'The woman had an incredible faith in us, I agree. And not an entirely warranted faith, at least when it came to me. Her sister's ears were much sharper than mine at hearing nuances.'
'The search of our cottage did catch our attention, though,' said Holmes benignly.
Lestrade shook his head.
'So elaborate. And almost suicidal. Why not come to us in the first place, or even to you, bring it out in the open? As mad as her sister, in a way.'
'I think it began simply— in a conviction— and grew. And yes, immensely single-minded, practical people do seem mad. But, you may be right about one thing: I don't think she much cared for the chance she had of living blind.'
A short time later, Lestrade's local police driver arrived to take him to the train. Before he left, Holmes congratulated him, so that going down the drive to the waiting car, his shoe leather was floating several inches above the gravel. Holmes shook his head sourly as we watched the driver negotiate the ruts and stones and peace began to settle again onto our patch of hillside.
'What is wrong, Holmes? I'd have thought you would be as cock-a-hoop as Lestrade, snatching a solution from the jaws of befuddlement as you did.'
'Ah, Russell, I had such hopes for this case,' he said mournfully. 'But in the end, it all came down to greed. So commonplace, it's hardly worthy of any attention. Do you know, for a few days I allowed myself to hope that we had a prime specimen among cases, a murder with the pure and unadorned motive of the hatred of emancipated women. Now, that would have been one for the books: murder by misogyny,' he drawled with relish, and then his face twisted. 'Money. Bah!'
* * *
Two days later, I took the train to London to see Colonel Edwards. I dressed carefully for that meeting, including my soft laced-up boots, which brought me to well over six feet in height. I arrived back late in the afternoon, and while Mrs Hudson went to heat more water for the teapot, I walked over to stand at the big south window that framed the Downs as they rolled towards the sea, to watch the light fade into purples and indigo and a blue in the heights the colour of Dorothy Ruskin's eyes. Small noises behind me told of Holmes filling and lighting his pipe— a sweetly fragrant tobacco tonight, an indicator of his temper, as well. Mrs Hudson came in with the tea. I accepted a cup and took it back to the window. It was nearly dark.
'So, Russell.'
'Yes, Holmes.'
'What did your colonel have to say?'
I took a contemplative sip of the steaming-hot tea and thought back to the man's reaction as he saw his gentle, hesitant, stoop-shouldered secretary climb out of the taxi as Mary Russell Holmes. I could feel a smile of pure devilment come onto my lips.
'He said, and I quote, 'I always felt there was more to you, Mary, but I must say I hadn't realised just how much more.' '
I grinned as I heard the sounds behind me, then turned, finally, to take in the sight of Sherlock Holmes collapsed in helpless laughter, his head thrown back on the chair, pipe forgotten, uncertainty forgotten, all forgotten but the beauty and absurdity of the colonel's elegy.
PART SEVEN
— Richard Steele
POSTSCRIPT
The letter that lay at the heart of our investigation, the little strip of stained papyrus that was written in a hurried moment some eighteen and a half centuries before I first laid eyes upon it, preserved by simple peasants in a vague awareness of its importance, passed within its clay amulet during the formative years of Islam into a branch of the family that followed the Prophet, kept in the heart of generations of believers over centuries of war and wandering until a simple act of generosity on the part of an Englishwoman brought it to light, is still in my possession. In the decades since it came to me, the scientific study of documents has made huge strides, from the chemical analysis of writing materials to radiocarbon dating to the grammatical analyses of the words themselves. Not one of these tests has taken me substantially further than Holmes' graphological conclusion or my own intuitive conviction that the thing was real. Certainly none of the tests that I have thus far been able to conduct or oversee has cast any degree of doubt on Mary's letter. As yet, I have found no indication that it is other than what it seems: a hasty, affectionate letter written by a woman of considerable wisdom and strength to a bewildered but much- loved sister, at a moment when the writer realised that her world was coming to a violent, catastrophic end.
It pains me, even now, to know that I have failed Mariam; I feel I have betrayed her trust. Rational factors count for little, and the promise I made to Colonel Edwards on that final afternoon all those years ago, a promise to delay publication of Mary's letter, need not have been said; the fact is, sheer cowardice kept me from revealing the letter Dorothy Ruskin gave into my keeping, abject terror at the thought of the battle I should be in for, a battle that would have consumed my entire life and all my energies. I have kept it safe in a bank vault; I shall hand it over to another, but I am not proud of my actions.
I admit, as did Dorothy Ruskin, to a degree of frustration in knowing that I will never witness the reaction when Mary's letter comes to light. It will not be released until a minimum of ten years after my death: I gave that promise to Col. Dennis Edwards to atone for my actions against him, and although the temptation to break my word has been great, I shall not. I do, however, like the previous owner, receive a great deal of amusement when I picture the results of the letter being made public.
I suppose that the Christian world at the close of the twentieth century will be better equipped to deal with the revelations contained in Mary's letter than it was in the century's earlier decades. As Miss Ruskin noted, presupposed notions of the role of women in leadership during the first century need to be discarded before the idea of Mary of Magdala as an apostle of Jesus and a leader of the Jerusalem church sits easy in the mind. Archaeologists, male and female, are pointing us inexorably in that direction, and presuppositions are teetering: We know that women were heads of synagogues in the early centuries of the Common Era and that adaptations to the Roman expectations concerning the Godhead were considerable as the nascent Church moved away from its troubled birthplace and struggled to carve a place for itself in the empire.
Perhaps before too many years, my heir will judge the world ready to see Mariam's letter. I do not know if I envy her, or pity her.
* * *
Death, and life, and the written word that binds them. The first letter to hit my desk brought with it an all- too-brief refluorescence of a friendship and led to the deaths of four people. The next letter gave life to a voice which the world had lost for more than eighteen hundred years. And a last letter, reaching out from the grave to assert the will of its writer and ensure the continuance of her life's work, coincidentally condemned those who would have brought that work to an end. The hand of bone and sinew and flesh achieves its immortality in taking up a pen. The hand on a page wields a greater power than the fleshly hand ever could in life.
