A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [93]
I had come here for three purposes. The first, I dispatched within two hours: Although modern Egyptian history is not my field, once one knows the basic techniques of research, no field's fences or unfamiliar terrain make much of a barrier. I skimmed half a dozen books and brought the colonel's wavering scholarship back to earth, noted two contrary arguments and a nice apothegm I would steal for him, and then abandoned Egypt, to proceed with my own, considerably more appealing projects. I began in Duke Humfrey's.
My tools were a broad-nibbed pen, an unlined notebook, and a page with twenty words written on it. On a quick tour of the room, I spotted three familiar heads: a good beginning. I gathered up two of my fellow students, approached the third figure, a don whose subject was church history, and explained my need.
"I wonder if I might ask your help with a little project of mine," I began. "There's this fairly old piece of manuscript that I think may have come from a woman's hand. I have a friend who's something by way of an expert on handwriting— you know, he can tell you whether the person is right- or left-handed, old or young, where and how much he was educated, that sort of thing— and he said that if I were to collect some samples of men and women writing Greek and Hebrew, which is what the manuscript is in, it would give him a paradigm for comparison."
"What great fun," the don exclaimed, his eyes sparkling through bottle-glass lenses. "Do you know, just the other day I dug up a sheaf of letters in Bodley, and as I was reading through them, two of them struck me as somehow ineffably feminine. They're Latin, of course, but if you do come up with anything on your project, you might be interested in seeing these others. Any particular phrase you want written?" he added, reaching for his pen.
"Yes, here's the list, and do use this pen— it'll keep the samples uniform." His eyebrows rose at the selection of words, but he wrote them neatly and handed back the pen and book. The other two did the same. I made note of their identities on each page, thanked them, and left them to their books.
Academia being what it is, the reactions of everyone else I approached during the course of the day's investigations were quite predictable. Intensely curious and intellectually excited, particularly over my chosen words (which in Greek included Jerusalem, Temple, Rachel, madness, confusion, and Romans, and in Hebrew the words for day, darkness, land, and wilderness), they were nonetheless loath to trespass on my personal research. As a result, all helped, except one ancient of days who was having a flare-up of arthritis in his writing hand, and all demanded to see the results of my little project as soon as it was published. By early afternoon, I had a filled notebook. Furthermore, by late afternoon, I had a clear idea of what Dorothy Ruskin had done on the missing Tuesday, and by evening, when I prepared to turn my back on the town centre, I had a vastly renewed sense of vigour and purpose. For all of those things, I felt profoundly grateful.
I made my late supper of a meat pie and half a pint of bitter at the Eagle and Child, and took the train back to London. It was nearly eleven o'clock when I said, "Evening, Billy" into the empty corridor and heard his reply through the door. I was hardly surprised that the room next to mine was empty. It had taken me some days to get back into the rhythm of a case, but I had now remembered it, and I no longer expected Holmes to appear but for brief snatches of consultation, reflection, and sleep.
I went down the hallway to the bathroom and washed away the day's grime, checked to see that I had an ironed frock for the next day, and settled down at the little window table with a lamp and the notebook. Shortly after midnight, I heard a key in the door of the adjoining room, and a moment later the grizzled, disreputable