A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [30]
The walls closed in, and the quiet was loud, and I was far from sleep. I went into the kitchen and did the washing up, wiped down the surfaces, made myself a cup of milkless tea, put his pipe on its rack, took a book from the shelves, and sat staring at the first page as the cup cooled. Sometime later, I remembered it and grimaced at the taste of the cold tannin, took the cup to the sink and dumped it out, washed it, dried it, put it away, and walked across the room to the internal door.
I looked at the bed a long time. In the end, I went back and took the throw rug from the back of the sofa, turned down the lights, curled up under the rug by the low glow of the fire, and wondered what the hell I was going to do.
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SIX
Tuesday, 28 December
How can woman be the image of God, seeing she is subject to man and has no authority, neither to teach, nor to be witness, nor to judge, much less to rule or bear empire?
—Saint Augustine (354-430)
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I had met Sherlock Holmes at a time when adolescence and the devastating circumstances of my orphaning had left me with an exterior toughness and an interior that was malleable to the personality of anyone willing to listen to me and take me seriously. Had Holmes been a cat burglar or forger, no doubt I should have come into adulthood learning to walk parapets at night or concocting arcane inks.
Over the years of my informal apprenticeship, I had learnt his trade, while at the same time pursuing my own academic vision. No doubt it made an odder combination than the two topics Margery Childe had remarked on, but if detecting was what I did, theology was what I was. Chemistry served to take up the slack. There had been clashes between the two disparate demands, but so far a final choice had not been necessary. The two sides of me lived in friendly mutual incomprehension.
That bed, though…
In the course of various investigations over the years, Holmes and I had spent any number of nights within arm’s reach of each other. He had slept in my bed, and I in his. Several times, we had even slept together in one bed, or whatever passed for a bed at the time. Never once had there been awkwardness over this. Two years before, at the beginning and at the end of a tense and terrifying case, we had each made a faint overture in the male-female dance, but later we had made the unspoken decision not to pursue that line of activity. We were intimate friends, but without the intimacy of the body.
Perhaps I ought to mention here that I was at the time not unaware of the entertainment value afforded by the reactions of one’s body. The postwar years had brought large numbers of mature young men into Oxford, and one of them in particular, being possessed of a quick mind, a wry sense of humour, an inexplicable persistence, and an automobile, had taught me a great deal.
However, the mind is a most peculiar organ, and the simple fact was that until the night atop the hansom, I had never drawn a connexion between those bodily reactions and Sherlock Holmes. I had contemplated marriage, had even played with the idea of suggesting it, but until he had himself referred so sarcastically to the marriage bed, I had never actually pictured him in those terms. Now, however, the checks were off, the blinkers removed; since I had seen him emerge from the dark doorway into the rainy street, the physical awareness of his proximity and his being had hammered at me, unrelenting. When he passed behind me, I had felt like the victim of a child’s balloon game, with static electricity causing the hairs on the arm to rise and follow the balloon’s path back and forth above the skin—I had been almost painfully aware of quivering receptors following him about the room.
The only way to stop it had been to savage him and drive him away. That had bought me some breathing space, albeit brief and at a high price, but now I had it, I could not think what to do. Something would have to be done, that was obvious. I had not asked for this intolerable awareness, I did