She clapped her hands together and squealed at the ceiling. “I knew it! The voice, the height, and she even knows the words. Can you do it à la vaudeville?”
“I, er—”
“Of course we can’t use real food in your scene where you throw it at the servants, not with all the shortages, it wouldn’t be nice.”
“May I ask…”
“Oh, sorry, how stupid of me. Veronica Beaconsfield. Call me Ronnie.”
“Mary Russell.”
“Yes, I know. Tonight then, Mary, nine o’clock, my rooms. First performance in two weeks.”
“But I—” I protested. But she was away.
I was simply the latest to discover the impossibility of refusing to cooperate in one of Ronnie Beaconsfield’s schemes. I was in her rooms that night with a dozen others, and three weeks later we performed The Taming of the Shrew for the entertainment of the Men of Somerville[90], as we called them, and I doubt that staid college of women had ever heard such an uproar before, or since. We gained several male converts to our society that night, and I was soon excused the rôle of Petruchio.
I was not, however, excused from participation in this amateur dramatic society, for it was soon discovered that I had a certain skill in make-up and even disguise, although I never let slip the name of Sherlock Holmes. I cannot now recall the process by which I, shy bluestocking intellectual Mary Russell, came to be the centre of the year’s elaborate prank, but some weeks later in the madness of the summer term[91] I was to find myself disguised as an Indian nobleman (Indian, for the turban to cover my hair) eating with the undergraduates of Baliol College. The breath of risk made it all the more delicious, for we should all have been sent down, or at the very least rusticated for the term, had we been caught out[92].
The career of Ratnakar Sanji in Oxford lasted for nearly the entire month of May. He was seen in three of the men’s colleges; he spoke briefly (in bad English) in the Union; he attended a sherry party with the aesthetes of Christ Church (where he demonstrated exquisite manners) and a football game with the hearties of Brasenose (where he appeared to down a large quantity of beer and contributed two previously unknown verses to one of the rowdier songs); he even received a brief mention in one of the undergraduate newspapers, under the heading “Rajput Nobleman’s Son Remarks on Oxford.” The truth inevitably trickled out, and I only escaped the proctor’s bulldogs[93] by moments. Miss Mary Russell walked demurely away from the pub’s back entrance, leaving Ratnakar Sanji in the dustbin behind the door. The proctors and the college authorities conducted a thorough search for the malefactors, and several of the young men who had been seen dining or at functions with Sanji received stern warnings, but scandal was averted, largely because no one ever found the woman who rumour said was involved. Of course the women’s colleges received their close scrutiny. Ronnie was called in, as one of the most likely due to temperament, but when I followed her in the door—quiet and bookish, loping along at Ronnie’s heels like a lugubrious wolf-hound—they discounted my height and the fact that I wore spectacles similar to Sanji’s, and excused me irritably from the interrogation.
Proctors’ bulldogs
The conspiracy left me with two legacies, neither of which had been in my original expectations of University life: a coterie of lasting friends (Nothing binds like shared danger, however spurious.) and a distinct taste for the freedom that comes with assuming another’s identity. All of which is not to say that I gave up work entirely. I revelled in the lectures and discussions. I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and, particularly before Sanji’s career began in May, would sit long hours in Bodley’s arms, to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books. The chemistry laboratories were a revelation in modernity, compared to Holmes’ equipment, at any rate. I blessed the war that had taken over the college rooms I might normally have been given, for the modernised quarters I found myself in had electrical lights, occasionally operating central heating radiators, and even—miracle of miracles—running water piped in for each resident. The hand-basin in the corner was an immense luxury (Even the young lords in Christchurch depended on the legs of the scouts[94] for their supply of hot water.) and enabled me to set up a small laboratory in my sitting room. The gas ring[95], meant for heating cocoa, I converted into a Bunsen burner.
Duke Humfrey’s, oldest section of the Bodleian.
Between the joys of work and the demands of a burgeoning social life I found little time for sleep. At the end of the term in December I crept home, emptied by the passion of my first weeks in academia. Fortunately the conductor remembered my presence and woke me in time to change trains.
I turned eighteen on the second of January 1918. I arrived at Holmes’ door with my hair elaborately piled on my head, wearing a dark-green velvet gown and my mother’s diamond earrings. When Mrs. Hudson opened the door I was glad to see that she, Holmes, and Dr. Watson were also in formal dress, so we all glittered regally in that somewhat worn setting. When Watson had revived Holmes from the apoplectic seizure my appearance had caused, we ate and we drank champagne, and Mrs. Hudson produced a birthday cake with candles, and they sang to me and gave me presents. From Mrs. Hudson came a pair of silver hair combs. Watson produced an intricate little portable writing set, complete with pad, pen, and inkwell, that folded into a tooled leather case. The small box Holmes put before me contained a simple, delicate brooch made of silver set with tiny pearls.
“Holmes, it’s beautiful.”
“It belonged to my grandmother. Can you open it?” I searched for a clasp, my vision and dexterity hindered somewhat by the amount of champagne I had drunk. Finally he stretched out his fingers and manipulated two of the pearls, and it popped open in my hand. Inside was a miniature portrait of a young woman, with light hair but a clear gaze I recognised immediately as that of Holmes.
“Her brother, the French artist Vernet[96], painted it on her eighteenth birthday,” said Holmes. “Her hair was a colour very similar to yours, even when she was old.”
Émile Jean-Horace Vernet
The portrait wavered in front of my eyes and tears spilt down my cheeks.
“Thank you. Thank you everybody,” I choked out and dissolved into maudlin sobs, and Mrs. Hudson had to put me to bed in the guest room.
I woke once during the night, disorientated by the strange room and the remnants of alcohol in my blood-stream. I thought I had heard soft footsteps outside my door, but when I listened, there was only the quiet tick of the clock on the other side of the wall.
***
I returned to Oxford the following week-end, to a winter term[97] that was much the same as the autumn weeks had been, only more so. My main passions were becoming theoretical mathematics and the complexities of Rabbinic Judaism, two topics that are dissimilar only on the surface. Again the dear old Bodleian opened its arms and pages to me, again I was dragged along in Ronnie Beaconsfield’s wake (Twelfth Night[98] this time, and also a campaign to improve the conditions for cart horses plying the streets of the city). Ratnakar Sanji was conceived in the term’s final weeks, to be born in May following the spring holiday, and again I simply did without sleep, and occasionally meals. Again I emerged at the end of term, lethargic and spent. The lodgings house was looked after by a couple named Thomas, two old dears who retained their thick Oxfordshire country accents. Mr. Thomas helped me carry my things to the cab waiting on the street as I was leaving for home. He grunted at the weight of one case, laden with books, and I hurried to help him with it. He brushed off his hands, looked at the case critically, then at me.
Bodleian (Divinity School) Oxford
“Now, Miss, not to be forward, but I hope you’ll not be spending the whole of the holiday at your desk. You came here with roses in your cheeks, and there’s not a hint of them there now. Get yourself some fresh air, now, y’hear? Your brain’ll work better when you come back if you do.”
I was surprised, as this was the longest speech I had ever heard him deliv
er, but assured him that I intended to spend many hours in the open air. At the train station I caught a glance of myself in a mirror and could see what he meant. I had not realised how drawn I was looking, and the purple smudges under my eyes troubled me.
The next morning the alien sounds of silence and bird song woke me early. I pulled on my oldest work clothes and a pair of new boots, added heavy gloves and a woolly hat against the chill March morning, and went to find Patrick. Patrick Mason was a large, slow-moving, phlegmatic Sussex farmer of fifty-two with hands like something grown from the earth and a nose that changed direction three times. He had managed the farm since before my parents had married, had in fact run with my mother as a child (he three years older) through the fields he now tended, had, I think, been more than half in love with her all his life. Certainly he worshipped her as his Lady. When his wife died and left him to finish raising their six children, only his salary as manager made it possible to keep the family intact. The day his youngest reached eighteen, Patrick divided his land and came to live on the farm I now owned. In most ways this was more his land than mine, an attitude both of us held and considered only right, and his loyalty to his adoptive home was absolute, if he was unwilling to suffer any nonsense from the legal owner.
Up until now my sporadic attempts to help out with the myriad farmyard tasks had been met with the same polite disbelief with which the peasants at Versailles must have greeted Marie Antoinette’s milkmaid fantasies.[99] I was the owner, and if I wanted to push matters he could not actually stop me from dirtying my hands, but other than the seasonal necessity of the wartime harvest (which obviously pained him) My Lady’s Daughter was taken to be above such things. He ran the farm to his liking, I lived there and occasionally wandered down from the main house to chat, but neither he nor I would have thought of giving me a say in how things were run. This morning that was about to change.
I trudged down the hill to the main barn, my breath smoking around my ears in the clear, weak winter sunshine, and called his name. The voice that answered led me through to the back, where I found him mucking out a stall.
Draught horses
“Morning, Patrick.”
“Welcome back, Miss Mary.” I had long ago forbidden greater formality, and he in turn refused greater familiarity, so the compromise was Miss and my first name.
“Thank you, it’s good to be back. Patrick, I need your help.”
“Surely, Miss Mary. Can it wait until I’ve finished this?”
“Oh, I don’t want to interrupt. I want you to give me something to do.”
“Something to do?” He looked puzzled.
“Yes. Patrick, I’ve spent the last six months sitting in a chair with a book in my hands, and if I don’t get back to using my muscles, they’ll forget how to function altogether. I need you to tell me what needs doing around here. Where can I start? Shall I finish that stall for you?”
Patrick hurriedly held the muck-rake out of my reach and blocked my entrance to the stall. “No, Miss, I’ll finish this. What is it you’d like to do?”
“Whatever needs doing,” I said in no uncertain terms, to let him know I meant business.
“Well…” His eyes looked about desperately and lit on a broom. “Do you want to sweep? The wood shavings in the workshop want clearing up.”
“Right.” I seized the big broom, and ten minutes later he came into the workshop to find me furiously raising a cloud of dust and wood particles that settled softly onto every surface[100].
“Miss Mary, oh, well, that’s too fast. I mean, do you think you could get the stuff out the door before you fling it in the air?”
“What do you mean? Oh, I see, here, I’ll just sweep it off of there.”
I took the broom and made a wild sweep along the workbench, and an edge of the unwieldy head sent a tray of tools flying. Patrick picked up a chipped chisel and looked at me as if I had attacked his son.
“Have you never used a broom before?”
“Well, not often.”
“Perhaps you should carry firewood, then.”
I hauled barrow-cart after barrow-cart of split logs up to the house, saw that we needed kindling as well, and had just started using the double-bitted axe to split some logs on a big stone next to the back door when Patrick ran up and prevented me from cutting off my hand. He showed me the cutting block and the proper little hand axe and carefully demonstrated how not to use them. Two hours after I had walked down the hill I had a small pile of wood and a very trembly set of muscles to show for my work.
The road to Holmes’s cottage seemed to have lengthened since last I rode that way, or perhaps it was only the odd sensation of nervousness in the pit of my stomach. It was the same, but I was different, and I wondered for the first time if I was going to be able to carry it off, if I could join these two utterly disparate sides of my life. I pushed the bicycle harder than my out-of-condition legs cared for, but when I came over the last rise and saw the familiar cottage across the fields, faint smoke rising from the kitchen chimney, I began to relax, and when I opened the door and breathed in the essence of the place, I was home, safe.
“Mrs. Hudson?” I called, but the kitchen was empty. Market day, I thought, so I went to the stairs and started upwards. “Holmes?”
“That you, Russell?” he said, sounding mildly surprised, though I had written the week before to say what day I would be home. “Good. I was just glancing through those experiments on blood typology[101] we were doing before you left in January. I believe I’ve discovered what the problem was. Here: Look at your notes. Now look at the slide I’ve put in the microscope…”
Good old Holmes, as effusive and demonstrative as ever. Obediently, I sat before the eyepieces of his machine, and it was as if I’d never been away. Life slid back into place, and I did not doubt again.
On the third week of my holiday I went to the cottage on a Wednesday, Mrs. Hudson’s usual day in town. Holmes and I had planned a rather smelly chemical reaction for that day, but as I let myself in the kitchen door I heard voices from the sitting room.
“Russell?” his voice called.
“Yes, Holmes.” I walked to the door and was surprised to see Holmes at the fire beside an elegantly dressed woman with a vaguely familiar face. I automatically began to reconstruct mentally the surroundings where I had seen her, but Holmes interrupted the process.
“Do come in, Russell. We were waiting for you. This is Mrs. Barker. You will remember, she and her husband live in the manor house. They bought it the year before you came here. Mrs. Barker, this is the young lady I was mentioning—yes, she is a young lady inside that costume. Now that she is here, would you please review the problem for us? Russell, pour yourself a cup of tea and sit down.”
It was the partnership’s first case.
The Adventure of the Yellow Face
(For more background, see this book’s page on the Laurie R. King website.)
A Monstrous Regiment of Women
(Nero Wolfe Award)
Russellisms
Holmes tended to recall his Victorian attitudes and my gender at the oddest times—it always took me by surprise.
**
“Russell, I am hardly the man to impose sobriety on another, save perhaps by my own wicked examples.”
**
“I’ve never taken orders, from anyone,” he muttered, almost too low to hear.
“High time then, Holmes,” I pronounced with asperity.
All the world’s stage: places Russell goes in this Memoir
Britain: Sussex, Portsmouth, Essex, London
(See the Maps chapter for details.)
Laurie’s Remarks
“I appreciate the forms of crime fiction, because it gives me an entertaining story to tell, while at the same time unrolling threads of meaning throughout the plot lines. Mysticism, feminist identity, scriptural interpretation, the struggle for equality between the sexes, control and submission, friendship and love: all the colors on the paint
er’s palette, brought together in service of an entertainment.” —Laurie R. King
***
An entertainment? What would Miss Russell say to that description of her multi-volume, meticulously detailed, closely reasoned work of autobiography?
This second Memoir marks the place where Mary Russell’s life changes for the second time. In Beekeeper’s Apprentice, the young orphan finds a path forward; in Monstrous Regiment, she faces the truth of where that path leads.
Does she want to be forever tied to Sherlock Holmes? Is she willing to link her life with him, knowing that the completeness of that bond will make it impossible to be anything but his partner? She has known him for six years. She is now 21 years old, and has just begun to explore the possibilities of academia, to feel her muscles as a scholar, as a friend, as an adult.
One of those friends she has made introduces her to the alternative path, represented by a religious leader named Margery Childe. Margery is the center of a health and service organization helping the poor women of London, feeding their bodies and their souls. Important work, challenging, and offering Russell a community of strong, like-minded women. Most tantalizing of all, Margery needs precisely what Russell has to offer. Once they get past the little question of criminality…
Women’s Clinic, London
So, where does Russell’s future lie? With Margery Childe, or with Sherlock Holmes?
This is the Memoir that reveals the most of Russell’s common ground with her literary agent. Laurie King’s background is Old Testament theology, specifically, the woman’s side of things. When Russell lectures Margery Childe on “feminine aspects of God”, she uses language Laurie King would understand.
This is also one language in which Sherlock Holmes is not fluent.
Holmes and his own agent, Arthur Conan Doyle, stand on opposite sides of a great chasm of belief. Doyle was a devout Spiritualist, a believer in seances with the dead, telepathy, ectoplasm, fairies—pretty much anything in the way of psychic phenomena found him eagerly gullible.