The Marriage of Mary Russell (2 page)

This man Sherlock Holmes, nearly three times my age and with long decades of history behind him, had spent the past six years rearranging his entire life around first an apprentice, then a partner-in-crime. He now, with no hesitation—no visible hesitation—proposed to change himself even further, sacrificing his independence to become half of a whole. There was nothing I could do about my youth, or about the coach and horses that marriage was going to drive through his orderly existence. Both those things meant that I should have to be even more sensitive than most wives about what parts of our life I could impress control over.

Such as, taking note of his look of regret at being denied the chapel.

Monday morning was cold, the sky lowering with the threat of snow, but I laced on my boots and trudged across the Downs to hunt down my…fiancé?

As I approached his old flint house, close enough to the coastline that one could hear the waves at Birling Gap, I was surprised to see all the windows flung open wide. I went in the back door, gingerly venturing a head inside the kitchen.

“Mrs Hudson?”

I did not need to go any farther to know why the Downs air was being invited inside. I hastily dug out a handkerchief to clap across my face. The door to Mrs Hudson's quarters, which had been firmly shut, opened a crack. One brown eye gazed out at me: brown, but bloodshot.

“An experiment gone awry?” I asked her.

“The man will kill us all,” she declared.

“Any idea how long…?”

“He said the worst of it should be gone by noon.”

That seemed optimistic, but there was no need to say that to her. Mrs Hudson had survived two decades as Holmes' Baker Street landlady before—for reasons I still could not fathom but attributed to a deeply pathological need for self-mortification—she had followed him in retirement down to Sussex and become his housekeeper.

Many things I did not understand about Mrs Hudson. However, as I said, when I appeared on her doorstep in 1915, she had opened her arms and her heart to me, and was now as near to a mother as I would ever again have.

No, I thought, as I studied her bloodshot eye: it would not be possible to wed Sherlock Holmes without the participation of Mrs Hudson.

“I don't suppose he's still up there?” I asked.

“In the laboratory? No, he discovered some urgent task elsewhere.”

“Of course he did. Any idea what direction?”

“He put on his Wellingtons.”

That meant either towards the sea, or up the Cuckmere. I thanked her, and beat a hasty retreat from the noxious fumes.

A few snowflakes danced around me at the Birling Gap cottages, where I followed the sound of a hatchet to ask the young man—the son of one of the lighthouse keepers—if he had seen Holmes go past. He said no, and pointed out (with patience, as if to a sweet but stupid child) that in any event he'd not have got far, since the tide was in.

Not the lighthouse, then.

Walking back up the silent lane, I decided to abandon my tracking of Holmes across Sussex to Alfriston or Seaford—or wherever he had gone. All I wanted was to deliver an apology, that my presence in his life promised not only to complicate matters, but to do so without even such benefits as doing open battle for his ancestral manor. Perhaps if I offered to accompany him on his next tedious and uncomfortable investigation, by way of recompense?

Both apology and offer could wait until he was restored to his aired-out home.

However, it had been a long cold walk across frost-crisp Downsland, with an equally long and frigid way back again. I could always throw myself on Mrs Hudson's hospitality and thaw out my toes before her fire, but it might be simpler (and less dangerous, when it came to letting slip Certain Pieces of News) to plant myself before the considerably larger and less socially fraught hearth at the nearby Tiger Inn. The innkeeper might even have a pot of soup on the hob.

Naturally, having decided not to seek after Holmes, the Tiger was where I found him, stockinged heels propped up before the crackling logs, beer in one hand and pipe in the other.

The sight of that ravaged scalp over the back of the chair gave me pause: his barber had made an attempt at tidying the results of the fire, but short of taking a razor to it, ear to ear, only time would restore normality. His head was currently an odd mix of neatly cropped greying hair and frizzed stubble, with traces of nearly bald skin here and there. It looked curiously…vulnerable.

With that thought came another—one that would not have crossed my mind for a thousand years, were it not for the events of this past week: should I present my cheek for a demure but affectionate kiss? It was the done thing, between two people on the edge of marriage, but…Holmes? I stood there a moment longer, studying that mottled scalp, but in the end, the thought of the reverberations of such a greeting—through Sussex and to the world beyond—swept any faint impulse out the door.

That decision, I would realise a very long time later, both reflected and set the pattern for our future behaviour: affection between us remained a private thing. Private even, occasionally, from one another.

“Hello, Holmes,” I said.

He tipped his head as I came around his chair to the fire; his eyes were still a touch shot with red, which I did not think was from the cold. “Ah, Russell,” he said. “I see you have been down to Birling Gap. Did Mrs Hudson tell you where to find me?”

I wavered briefly over how he'd known, then refused the bait. “Mrs Hudson seemed to think you were headed to the lighthouse—or to the beach, at any rate. She's got all the doors and windows wide open.”

“Yes, I'm not sure what went wrong. I may have added sulphur when I meant to reach for the saltpetre. Nothing seriously wrong, but the air was a touch thick.”

“I'm glad the walls are still standing. No, I was heading for home, but thought I'd have something warm first.”

“Do sit,” he agreed, making no move to fetch me a seat.

I had a word with the innkeeper, returning to the fire with another chair. As I arranged it as close as I could get to the heat without risking combustion, my foot brushed something that clanked. I looked down—noticing first the distinctive black hairs on my trousers that betrayed my encounter with the lighthouse keeper's dog, then the object on the floor.

“What on earth is that?”

“It would appear to be a sterling silver flail.”

Did I want to know? Wellington boots; a peasant's weapon made from an aristocratic metal; its source in the tiny hamlet of East Dean—the combination bore all the hallmarks of one of his outré cases, and I wished merely to get the matter of the Holmes family chapel off my mind. However, he took my brief pause as an invitation, and launched into an unlikely tale that seemed to involve a well-digger, the restoration of a nearby abbey, a lesser title from an Eastern European country, and strange marks on a stone bridge. Or perhaps it was an aristocratic bridge-restorer and strange digging marks in an abbey: I admit I was not paying much attention.

My bowl of cock-a-leekie soup was half gone before he drew breath, but I did not leap to interrupt him. I was enjoying the sensations of the moment: the fire at my knees felt as if it had been burning for two centuries, the beer in my glass was cool, the soup was a comfort within. The satisfaction made me aware that, once we were married, we could come here anytime, day or night, with no concern for village proprieties.

This startling idea kept my mind well occupied until he leant forward to crack the dottle of his pipe into the fire. I noticed that his glass—and apparently his story—had come to an end, and I cast a quick glance around us to make sure we were not overheard before speaking.

“Look, Holmes, about the…the wedding.”

“Have you another regiment of guests we would offend if they went uninvited?”

I opened my mouth to deliver the speech I had so carefully composed, about how sorry I was that we weren't able to use his family chapel, and what we might do instead…and yet I heard a very different set of words coming out. A set of words, moreover, that said one thing, but meant another.

“Do you suppose your cousin could be bought out?”

The moment I said it, I knew what the question represented: the bride's gift to her husband.
You've spent your life straightening out the problems of others,
I was telling him;
let me do this for you.

“It's not his to sell,” he said automatically. “And if it were, he'd refuse to sell it to
me
.” Then he paused, his right eyebrow quirking up as he turned his gaze from the fire. “Do you mean, would he sell to you? Good Lord. Why would you want that old pile?”

“I don't especially want another house. But buying it might simplify matters. For you and Mycroft, that is. Unless—is the property entailed?”

He let out a bark of laughter and sat back, fingers laced across his waistcoat. “The Holmes family is hardly grand enough to entail a property in the interests of primogeniture. And I assure you, ownership of that house would trade one small and symbolic problem for a cart-load of mundane nightmares. No, I for one am perfectly happy to allow my cousin to continue fretting over tax bills and the state of the roofs and the return from the tenant farmers. I merely refuse to withdraw from the field of battle and cede my rights of access and usage.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, in that case.”

“Yes?”

I took a deep breath. “Holmes, if we can keep Mrs Hudson and Dr Watson from being peppered with bird-shot, I should be honoured to accompany you in breaking into your family chapel and having the words of marriage recited at speed over our heads.”

However (Why is it, I wonder, that my accounts of adventures with Holmes so often employ that word?), our window of opportunity promptly slammed down upon our fingers, a bare two hours later. My first exploratory telephone call was to Dr Watson. He was not at home. His housekeeper informed me that her employer was currently visiting friends in Edinburgh, and although he would return in two days, he would be at home less than seventy-two hours before boarding a ship for New York, where a band of literature lovers (or at any rate, fans of the Doyle tales) were to present him with an honour and—more to the point—a paying lecture series. The dates, unfortunately, were set in stone.

It was now Monday evening; the good Doctor would return on Wednesday; his ship sailed at midday on Saturday.

I hung up the telephone earpiece and gazed down at the scrap of paper on which I'd made some quite unnecessary notes. Holmes and I were in my newly painted and partially refurbished house a few miles north of his, where the air smelt not of sulphur but of varnish, paint, the fresh dyes of carpets and curtains, and the eggs I had scorched for our supper. In the current absence of my neighbour and occasional housekeeper, Mrs Mark, the only sound was the whisper from the fire. “This is not going to work.”

“Don't sound so disappointed, Russell. You were not keen on the venue to begin with.”

“I am now.”

“We could proceed without Watson.”

“We really couldn't. No, Holmes, it's just not practical. Even without posting banns for a church—assuming we could convince a rector that I counted as one of his flock—we'd still need a fifteen-day period for the Registrar.”

“When Watson gets back, then.”

I looked sadly at my final note on the page: July 7. Five whole months. An eternity.

But what did it matter? Holmes and I would go ahead as we were—as we had been before I stood on a London pier and, seeing him resurrected from a fiery death, literally embraced an unexpected future.
Patience, Russell.

And yet, I was afraid. That real life would intervene. That doubts would chew at our feet, causing one or both of us to edge away from the brink. That neither of us had really meant it, and the memory of those dockside sensations would turn to threat. That my gift to him was nothing but the selfish impulse of an uncertain young girl.

I felt his gaze on me, and put on a look of good cheer before raising my face. “Of course. July will do nicely—and will give us plenty of time to arrange a distraction, to get your cousin and his shot-guns away from the house.”

He did not reply. Under his gaze, my smile faltered a bit. “It's fine, Holmes. You have commitments in Europe next month; I have much to do in Oxford. I will be here when you get back.”

Abruptly, he jumped to his feet and swept across the room to the door. I watched him thrust his long arms into the sleeves of his overcoat. “Thursday, Russell,” he said, clapping his hat onto his head. “Be ready on Thursday.”

“For what?” I asked, but he was gone.

For anything, knowing him.

Tuesday morning dawned. I expected…I don't know what I expected. Excited telephone calls from Mrs Hudson, a disapproving telegram from Mycroft. Earthquakes…

What happened was precisely nothing. A pallid sun crawled above the horizon, setting the frost to glittering. Patrick, my farm manager, let the horses out and wrestled with the aged tractor for a while, achieving a few moments of roar and a stink of burnt petrol over the landscape. Mrs Mark let herself in and pottered dubiously about the newly equipped kitchen. The children from up the lane hurried by for school. An aeroplane passed overhead.

Normal life, it appeared, was going on.

I dressed and went downstairs, eating the breakfast Mrs Mark cooked for me and drinking her weak coffee without complaint. I tried to settle to a paper I had been working on, back in the days of innocence before I turned twenty-one and reached out to seize my majority, but I could make little sense of it. None of the crisp new novels I had bought in London bore the least interest. Even the newspapers were filled with faraway events and two-dimensional problems.

Another day, I might have taken the train to London, but London was filled with Margery Childe and all the uncomfortable elements of that case, that life. Or Oxford, where normally I would have happily fled at an instant's notice—but its beloved spires seemed awfully…far away.