"We have perhaps five minutes without it looking odd," he said.
"You're watched, I take it."
"Every move, even in the sitting room. They've made some arrangement with the neighbours — telescopes in the trees. They may even be able to read lips. Will tells me that rumour in town says they have a deaf person there."
"Patrick says they were asking about me, and you. They are city people, and don't know that you can't hide anything in the country."
"Yes, and they are sure of themselves. I assume you are being watched."
"I only saw them two weeks ago, two men and a woman. Very good, too. Five cars followed me down here. The lady has money."
"We knew that." His eyes studied my back. "Are you all right, Russell? You've lost half a stone since January, and you aren't sleeping."
"Only six pounds, not seven, and I sleep as you do. I'm busy." My voice dropped to a whisper. "Holmes, I wish this were over." I felt him behind me and stood up abruptly. "No, don't come near me, I couldn't bear it. And I don't think I can do this trip again. I'm fine when I'm in Oxford, but don't ask me to come down again until the end. Please."
Silence radiated off the man like heat waves, and the low, hoarse voice that came from him was a thing I had never heard before. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I understand." He stopped, cleared his throat, and I heard him take a deliberate, long breath before he spoke again in his customary incisive tones.
"You are quite correct, Russell. There is nothing to be gained by it, and much to lose. To business then. I had copies of the photographs made for you. I gave the Roman numeral series to Mycroft, but neither of us can make any sense of it. I know it's there. Perhaps you can dig it out. It's that packet on the bench in front of you."
I took the oversized brown envelope and put it in an inner pocket.
"We must go back out now, Russell. And in about ten minutes we will begin again, and you will leave angrily before Mrs. Hudson can offer you any supper. Yes?"
"Yes, Holmes. Goodbye."
He went back out into the sitting room, and I joined him a few minutes later. Within twenty minutes the sarcastic remarks were beginning to escalate, and shortly after six o'clock I slammed out of his cottage door without saying good-bye to Mrs. Hudson and sped off down the lane. Two miles away I stopped the car and rested my forehead on the wheel for some time. It was all too real.
SIXTEEN: The daughter of the voice
It is so certain, then, that the new generation — will do something you have not done?
The dreary weeks dragged on. My watchers remained discreet and I, absentminded. Trinity term began, and I was almost too busy to remember that my isolation was an act. Almost. Often at night I would start awake from bed or chair, thinking I had heard two soft taps at the door, but there was never anything. I moved in a woolly cocoon of words and numbers and chemical symbols, and spent my every spare minute in the Bodleian. Oddly, the Dream did not come.
Spring arrived, hesitant at first and then in a rush, heady, rich, long days that pushed the nighttime back into ever smaller intervals, the first spring in five free from the rumour of guns across the Channel, a spring anxious to make up for the cold winter, life bursting out from four years of death. All of England raised her face to the sun; or nearly all. I was aware of the spring, peripherally, aware that no one in the University save myself and a number of shell-shocked ex-soldiers was doing any work, and even I submitted to a picnic on Boar's Hill and another day allowed myself to be dragged off for a punting expedition upriver to Port Meadow.
For the most part, though, I ignored the blandishments of my former friends and current neighbours and kept my head down to work. That was the pattern for most of May, and it was the case on the day nearly at May's end when the tight snarled threads of the case began to come loose in my hands.
Upon my return from Sussex I was faced with the problem of where to put the envelope Holmes had given me. I could no longer depend on the security of my rooms, and preferred not to carry it about on my person at every moment. In the end I decided that the safest place to hide it was behind one of the more obscure volumes around the comer from the desk where I habitually worked in the Bodleian.
It was a risk, but short of buying a safe or visiting the bank vaults with suspicious regularity, either of which would have alerted our enemy that I was up to something, it was the safest risk I could come up with. After all, the general public was not allowed inside the library, so my watchers usually waited long hours outside, and both the hiding place and my work table were in dim corners where it was easy to see people approaching. Over the weeks I retrieved it any number of times to study the mysterious series of Roman numerals. Like Holmes, I knew our opponent well enough to be positive that this was a message, and like Holmes and his brother both, I could find no key to unlock it.
However, the mind has an amazing ability to continue worrying away at a problem all on its own, so that when the "Eureka!" comes it is as mysterious as if it were God speaking. The words given voice inside the mind are not always clear, however; they can be gentle and elliptical, what the prophets called the bat qol, the daughter of the voice of God, she who speaks in whispers and half-seen images. Holmes had cultivated the ability to still the noise of the mind, by smoking his pipe or playing nontunes on the violin. He once compared this mental state with the sort of passive seeing that enables the eye, in a dim light or at a great distance, to grasp details with greater clarity by focussing slightly to one side of the object of interest.
When active, strained vision only obscures and frustrates, looking away often permits the eye to see and interpret the shapes of what it sees. Thus does inattention allow the mind to register the still, small whisper of the daughter of the voice.
I had been working hard, I had spent a sleepless night and rose to bird song, I had attended a lecture, finished an essay, and twice taken out the packet of photographs
Holmes had given me. I held each one by its increasingly worn edges, studying the mute series of numerals until they were burnt into my brain, every wisp of horsehair that tufted from the crossed slashes, every straight edge of the twenty-five recalcitrant black Roman numerals. I even turned the photographs upside down for twenty minutes, in hopes of stirring some reaction, but there was nothing.
All that happened was that I became increasingly irritable at having to cover them with some innocent papers every time someone walked by my worktable.
In the late afternoon the traffic past my table picked up, and after having slipped the photographs away seven times in less than an hour my temper snapped. I had no idea if those accursed slashes meant anything or not, and here I was wasting precious hours on a problem that quite possibly existed only in my mind. I shoved the photos back in their envelope and into their hidey-hole and stalked out of the library in a foul mood. I did not even care what my watchers would think, I was so disgusted with myself. Let them wonder. Maybe there is no goddamned enemy, I thought blackly. Maybe Holmes really has gone mad, and it's all one of his little tricks. Another "examination."
By the time I reached my rooms I had calmed down somewhat, but the look of my desk waiting reproachfully in the corner was more than I could bear. I heard my neighbour moving around in her room next door. I went out into the corridor.