A Monstrous Regiment of Women

“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. Suppose 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