A movement on the deck above caught my eye, and I looked up into Holmes' eyes. He looked dreadful. His grey irises stared out like holes in two blood'filled pools. His yellowed skin sagged over his bones, and he was poorly shaven, this normally fastidious individual. His tie was straight, but the collar of his shirt was slightly rumpled, and his jacket was unbuttoned. I squelched any urge to pity or uncertainty and summoned up every drop of the scorn I had spent the last days in distilling, filling my face, my stance, my mind with it, so that when I spoke, acid dripped from my words.
"There he is, gentlemen, the great Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Savior of nations, the mind of the century, God's gift to humanity. Gentlemen, I leave you to him."
Our eyes met in a brief flash, and I saw in them both approval and apprehension, and a farewell. I turned on my heel and stalked away down the wharf. Watson must have started after me, because I heard Holmes' sharp, high' pitched, and infuriating drawl stop my friend and uncle dead in his tracks. "Let her go, Watson, she'll have none of us. She's off to make her mark on the world, can't you see?" His voice sharpened further into a querulous cry that must have carried to the other side of the river. "And God help any man who gets in her way!"
With these searing words on my coattails I rounded the corner and set off to find a cab. It was the last I was to see of him for two months.
FIFTEEN: Separation trial
She is alone in the world, in the midst of an awakening spring.
Dack at Oxford, I threw myself furiously into my studies. I had missed nearly a month, and although the Oxford program is not dependent on classes and attendance at lectures, one's absence is noted and strongly disapproved. My maths tutor was away, illness of some kind, and I was secretly grateful not to have that pressure. The woman who tutored Greek was also away, vanished into maternity over the Christmas holidays. By dint of working flat out for three weeks I managed to redeem myself in the eyes of my remaining supervisors and felt that I had caught up to my own satisfaction as well.
I changed that spring. For one thing, I no longer wore trousers and boots, but filled my wardrobe with expensive, austere skirts and dresses. I had, as I feared, alienated Ronnie Beaconsfield, and lacked the energy to regain her friendship, but instead made an effort to make contact with the other girls in my year. I found I enjoyed it, although after a few hours their talk made me impatient for my solitude. I took long walks through the streets and the desolate winter hills around Oxford. I took to attending church, particularly Evensong at the cathedral, just to sit and listen. Once I went to a concert with a quiet young man from my patristics lecture. The music was Mozart, and well played, but halfway through the shining genius and the pain of it made it impossible to breathe, and I left. The young man did not ask me again.
My written work changed, too. It became even more precise, less tolerant of other, softer viewpoints, more ruthlessly logicaclass="underline" "Brilliant and hard, like a diamond" was a remark from one reader, not altogether approving.
I drove myself. I ate less, worked invariably into the early hours of morning, drank brandy now to help me sleep.
I laughed when a librarian at the Bodleian suggested, only half joking, that I might move into the stacks, but my laughter was a polite, brittle noise. I became, in other words, more like Holmes than the man himself: brilliant, driven to a point of obsession, careless of myself, mindless of others, but without the passion and the deep-down, inbred love for the good in humanity that was the basis of his entire career. He loved the humanity that could not understand or fully accept him; I, in the midst of the same human race, became a thinking machine.
Holmes himself, on his farm in the south downs, was retreating from the world into softness and bewilderment.
Mrs. Hudson cut short her expedition to the Antipodes and returned home in late February. Her first letter to me was brief and shocked at the state she had found Holmes in. Subsequent letters neither accused nor begged, but pained me even more deeply when she simply stated that Holmes had not been out of bed one day, or that he was talking about selling his hives. Lestrade had set guards on the cottage at all times. (He had tried to do the same for me, but I had baited him and eluded them and finally he withdrew. I did not believe any of Lestrade's men could guard me better than I could myself, and as time went on I was more surely convinced that the rules of the game had indeed been changed, and that I was not yet in danger. Besides, I found their constant presence unbearable.)
Watson wrote too, long tentative letters, mostly about Holmes' health and mind. He came to see me once in Oxford. I took him for a long walk so I might not have to sit and face him, and the cold and my coolness sent him limping away with his bodyguard.
It was a long, bitter winter after the warmth of Palestine.
I read my Hebrew Bible, and I thought about Holofernes and the road to Jerusalem.
In early March I received a telegram from Holmes, his preferred method of communication. It said simply:
ARE YOU COMING DOWN
BETWEEN TERMS QUERY
HOLMES
I read it openly at Mr. Thomas's busy front desk and allowed a short twist of irritation to show on my face before I turned to go upstairs. The next day I sent him a return question.
SHOULD I QUERY
RUSSELL
The following day his response lay in my pigeonhole.
PLEASE DO
MRS HUDSON WOULD ALSO BE GLAD
HOLMES
Mine in return, sent two days later, confirmed that I would come.
The next free day I went to London to see the executors of my parents' will, to lay before them the proposal that I be given sufficient advance from my inheritance, now less than two years away, to purchase a motorcar. The partner who handled my parents' estate hemmed and hawed and made several private telephone calls, and to no great surprise of mine he approved. I went down the next day to the Morris Oxford garage and paid for it, as well as arranging lessons. I was soon mobile.
It was at this time, two weeks before the end of term, that I first became aware that I was being watched. I was highly preoccupied, and often read a book while walking, so it is possible that they had been present before and I hadn't noticed them. The first time I saw the man, I was outside my lodgings and realised suddenly that I had forgotten a book. I doubled back quickly to get it, and out of the corner of my eye noticed a man stoop down suddenly to tie his shoe. It wasn't until I had my key in the door that it hit me: He had been wearing laceless shoes. After that I was more attentive, and found that a woman and another man alternated with the first. All were reasonably good at disguises, particularly the woman, and I should certainly not have been able to pick out the nun with no scuffs on her toes or the man walking the bulldog as being the same person had I not spent time under Holmes' tutelage.
I had only one problem. If I had truly cut myself off from Holmes, I would not hide my annoyance at being spied on. However, I hesitated to bring the thing into the open before consulting him. This was the first time anyone had come sniffing around the bait at my end, and I was loath to frighten them off. Would the adversary believe that I was not seeing them? They were far from obvious, but still — I decided to continue as before, and became even more absentminded until one day as I had my Greek Testament in front of my nose, I walked into a lightpost on the High Street. I found myself sitting stupefied on the ground while people exclaimed over the blood on my face and a young woman held out my shattered spectacles. I came home from the surgery with a large plaster on my forehead, and I had to wear my spare spectacles for two days while the others were repaired. As I would probably not have recognised Mycroft Holmes himself standing in front of me with the old ones on, it settled temporarily the problem of whether or not I ought to notice my followers.