The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [72]
No, Russell. Your imagination is going berserk. It must have been Mrs. Thomas herself, opening the window to let out a moth and let-ting in the drops and the leaves and...No? The crew that had trimmed the ivy so inadequately last spring, returned to finish the job? But why should they have the window open...
I took hold of myself firmly and strode down the hall to my door, and there I stood for several minutes, the key in my hand, and I could not bring myself to use it. More than anything I wished I had the re-volver that Holmes had insisted I take, but it sat in my chest of drawers, as useless as if it had been in China.
The truth of the matter was that Holmes had enemies, many of them. He had explained this to me a number of times, drilled me on the precautions I had to take, forced me to acknowledge that I too could be-come a target for vengeance-seeking acquaintances. I thought it highly unlikely, but I had also to admit that it was not impossible. And right now, all the suspicions Holmes had so laboriously implanted in me won-dered if tonight, in my lodgings house, on this wet night in Oxford, someone’s animosity against Holmes had not spilled over onto me.
I was sorely tempted to go back downstairs and have Mr. Thomas ring the police, but I found the thought of the Oxford constabulary walking through here with their big shoes and heavy manner little comfort. They might frighten off an evildoer temporarily, but I could not imagine myself sleeping any better after they had gone.
Discounting the police, then, I had two choices. I could use my key after all and confront whomever I found inside my rooms, but that was an action my association with Holmes made me loath to carry out. The other was to approach my rooms by another means than the door. Unfortunately, the only other entrance was through the windows that looked out onto a stone courtyard twenty-five feet below. In the sum-mer I had once climbed the ivy in the nonalcoholic exhilaration of a long midsummer’s dusk, but it had been warm and light then, with nothing more dangerous at the end of the climb than a fall forward through an open window. I did know that the vines would hold my weight, but would my fingers?
“Oh for God’s sake, Russell, it’s only twenty-five feet. Oxford is making you lazy, sitting on your backside in the library all day. You’re afraid of the cold? You’ll warm up again. There’s really no other choice, now is there? Get on with it.” My father’s American drawl of-ten surfaced when I spoke to myself, as did his irritating tendency to be right.
I went silently back down the hallway, down one flight of stairs, up that hallway, and down the stairs at the far end. These led into the building’s inner quad rather than out onto the street. I removed my wool stockings and jacket and left them with my boots and book bag in a dark corner. My glasses I buttoned carefully into a shirt pocket and, taking a deep breath, let myself quietly out into the wicked hands of the storm.
The temperature had dropped further since I had been out on the street, and I stood in wool clothing that might have been gauze when faced with a downpour that was perhaps three degrees from freezing. It took my breath away as the icy wave drove over me, plastering my shirt against my shrivelled breasts and encasing my legs in a thick layer of frigid wool. I pulled myself up into the greasy ivy with fingers that already had trouble moving and thrust into the branches with unfeeling toes. I really ought to get Mr. Thomas to call the police, I thought, but my body had taken over and numbly continued the climb.
I reached the second layer of dark windows and could see the lighted squares of my own just above my head. With renewed caution I reached for the next handhold, only to find that my hand had not loosed from the previous hold. From then on I had to consciously think the muscles of my hands open and, more important, shut on the vine. Slowly, slowly I pulled myself up beside the first of my windows