A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [80]
Moments of pure relaxation were rare for me. There was always the nagging of books unread, work undone, time a-wasting. For this brief slice of an afternoon, though, the choice was taken from me; the only alternative to relaxation was fretting. But the sun was too warm and my muscles too pleasantly loosened to fret, so I stretched out my long legs, crossed them at the boots, folded my glasses onto my stomach, and gave myself over to the sheer debauchery of simply lying in the sun. I was vaguely aware that I was presenting a sight shocking to the eyes of an Edwardian gentleman, long jodhpur-clad limbs and thin blouse, bare head and naked face and hair awry, giving herself over to a shameless and unafraid snooze. I smiled at the thought.
In the arms of Nature's soft nurse, I half-dozed, aware of the sun on my eyelids and a fitful breeze across my cheeks, the food in my stomach and the good air in my lungs and the faint remnant of wine in my blood, the odours of cleaning fluid and cedar from the coat under my head and the clean smell of horse moving off and the aroma of a warm male human nearby. I held the awareness of all these things of the day and the birdsong in a compartment, a light place into which I could reach at any instant, and allowed the rest of myself to sink away into the silent, warm, dark place that lies within.
Mary Magdalene. I had not thought of her in days, and yet a week ago, reading her letter aloud to Holmes, I should have said she would remain before my eyes for the rest of my days. Mary of Magdala, one vital link between the ministry of Jesus the Nazarene carpenter, the crucifixion of Jesus the political criminal, and the resurrection of Jesus the Son of God— a link who, having brought the news of the resurrection to the male disciples, vanishes utterly on Easter afternoon. I reflected, not for the first time, on the irony that this woman, later called a harlot, traditionally identified with John's "woman taken in adultery," this mere woman and her vision of the empty tomb was the foundation stone on which two thousand years of Christian faith was laid, and at that moment, lying there in the sun, I knew in my heart that, despite the difficulties, I accepted her authorship of my papyrus. I was filled with admiration for the pure, distilled strength of the woman with her simple, deadly decisions— and for the first time I wondered what had become of the granddaughter, Rachel, how old she had been, if she made it safely to Magdala. "I look out across my rocky desolation," the woman had written, in that flowing and spiky hand that gave the impression of hurried calm even before I knew her words, a rocky desolation and fleeing the coming wrath of the conqueror that would turn the holy place that was the heart of Judaism into a ruin where jackals would howl and soldiers empty their bladders, the same soldiers who carried pikes and swords and who stank of garlic and stale sweat in that land of sun and little water, a smell very unlike the cedar and the tobacco and the fresh male smell that was in my own nostrils now, which combination was evocative of Holmes. I lay limp, part of me drifting on a hillside in a long-off age under a different sun, and a bit of me aware of Mr Brown's cultivated natural landscape, and gradually a third part of me becoming aware of a series of distinctly arresting sensations that slowly transformed my state of torpid dreaminess into hypnotic attention, a third point of awareness that kept me frozen and divided, the awareness of lips exploring the exquisitely sensitive tracery of veins that ran up the inside of my wrist.
It was overwhelmingly erotic, the feather touch and dreamlike movement of his breath and mouth and moustache in my palm, on the swell and hollow of my thumb, up the line of my tendons, the amazing, unexpected, electrifying gentleness and sensitivity of his mouth taking possession of my right