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By Root 910 0

or visiting the bank vaults with suspicious regularity, either of which would have alerted our enemy that I was up to something, it was the safest risk I could come up with. After all, the general public was not allowed inside the library, so my watchers usually waited long hours outside, and both the hiding place and my worktable were in dim corners where it was easy to see people approaching. Over the weeks I retrieved it any number of times to study the mysterious series of Roman numerals. Like Holmes, I knew our opponent well enough to be positive that this was a message, and like Holmes and his brother both, I could find no key to unlock it.

However, the mind has an amazing ability to continue worrying away at a problem all on its own, so that when the “Eureka!” comes it is as mysterious as if it were God speaking. The words given voice in-side the mind are not always clear, however; they can be gentle and el-liptical, what the prophets called the bat qol, the daughter of the voice of God, she who speaks in whispers and half-seen images. Holmes had cultivated the ability to still the noise of the mind, by smoking his pipe or playing nontunes on the violin. He once compared this mental state with the sort of passive seeing that enables the eye, in a dim light or at a great distance, to grasp details with greater clarity by focussing slightly to one side of the object of interest. When active, strained vi-sion only obscures and frustrates, looking away often permits the eye to see and interpret the shapes of what it sees. Thus does inattention allow the mind to register the still, small whisper of the daughter of the voice.

I had been working hard, I had spent a sleepless night and rose to bird song. I had attended a lecture, finished an essay, and twice taken out the packet of photographs Holmes had given me. I held each one by its increasingly worn edges, studying the mute series of numerals until they were burnt into my brain, every wisp of horsehair that tufted from the crossed slashes, every straight edge of the twenty-five recalcitrant black Roman numerals. I even turned the photographs upside down for twenty minutes, in hopes of stirring some reaction, but there was nothing. All that happened was that I became increas-ingly irritable at having to cover them with some innocent papers every time someone walked by my worktable.

In the late afternoon the traffic past my table picked up, and after having slipped the photographs away seven times in less than an hour my temper snapped. I had no idea if those accursed slashes meant any-thing or not, and here I was wasting precious hours on a problem that quite possibly existed only in my mind. I shoved the photos back in their envelope and into their hidey-hole and stalked out of the library in a foul mood. I did not even care what my watchers would think, I was so disgusted with myself. Let them wonder. Maybe there is no god-damned enemy, I thought blackly. Maybe Holmes really has gone mad, and it’s all one of his little tricks. Another “examination.”

By the time I reached my rooms I had calmed down somewhat, but the look of my desk waiting reproachfully in the corner was more than I could bear. I heard my neighbour moving around in her room next door. I went out into the corridor.

“Hello, Dot?” I called. She appeared at her door.

“Oh, hello, Mary. Cup of tea?”

“Oh, no thanks. Are you doing anything urgent tonight?”

“Going to hell with Dante, but I’d be glad of an excuse to put it off. What’s up?”

“I’m so sick of it, I can’t face another book, and I thought—”

“You? Sick of books?” Her face would not have registered more dis-belief if I had sprouted wings. I laughed.

“Yes, even Mary Russell gets fed up occasionally. I thought I’d have dinner at the Trout and go listen to a harpsichord recital a fellow in one of my lectures is giving. Interested?”

“When do we leave?”

“Half an hour all right with you?”

“Forty-five minutes would be better.”

“Right. I’ll call for a cab.”

We had a pleasant dinner, Dorothy found a friend to flirt