The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor (28 page)

“Judith, a wise, upstanding, wealthy young widow, was disgusted with them. She put on her richest clothes, summoned her maid, and left the town to walk out to Holofernes’ camp. She told him she wished to be saved from the coming destruction and paraded herself around in front of him for a few days. He, of course, invited her to his tent. She got him drunk, he passed out, and she cut off his head and took it back with her to the town. The invasion fell apart, Jerusalem was saved, and two and a half thousand years later women named for her give their children nightmares with the story.”

“A stimulating tale, Russell, though hardly one that I should choose for a seven-year-old.”

“My mother believed in starting theological training early. The following year we did the Levite’s concubine, which makes the Judith story sound like a nursery rhyme. Still, that is why I wanted to come here, to see where Holofernes arrayed his troops. Does that answer your question?”

He sighed. “I’m afraid so. Then you did see what I was thinking, on the boat?”

“I could hardly miss it.”

“And you offer this as an alternative.” He waved one hand at the darkening plain.

“Yes.” I would not consider the implications, not until I had to.

“No. I am sorry, Russell, but I will not have you place yourself within the enemy camp. I do not believe that you would find this opponent of ours an obliging drunkard.”

“I won’t be sacrificed, though, Holmes. I refuse to abandon you.” I was relieved, but all the same I would not be a coward.

“I am not suggesting that you abandon me, Russell, only that you appear to do so.” He rose and went to his tent and came back with a familiar wooden box in his hand. He set out the pieces as they had been in the game we had played off Crete, before my queen had fallen. He then turned the board around to take possession of the black. This time it was I who captured his queen, I who pressed and chivvied him into a corner. The game shifted, however, for I knew his intentions and refused to be drawn in.

The moves lengthened, slowed, as our two diminutive armies clashed. Pieces fell and were removed from the field of battle. The first stars emerged unnoticed, Ali brought over a small oil lamp and set it on a rock between us, and Holmes laid a pincers movement that took my second bishop. I took a rook (a hollow victory; Holmes scorned their stolid directness) and two moves later lost one to his knight. (Holmes’ knights were terrible weapons when a certain mood was upon him, more like Boadicea’s bladed chariot with its wholesale mowing-down of men than a proper knight on horseback.) Mahmoud pressed tiny cups of syrupy coffee into our hands, watched the board for a time without comment, and went off.

It was a long game. I knew that he intended to duplicate my surprise victory, when I allowed the queen to fall in order to set up a trap in the hands of the commoners, but I refused to be manoeuvered. I drew him out, I kept away from his pawns, and used my queen with great caution, and eventually he seemed to change his tactics and laid another triangle of pincers to drive me into. I danced away from it, he relaid it farther back on the board. Again I avoided it and sent my remaining rook down to place him into check. He evaded it, I brought up my queen in support, and then somehow in the excitement of closing in I overlooked the board in front of me, and the pawn that had been weak man in the first, long-forgotten pincers movement was in my second rank, and then it was before me, newly born a queen.

“Regina redivivus,”
Holmes commented sardonically, and proceeded to tear into the unprotected back side of my offence like a hailstorm through peach blossoms. I fell before his resurrected queen in a complete rout, was mated in half a dozen moves, and then it was my turn to laugh quietly and shake my head before I sobered.

“Holmes, she’ll never fall for it,” I objected.

“She will, you know, if the distraction is believable enough. The woman is proud and scornful, and her anger at our absence will make her incautious and all too willing to believe that Sherlock Holmes has failed to preserve his queen, that poor old Holmes stands alone, exposed and helpless.” He reached out and rocked the crown of the black king with the tip of his finger. “She will swoop in to pick me off,” he tapped the white queen, “and then, we have her.” He picked up the black pawn and rolled it around in his hands as if to warm it, and when he opened his hands the black queen lay there. He put her back onto the board and sat back with the air of a man concluding a lengthy and delicate business negotiation. “It is good,” he pronounced, “really very good.” His eyes gleamed in the last flicker of the lamp’s wick, with a curious, intense relish such as I had seen on his face the week before, when he was facing a young assailant with a large knife.
Joie de combat,
I supposed, and my heart quailed before this changed Holmes.

“It’s dangerous, Holmes,” I protested, “really very dangerous. What if she sees what we’re doing? What if she doesn’t play by the rules and just decides to wipe us both out? What if—” What if I fail? a voice wailed inside me.

“What if, what if. Of course it’s dangerous, Russell, but I can hardly spend the rest of my life rusticating in Palestine or tripping over bodyguards, can I?” He sounded quite pleased about it, but now that the time had come, I wanted to hide.

“We don’t know what she’ll do,” I cried. “At least let Lestrade provide some guards at the beginning. Or Mycroft, if you don’t want Scotland Yard in on it, until we know how she’s going to react.”

“We may as well put an advertisement in
The Times
to inform her of our intentions,” he scoffed. “You ought to take up fencing, Russell, truly you should. It offers a most instructive means of judging your adversary. You see, Russell, I have a feel for my opponent now, I know her style and her reach. She has made some points off me in the game thus far, but she has also revealed her own faults. Her attacks have all been patterned on her perception of my nature, my skill at the game. When we return, she will expect me to continue dodging and parrying with my customary subtlety and skill. She knows that I will do so, but…I shall not. Instead, I shall foolishly lower my blade and walk unguarded into her. She will stand back for a moment, to see what I am doing. She will be suspicious, then gradually convinced of my madness, then gloating before she strikes. But you, Russell,” he swept his robed arm over the board, and when he drew it back the black queen stood in the place of the white bolt-and-nut king. “You will be waiting for her all the time, and you will strike first.”

Dear God. I had wanted more responsibility, and here it was, with a vengeance. I worked to control my voice.

“Holmes, it is no false modesty to say that I haven’t the experience in this—this ‘game,’ as you insist on calling it. A mistake on my part could be fatal. We must have a back-up.”

“I shall think about it,” he said finally, and then he leant forward over the chessboard and looked into my eyes with that same curious intensity that he had shown earlier. “However, I want you to realise, Russell, that I know your abilities, better than you do. After all, I have trained you. For nearly four years I have shaped you and tempered you and honed you, and I know the mettle you are made from. I know your strengths and weaknesses, particularly after these last weeks. The things we have done in this country have honed you, but the steel was there to begin with. I do not regret my decision to come here with you, Russell.

“If you truly feel that you cannot do this, then I shall accept that decision. I will not consider it a failure on your part. It will merely mean that you join Watson while I enlist Mycroft’s help. It would be inferior, I admit—inelegant, and I think long, but not hopeless. It is, however, your choice entirely.”

His words were placid, but what lay beneath them shook me breathless, for what he was proposing would in another man be sheer recklessness. Holmes the painstaking, Holmes the thoughtful, calculating thinker, Holmes the solitary operator who never so much as consulted another for advice, this Holmes I thought I knew was now proposing to launch himself into the abyss, trusting absolutely in
my
ability to catch
him.

And more even than that: This self-contained individual, this man who had rarely allowed even his sturdy, ex-Army companion Watson to confront real risk, who had habitually over the past four years held back, been cautious, kept an eye out, and otherwise protected me; this man who was a Victorian gentleman down to his boots; this man was now proposing to place not only his life and limb into my untested, inexperienced, and above all female hands, but my own life as well. This was the change I had noticed in him and puzzled about, the intensity and relish with which he was facing the coming combat: There was no hesitation left. He had let go all doubt, and was telling me in crystal-clear terms that he was prepared to treat me as his complete, full, and unequivocal equal, if that was what I wished. He was giving me not only his life, but my own.

I had long known the intellect of this man, been aware for nearly as long of his humanity and the greatness of his heart, but I had never had demonstrated to me so clearly that the size of his spirit was equal to his mind. The knowledge rumbled through me like an earthquake, and in its wake a small voice echoed, wondering if I had just pronounced his epitaph.

I don’t know how long it was before I looked up from the small carved queen into the carved-looking features of the man across from me, but when I did, it seemed that his eyebrows were waiting for something. I had to think for a moment before I realised that he had actually asked a question. But there was no decision to be made.

“When faced with the unthinkable,” I said shakily, “one chooses the merely impossible.” He smiled approvingly, warmly.

And then a miracle happened.

Holmes reached out his long arms to me and, like a frightened child, I went inside them, and he held me, awkwardly at first, then more easily, until my trembling faded. I sat, safe, listening to the steady beat of his heart until the oil lamp guttered out and left us in darkness.

T
WO DAYS LATER
the Crusader walls of Acre closed in on us, as unlike the sun-swept stones of Jerusalem, eighty miles away, as could be imagined. Jerusalem’s golden walls had sparkled and shone, and the city vibrated with an inaudible song of joy and pain, but Acre’s walls were heavy and thick, and its song was a multilingual dirge of ignorance and death. The long shadows seemed like spectres to be avoided, and I noticed Holmes glancing about him sharply. Ali and Mahmoud, in their customary place four strides ahead of us, seemed as unaware of the gloom as they were of anything outside themselves, but even they edged towards the middle of the streets as if the walls were unclean. I tried to push away the mood, but it crept back stubbornly.

“I wonder if these stones would speak with such a bleak voice if I didn’t know what the place stood for,” I said to Holmes irritably.

“To a mind attuned to observation and deduction, the product reveals the mind of its creator.” He squinted up at the great, ponderous blocks that loomed up to hide the sky, and rubbed his hands together slowly. “Take Mozart—frenzied gaiety and weeping put to music. The agony of the man is at times unbearable. Let us go.”

We made our way through the streets down to the water, and when we turned a final corner, Ali and Mahmoud had disappeared. I felt shockingly naked without those two swathed backs billowing along in front of me, heads together, but Holmes just smiled and nudged me ahead. As we went past a wooden door set into a wall he spoke into the air.

“Marhaba,”
he said, and to my surprise added,
“
^c
Alla-M’a
^–
q.”

I echoed his thanks, and the blessing, and we went on to the edge of the water, and we sat drinking mint tea from a nearby stall and watched the waves rub at the remnants of the Crusader pier until dark, when we were found by the crew member who had taken us ashore at Jaffa the month before. Our backs were to the fortress as he rowed us noiselessly towards the waiting boat, our faces turned to England.

We stood on the deck and watched the last lights of Palestine fade. Jerusalem was hidden from sight, but to my eyes there was a faint glow in the southeast, as of stored sunlight. I recited under my breath,

“You sang that the other night, did you not?” asked Holmes. “What is it?”

“A psalm, one of the more powerful Hebrew songs, full of sibilants and gutturals.” I translated it for him.

“Amen,” he murmured, surprising me again.

The land receded to a smear of lights against greater darkness, and we went below.

Battle Is Joined