But it was the wall facing the bed that drew the attention. Ceiling to floor, side to side, the wall was one enormous collage of shiny and curious objects, broken only by the mirrored dressing table set against its centre. All the objects were neatly hung and perfectly tidy within their allotted space, but the mix was idiosyncratic to an extreme: a curly twig here, a pyramid of buttons threaded through a hat-pin there, and between them a nosegay of long-dried flowers tucked into an infant’s embroidered shoe. Six tiny, perfectly framed paintings of a rock—different views of the same rock, and hung with a compulsive’s precision. There were scraps of cloth, a dog’s collar, and a broken roof-slate on which was painted a track of bare foot-prints, like a miniature beach at low tide. I counted five masks—two Venetian, two African, and an oddity made from a turtle shell. A cameo depicted the Roman Colosseum; half a dozen silk flowers of different design and colour were scattered about. There were a dozen or so keys, modern to Medieval, from thumbnail-sized to as long as my hand, and as many antique photograph portraits of various sizes, some framed and others held up with a push-pin. One wizened object that might have been a plum lay inside an intricately worked straw basket three inches high; to its left, a bow tied of exquisitely delicate lace; to its right, a long, thin mirror with a gilded frame.
Dizzying, baffling, glorious: mad? I lay down on Vivian’s bed, curious about what she would see from there, and found it oddly…composed. I removed my glasses to let the individual identities blur, and realised that if one imagined the objects as dots of paint, it made a modernistic, yet oddly comforting, overall impression. With two small flaws.
I put on my glasses and went to look. Yes, there were two places where things had been removed—one the size of my palm, the other of my outstretched hand. Both left tiny brass nails protruding from the wallpaper, suggesting that whatever had been there was considerably lighter than the slate or the mirror.
I tore my gaze away, to continue my search through drawers and under mattresses and carpets, atop curtains and under the stone sill outside the window. There was no clutter in her drawers and wardrobe, and all the clothing, somewhat out of date, smelt of cedar shavings or moth-balls. The colours I found there were every bit as subtle as in her sitting room, and their fabric as pleasing to the touch. She liked velvet, and silk, and loose-knitted merino. And belts—she had quite a collection of new-looking belts. Perhaps to compensate for an institutional weight loss? Hanging on a hook, so as to avoid wrinkles, was a pale green evening dress, again rather out of date, that I guessed she’d intended to wear to her brother’s birthday celebration. But there was also an assortment of male clothing—made to fit a short, slim figure.
Perhaps the maid had been instructed to provide Vivian with the means to go wandering through the hills again, in the gentle disguise of her childhood.
Other than that, wardrobe and drawers held nothing of interest. As I left the room, I paused to study the display.
The wall was mad, and therefore worrying. But it was also compelling, and therefore equally worrying.
No, I thought, turning away: Holmes would surely have let me know if my grip on reason was slipping.
Chapter Six
SHERLOCK HOLMES LOOKED AT THE books and musical pages spread over his table in the Reading Room, and realised that in ninety minutes, he had taken in not a single word.
Two weeks they’d had this time: two weeks and one day since Mrs Hudson’s case finished and she’d fled to Monte Carlo. Before that, he and Russell had nearly three weeks of calm between storms—although prior to that it was difficult to remember a time without demands.
Amusing to think that in his Baker Street days, boredom often drove him to a drugged stupor. When he’d…married (interesting how, four and a half years on, the word still fit poorly in the mind) he had anticipated a life peaceably divided between his Sussex bees and her Oxford books, with the occasional piquant outing to the world of crime. Indeed, that’s what they had, more or less, for the first two and a half years—until an acquaintance had called them to service, in August 1923. They had not stopped running since, racketing about the world, getting shot and taken hostage, with any number of threats thrown in their direction. During the past two years they’d had…what? Ten quiet days at the end of 1923? After that, a handful of days here and there (mostly there) until the two weeks, and then three weeks, this past spring. They might have had two entire months to themselves during the autumn of 1924, but for Watson’s little problem.
So much for retirement.
Still, it was probably all to the best—for him, at least. Lack of a challenge had always eaten at his spirit and his health. When he’d met Russell in 1915, he’d been on a downward spiral to the grave. At the current rate, he was going to live well into his second century.
Russell was a different question.
For her, the detecting life was less a demand than a choice. The young woman was quite capable of making a different life for herself—any number of different lives, come to that. Had she never encountered him on the Downs that afternoon, she would today be happily battling herself into a position of authority in the University, if not the Government. Marriage, normalcy—children, even: nothing was beyond her.
Instead, Russell had chosen to follow the path he offered.
She was content, he knew that. But he had also seen her eyes following the carefree young people the other night. He told himself that the slight softening of her eyes and mouth had been amusement, not wistfulness. He wished he could be sure of it.
He looked down at the books, and wondered if there had been a reason his musical studies had nudged him into the question of Johann Sebastian Bach’s argument between formal and natural art. Or, one might say, between logic and passion, deliberation and mania…
Pah. He slapped shut the aged volume, drawing looks of scandal from all around, and abandoned his table and his studies in favour of a missing Bedlamite.
Chapter Seven
HAD SELWICK HALL NOT BEEN tucked into the far reaches of the county, I might have turned down Lady Dorothy’s offer to stop there the night, in favour of returning to London. But I did want to speak with the servants, and I had no wish to tramp the lanes to the station after dark.
So I accepted, expecting a quiet meal before the fire with Ronnie’s lonely mother. Instead, it seemed, we were to dine in grandeur at the Marquess’ table. I’d met the man once or twice, most recently at Ronnie’s wedding, and thought him an unfortunate product of the system of aristocratic privilege. Dining with him was not an enticing prospect.
However, it was difficult to refuse, since I’d brought one of those long, all-purpose skirts that (with a borrowed shawl) could pass as “dressing for dinner.” And I did have questions for him. If I remembered his habits correctly, he might take enough wine to simplify that task—assuming I could control my own intake in his presence.
It’s not that I object to self-assured men, not really. And although flirtation can be tiresome, I have learned to live with the fact that for a certain generation of men—men who’ve been schooled away from their sisters and mothers, and never learned how to converse with the opposite sex—hearty jests and an exchange of suggestive glances with any other male present was the best they could do. My habit was to remind myself that some men never got over the handicap of not being women, and keep my mouth in a tight-lipped smile.
Ronnie’s mother had taken care not to underscore my own lack of satin and diamonds, although she had put her hair up, its silver threads winding like Nature’s tiara amidst the dark background, and wore a necklace of small rubies that sparkled in the electric light.
She smiled, looking distracted, and reached out to straighten a fold in the silk wrap she had lent me. “You look very nice, Mary.”
“I look like a bluestocking without a dress allowance.”
“A very pretty bluestocking. Is that the gong?”
Distracted, or worried? For some reason, we were waiting at the end of a corridor, facing a plain wooden door. Lady Dorothy now reached for the handle and we passed into the main house as the gong’s reverberations were fading. The long dining table was laid with three places. With a gesture towards the chair on the far side, my hostess took up a position behind the chair across from that one—and stood, her hands on the chair’s back, waiting.
The Lady Dorothy—daughter of a duke, widow of an earl—waited in this oddly servile position as if she was well accustomed to it, but just as I was about to pull out my own chair and plunk myself down, The Most Hon Marquess of Selwick came through the doorway. The butler sprang to seat him, then came around and pulled out my chair while the footman pulled back Lady Dorothy’s.
“Evening, Miss Russell,” the Marquess boomed. “See you’ve fallen for this fad of chopping your hair. Pity, I remember it was charmin’.”
And I remembered how he had found an excuse to touch it, at the wedding, claiming there was a bit of leaf caught in it.