A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [106]
“Where are we now?” It was the first time I had thought to ask.
“Not far from Little Waltham, in Essex.”
“The flat then, if you think it’s safe.”
“It will be,” he said, somewhat ambiguously, and leant forward to speak to Q. I looked back as we went down the drive, and I saw a big, ugly, down-at-its-heels stone country house, like a hundred others. Nothing whatsoever to distinguish it, except the knowledge that I had left the remnants of my youth in one of its deserted cellars.
* * *
NINETEEN
Wednesday, 2 February-
Saturday, 5 February
For nature has in all beasts printed a certain mark of dominion in the male and a certain subjection in the female, which they keep inviolate.
—John Chrysostom
« ^ »
The next days were tedious, but I had spent enough time recovering from various injuries to know that health would return eventually. It was less painful than most of the other convalescences I had gone through, rather like a case of the influenza that had ravaged the country the last two winters.
And yet, that is a lie. Not that the bodily discomfort was to any extent extreme: I felt shaky and feverish, cramped and aching and quite unable to eat, but no more than that. It was my soul that was ill, in a way I had never known and did not know how to deal with.
I first knew severe injury when I was fourteen, recovering from the automobile accident that had cost my family’s life, an accident for which I felt responsible. Guilt ate at me then, and for some years afterwards. The second time was when I took a bullet in the shoulder, one that was meant for Holmes. In the aftermath, I had retreated emotionally, because the woman trying to kill us had been a person I respected and thought loved me, and because I could not blame Holmes for causing her death.
Now what I felt was shame, simple, grinding shame at my body’s continued craving for the poison that had been fed me.
I wanted the needle, wanted it badly, and the desire was a craven one, and I was ashamed. For the rest of Thursday and all of Friday, I raged up and down in my locked bedroom, ignoring the entreaties of Mrs Q with her tea and her delicacies.
It was not simply physical addiction. Heroin does not turn a person into a raving dope fiend in a night, or a week. However, circumstances conspired against me, and the drug had acted more quickly than might have been expected. Normally, the man might have pumped me full of the stuff for a month and I still should have viewed the process with loathing; however, alone, undernourished, off balance in the dark, and with a history of prolonged use of a similar drug, I could not resist the only pleasures and stimulus offered me.
The desire wore down, of course; it was, after all, hardly a habit of any duration, and, like any addiction, it was mostly in the mind. However, the shame and the rage only grew, until I hated everyone: Margery, whose fault it somehow was; Veronica, who had put me here; Holmes, who had seen me in that despicable state and burnt me with his compassion. I refused to go to the telephone, had Q simply inform people that I was unwell and not to come by or send flowers. I did not read the growing pile of messages: from Margery Childe, from Mrs Hudson, from Duncan. I hated everyone, except, oddly enough, the true villain of the piece, the man I thought of as simply Him. After all, He had been an honest enemy, not a masquerading friend.
It was Holmes, I suppose inevitably, who pulled me out of this maudlin state. He came to the flat late on Friday. I naturally refused him entrance to my room. He entered anyway, by the simple expedient of sliding a newspaper under the door, poking a kitchen skewer through the keyhole to knock the key out, and briskly drawing back paper and key to his side. His shoulder proved stronger than my bare foot against the door, and I faced him in a fury.
“How dare you!”
“I dare many things, Russell, not the least of which is entering a lady’s chamber contrary to her express wishes.”
“Get out.”
“Russell, had you truly not