Again she reacted with astonishment. ‘He is here? In England? Now?’
Holmes nodded. ‘Not only is he in England, he is in London and only minutes away from us. Does it surprise you to learn that he is the man who was following you about hidden behind a large false beard?’
Now her astonishment silenced her. She simply sat and shook her head in bewilderment while Holmes watched her.
‘I have questioned Professor Gregorieff,’ said Holmes after a moment, ‘and you may be pleased to hear that he has steadfastly refused to answer any question that might reveal the nature of the secret that lies between you. He has told me that the two of you entered into a pact in Vladivostok, whereby neither of you would ever reveal what is known to both of you. Is that correct, Mrs Fordeland?’
There was a long silence, during which the lady picked up the photographs and turned them in her hands. ‘That is correct, Mr Holmes,’ she said at last. ‘We made such an agreement. All I can or will tell you is that there was nothing wrong in our agreement. It was made to protect each other and other people.’
‘I believe you,’ said Holmes. ‘But you can, if you will, tell me more, for Professor Gregorieff has given me a message for you. He has asked me to tell you that, if you wish to reveal the subject of your secret pact, you may do so.’
There was another long silence while she looked at the table. At last she lifted her eyes to my friend’s.
‘You must be telling the truth, Mr Holmes, because none but Gregori and I have ever known of that agreement before. He is right. The time has come to tell you what I had hoped to avoid. Do you think I might have some more tea?’
Fifteen
A Time for Answers
The tea was served and we took it in silence. Our client drank with her eyes lowered.
When she had finished her tea she stood up and walked to the window, where she remained for several minutes, looking down into the street. Holmes’ eyes never left her but he made no sound.
At last she turned about and spoke, though she remained standing at the window, perhaps because its sunlit background made it difficult for us to see her expression.
‘I had hoped,’ she said, with a clear and firm intonation, ‘that what has taken place in London had nothing to do with my past, but you have proved to me, Mr Holmes, that it does. For that reason, it would be unfair to you were I not to reveal the matter that lies between myself and Professor Gregorieff. To explain that, I must also reveal certain other things which are not the subject of my promise to the professor, merely the subject of a long- held vow to myself.’
She paused and we remained silent.
At last she said, ‘Dr Watson, you have told me that you have read my first book. Leaving aside anything that you may have learned since I came to consult Mr Holmes, will you tell me what you know of my past from reading that book?’
I shifted in my seat. It was a good many years since I had read her account of her years in Mongkuria, but it had made a memorable impression upon me.
‘I believe,’ I said, ‘that you are British by birth, the daughter of a Welsh officer in the army. That you married another officer, that you have a child or children by him, but that he died unfortunately in the Malay States. Widowed, and with no great fortune, you took up teaching to support yourself and your children and, through a friend in the Consular Service, became aware that the King of Mongkuria was seeking an English governess for his many children. With considerable courage, if I may say so, you applied for and were accepted in that appointment.’
She nodded slowly.
‘Would you be surprised,’ she asked, ‘to know that what you believe is untrue?’
I was confused. ‘I really cannot say,’ I replied. ‘I have always believed those to be the bald facts of your life.’
She nodded again.
‘I was not,’ she said, ‘the daughter of a Welsh officer. I was one of two daughters of a Welsh private soldier, born at Ahmednugger in India. My mother was a woman of mixed blood. You, Doctor, have served in the East. You will be able to imagine, as perhaps Mr Holmes cannot, the conditions of squalor and poverty in which I grew.’
It was my turn to nod, and to cast my mind back to the other ranks’ quarters to which my medical duties had sometimes taken me. I remembered the great, dirty common living quarters of the squaddies, with a corner set aside and separated by matting screens to provide a little privacy for married soldiers.
Behind them was little room to live and move. The bed was provided for a soldier, which he might share with his wife or paramour. Children could sleep only on mats laid on the floor beneath the bed.
Sometimes, when duty kept soldiers away from the barrack room, male children were allowed to
occupy the empty beds, but this privilege was never given to girls. Our client and her sister would have grown up sleeping under their parents’ bed. The first time that ever I saw such an arrangement I was deeply angry at the contempt with which our Empire treated those who defended its frontiers and their unfortunate children. In addition, the family would be surrounded by the common barrack room where the private soldiers ate, drank and pursued their amusements. I thought of my own dear Mary, herself an officer’s daughter and so like our client in many ways. It was difficult to imagine this poised, intelligent, educated and resourceful lady emerging from such squalor and moral peril.
‘I see,’ continued Mrs Fordeland, ‘from your expression, that you know the circumstances to which I refer. That I do so is because it is relevant to who I am and to what occurred in Russia. I will not dwell on the physical conditions in which I lived with my poor mother and sister. My father died before my birth and my mother, for economic reasons if no other, rapidly married another private soldier. Private soldiers were not then and are not now well paid. My mother had to take in laundry from single soldiers to make ends meet, and Eliza and I had to help her with this drudgery. In England such a life would be a burden; in the heat and dust of India it was akin to slavery.’
She paused and stepped to the table, pouring herself another cup of tea and retaking her seat in the basket chair.
‘There was no future for us,’ she went on, ‘except to be evicted from the barracks at fifteen. Where might we then go? A small requirement existed for maids for officers’ households, but very few, for the majority were plentifully staffed with cheap Indian labour, and few ladies would care to have about their house and in contact with their children what they called a ’barrack rat‘. We were regarded as inevitably corrupted by the life in which we were bred, and it is sad to say that many of us were. No English merchant or trader in the town would employ a girl. Our only future lay in marrying another private soldier and repeating the heritage of misery.’
She sipped her tea and lifted her eyes to ours. ‘At an early age,’ she declared, ‘I determined that I would not submit to such a cycle. I realized that education was the only chance that I had. The garrison school was not the best, but it had books and it had teachers, and to those two lanterns I clung with desperation that they would guide me out of my wretched existence. Every minute which I spent in school was not only a minute away from the squalor and drudgery of the barrack room, it was an investment in escape.’
A small smile lit up her sombre expression. ‘There was another source of light in my life, gentlemen.
As I grew, I became aware of a young clerk in the barracks, Rupert Eland.
He was only a few years older than I, and we became fast friends. He became the greatest light in my young life, because a marriage to him, when he was of sufficient standing and income to take a wife, would solve all my problems in an instant.‘
She shook her head. ‘But it was not, it seemed, to be. I was fourteen, rising fifteen and soon to be forbidden to live in the barracks, when my stepfather took a hand. He was not going to risk having a daughter living beyond the barracks, one that he would have to support, and so he commenced
arrangements for me to marry one of his fellows, another private soldier. I could not wait for Rupert’s advancement, for the grim future which I feared was almost upon me.’
She set her jaw and looked directly at us, as though daring us to query what she was about to say.
‘I ran away,’ she said. ‘I lied about my age and background and attached myself to the retinue of an English missionary who was departing for Singapore. The teaching which I had absorbed in the
