building—real or imagined, palace or basilica—and furnishes it with items that stimulate specific memories.”
“The problem being,” Holmes commented, “that the formulation and retention of the myriad rooms and furnishings alone requires a prodigious memory.”
“And,” Long added, with an air of finally being permitted to reach his central thesis, “there is nothing to guarantee that a room once furnished will not be closed off and forgotten. To have its lock turned, as it were.”
“I see,” Russell said. Her chin had come up and one light brown eyebrow had arched delicately above the frame of her spectacles: scepticism, and a trace of indignation that this stranger would presume to know her mind. Before she could voice her objections aloud, Holmes firmly turned the conversation to books and Chinese philosophy, and in a while they were lighting their after-dinner cigarettes and arguing amiably over the bill.
She was still silent when they stood to leave, rousing herself only to say the necessary words of farewell to the bookseller. Outside, the fog had thickened into a clean, grey version of a London particular, and Holmes relaxed into its protection, hooking her hand through his left arm as they set off for downtown.
Holmes was intensely aware of the physical sensation of her arm on his. He generally was aware of her presence, that sturdy physicality wrapped around a magnificent brain and the stoutest of hearts. One flaw alone had he found in this incomparable hard diamond of a woman, an imperfection that had long puzzled him, and cost him no small amount of sleep.
Five years ago he had sat in a dark cabin on a boat heading to Palestine, listening to the details of her family's death, hearing of the guilt that had been bleeding her like an invisible wound. Ever since that night, he had waited for Russell to question those things that she believed to be true. She was, he had reminded himself time and again, one of the most competent natural investigators he had ever known, unerring and undistractible. If her ears would not hear and her eyes refused to focus, there might well be a reason.
Even so, over the years it had been on the very end of his tongue a score of times to push matters into the open. At first, he had not done so because she was so very young, and clearly needed to shield herself against further injury. Later, he had come to realise that forcing her into a confrontation with her beliefs, tempting though it might be, could well drive a steel wedge between the two of them: She would blame him for introducing the troubling question, then further blame him for having waited so long before doing so—if there was a thing Russell hated more than a stranger presuming to know how her mind worked, it was the sensation of being protected. The resulting disquiet and mistrust would have made an already difficult relationship unbearably, perhaps fatally, complicated.
And nearly literally fatal: On the boat out from Japan, he had ventured a slight step, suggesting that the flying dream was a reference to the earthquake; the very next day he'd found Russell at the rail, moments from overbalancing.
Yes, fear had kept him silent.
Later, a growing and perverse fascination with his wife's single, glaring blind spot had stayed his hand. It had felt at times like watching a child's block-tower continue to grow and wondering when it would topple and crash.
Abject cowardice, compounded by intellectual curiosity.
And then in January, his brother Mycroft's commands had prised them out of England and flung them halfway around the world, and Russell had decided—on her own, without the faintest suggestion from him—to come to this place. He had known it was coming, then, and held his breath. Even when he'd come up the stairway on the ship and seen her about to tumble over the rail, he'd held back.
She was coming to it: The mounting pressure of the things she had seen yet not perceived would break down her blindness. She knew, yet kept it from herself; she had the key, and had only to draw it from her pocket. He would force himself, as he had all this time, to continue trusting that she would face the question before she failed to notice a man with a gun, or absent-mindedly stepped out in front of a taxi. Sooner or later, something would drive her to a confrontation with all the things she knew and did not see.
He, Holmes, had known the question's answer the moment he saw that intent young man making his way up the hill in Miss Adderley's photograph: This was not a man to be fatally distracted by a pair of argumentative children.
Russell should not require a photograph: She knew her father.
And there were any number of ways to send a motorcar off a cliff: steering wheel, brakes, a score of parts vulnerable to sabotage.
Russell knew that as well.
Soon now, she would look down at her hand and see the key lying there; she would ask herself a simple question that would teeter an edifice of ten years' belief.
Chapter Fifteen
The fog had ceased its teasing around the street-lamps and taken possession of the streets. However, the fog here was a very different thing from that stinking, inert yellow blanket that settled over London every winter. This seemed a living thing, shifting and breathing across the city, and it sheltered their walk, wrapping these two wayfaring strangers in anonymity. No shots rang out, no gaunt figures with tubercular coughs dogged their heels, and they walked arm in arm in mutually distracted silence, physically linked but mentally miles apart, through the Chinese district and downtown to the welcoming lights of the St Francis.
Between the excess of drink and the shock of two complete meals that day, Russell succumbed quickly to the warmth of the bed and did not wake until Holmes placed a cup of coffee on her bed-side table. She opened one eye, winced back from the brightness as the curtains went back, then threaded out a hand to fumble with the alarm- clock, holding its face up before her own. When she had focussed, she slammed it back down and made to throw off the bed-clothes.
“Nearly nine o'clock! Holmes, why didn't you wake me earlier? I told you that Flo wanted to get an early start, and I haven't finished packing my things.”
“Your friend telephoned five minutes ago to say that she was only now putting her things into a bag, that she would be here in an hour. The word ‘early' appears to have a different meaning in Californian English.”
“Only in the dialect spoken by a certain sub-genus of nocturnal Californians,” Russell said, pawing the bed- clothes back into place and reaching for spectacles, then coffee. With lenses and the beverage, her vision improved, and she looked more closely at her husband's attire and his purposeful movement through the rooms.
“Are you going somewhere, Holmes?”
By this time he had his coat and hat in hand, and it was apparent that he was indeed on his way out of the door. “Yes, if you don't mind I shan't wait for your friend to arrive. There's a gentleman with a collection of manuscript papers across the Bay in Oakland, and a ferry that leaves at ten-thirty. If that's all right with you?”
“Of course it is,” she answered with just the faintest edge of too much protest in her voice. “I'm glad you have something to keep you busy, so I won't worry that you're going to be bored silly in my absence.”
“No danger of that,” Holmes replied lightly. “Do you wish me to mention at the desk that we won't be leaving San Francisco on the Wednesday as you had intended?”
“Oh! I forgot to do that. Yes, would you? I have a few more days' business with Norbert, so perhaps another week?”
“The fourteenth,” he said, pulling on his gloves, and carefully not bringing up the topic of cross-country aeronautical pioneering.
“Or maybe the next day; that ought to give Norbert sufficient time to finish things off.”
“Thursday the fifteenth it is. Have a pleasant time, Russell.”
