A Letter of Mary

'Mycroft's Arabs strike me the same way,' I said, sounding regrettably peevish. Holmes glanced at me then, amused, and rose to his feet.

'I think that brings us up-to-date. When shall we four meet again?'

'If it's in thunder and in rain, I'm going to throw Miss Small's accursed shoes out the window and wear my Wellingtons,' I grumbled. 'Not tomorrow— I'll be back late. Tuesday?'

It was agreed, and we dispersed.

* * *

Holmes and I drove back with few words. He had to return the cab to its owner, and as it was still raining hard, he stopped in front of the boardinghouse to let me out. I looked out the window at the unwelcoming door, with my fingers on the car's door handle.

'You won't be long?' I asked. It would be just like him to disappear again for some days.

'Twenty minutes. If he's there, I'll have him drive me back.'

I nodded and moved to open the door. His voice stopped my hand.

'You know, Russell, one of the damnable things about working in partnership is that one has to take the other person's proprietary feelings into account— Russell proponit sed Holmes disponit. It's not everyone who will put up with being run roughshod over in the course of the chase and then be willing to brush himself off and set to again as if nothing had happened. It was one of Watson's most valuable strengths as a partner, his doglike devotion. However,' and here he turned his face towards me, though there was not enough light to reveal his expression, 'you will no doubt have noticed that I did not consider this a strength when it came to a permanent partnership.'

It was a generous apology, for Holmes, and I grinned at him.

'Woof,' I said, and ducked out into the rain.

PART FIVE

Monday, 3 September 1923-

Wednesday, 5 September 1923

The poet's pen ... gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name.

— Shakespeare

NINETEEN

tau

I never tire of Oxford. Cambridge is stunning, of course. Cambridge is sweet and ethereal, and the air in Cambridge bubbles in the mind like fine champagne, but I cannot imagine getting any work done there. Oxford is a walled city still, and within her black and golden, crumbling, scabrous, aged, dignified, and eternal walls lie pockets of rarefied air, places where, turning a corner or entering a conversation, the breath catches and for an instant one is taken up into ... if not the higher levels of heaven, at least into a place divine. And then, in the next moment, there comes an eddy of grit, and the ghostly echo of mediaeval oxcarts is heard rumbling down past Christopher Wren's bell tower on their way from Robert D'Oilley's castle to his grand bridge over the river. Even in Oxford University's holy of holies, the Bodleian Library, there comes an occasional grumble and whiff of the internal combustion engine.

The grit that morning was palpable, for the haze that softened the sunlight of what might otherwise have been a shimmering morning was the result of burning stubble in the surrounding countryside, and even at the early hour of my arrival, the black skeletal remains of the hard stalks rained gently onto the city, forming drifts that swirled up at the passing of motorcars. I saw no washing hung up to dry that Monday morning as I walked into town from the train station, along the sluggish canal, under the shadow of the otherworldly castle mound, looking in its vernal leaf more like a setting for Puck and Titania than it did a hillock for undergraduate picnics overlooking the prison, then past the decrepit slums of Greyfriars and out onto the deceptive everyday face of the most beautiful high street in any city I have seen, dodging carts, autos, trams, and bicycles, the town centre strikingly incomplete without its normal complement of fluttering black gowns, like a friend with a new and extreme haircut. Up the High towards the tantalising curve, but before entering it, at the very foot of St Mary's wise divinity, I made an abrupt turn north, and there, oddly satisfying in its scorn for a deliberate and formal perfection, was the quadrangle with the rotund earthiness of the Radcliffe Camera in its centre, bounded on its four sides by the tracery of All Souls on my right, the height of St Mary's at my back, Brasenose College on the left giving nothing away, and before me, where there should rightly have been trumpets and gilt, the unadorned backside of the Bodleian and the Divinity School. I was home.

I had come here for three purposes. The first, I dispatched within two hours: Although modern Egyptian history is not my field, once one knows the basic techniques of research, no field's fences or unfamiliar terrain make much of a barrier. I skimmed half a dozen books and brought the colonel's wavering scholarship back to earth, noted two contrary arguments and a nice apothegm I would steal for him, and then abandoned Egypt, to proceed with my own, considerably more appealing projects. I began in Duke Humfrey's.

My tools were a broad-nibbed pen, an unlined notebook, and a page with twenty words written on it. On a quick tour of the room, I spotted three familiar heads: a good beginning. I gathered up two of my fellow students, approached the third figure, a don whose subject was church history, and explained my need.

'I wonder if I might ask your help with a little project of mine,' I began. 'There's this fairly old piece of manuscript that I think may have come from a woman's hand. I have a friend who's something by way of an expert on handwriting— you know, he can tell you whether the person is right- or left-handed, old or young, where and how much he was educated, that sort of thing— and he said that if I were to collect some samples of men and women writing Greek and Hebrew, which is what the manuscript is in, it would give him a paradigm for comparison.'

'What great fun,' the don exclaimed, his eyes sparkling through bottle-glass lenses. 'Do you know, just the other day I dug up a sheaf of letters in Bodley, and as I was reading through them, two of them struck me as somehow ineffably feminine. They're Latin, of course, but if you do come up with anything on your project, you might be interested in seeing these others. Any particular phrase you want written?' he added, reaching for his pen.

'Yes, here's the list, and do use this pen— it'll keep the samples uniform.' His eyebrows rose at the selection of words, but he wrote them neatly and handed back the pen and book. The other two did the same. I made note of their identities on each page, thanked them, and left them to their books.

Academia being what it is, the reactions of everyone else I approached during the course of the day's investigations were quite predictable. Intensely curious and intellectually excited, particularly over my chosen words (which in Greek included Jerusalem, Temple, Rachel, madness, confusion, and Romans, and in Hebrew the words for day, darkness, land, and wilderness), they were nonetheless loath to trespass on my personal research. As a result, all helped, except one ancient of days who was having a flare-up of arthritis in his writing hand, and all demanded to see the results of my little project as soon as it was published. By early afternoon, I had a filled notebook. Furthermore, by late afternoon, I had a clear idea of what Dorothy Ruskin had done on the missing Tuesday, and by evening, when I prepared to turn my back on the town centre, I had a vastly renewed sense of vigour and purpose. For all of those things, I felt profoundly grateful.

I made my late supper of a meat pie and half a pint of bitter at the Eagle and Child, and took the train back to London. It was nearly eleven o'clock when I said, 'Evening, Billy' into the empty corridor and heard his reply through the door. I was hardly surprised that the room next to mine was empty. It had taken me some days to get back into the rhythm of a case, but I had now remembered it, and I no longer expected Holmes to appear but for brief snatches of consultation, reflection, and sleep.

I went down the hallway to the bathroom and washed away the day's grime, checked to see that I had an ironed frock for the next day, and settled down at the little window table with a lamp and the notebook. Shortly after midnight, I heard a key in the door of the adjoining room, and a moment later the grizzled, disreputable face of my husband leered at me from the connecting door, one eye drooping and sightless, teeth stained brown and yellow, lips slack.

'Good evening, Russell, hard at work, I see. I'll be with you in a moment.' He pulled back into his room. I closed my notebook and walked over to the doorway to lean against the jamb with my arms crossed, watching him as he discarded the disguise. There was a lift to his shoulders and a gleam in his eyes that I rarely saw at home, and he looked and moved like a man twenty years younger as he tossed his clothing into an untidy heap in the