me, so I left a message with my whereabouts for the next few hours, to be given to Mr Holmes.
Veronica’s courtyard looked even worse by waning light than it had by waxing. A handful of urchins lingered outside her door, no doubt waiting there until their mothers might allow them inside their own homes for tea. Two had healing facial sores, four went barefooted, and one had no coat. An incomprehensible but identifiable noise echoed across the yard, and after paying the taxi driver, I followed the sound to its source: Veronica’s door was ajar and a pandemonium of voices came spilling out. I pushed my way gently through the children in order to lean my head inside, realised there was little point in knocking or calling a polite hullo, and walked in. The noise came from the second of the ill-furnished ground-floor rooms, in the back, and I stood at the door and tried to make sense of what was apparently a domestic squabble involving portions of at least four families, mothers with babies perched on their hips and sobbing children at their skirts, several bellicose men and male adolescents thrusting their chests out at each other, a matched trio of grandmotherly figures furiously casting anathema upon one another, and, in the middle, like a pair of crumbling rocks beset by a typhoon, two more people: Veronica Beaconsfield and another woman, small, squat, and foreign. A Belgian, I thought.
I stood at the back of the crowd for several minutes before Veronica’s eyes, coming up from the deluge of words beating at her, latched on to me with unspeakable relief. I saw her lips move, saw her turn to the other target and mouth a phrase, at which the other woman’s eyes went wide with something close to horror before she marshalled her forces and, with a motion curiously reminiscent of a prodded limpet, nodded at Veronica and put her head down against the storm. Veronica worked her way across the room toward me, shaking her head and putting a hand up at the entreaties along the way, until she plunged out into the corridor.
“Do you have a cab?” she asked, ignoring the two women hanging onto her coattails.
“I doubt it; I didn’t ask him to wait. Here are your clothes,” I said doubtfully.
“Just toss them over there. Come on, we’ll find one down the road.”
I made haste to deposit the parcel on the shelf of the coatrack and reached the door just before the women. Smiling and nodding, I pulled it shut in their faces and scurried after Veronica, who had already rounded the corner.
“What on earth was that all about?” I asked. “And where are we going?”
“It’s of no importance. I did something for one family, and the others now think they deserve the same. My assistant will sort it out. Or rather, they’ll all get so tired of shouting at her, since she’ll speak only French to them, that they’ll go home. We have to go around to the Fitzwarrens’. Miles surfaced today.” She shot out a hand and a taxi peeled itself from the pack. Once inside, she turned to me with an anxious line between her eyebrows. “Do you mind? Going there with me, I mean? Major Fitzwarren telephoned about half an hour ago and asked me to come, but I—do you mind coming with me?”
If she wanted to use me as a shield against Miles, I did not particularly care for the idea, but I felt quite strong enough. I told her I was content to go.
“Oh good. I don’t know whether we’ll have tea or a drink, but afterwards we’ll go on for a bite and then to the Temple. Does that suit?”
“It suits.”
“I’m so glad,” she said, and to my astonishment she reached out and squeezed my gloved hand with hers. “Thank God you’re here, Mary. I can’t think how I could face this without your help.”
“What?” I said lightly. “Is this the Veronica Beaconsfield who single-handedly holds together half of London?”
She flashed me a nervous smile and looked at her watch. We rode in silence through the gathering dusk to St John’s Wood.
AN ELDERLY BUTLER with the prerequisite long and lugubrious face admitted us into the marbled and gleaming entrance foyer and relieved us of our outer garments.
“Good evening, Marshall,” Veronica said, handing him her gloves. “Mrs Fitzwarren is expecting me. This is Miss Russell.”
“Good evening, miss,” he said. “It is good to see you again, Miss Beaconsfield. I shall go and inform Mrs Fitzwarren of your arrival, if you would like to wait in here for a moment.”
Veronica balked at the indicated door.
“Do you mind if we wait in the library, Marshall? I may be upstairs some time, and Miss Russell will enjoy looking at the books, I think.”
An instant’s hesitation was the only sign of a dilemma that would have undone a lesser man. Mere visitors were not normally given the run of the house, the hesitation said, but in the past Miss Beaconsfield had become more than a mere guest, and no formal announcement had been made to the contrary.
“Lieutenant Fitzwarren is currently in the library, miss,” he said, further explaining his hesitation and giving the decision back to her.
“Miles?” she said, and it was her turn to hesitate before squaring her shoulders. “Well, I shall have to see him sometime. Perhaps you’d best warn him I’m coming, though. I’ll show Miss Russell the drawing room, and you can come back for us.”
This diplomatic solution met with his approval. He ushered us in and faded away, to reappear shortly, bereft of coats and paraphernalia. I was relieved that I was not to spend more of the evening in the austerely formal room, with its grey walls more suited to a summer’s day and its collection of remarkably unsettling futurist paintings. The library for me.
Veronica’s face was serious but not apprehensive; however, the spine that I followed down the portrait-lined passageway belonged to someone about to confront a firing squad. She took two steps inside the room, then stopped, and I looked past her at the figure by the window.
It took no great medical knowledge to recognise in Miles Fitzwarren a sick young man, and no great cleverness to discern his ailment. He moved as if gripped by the ache of influenza, but the torpid lassitude of that illness was replaced here by a jittery restlessness, an inability to settle into a chair or a thought, which reminded me of a caged zoo animal. It was painful to witness. To Veronica, it must have been excruciating, but there was no sign of it in her face or her voice.
“Hello, Miles.”
“Evenin’, Ronnie. You’re certainly looking chipper,” he burbled gaily. “Surprise to see you here, don’t you know? It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Did you have a good Christmas? How are your parents—your father’s sciatica, was it? Hope it didn’t interfere with the shootin’ this year. Oh, here, frightfully rude of me. . . . Come and sit down. You a friend of Ronnie’s? Miles Fitzwarren. Pleased to meet you, Miss . . .”
“This is Mary Russell, Miles. A friend from Oxford.”
“Another bluestocking, eh, Miss Russell? Or do you go around doin’ good, too? How are the opera sordida, Ronnie? Most awfully embarrassin’, you know,” he confided to me, “bein’ surrounded by people who do good deeds right and left.” His attempt at gay and tripping laughter rang hollow even in his ears, and the fuzzy remembrance that he was mourning his sister, or perhaps the tardy realisation that he was giving away quite a lot, hurried him on. “I’ve heard about this church lady of yours, Childe. Supposed to be quite the thing. Friend of mine in the City went to hear her about a week or two ago, said she talked all about love. Quite taken with her, he was, though I must say it all sounded positively loose to me, love in church. Still, she probably means well enough.”
“Miles, I—”
“As a matter of fact, I saw her,” he prattled on desperately. “A week ago. Someone told me who she was. Tiny little thing, should have thought she was a child if I hadn’t seen her face. Supp
ose she is a Childe, though, isn’t she—the name, d’you see? Still, good things come in small packages, they say.”
I do not know what further revelations the man might have split, or what Veronica would have said, because the melancholy presence of Marshall appeared at the door and said that Mrs Fitzwarren would be pleased to see Miss Beaconsfield, if she should care to follow him.
Veronica stood up, bit her lip, took three impulsive steps forward to where Miles sat perched on the corner of a desk, kissed him lightly on the cheek, and turned to go. From his flinch, a person would have thought she was touching a burning coal to his skin. The look she flashed me held all her fear, her sorrow, and her hopelessness.
When she had gone, he seemed to forget my presence. He started to pace again, smoking furiously and stopping occasionally at the window to stare out into the dark garden. He was thin, a good stone less than when the suit was made (an exquisite suit, in need of cleaning), and something in his nervous hands reminded me of Holmes, and of Holmes’ lovely lost son. The hands of this young man trembled slightly, though, as Holmes’ never did, and the nails were unkempt. The handkerchief he pulled from a pocket was little better. He blew his nose and wiped his watering eyes, lit another cigarette, paced around the room, and ended up at the black window again, where I could see his reflection in the glass. (Sure sign of a disturbed household, I thought irrelevantly: curtains that remained drawn back after darkness has fallen.) He yawned hugely and looked for a long minute at his ghostly face in the glass before his hand came up and covered his eyes. His shoulders drooped, and I could see the moment of helpless capitulation come over him. I rose swiftly and moved two steps to stand, if only briefly, between him and the door, and when he turned around, he saw me and dropped his cigarette in surprise. He bent quickly to retrieve it and rub the sparks from the pile, and when he came up, the terrible brightness was back in place.
“Dreadfully sorry, old thing, you were so quiet—stupid of me, I forgot you were there. Awfully rude, I know. I’m not normally quite such a bounder—”
A bell rang. It cut off his drivel; it delayed my need to acknowledge that I had no right to keep him from his needle. Slow footsteps went down the corridor, the front door opened, and the heavy wood of the library door was pierced by the voice of a man, clear, high, and utterly unmistakable.
“Why, if it isn’t Edmund Marshall. How are you, my good man?”
“Mr—Mr Holmes! Well, I never. It’s been . . .”
“Thirteen years, yes. Is there a Miss Mary Russell here?”
“Yes, sir. She’s in the library with Mr—with Lieutenant Fitzwarren.”
The object of this sentence was frozen in the attitude of a hound listening for the faint trace of a horn. Or perhaps, rather, the fox at the sound of distant baying.
“Excellent. Here, take my stick, too, Marshall. This door, I believe?”
He was in the doorway, and his eyes immediately took in my position in the room and Miles Fitzwarren’s physical and mental state—as well as the curtains, my hemline, and the chess pieces on the fireside table, knowing him.
He was wearing the dress of the natives, in this case a raven black suit of a slightly old-fashioned but beautifully tailored cut, with a sharp white collar and just the edge of brilliant cuff peeking out at the sleeve. Judging from the indentation in his hair, he had given Marshall a silk top hat. His trouser creases were like razors, his shoes mirrors, and he moved confidently into the opulent library with the politely bored attitude of a potential but unenthusiastic buyer. I subsided into a chair. He shot me an approving glance and strolled nonchalantly over to the chessboard.
“I must have just missed you twice this afternoon, Russell,” he commented, reaching down to move a black knight. “First at your club and then at the home of Miss Beaconsfield, where a riot was just in the process of being quelled by a highly competent young Belgian lady. She told me in her tongue where you had gone.” He pursed his lips and shifted a white bishop three spaces. “Your Miss Beaconsfield appears to have some . . . interesting friends.” Another pause while he moved the black king to the side, and then he seemed to tire of it. He clasped his hands behind his back and continued around the room, his eyes examining the rows of leather-bound spines. At the window, his gaze dropped to the carpet, and he put out his left hand and began to run one finger slowly along the pleated back of the long maroon leather settee, then under the fringe of the lamp shade, across the space to the gleaming mahogany of the desk, touching its carved ivory pen holder lightly before he came to a halt before the rigid figure of Miles Fitzwarren, who was standing still for the first time since I had met him. Holmes stood in contemplation of the intricate crystal paperweight that had appeared in his hand, then slowly raised his eyes to those of the younger man, fixing him with a grey gaze that seemed to come from a great height.
“Good evening, Lieutenant Fitzwarren,” he said with the voice of gentle Fate. The man jerked upright and tried to find his mask.
“Evenin’, sir. I, er, I don’t believe I’ve had the honour.”
“We have met, but it was some years ago. The name is Holmes, Sherlock Holmes.”
The younger man blinked his eyes rapidly and tried unsuccessfully to laugh.
“Awkward name, that, don’t you find? People mistakin’ you for that detective chappy? Magnifyin’ glass and deerstalker and all that.”
“I am that detective chappy, Lieutenant. And I have been in this house before, a trifling matter of some jewels, when you were but a lad. I expect you might remember if you turned your thoughts to it.”
“Good Lord. I do. I mean, I thought it was my imagination, but I do remember meeting Sherlock Holmes.” The awe had knocked out his silly-ass act, and he looked slightly stunned. “What are you doing here? I mean to say, is there anything I can do for you?”
“I came here to ask the same of you.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Do you mean about Iris? The police seem to be—”
Holmes held up a finger and cut him to silence.
“Lieutenant Fitzwarren,” he said clearly, “you can be helped.”
The young man gawped and swallowed. “Yes? Er, well, that’s terribly kind of you,” he began uncertainly before Holmes cut him off again.
“Young man, you have made the unfortunate and all-too-common discovery that the compound formed by the acetylation of morphia is highly addictive both physically and mentally. I cannot help you with your mental dependency on heroin, but I can help you rid yourself of the physiological one. It is not a pleasant process. You will feel as you do now for an unbearably long time, and you will for a shorter time feel considerably worse. At the end of it, you will feel weak and empty and filled with shame, and the craving for the drug will eat at your very soul, but you will be clean, and you will begin to remember who you are. If, as I believe, the desire for cleanliness and memory is growing in you, I can help. You, however, must make the decision.”
“But . . . why? I don’t even know you. Why should you . . .”
“For four years, you did for me what I could not, in the trenches, and this is the price. I have been in your debt since you set foot on the troopship. I can now begin to pay off that debt, by taking over a small part of the price that you paid. You need only say the word, and I am your man.”
A clock ticked slow seconds. Half a minute passed, then a minute. I listened in agony for the approach of footsteps that would interrupt the two men (the one young and racked by the drug pulling at his nerves, the other implacable and utterly solid) and their wordless confrontation.
It was hard to say who moved first, but as the young man gasped for breath, his hand came up, and as Holmes took it, his other hand came around to seize Fitzwarren’s shoulder in support and approval.
“Good man. Where’s your hat?”
“My hat? Surely you don’t intend—”
“I do intend.”
“But, my mother . . .”
“Your mother will be infini
tely better served by knowing that her son is returning to himself than if she were forced to be around him in his present state. She will forgive your absence at the funeral. Besides, if ’twere done, best ’twere done quickly.” He took the elegantly clad elbow and politely but inexorably propelled his charge towards the door. “No, young man, you asked for my help, and as many have found, you must take it as it comes, inconvenient as that may be. Russell, you will make our apologies to the family and give out some explanation or other, will you? Also, would you be so good as to telephone Mycroft at the Diogenes Club and tell him that we are on our way to the sanatorium and please to inform Dr McDaniels that we shall meet him there.”
The startled Marshall had scurried to retrieve the belongings of the two men, and Holmes took the hat from the butler’s hand and slapped it onto Fitzwarren’s head, jammed his own on, and gathered up the two proffered coats.
“Good-bye, Russell. You can reach me through Mycroft.”
“Mazel tov, Holmes.”
“Thank you, Russell,” he said, and added under his breath, “I shall need it.” Ignoring the hovering butler, he draped the young man’s shoulders with a coat and shrugged into his own. The poor servant leapt for the door and held it until both men had been whisked away by the waiting taxi, and then he turned to me with a faint air of reproach.