A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [24]
The impassive door guard got up from his chair and his yellow-back novel to unlock the wide door for me. It was raining still, and though the street was well lit, it was quite deserted.
I hesitated for a moment, half-tempted to telephone for a cab, but the image of Margery Childe as a carnivorous plant and a waft of disapproval from the guard came together, and I realised that despite the wet, I wanted to be out of the building, away from the provocative scent and into the clean shock of the night. I pulled my thin borrowed coat up around my neck, settled my hat low over my spectacles, and set out resolutely towards the brighter lights at the end of the street.
Halfway there, the cloy had rinsed away. The rain had also gained both my shoulder blades and the inside of my shoes, and I was occupied with mordant thoughts about the English climate and ambiguous thoughts about the woman I had left, when a surreptitious movement from inside the unlit doorway I was passing brought me whirling around in a crouch. A tall, indistinct figure loomed up, darkness in a dark place, with a pale slash the only indication of its face. It whispered at me, a sly and salacious hiss that oozed suggestively into the night, barely above the sound of the rain.
“Pretty young ladies like you have no business on the streets at this time of night.”
I froze, but before the first immediate frisson of shock could pass on into gooseflesh, I straightened and began to laugh in relief.
“Holmes! Good God, what on earth are you doing here?”
He gathered his dark garments around him and stepped into the dim light, looking for all the world like some Byronic version of a vampire. (Thirty years before, I thought briefly, he’d have been run in, or strung up, for Jack the Ripper.) His face was largely in the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat, but one corner of his thin mouth was turned up in a familiar sardonic smile. When he spoke, his tones were half an octave lower than usual, which meant that he was feeling inordinately content with life.
“A whim, Russell,” he said, and tilted his head back so I might see his eyes, crinkled in silent laughter. “Merely a whim.”
* * *
FIVE
Monday, 27 December-
Tuesday, 28 December
Since private affairs are part of the human condition, as well as public ones, God has doled them out: All that takes place outside, He has trusted to man, all that is within the house, to woman… This is an aspect of the divine providence and wisdom, that the one who can conduct great affairs is inadequate or inept in small things, so that the function of woman becomes necessary. For if he had made man able to fulfil both functions, the feminine sex would have been contemptible. And if he had entrusted the important questions to women, he would have filled women with mad pride.
—John Chrysostom
« ^ »
My dear Holmes, whatever it was and however you found me, we are well met. I was coming to see you tomorrow, in fact. I don’t suppose you have an umbrella tucked beneath your assorted raiment?” I asked hopefully as a dollop of icy rain from the diabolically designed hat brim gushed down the back of my neck.
“You are dressed somewhat inadequately,” he agreed unsympathetically, “and from the ill fit, I observe that the clothes are not your own. Perhaps another layer would not go amiss,” and he began to undo the fastenings of the long, caped greatcoat he wore. I protested, but as he shrugged it off, I saw that underneath he wore a similar garment, in an unfortunate houndstooth check. He shook the coat free of half a gallon of water and dropped it onto my shoulders. It was enormously heavy but still dry inside. I straightened my buckling knees and fancied I could feel the inner layers of wool beginning to steam.
“Thank you, Holmes, that was most gallant of you. Precisely what I should expect of a Victorian gentleman. I don’t suppose you have a Primus stove and teakettle in an inner pocket? Although an all-night