A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [89]
I always hated what Londoners called with such wry pride their “particulars,” their “peculiars,” their “pea soupers,” like the beaming parents of some uncontrollable and pathologically destructive brat. Myopia is too close to a permanent state of fog to make for any entertainment in finding one’s self groping through the streets with hands outstretched, with the additional irritant of having to be constantly wiping one’s spectacles and wondering if it would not be simpler to dispense with them entirely until such time as the Thames deigned to melt back into its solid banks and its fluid state. Also, truth to tell, I have always been a bit of a claustrophobe, and the edginess that comes from suppressing an irritating and irrational fear, combined with my current far-from-irrational caution about venturing into a London bristling, for all I knew, with knife-wielding youths all too willing to pick up where their colleague had left off, made me regret that the chief inspector had not decided to keep me locked up overnight. Perhaps I ought to turn myself in, I thought in disgust. Fling my picklocks on the charge desk and myself into the burly hands of the sergeant on duty. I wiped my spectacles with my handkerchief and replaced them on my nose, then moved the white linen square slowly away from my eyes. Standing as I was directly under the entrance light of the station, at arm’s length the handkerchief was only a vaguely lighter streak in the soup. From up the street came a heavy thud and a metallic screech, followed immediately by two frightened shrieks, one female and one equine, and two male voice began to curse each other hugely. Taxi and cart colliding, I diagnosed, and sighed.
In response, a voice spoke from the gloom on my right.
“Russell?”
I jerked and the handkerchief dropped from my hand, lost forever in the Stygian depths of the pavement, but had he been standing nearer than the ten feet or so that separated us, I believe I should have flung my arms about him and kissed him. As it was, I had to content myself with merely grinning— idiotic, considering the ambiguity of my feelings about the man over the past few weeks. But the lift in my heart could not be denied, as if the door to my own house had suddenly opened up before me on the street.
“Damn it, Holmes, how do you do that? I swear you must have psychic powers, or the best conjuring manual in the business.”
I heard his footsteps come up to me as surely as if it had been a clear spring morning, and an impression of his face swam into view.
“Just a brother, with ears in many places. Mycroft reached me an hour ago with the message that the police had a dangerous young woman in custody. I came on the Underground, which is still operating, if slowly. Had you not emerged in another half hour, I should have gone to your rescue, but I thought it might be less complicated were I to let you talk your own way out. You were not injured?”
“Not seriously, either by the man with the knife or by the metropolitan police, thank you. What are you doing back in town? You said yesterday you were going back to Sussex for a few days.”
“I never left, although town has seen nothing of Sherlock Holmes.”
I had a sudden brief vision of Holmes moving crablike through the city, sidling through the background of scenes in first one guise, then another.
“Basil the driver?”
“Some of his cousins, perhaps,” he agreed. “I decided that the experiments awaiting me were of less importance than the business I have here.”
“And I am keeping you from it.”
“You are it.” Before I could consider whether to be warmed or forewarned by this, he went on. “You said you were going up to Oxford for a few days. Have you changed your mind?”
“Holmes, I can’t change my plans. I promised Duncan.”
“Quite. In that case, I shall assume the London end of the investigation until you return. Not, perhaps, inside your Temple, but nearby. Although, come to think of it, they may need a casual workman. Perhaps even a cleaning woman.”
“Holmes, I’d rather you didn’t.”
“No? You may be right.