A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [124]
“And you smoke foul tobacco and get down in the dumps for days and mess about with chemicals, but I don’t keep a bull pup.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Holmes, is this a proposal of marriage?”
He blinked in surprise.
“Does it need proposing?” he asked. “Would it please some obscure part of your makeup if I were to get down on one knee? I shall, if you wish, although my rheumatism is a bit troublesome just at the moment.”
“Your rheumatism troubles you when convenient, Holmes,” I remarked, “and I think that if you’re going to propose marriage to me, you’d best have both your feet under you. Very well, I accept, on the aforementioned condition that you never again try to keep me from harm by hitting me on the skull, or by trickery. I’ll not marry a man I can’t trust at my back.”
“I give you my solemn vow, Russell, to try to control my chivalrous impulses. If, that is, you agree that there may come times when—due entirely to my greater experience, I hasten to say—I am forced to give you a direct order.”
“If it is given as to an assistant, and not as to a female of the species, I shall obey.”
These complicated negotiations of our marriage contract thus completed, we faced each other as a newly affiancéd couple, reached out, and shook hands firmly.
* * *
POSTSCRIPT
Being deceivers, yet we are true;
unknown, yet well known; dying, yet, behold we live;
punished, yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing;
poor, yet making many rich;
having nothing, yet possessing everything.
Corinthians 6:8-10
« ^
There is no precise end to a tale such as this one, and yet, a line must be drawn. For the sake of those who wish to look beyond the boundary, however, I shall recount two conversations I had that spring.
The first was held six or eight weeks after the final events of this story, when Veronica rang me in Sussex. Miles had set off for a tour across America some weeks before, but she had just received a telegram from him sent from Washington, D.C.
“He’s turning home early,” she said. “He’s coming back to me, Mary.”
“Did he say that?”
“His exact words were, ‘What am I doing here query. Bounderhood piled on bounderhood.’ He’s coming home.”
“I’m very glad, Ronnie. I only hope you don’t reciprocate my example of rudeness and stage a secret elopement.”
“Not a chance, with our families. There probably won’t be a ball, because of Iris, but that’s just as well. Miles is almost as clumsy on his feet as I am.”
They married in a cloud of white roses. She had him for three years and one child before losing him to a sniper’s bullet in Ireland in 1924.
The other conversation took place a few months later. The first of the court cases set off by the charred body of Claude Franklin/Calvin Franich/Claude de Finetti eventually wrangled its way to a close, leaving two members of the Inner Circle, Susanna Briggs and Francesca Rowley, serving time in prison for their parts in his smuggling operations. Other cases were pending, capital cases against the men taken in the London warehouse and in the house where I had been held in Essex, but in none of them was Margery Childe charged. There was no evidence that she knew of her husband’s smuggling or of his murderous plots involving inheritances; after the conversation Holmes and I had heard, even Lestrade had to agree that she had been blind, but not criminal. She was not charged, not by the authorities. However, she brought against herself a verdict of guilty, and as penance stripped herself of everything. The monies she had inherited were returned to the families of the murdered women, the remains of the Temple turned over to those of her Circle who were still faithful, and Margery took herself, with all her considerable charms and abilities, to the west coast of Africa, where she did great good and was much loved until her death in a cholera epidemic in 1935.
I went to see her the night before she left, in the run-down boarding house where she was staying in Portsmouth.