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would not agree with her, but Miss Ruskin became convinced that Jews and
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Mohammedan Arabs could not easily be neighbours in the same small country, and
so she gradually withdrew herself from her former work and returned to
archaeology. Her work for the Zionist movement has gone on, but quietly, so
as, I think, not to oppose directly her Arab friends and not to burden the
movement with an apparent turncoat.
Inevitably, there were some members of the Arab faction who were angered by
what they saw as her desertion of their cause, her betrayal. There was one
family in particular with cause for bitterness. She had been supporting them
in a land dispute before her, shall we say, conversion, and afterwards she
backed away. They lost their claim and were forced to move into town. Last
year, the Zionists established a settlement on that piece of land.
And equally inevitably, there are at least two young men in the family who
are well educated, and they were in this country last Wednesday, and they
naturally have black hair, I groaned. Oh, why couldn t this be a simple
case?
Don t complain, Russell, said my unsympathetic husband. Just think how
pretty it will look when you get around to writing your memoirs.
I would settle for writing my Wisdom book, thank you.
Well, you ll not have time for either just yet. There remains much to do.
Lestrade, shall we meet tomorrow night to discuss tactics?
Here?
Mycroft?
Certainly. I cannot promise grouse again, but my housekeeper is always happy
to oblige.
Eight o clock, then, Lestrade.
Good nights were given all around, glasses were cleared away, Mycroft excused
himself, and I went off to our rooms to wash the late-night grit from my eyes.
I came back, to find Holmes where I had left him, curled into a chair with his
pipe, glowering fiercely at the scoured, empty tiles of the fireplace. I
turned down the lights, but he did not move. The threads of smoke surrounding
his head looked like the emissions of some hard-pressed engine, smoking with
the fury of its labours. I turned at the doorway and watched him for a long
minute, but he gave no sign of feeling my eyes on him.
Normally when Holmes was in this state, I would slip away and leave him to his
thoughts, but that night something pulled me over to his chair. He started
when I touched his shoulder, and then his face relaxed into a smile. He
uncurled his legs, and I wedged myself next to him in the chair, which, being
fitted to Mycroft, held the two of us with ease. We sat, silent, aware of the
occasional clop of shod hooves, the growl of motors, the slight shift of the
building around us going to bed, once the call of a night vendor wandered away
from his home territory. The lace curtains moved faintly and brought in a
much-adulterated hint of a change in the weather.
Holmes and I had met when I was fifteen, and I became, in effect, his
apprentice. Under his guidance, I harnessed my angry intelligence, I found a
direction for my life, and I came to terms with my past. When I was eighteen,
we worked together on a series of cases, which culminated with finding
ourselves the target of one of the cleverest, most deadly criminals he had
ever faced. After that case, I was an apprentice no longer I was, at the age
of nineteen, a full partner.
I was now twenty-three, though considerably older internally than the calendar
would suggest. However, for the last year and a half the partnership had been,
in some ways, in abeyance. We had worked together on only two serious cases
since our marriage. Instead, I had immersed myself in the rarefied air of
Oxford, where I was beginning to make a name for myself in the more abstruse
divisions of academic theology. My only real contact with the art of detection
for some months had been in its theoretical aspects as I helped Holmes with
his magnum opus on that subject. Holmes had, I realized now, been waiting, and
now his world had come again to lay claim upon me.
As if to underscore the point my thoughts had reached as I lay back in the
chair with my eyes closed, half-drowsing, I felt my left hand taken up. In the
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silence of our breathing, he began to explore my hand with his, in a slow,
almost impersonal manner that left me unaware of anything else in the
universe. He ran his smooth, cool fingertips along each of my fingers,
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