A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [47]
"She was a highly intelligent woman from all indications. I believe I should have enjoyed meeting her. It did not take her long to decide that Zionism and Arab self-rule were fundamentally incompatible. There are many people who would not agree with her, but Miss Ruskin became convinced that Jews and Mohammedan Arabs could not easily be neighbours in the same small country, and so she gradually withdrew herself from her former work and returned to archaeology. Her work for the Zionist movement has gone on, but quietly, so as, I think, not to oppose directly her Arab friends and not to burden the movement with an apparent turncoat.
"Inevitably, there were some members of the Arab faction who were angered by what they saw as her desertion of their cause, her betrayal. There was one family in particular with cause for bitterness. She had been supporting them in a land dispute before her, shall we say, 'conversion,' and afterwards she backed away. They lost their claim and were forced to move into town. Last year, the Zionists established a settlement on that piece of land."
"And equally inevitably, there are at least two young men in the family who are well educated, and they were in this country last Wednesday, and they naturally have black hair," I groaned. "Oh, why couldn't this be a simple case?"
"Don't complain, Russell," said my unsympathetic husband. "Just think how pretty it will look when you get around to writing your memoirs."
"I would settle for writing my Wisdom book, thank you."
"Well, you'll not have time for either just yet. There remains much to do. Lestrade, shall we meet tomorrow night to discuss tactics?"
"Here?"
"Mycroft?"
"Certainly. I cannot promise grouse again, but my housekeeper is always happy to oblige."
"Eight o'clock, then, Lestrade."
Good nights were given all around, glasses were cleared away, Mycroft excused himself, and I went off to our rooms to wash the late-night grit from my eyes. I came back, to find Holmes where I had left him, curled into a chair with his pipe, glowering fiercely at the scoured, empty tiles of the fireplace. I turned down the lights, but he did not move. The threads of smoke surrounding his head looked like the emissions of some hard-pressed engine, smoking with the fury of its labours. I turned at the doorway and watched him for a long minute, but he gave no sign of feeling my eyes on him.
Normally when Holmes was in this state, I would slip away and leave him to his thoughts, but that night something pulled me over to his chair. He started when I touched his shoulder, and then his face relaxed into a smile. He uncurled his legs, and I wedged myself next to him in the chair, which, being fitted to Mycroft, held the two of us with ease. We sat, silent, aware of the occasional clop of shod hooves, the growl of motors, the slight shift of the building around us going to bed, once the call of a night vendor wandered away from his home territory. The lace curtains moved faintly and brought in a much-adulterated hint of a change in the weather.
Holmes and I had met when I was fifteen, and I became, in effect, his apprentice. Under his guidance, I harnessed my angry intelligence, I found a direction for my life, and I came to terms with my past. When I was eighteen, we worked together on a series of cases, which culminated with finding ourselves the target of one of the cleverest, most deadly criminals he had ever faced. After that case, I was an apprentice no longer— I was, at the age of nineteen, a full partner.
I was now twenty-three, though considerably older internally than the calendar would suggest. However, for the last year and a half the