A Monstrous Regiment of Women (8 page)

It was with relief that I wished her a good night. However, the relief was tempered by a certain wistful regret, and by the awareness that I had not entirely escaped the trap after all.

The impassive door guard got up from his chair and his yellow-back novel to unlock the wide door for me. It was raining still, and though the street was well lit, it was quite deserted.

I hesitated for a moment, half-tempted to telephone for a cab, but the image of Margery Childe as a carnivorous plant and a waft of disapproval from the guard came together, and I realised that despite the wet, I wanted to be out of the building, away from the provocative scent and into the clean shock of the night. I pulled my thin borrowed coat up around my neck, settled my hat low over my spectacles, and set out resolutely towards the brighter lights at the end of the street.

Halfway there, the cloy had rinsed away. The rain had also gained both my shoulder blades and the inside of my shoes, and I was occupied with mordant thoughts about the English climate and ambiguous thoughts about the woman I had left, when a surreptitious movement from inside the unlit doorway I was passing brought me whirling around in a crouch. A tall, indistinct figure loomed up, darkness in a dark place, with a pale slash the only indication of its face. It whispered at me, a sly and salacious hiss that oozed suggestively into the night, barely above the sound of the rain.

“Pretty young ladies like you have no business on the streets at this time of night.”

I froze, but before the first immediate
frisson
of shock could pass on into gooseflesh, I straightened and began to laugh in relief.

“Holmes! Good God, what on earth are you doing here?”

He gathered his dark garments around him and stepped into the dim light, looking for all the world like some Byronic version of a vampire. (Thirty years before, I thought briefly, he’d have been run in, or strung up, for Jack the Ripper.) His face was largely in the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat, but one corner of his thin mouth was turned up in a familiar sardonic smile. When he spoke, his tones were half an octave lower than usual, which meant that he was feeling inordinately content with life.

“A whim, Russell,” he said, and tilted his head back so I might see his eyes, crinkled in silent laughter. “Merely a whim.”

FIVE

Monday, 27 December-
Tuesday, 28 December

Since private affairs are part of the human condition, as well as public ones, God has doled them out: All that takes place outside, He has trusted to man, all that is within the house, to woman… This is an aspect of the divine providence and wisdom, that the one who can conduct great affairs is inadequate or inept in small things, so that the function of woman becomes necessary. For if he had made man able to fulfil both functions, the feminine sex would have been contemptible. And if he had entrusted the important questions to women, he would have filled women with mad pride.

—John Chrysostom

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My dear Holmes, whatever it was and however you found me, we are well met. I was coming to see you tomorrow, in fact. I don’t suppose you have an umbrella tucked beneath your assorted raiment?” I asked hopefully as a dollop of icy rain from the diabolically designed hat brim gushed down the back of my neck.

“You are dressed somewhat inadequately,” he agreed unsympathetically, “and from the ill fit, I observe that the clothes are not your own. Perhaps another layer would not go amiss,” and he began to undo the fastenings of the long, caped greatcoat he wore. I protested, but as he shrugged it off, I saw that underneath he wore a similar garment, in an unfortunate houndstooth check. He shook the coat free of half a gallon of water and dropped it onto my shoulders. It was enormously heavy but still dry inside. I straightened my buckling knees and fancied I could feel the inner layers of wool beginning to steam.

“Thank you, Holmes, that was most gallant of you. Precisely what I should expect of a Victorian gentleman. I don’t suppose you have a Primus stove and teakettle in an inner pocket? Although an all-night restaurant with good radiators would do nicely.”

“If your feet will carry you a mile in those shoes, I might offer you a greater degree of hospitality than a brew-up in a sheltered doorway.”

“You have a room?”

“I have a hole-in-the-wall. You’ve not been to this one, I think, but it is one of the more comfortable.”

“Any bolt-hole in a storm, Holmes. Lead on.”

Although we began by walking side by side, he did in fact lead in the end, down several narrow passageways, up a fire ladder, across a roof, down another ladder, and through the crawl space beneath a large department store. We ended up at a blank wooden wall surrounded by blank brick walls. Holmes took out an electric torch and a key and inserted the latter into a tiny fissure in the wood. With a low click, one section of the wall lost its solidity. He set his shoulder against it, we slipped into the resultant dark space, and he pushed the door to and bolted it. With his torch, he indicated the way, undid and locked another door, led me up numerous stairs, then through a shadowy office and into a mahogany wardrobe hung with musty overcoats. We unfolded from the back of it into a space that smelt of coffee and tobacco and coal fire and the ineffable essence of books.

“Guard your eyes, Russell,” he warned, and flicked on a dazzle of electric lights.

We were in one of his bolt-holes, the sanctuaries he maintained across London, each of them a small, self-contained, and invisible hideout equipped with the means of withstanding a siege (water, food, and reading matter) and an assortment of disguises, weapons, and the like that might be called upon in venturing out into a hostile city. I had been in two others, and this was the most elaborate, if not sumptuous, of the three. It even had paintings on the wall, something Holmes rarely bothered with: He preferred to use the space for bookshelves, corkboards, or target practice. I dragged off my sodden outer garments and looked for a place to drape them. Holmes held out a hand.

“Give them to me; I’ll hang them in the airing cupboard.”

He opened a narrow panel in the wall and took some clothes hangers from the metal-lined space. I went to look over his shoulder, and found a vertical ventilation shaft about two feet across, into which he had set a length of metal pipe as a clothes rail.

“Emergency exit?” I asked, peering into the depths.

“Only in a considerable emergency. There is a bar forty feet down that ought to stop one from actually entering the furnace, although whether or not a person could remove the four screws from the access panel before being roasted or asphyxiated, I have yet to determine. I estimate that it is possible, but I have actually attempted it only when the furnace was cool. However, it is an eminently successful means of drying wet clothing.” He closed the door. “Tea, coffee, wine, or soup?”

We decided on the last three, the wine splashed into the tinned soup to enliven it, and while he pottered with kettle, pan, and gas ring, I lit a fire and looked around, fetching up at one of the paintings, a large, too-perfect evocation of hills, trees, and sheep.

“This is a Constable, isn’t it?” I asked him. “And who did the shipwreck?” This latter was a powerful, savage scene of pounding waves and drunken masts—like the Constable, very dated in its romanticism, but technically superb.

“That’s a Vernet.” His voice came muffled by cupboard doors as he shovelled about looking for edibles.

“Ah yes, your great-uncle.”

“His grandfather, actually. Do you prefer turtle or cream of tomato?” he asked, emerging with two tins.

“Whichever is newer,” I said cautiously.

“Nothing has been here longer than three years. However, a comparison of the respective dust layers would seem to indicate that the tomato is half the age of the other.” He eyeballed them judiciously. “Perhaps eighteen months.”

“The tomato, then. Did you bring everything in through the back of that wardrobe?”

“Hardly, Russell. I arranged the rooms, then bricked up the wall behind.”

“It’s nice, Holmes. Cosy.”

“Do you think so?” He sounded pleased, and standing with a spoon in one hand and a jagged-topped tin in the other, all he needed to complete the picture of domesticity was a lace apron. I was much taken aback by this utterly unexpected side of Holmes—I had never known him to be so much as conscious of his surroundings, save where they intruded on his work, and to have him admit to a deliberate choice and arrangement of household furnishings—well, I was taken aback.

“It was an experiment,” he explained, and returned to his soup tin. “I was testing the hypothesis that one’s surrounds influence one’s state of mind.”

“And?” I prompted, fascinated.

“The results are hardly conclusive, but I did find that after seventy-two hours here, I seemed to be less irritable, more rested, and had a higher threshold of distraction than after seventy-two hours in the Storage Room.”

The ‘Storage Room’ was the first of his bolt-holes I had encountered, an ill-lit, ill-furnished, claustrophobic survival space in the upper floors of a large department store. Seventy-two hours in it would have sent me raving into an asylum.

“You don’t say,” I commented mildly, and shook my head.

“Yes, quite interesting, really. I intend to work the results into a monograph I’ve been writing, ‘Some Suggestions Concerning the Long-Term Rehabilitation of Felons.’ ”

“Rehabilitation through interior decoration, Holmes?”

“There is no call for sarcasm, Russell,” he said with asperity. “Drink your soup.”

There followed a meal even odder than my breakfast/tea of eight hours previous, consisting of cream of tomato soup liberally dosed with Madeira, rock-hard water biscuits, two cold boiled eggs, half an orange that had begun to ferment, a slab of good crumbly cheddar, and the offer of a box of congealed after-dinner mints, which I refused in favour of a second wedge of the cheese. Holmes cleared the plates off onto a tray.

“Thank you, Holmes,” I said politely.

He paused with a soup bowl in one hand, scowling down at the scum of dirty brown-red liquid that had been the result of wine meeting soup.

“Do you know, Russell,” he mused, “I once earned an honest living for six entire months as a
sous-chef
in a two-star restaurant in Montpellier.” He shook his head in self-reproach and rattled the dishes off into the cupboard-sized kitchen, leaving me to stare openmouthed at his retreating back.

Never, never would I get his limits.

He came back some minutes later with black coffee and a bottle of crusty port, handed me a cup and a glass, and lowered himself with a sigh into the other chair, feet towards the fire.

“So, Russell, are you going to tell me why you have suddenly become a church-goer, or shall I invent another topic of conversation?”

“If you knew I was there, you must know whom I went with. Did you find me through that amazing tea shop?”

“You left your philanthropic tracks across London like hob-nailed boots on a snowy hillside,” he snorted in comfortable derision. “What on earth moved you to give that child five whole pounds? The entire parish was on fire before noon, though there was considerable disagreement over whether the series of gifts was, like lightning, a solitary occurrence or if it marked the beginning of a run of angelic visitations, and, if the latter, whether the better approach would be to wait calmly to be one of the chosen or to drag in benighted strangers from the streets and force food and drink into them. You may laugh,” he protested, “but your little gesture has caused the whole of Limehouse to be overrun with beggars. Word got out that good meals were to be had, and hungry men from all over the city are now lurking under all the steps. Or they would be, if they weren’t snatched up and fed before they had the opportunity to settle. At any rate, yes, after that, the general drift of your movements led me to the chestnut-seller who had found silver among the ashes, various elderly and unprosperous ladies of the evening, and finally to the denizens of the dockside tea shop. All except the chestnut seller remembered the inexplicable and unrewarded generosity of a bespectacled young man dressed for the country, and at the end, one of them knew the whereabouts of the young lady this singular young man finally went away with. Discreet enquiries proved that she was in the habit of going to hear the words of a certain woman of the cloth, if that be the right term, of a Monday night. That lady is not listed in Crockford, but I found her, and you. I had not realised you should be closeted with her for half the night, though. My bones protest.”

“Come now, Holmes, your rheumatism only bothers you when it’s convenient. Besides, you hadn’t been there all that long.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked, a spark of amusement in his grey eyes.

“The coat was damp, but the water was on the surface,” I answered him unnecessarily. “If you had been in the doorway for very long, the water would not have shaken out so easily.” He twitched his lips in appreciation and approval, and it occurred to me that since the term began, I had been either absent or preoccupied. Had he missed our exchanges, too? It was not something I could ask. I smiled back at him. “You might have saved your bones the discomfort by ringing the bell and asking the watchman to give me a message.”

“And risk disturbing you at a case?” He sounded shocked, which meant he was making a mild jest.

“There’s no case here—I’m sorry to disappoint you, Holmes. Nothing but my own peculiar interest in things theological. And yet, if you can set aside your instinctive response to these irrational matters, I should like your reaction.”

“That is what you were coming to see me about?”

“In part, yes.”

“Very well, let me get my pipe and I shall prepare myself to listen.” To my amusement, in this place, his pipes were kept in a pipe rack, his tobacco not in a Persian slipper or a biscuit tin or beneath the nonexistent roots of an artificial aspidistra, but in a pouch, and his matches in a silver matchbox. What-ever would Watson say—or Mrs Hudson?