hand with his big, calloused one.
'Don't you worry. Just remind yourself that you're not yoked to him, and you'll be fine.'
'I'll do that, Patrick, and thank you.'
I had arranged to be at Holmes' cottage at four o'clock, knowing that tea was Mrs. Hudson's favorite meal to produce.
There was a farm cart overturned on the road, which made me somewhat late, but at a quarter past four I pulled the car into his gravel drive and shut off the motor. The sound of Holmes' violin came to my ears. The violin is by its very nature one of the most melancholy of instruments when played alone; played as Holmes was doing, a slow and tuneless meditation, it was positively heart-wrenching.
I slammed the car door noisily to interrupt and retrieved the basket of cheeses and fruits I had brought from Oxford.
When I straightened up, the door of the cottage was open, and Holmes was leaning against the door jamb, no expression on his face.
'Hello, Russell.'
'Hello, Holmes.' I walked up the path trying to discern what was behind those hooded grey eyes, and failing.
I stood below him on the doorstep and held out the basket. 'I brought you and Mrs. Hudson a few things from Oxford.'
'That was nice of you, Russell,' he said politely, voice and eyes saying nothing. He stepped back into the room to let me pass. 'Please come in.'
I took the basket through into the kitchen and somehow survived Mrs. Hudson's welcome without breaking down into tears. I allowed myself to embrace her, hard, and let my lip quiver slightly to let her know that I was still Mary Russell, and then became polite again.
She laid out vast quantities of food for us and talked on and on about the ship and the Suez Canal and Bombay and her son's family while I filled my plate with morsels I did not want.
'How did you hurt your head, Mary?' she finally asked me.
I decided to make a joke out of it, the absentminded undergraduate walking smack into the lightpost, but it didn't really succeed as humour. Mrs. Hudson smiled uncomfortably and said she was glad the glass hadn't hurt my eye, and Holmes watched me as if I were a specimen under his microscope. She excused herself and left us alone.
Holmes and I drank our tea and pushed the food around on our plates. I told him what I had been doing that term, and he asked a few questions. Silence crept heavily in. I desperately asked him what he had been working on, and he described an experiment going on in his laboratory. I asked some questions to keep the flow of words going, and he answered, without much interest. Finally he put his cup down and gestured vaguely in the direction of his laboratory.
'Do you want to see it?'
'Yes, certainly, if you want to show it to me.' Anything was better than sitting here crumbling a cheese scone into a pile of greasy bits.
We stood up and went into his windowless laboratory, and he closed the door behind us. I saw immediately that there was no ongoing experiment, and when I turned to question him, he was standing against the door, his hands deep in his pockets. 'Hello, Russell,' he said for the second time, only now he was there in his face, and his eyes looked out at me, and I couldn't bear it. I turned my back on him, my hands two fists, my eyes shut. I could not see him now, talk to him, and still keep up the act. After a moment two soft taps came on the door, and I smiled in sheer relief. He understood. He pushed a tall lab stool up behind me and I sat on it, my back to him, eyes still closed.
'We have perhaps five minutes without it looking odd,' he said.
'You're watched, I take it.'
'Every move, even in the sitting room. They've made some arrangement with the neighbours — telescopes in the trees. They may even be able to read lips. Will tells me that rumour in town says they have a deaf person there.'
'Patrick says they were asking about me, and you. They are city people, and don't know that you can't hide anything in the country.'
'Yes, and they are sure of themselves. I assume you are being watched.'
'I only saw them two weeks ago, two men and a woman. Very good, too. Five cars followed me down here. The lady has money.'
'We knew that.' His eyes studied my back. 'Are you all right, Russell? You've lost half a stone since January, and you aren't sleeping.'
'Only six pounds, not seven, and I sleep as you do. I'm busy.' My voice dropped to a whisper. 'Holmes, I wish this were over.' I felt him behind me and stood up abruptly. 'No, don't come near me, I couldn't bear it. And I don't think I can do this trip again. I'm fine when I'm in Oxford, but don't ask me to come down again until the end. Please.'
Silence radiated off the man like heat waves, and the low, hoarse voice that came from him was a thing I had never heard before. 'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, I understand.' He stopped, cleared his throat, and I heard him take a deliberate, long breath before he spoke again in his customary incisive tones.
'You are quite correct, Russell. There is nothing to be gained by it, and much to lose. To business then. I had copies of the photographs made for you. I gave the Roman numeral series to Mycroft, but neither of us can make any sense of it. I know it's there. Perhaps you can dig it out. It's that packet on the bench in front of you.'
I took the oversized brown envelope and put it in an inner pocket.
'We must go back out now, Russell. And in about ten minutes we will begin again, and you will leave angrily before Mrs. Hudson can offer you any supper. Yes?'
'Yes, Holmes. Goodbye.'
He went back out into the sitting room, and I joined him a few minutes later. Within twenty minutes the sarcastic remarks were beginning to escalate, and shortly after six o'clock I slammed out of his cottage door without saying good-bye to Mrs. Hudson and sped off down the lane. Two miles away I stopped the car and rested my forehead on the wheel for some time. It was all too real.
SIXTEEN: The daughter of the voice
It is so certain, then, that the new generation — will do something you have not done?
The dreary weeks dragged on. My watchers remained discreet and I, absentminded. Trinity term began, and I was almost too busy to remember that my isolation was an act. Almost. Often at night I would start awake from bed or chair, thinking I had heard two soft taps at the door, but there was never anything. I moved in a woolly cocoon of words and numbers and chemical symbols, and spent my every spare minute in the Bodleian. Oddly, the Dream did not come.
Spring arrived, hesitant at first and then in a rush, heady, rich, long days that pushed the nighttime back into ever smaller intervals, the first spring in five free from the rumour of guns across the Channel, a spring anxious to make up for the cold winter, life bursting out from four years of death. All of England raised her face to the sun; or nearly all. I was aware of the spring, peripherally, aware that no one in the University save myself and a number of shell-shocked ex-soldiers was doing any work, and even I submitted to a picnic on Boar's Hill and another day allowed myself to be dragged off for a punting expedition upriver to Port Meadow.
For the most part, though, I ignored the blandishments of my former friends and current neighbours and kept my head down to work. That was the pattern for most of May, and it was the case on the day nearly at May's end when the tight snarled threads of the case began to come loose in my hands.
Upon my return from Sussex I was faced with the problem of where to put the envelope Holmes had given
