holding her there.
It only took two or three minutes for her to burn to the water, and then she sank.
I had not realised I was on my feet and at the very edge of the pier until my knees collapsed beneath me and left me sitting on a great mound of rope, watching the sudden scurry of activity before me, men on boats of all kinds, shouts, people running, cursing, gesticulating, a police boat. The men on the barge were standing in a row, staring down into the water over their side, subdued, with the attitude of those who have witnessed death.
I stared at the fragments of burning planks and unidentifiable smouldering things, the remnants of what had been an expensive launch, and I felt nothing. There was nothing inside me to feel. How curious. I watched the boats gather, waited for the horror to overwhelm me, waited for the urge to fling myself howling into the river, or into insanity, but I felt nothing but emptiness.
After a long, long time, a stir came in the water below my feet. I looked down and saw floating there a white oval topped by a scrawl of iron grey and coated with scum and debris. It spoke to me in the drawl of a Cockney.
“Give us an ’and, laidee.”
“Holmes?” I whispered. I knelt. I put a hand down to the water and hauled back a dripping, scorched caricature of a man in shirtsleeves, barefoot, missing half the hair on the back of his head, covered in oil and filth, and exposed to half the diseases of Europe. When he was upright, I flung my arms around him and put my mouth to his. For a long minute, we were one.
Rational thought returned in a flood. I pulled back, and I hit him—nothing fancy, just a good, traditional, lady’s open-handed slap that had all the muscles of my arm behind it. It rattled his teeth and nearly sent him back into the river. I glared furiously at him.
“Never, never do that again!”
“Russell!
“Knock me out and leave me behind—Holmes, how could you?”
“There was no time for a discussion,” he pointed out.
“That is no excuse,” I said illogically. “Never even think of doing something like that again!”
“You’d have done the same, if you’d thought of it.”
“No! Well, probably not.”
“I do apologise for making your decision for you, Russell.”
“I want your word that you’ll never do anything like that again.”
“Very well, I promise: Next time, I will allow the villain to escape while we stage a debate on who is to do what.”
“Good. Thank you.” He stood fingering his jaw; I reached up to explore the knot on my skull. “My head hurts. What did you hit me with?”
“My hand. I think I’ve broken a bone in it,” he added thoughtfully, and, turning his attentions to that part, he flexed it gingerly.
“Serves you right.” I reached out and brushed a strand of rotted straw from the side of his face, peeled a scrap of oil-soaked newspaper from the charred remnant of his collar. He pulled a dripping handkerchief out of his trouser pocket, wrung it out, and unfolded it, then ran it over his face and hands and hair. He held it out and glanced at its transformation into a mechanic’s rag, then dropped it over the side of the pier and turned back to me, his face unreadable.
“A bath and some inoculations are called for, Holmes,” I said, or rather, started to say, because on the third word he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around me and his mouth came down on mine with all the force that the side of his hand had used earlier on my skull, and with much the same effect on my knees.
(How could he have known? How could he know my body better than I did myself? How could he foresee that a thumbnail run up my spine would—)
“By God,” he murmured throatily into my hair. “I’ve wanted to do that since the moment I laid eyes upon you.”
(—arch my body against his, close my eyes, stop the breath in my throat? That his lips on the inside of my wrist and on the hollow of my jaw would concentrate my entire being, every cell in my body—)
“Holmes,” I objected when I could draw breath, “when you first saw me, you thought I was a boy.”
(—on that point of joining? That his mouth at the corner of mine was so excruciating, so tantalising, that it would arouse me more—)
“And don’t think that didn’t cause me some minutes of deep consternation,” he said.
(—than a direct kiss, would ring in my body the desire for more?)
When he held me away from him, it was fortunate he left his hands on my shoulders. He spoke as if continuing a discussion.
“You do realise how potentially disastrous this whole thing is?” he said. “I am old and set in my ways. I will give you little affection and a great deal of irritation, though heaven knows you’re aware of how difficult I can be.”
“And you smoke foul tobacco and get down in the dumps for days and mess about with chemicals, but I don’t keep a bull pup.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Holmes, is this a proposal of marriage?”
He blinked in surprise.
“Does it need proposing?” he asked. “Would it please some obscure part of your makeup if I were to get down on one knee? I shall, if you wish, although my rheumatism is a bit troublesome just at the moment.”
“Your rheumatism troubles you when convenient, Holmes,” I remarked, “and I think that if you’re going to propose marriage to me, you’d best have both your feet under you. Very well, I accept, on the aforementioned condition that you never again try to keep me from harm by hitting me on the skull, or by trickery. I’ll not marry a man I can’t trust at my back.”
“I give you my solemn vow, Russell, to try to control my chivalrous impulses. If, that is, you agree that there may come times when—due entirely to my greater experience, I hasten to say—I am forced to give you a direct order.”
“If it is given as to an assistant, and not as to a female of the species, I shall obey.”
These complicated negotiations of our marriage contract thus completed, we faced each other as a newly affianced couple, reached out, and shook hands firmly.
POSTSCRIPT
Corinthians 6:8-10
« ^
There is no precise end to a tale such as this one, and yet, a line must be drawn. For the sake of those who wish to look beyond the boundary, however, I shall recount two conversations I had that spring.
The first was held six or eight weeks after the final events of this story, when Veronica rang me in Sussex.
