• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Come on, and kiss me Kate?” I offered. “What, sweeting, all amort?”

She clapped her hands together and squealed at the ceiling. “I knew it! The voice, the height, and she even knows the words. Can you do it à la vaudeville?”

“I, er—”

“Of course we can’t use real food in your scene where you throw it at the servants, not with all the shortages, it wouldn’t be nice.”

“May I ask...?”

“Oh, sorry, how stupid of me. Veronica Beaconsfield. Call me Ronnie.”

“Mary Russell.”

“Yes, I know. Tonight then, Mary, nine o’clock, my rooms. First performance in two weeks.”

“But I—” I protested. But she was away.

I was simply the latest to discover the impossibility of refusing to co-operate in one of Ronnie Beaconsfield’s schemes. I was in her rooms that night with a dozen others, and three weeks later we performed The Taming of the Shrew for the entertainment of the Men of Somerville, as we called them, and I doubt that staid college of women had ever heard such an uproar before, or since. We gained several male converts to our society that night, and I was soon excused the rôle of Petruchio.

I was not, however, excused from participation in this amateur dramatic society, for it was soon discovered that I had a certain skill in make-up and even disguise, although I never let slip the name of Sherlock Holmes. I cannot now recall the process by which I, shy bluestocking intellectual Mary Russell, came to be the centre of the year’s elaborate prank, but some weeks later in the madness of the summer term I was to find myself disguised as an Indian nobleman (In-dian, for the turban to cover my hair) eating with the undergraduates of Baliol College. The breath of risk made it all the more delicious, for we should all have been sent down, or at the very least rusticated for the term, had we been caught out.

The career of Ratnakar Sanji in Oxford lasted for nearly the entire month of May. He was seen in three of the men’s colleges; he spoke briefly (in bad English) in the Union; he attended a sherry party with the aesthetes of Christ Church (where he demonstrated exquisite manners) and a football game with the hearties of Brasenose (where he appeared to down a large quantity of beer and contributed two previously unknown verses to one of the rowdier songs); he even received a brief mention in one of the undergraduate newspapers, under the heading “Rajput Nobleman’s Son Remarks on Oxford.” The truth inevitably trickled out, and I only escaped the proctor’s bulldogs by moments. Miss Mary Russell walked demurely away from the pub’s back entrance, leaving Ratnakar Sanji in the dustbin behind the door. The proctors and the college authorities conducted a thorough search for the malefactors, and several of the young men who had been seen dining or at functions with Sanji received stern warnings, but scandal was averted, largely because no one ever found the woman who rumour said was involved. Of course the women’s colleges received their close scrutiny. Ronnie was called in, as one of the most likely due to temperament, but when I followed her in the door—quiet and bookish, loping along at Ronnie’s heels like a lugubrious wolfhound—they discounted my height and the fact that I wore spectacles similar to Sanji’s, and excused me irritably from the interrogation.

The conspiracy left me with two legacies, neither of which had been in my original expectations of University life: a coterie of lasting friends (Nothing binds like shared danger, however spurious.) and a distinct taste for the freedom that comes with assuming another’s identity.

All of which is not to say that I gave up work entirely. I revelled in the lectures and discussions. I took to the Bodleian Library as to a lover and, particularly before Sanji’s career began in May, would sit long hours in Bodley’s arms, to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books. The chemistry laboratories were a revelation in modernity, compared to Holmes’ equipment, at any rate. I blessed the war that had taken over