A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [102]
“Will you be all right if I leave you here and go find you some clothes?”
“Leave the door open.” My voice trailed upwards and cracked.
“Of course.”
He ran light-footed up the stairs, and returned within three minutes, to find me cowering just inside the door like some timid beast afraid to seize its freedom. He held out a pair of trousers, a linen shirt, a pair of carpet slippers. I just looked at them.
“It will take me some time to locate your own clothing,” he said, mistaking my hesitation. I reached for the things, avoiding his hand, and stepped back into the dark to dress. The clothes were my captor’s. I could smell Him, feel the imprint of his body. A curious intimacy, but, oddly enough, not unsatisfying. I straightened my shoulders and stepped into the light, then walked out of my cellar prison and up the bright stairs, feeling like the mermaid granted feet.
Holmes escorted me up into the house, never touching me but guiding me with his physical presence, as substantial beside me as one of my pillars. In the main corridor, a uniformed constable came up to us, eyeing me with alarm before recalling himself and greeting Holmes.
“Mr Holmes, sir, Inspector Dakins sent me to ask you if the young lady would see fit to identify the men under arrest. He thinks there may be one or two missing, and it’d be helpful he says if the young lady could give us descriptions. If she’s up to it, he says,” the constable added dubiously. I straightened my shoulders again and felt the fingers of the restless shakes playing over my nerve endings.
“Yes, I’m quite fit,” I said in an unfamiliar and far-off voice.
“Very good, miss. If you’d follow me.”
Holmes stayed at my shoulder, close enough that I felt the heat of him, but never actually making contact. A part of me was disintegrating, not only because of the drug, and without him beside me, I could never have looked into the knowing, leering eyes of the thugs (easily recognised despite the absence of the false beards) and the curious, disapproving eyes of the police, could never have described my captor (two inches under six feet, thirteen and a half stone, black hair, small scars on his right lip and in his left eyebrow, Yorkshire-born, London-raised, with a fairly well-seated French addition to his accent, various moles, and the habits and abilities I had deduced), could never have made it out the door and up the stairs to the anonymous guest quarters and walked calmly in and waited while the constable brought in a tray with tea and biscuits and cheese and fresh plump apples and set it clumsily on a table. Holmes chased him out, poured a cup, and brought it to me where I stood with my face pressed up against the window, drinking in the glorious sight of a rain-swept hillside. The vibrancy of the green grass against the grey sky was almost frightening in its intensity; it certainly hurt my eyes. Holmes stood at my shoulder for a moment before putting the cup down on a polished table and reaching past me to work the latch and push the window open. Sweet, freezing air engulfed me, an almost tangible substance pressing against my face and in my hair.
“What time is it?” I asked him.
I heard the sound of his watch rubbing against the coin he wore on it, a faint metallic sound I had heard a thousand times before and had not thought I would hear again. “Twelve minutes past eleven.”
For the first time in days I was anchored again to the progress of the sun through the heavens. Holmes took up the tea cup, put it into my hands, and then snatched it back to keep it from tumbling out the window. He carried it back to the tray, stirring in three spoons of sugar before bringing it back to where I stood. He held the cup to my lips, and I drank. When the cup was drained to the sugary dregs he gently closed the window and led me to a chair in front of the fire. I sat where I could see out of the window, and I managed to hold the second cup of tea on my own. The horrid iced biscuits he pressed on me were too much, and I told him so, my words