rectangle. I poured the papers back into her bag, took the card, and helped her up into the carriage.
'Good-bye, my dear Miss Russell. Come see me again in Palestine!' She seemed on the edge of saying something else, but the whistle blew, the moment passed, and she contented herself with leaning forward and kissing my cheek. I stepped down from the train, and she was gone.
On the way home, I was in time to be greeted by a neighbour's dairy herd being brought down the narrow lane for the night. I took the car out of gear to wait and looked down at my hands. Competent, practical hands, with large knuckles, square nails, rough cuticles, ink stains, and a dusting of freckles. The two outer fingers of the weaker right hand were slightly twisted, a thin white scar almost invisible at their base, near the palm, one remnant of the automobile accident that had taken the lives of my parents and my brother and had left me with a multitude of scars, visible and otherwise, following weeks in the hospital, further weeks in hypnotic psychotherapy, and years in the grip of guilt-inspired nightmares. The hands on the steering wheel were those of a student who farmed during the holidays, ordinary hands that could hold a pen or a hay fork with equal facility.
Holmes' hands, however, were indeed extraordinary. Disembodied, they could as easily have belonged to an artist or surgeon, or a pianist. Or even a successful safe cracksman. As a young man, he had some considerable talent as a boxer, though the thought of putting those hands to such a use made me cringe. Fencing, yes— the nicks and cuts he had picked up left only scars— but to use those sensitive instruments as a means of pummelling another human being into insensibility seemed to me like using a Waterford vase to crack nuts. However, Holmes was never one to believe that any part of himself could be damaged by misuse, which only goes to show that even the most intelligent of men is capable of considerable feeblemindedness.
At any rate, his hands had survived unbroken. As Miss Ruskin had seen, his hands were direct extensions of his mind, the long, inquisitive fingers meandering about over surfaces, lightly touching a shelf or a shoe, until without apparent interference from his brain, they arrived at the key clue, the crux of the investigation. His bony hands were the outer manifestation of his inner self, whether they were probing a lock, tamping shreds of tobacco into his pipe, coaxing a complex theme from his Stradivarius, handling the reins of a fractious horse, or performing a delicate experiment in the laboratory. I had only to look at them to know the state of his mind, how an investigation or experiment was proceeding, and how he thought it might turn out. A person's life is betrayed by the hands, in the calluses and marks and twists of skin and bone. The life of Sherlock Holmes lay in his long, strong, sensitive hands. It was a life that was dear to me.
I looked up, to find the road clear of all but a few gently steaming cowpats, and the farmer's small son staring curiously at me over the gate. I put the car into gear and drove home.
FOUR
For such a short and apparently uneventful episode, the visit of this passionate amateur archaeologist left behind it a disconcerting emptiness. It took a deliberate and conscious effort to return to our normal work, I to my books, Holmes into a laboratory that emitted a variety of odours late into the night, most of them sulpherous, all of them foul. I indulged myself in an hour of deciphering Mariam's letter before returning to the manly declarations of the prophet Isaiah, waved vaguely at Mrs Hudson's greeting and later at her 'Good night, Mary,' and worked until my vision failed around midnight. I closed my books and found myself looking at the box. Whose hands had so lovingly formed that zebra? I wondered. What Italian craftsman, so far from an obviously well-known and beloved African landscape, had carved this piece of perfection? I rested my eyes on it until they started to droop, then picked up the box and held it while I went through the house, checking the windows and doors. I then climbed the stairs.
Holmes did not look up from his workbench, just grunted when I mentioned the hour. I went down the hallway to the bath. He had not appeared when I returned. I put the box on the bedside table and turned off the lamp, then stood for some minutes in the wash of silver light from the moon, three days from full, and watched the ghostly Downs tumble in frozen motion to the sea. I left the curtains drawn back and took myself solitary to bed, and as I lay back onto the pillow, I realised that Holmes had not read the newspapers for at least three days.
The observation sounds trivial, a minor disturbance on the surface of our lives, but it was no less ominous than a stream's roil that, to the experienced eye, shouts of the great boulder below. Marriage attunes a person to nuances in behaviour, the small vital signs that signal a person's well-being. With Holmes, one of those indicators was his approach to the London papers.
In his earlier life, the daily papers had been absolutely essential to his work. Dr Watson's accounts are as littered with references to the papers as their sitting room was with the actual product, and without the facts and speculations of the reporters and the personal messages of the agony columns, Holmes would have been deprived of a sense as important as touch or smell.
Now, however, his newspaper habits varied a great deal, depending on whether the case he was on concerned the politics of France, the movements of the art world, or the inner financial doings of the City. Or, indeed, if there was a case at all. He regularly drove the local newsagent to distraction, and vice versa. For weeks on end, Holmes was content with a single edition of one of the London papers, and the Sussex
During one of my absences the previous spring, Holmes had inexplicably changed from one of the more lurid popular papers to
If Holmes was at home when the newspaper arrived, he would react in one of two ways, which I had come to watch carefully, as a bellwether of his inner mind. Some days, he would spot the boy coming down the lane and rush down the stairs to snatch it out of whatever hand happened to carry it through the door, hurl himself into the frayed basket chair in front of the fireplace, and bury his head in it, moaning and exclaiming for the better part of an hour. Other days, he would ignore it entirely. It would lie, folded and reproachful, on the table next to the front door. He would pass it by without a glance, drop letters to be posted on top of it, pull a pair of gloves from the drawer beneath it, until eventually, that evening or even the following morning, he would retrieve it, glance through it in a desultory fashion, and discard it in disgust.
Those were the days I dreaded, the days when he was deliberately resisting the pull of London and all it had been to him. He was also unfailingly polite and sweet-tempered on those days— always a signal of great danger. An unread paper meant an unsettled mind, and to this day the sight of a fresh, folded newspaper on a polished surface brings a twinge of apprehension. And for three days, he had only glanced at his newspaper over breakfast.
I lay awake and looked at the box on the table beside the bed, seeing the indistinct sparkle of the moon reflected off the blue eyes of a diminutive monkey perched on a miniature wall, and I felt, frankly, peeved at the
