|
Chapter One
Japan had been freezing, the wind that sliced through its famous cherry trees scattering flakes of ice in place of spring blossoms. We had set down there for nearly three weeks, after a peremptory telegram from its emperor had reached us in Hong Kong; people kept insisting that the countryside would be lovely in May.
The greatest benefit of those three weeks had been the cessation of the dreams that had plagued me on the voyage from Bombay. I slept well--warily at first, then with the slow relaxation of defences. Whatever their cause, the dreams had gone.
But twelve hours after raising anchor in Tokyo, I was jerked from a deep sleep by flying objects in my mind.
Three days out from the island nation, the rain stopped and a weak sun broke intermittently through the grey. The cold meant that most of the passengers, after venturing out for a brief turn on the decks, settled in along the windows on the ship's exposed side like so many somnolent cats. I, however, begged a travelling-rug from the purser and found a deck-chair out of the wind. There, wrapped to my chin with a hat tugged down over my close-cropped hair, I dozed.
Halfway through the afternoon, Holmes appeared with a cup of hot coffee. Actually, it was little more than tepid and half the liquid resided in the saucer; nonetheless, I sat up and disentangled one arm to receive it, then freed the other arm so that I could pour the saucer's contents back into the cup. Holmes perched on a nearby chair, taking out his pipe and tobacco pouch.
"The Captain tells me that we are making good time," he commented.
"I'm glad the storm blew itself out," I replied. "I might actually be able to face the dinner table tonight." Something about the angle of the wind the past days had made the perpetual pitch and toss of the boat even more quease-inducing than usual.
"You haven't eaten anything in three days." Holmes disapproved of my weak stomach.
"Rice," I objected. "And tea."
"Or slept," he added, snapping his wind-proof lighter into life and holding it over the bowl of his pipe.
That accusation I did not answer. After a moment, as if to acknowledge that his comment had not required a response, he went on.
"Had you thought any more about pausing in Hawaii?"
I stifled a yawn and put my empty cup onto the chair's wide arm, nestling back into the warmth of the rug. "It's up to you, Holmes. I'm happy to stop there if you like. How many days would it be before the next ship?"
"Normally three, but it seems that the following ship has turned back to Tokyo for repairs, which means we could be marooned there for a week."
I opened one eye, unable to tell from his voice, still less his smoke-girt expression, which way his desires leant. "A week is quite a long diversion," I ventured.
"Particularly if Hawaii has embraced the austerities of Prohibition."
"A half-day would mean a long walk and sit at a table where I don't have to aim a moving soup spoon at my mouth. Both would be quite nice."
"Then another four days to San Francisco." The pointless, unnecessary observation was unlike Holmes. Indeed, this entire conversation was unlike him, I reflected, squinting at him against the glare. He had his pipe between his teeth, and was concentrating on rolling up the pouch, so I shut my eyes again.
"Terra firma," I said. "A week in California, tying up business, and then we can turn for home. By train." I don't get seasick on trains.
"A week will be sufficient, you believe?"
"To draw up the papers for selling the house and business? More than enough."
"And that is what you have decided to do."
This noncommittal, pseudo-Socratic dialogue was beginning to annoy. "What are you getting at, Holmes?"
"Your dreams."
"What about them?" I snapped. I should never have told him about them, although it would have been difficult not to, considering the closeness of the quarters.
"I should say they indicate a certain degree of anxiety."
"Oh for heaven's sake, Holmes, you sound like Freud. The man had sex on the brain. 'Rooms in dreams are generally women,' he declares. 'A dream of going through a series of rooms indicates a brothel, or a marriage'--I can't imagine what his own marriage could have been like to equate the two so readily. And the key--God, you can imagine the fraught symbolism of playing with a key that lies warm in my pocket! 'Innocent dreams can embody crudely erotic desires.' The faceless man he'd no doubt equate with the male organ, and as for the objects that spurt wildly into the air--well, I'm clearly a sick woman. What does it say about my 'erotic desires' that reading the man's book made me need a hot bath? Or perhaps a cold shower-bath."
"You sound as if you've researched this rather thoroughly."
"Yes, well, I found a copy of his Interpretation of Dreams in the ship's library," I admitted, then realised that I was also admitting to a greater degree of preoccupation than I thought sensible. To lead him away from the admission, I said, "I wouldn't have thought that you of all people would fall for the Freud craze, Holmes."
His face darkened as he came close to responding to my diversion, then he caught himself, and counterattacked with a deceptively mild, "A knowledge of psycho-logical jargon is hardly necessary when confronted with such an unambiguous statement such as that contained in those dreams of yours."
"What do you mean, unambiguous?" I protested furiously, and too late realised that I had stepped into his own diversion with both feet.
"San Francisco's earthquake, which sent things flying about, is clearly the paradigm for the first dream. And the locked rooms may represent your family's house, which has stood empty for ten years while you pretended it wasn't there."
"A house is more often symbolic of the self," I told him, although I did not know why I wanted to argue.
"True, although a house may also be simply a house."
I threw off the rug so as to face him unencumbered. "Holmes, you're mad. I've only owned the place for three years, since I turned twenty-one, and I've been rather too busy to travel halfway across the world to take care of things. As for your earthquake fantasy, I wasn't even here in 1906. And what about the faceless man dream, anyway?"
"There is as yet insufficient data to identify him," he said, not in the least troubled by my words.
I drew breath to argue with him, but in the event, I couldn't be bothered. I rose with dignity, and said merely, "If you imagine we shall have time to uncover the relevant data in San Francisco, you are mistaken. We will be there only long enough for me to sign papers, then catch the train for New York."
Tucking the rug under my arm, I left him to his pipe.
Earthquakes. Ridiculous.
He did not bring it up again, and neither did I, although over the following days I often felt his eyes upon me, and knew that at night he too lay awake, waiting for me to speak. But I did not, and he did not, and thus we traversed the Pacific. Between the dreams themselves and lying awake in dread, I scarcely slept, and began to feel as if I was walking in a wrap of cotton gauze.
Hawaii was a pleasant interlude, although the wind blew and the wide beaches were nearly deserted. We walked for hours, and I even managed to eat something, but that night I slept no better.
The following evening I wandered about the ship, up and down the various decks (trying to ignore the Freudian overtones of entering enclosed stairways) until I found myself at the furthest point of the ship, after which there was only water. The wind had stopped that morning, leaving the smoke from the stacks to trail straight back along the various layers of deck, which created a series of solitary if insalubrious places for meditation. I was on the last of those decks, with only a railing between me and the Pacific.
And there I meditated, about the dreams and what Holmes had said.
Clearly, I thought, the damage we had seen in Japan, with Tokyo still recovering from the previous year's devastating earthquake, had set the literalist idea of shaken objects into his mind. I was not worried about the possibility he had suggested; no, despite my words, it was the niggling fear that Freud might be right.
Since leaving England in January, we had marked the ten-year anniversary of our meeting and the third year of marriage. I was content in ways I had not thought possible, well matched mentally and--despite the difference in our ages, despite the regular clash of our personalities, and despite the leering innuendo of Sigmund Freud--well suited physically, to a man who interested my intellect, challenged my spirit, and roused my passions.
So, no: Psychology be damned--the dreams weren't about my marriage.
Yet there they were, keeping me exhausted and irritable and searching out a piece of quiet if smoke-covered deck where I could stand by myself and stare down at the endless sea.
The water stretched out as far as the eye could see in an expanse of gentle grey-blue swells broken only by the occasional white-capped wavelet and the line of the ship's passage, unrolling die-straight behind us until it faded into the glare of sun on the western horizon. Directly below where I stood, dominating my vision if I leant my upper body over the rail, the churn of the great screws dug an indentation in the surface, followed by a rise just behind. Like the earth from a farmer's plough, I thought dreamily, cutting a straight furrow across three thousand miles of sea. And when the ship reached the end of its watery field, it would turn and begin the next furrow, heading east; and after reaching that far shore it would shift again, ploughing west. Back and forth, to and fro, and all the while, beneath the surface the marine equivalents of earthworms and moles would be going busily about their work, oblivious of the other world above their heads. The farmer, the ship, above; the insect, the fish, below. So peaceful. Peacefully sleeping, while occasionally a seed would fall and take root in the freshly split furrow . . .
"Russell!" Holmes exclaimed, and the sharp voice and his sudden hand on my arm snatched me awake and sent my hat flying. I grabbed at it, but too late; the scrap of felt sailed out behind the ship, floating on the air for a long time until eventually it planted itself into the brine furrow. I turned to my husband.
"Why did you have to startle me like that?" I complained. "That was my last warm hat."
"Easier to purchase another hat than to fish you out of the sea," he said. "You were on the edge of going over."
"Don't be ridiculous, Holmes, I was just watching the patterns made by the propellers. What did you want, anyway?"
"The first bell for dinner went a bit ago. When you didn't come to dress I thought perhaps you hadn't heard it. And when I came down the stairs, it appeared as though you were trying to throw yourself over."
His laconic words bore just the slightest edge of true concern, as if a question lay behind them. I reached up to adjust my hair-pins, only to find them gone--weeks after chopping off my thick, waist-length hair (a necessary element of disguising myself as a British officer) my hand was still startled to find the weight of it missing from my head. Spreading my fingers instead to run them through the brief crop, I glanced back at the straight path laid out behind us, and felt a shudder play up my spine. Perhaps I shouldn't lean over any more rails while I was as tired as this, I told myself, and allowed Holmes to thread my hand through his arm and lead me back towards our cabins.
I picked at my meal, making no more response to the conversations around me than would a stone statue. Afterwards we listened to the ship's string quartet render a competent selection of Beethoven, and took a turn around the decks, Holmes chatting, me unresponsive. Eventually we took ourselves to bed, for another night's broken sleep.
The next morning the mirror showed a woman with stains beneath her eyes. Holmes had already risen, and I dressed slowly, drank several cups of strong coffee, and took a book up onto the sun-drenched deck. The pages, however, made no more sense than the conversations of the night before, and eventually I merely sat, staring at the almost imperceptible horizon of sky and sea.
After some time I became aware that Holmes had settled into the adjoining chair. My gaze came reluctantly back from the distance and settled onto the bit of brightness he held in his hand. It was, I decided, the silken scarf he had purchased in a bazaar on the first leg of our voyage out from England, a garish item perhaps useful for one of his gipsy disguises. He held it in his hands as if its bright dye bore a hidden message; it was his focussed concentration that finally caught my attention.
"What is that, Holmes?"
"The length of silk we bought in Aden. I thought to use it as an aide-memoire, to bring back the details of that curious afternoon. The whole affair puzzles me still."
Recalling the events of Aden was something of a wrench, since so much had taken place in the intervening months--weeks in India tracking down a missing spy and jousting with a mad maharaja, followed by the better part of a month in Japan with all the complexity of events there, interspersed by the dream-plagued weeks at sea. Granted, we had nearly been killed in the Aden bazaar by a balcony falling on our heads, but near-death experiences were no rarity in my life with Holmes. I had in the end dismissed it as a curious series of events that might have had tragic consequences, and fortunately had not. Clearly, Holmes was not of the same mind.
"It had to have been an accident, Holmes," I objected. "The balcony fell because the bolts were old, not because someone tried to pull it down on our heads."
"So I tell myself."
"But yourself will not listen."
"A lifetime's habit of self-preservation leaves one disinclined to accept the idea of coincidence."
"Holmes, one event does not a coincidence make."
"But two oddities catch at the mind."
"Two?"
"The fallen balcony, and the ship's passenger who enquired about us, then disembarked. In Aden." He raised an eyebrow at me to underscore the importance of that last.
"The ship's . . . Oh, yes, Thomas Goodheart's little story. A Southerner, didn't he say?" Tommy Goodheart, American aristocrat and occasional Bolshevik, had led us a merry chase across India over the course of January and February. Deep in a tunnel beneath a hill palace, with the maharaja's guards close on our heels, Tommy happened to mention that a female passenger on board our ship, a passenger who mysteriously disembarked in Aden, had been talking to him about Sherlock Holmes. Later, in a spymaster's office one sultry afternoon in Delhi, Holmes had pressed the young man for further details, but there were few to be had.
"From Savannah, or so she'd claimed. It might be noted that the accents of the American South are among the easiest to feign."
"Holmes," I chided, "don't you find it difficult to mistrust that the sun will rise in the east come morning?"
"Not in the least. I am more than willing to operate under the hypothesis that past experience will continue to provide the paradigm for Nature's functions. Although I do not believe that witnessing the sun rising in the west would cause my heart to stop."
"Glad to hear it."
"Watching my wife go over the rail of a ship, however, might have done the job."
"I was only --- "
"You were three degrees from overbalancing." His hard voice brooked no argument, and although that in itself would not normally have prevented me from arguing, at the moment all I could think of was my inadvertent shudder at the alluring smoothness of the ship's wake.
When I did not answer, he sighed. "Russell, clearly something is tormenting your mind. And while I firmly believe that all persons should be allowed to wrestle with their own demons, it is nonetheless possible that two minds working in tandem on the problem might have more effect than one tired mind on its own."
"Yes, very well," I snapped. I set my feet onto the deck, then spent some time studying my hands while the words arranged themselves in my mind. "When I suggested that after Bombay we should go to San Francisco, it seemed a logical idea. My business in California is best served by my presence, and . . . Well, I thought it a means of saying my farewells, which I was in no condition to do when I left ten years ago. But I am finding that the nearer we get, the more I wish we'd just turned for home. I . . . I find I am dreading the entire thing."
"Of course you are," he said. "It is quite natural that you do not wish to go to San Francisco."
"What do you mean?" I protested, stung. "It's taken me days to admit to myself that I was wrong, yet you claim to have known all along?"
"I do not say you are wrong, merely that you are torn. Russell, the moment we turned for California you became irritable, insomniac, restless, and without appetite. When we paused in Japan, your troubles were suspended --- you slept, ate, and concentrated as you normally do --- but when we resumed our easterly progress, they began again. What else could it be? Some curious aversion to the ship itself? I think that unlikely."
I could only stare at him, openmouthed, until his face twisted in a moue of impatience. "Russell, we are sailing on a straight path for the place that holds the most troubling memories of your childhood. It is only natural that you feel concern about seeing the place that burned to the ground when you were six --- yes, yes, you weren't there, but even if you were not present you would have been told about it, over and over. Furthermore, it is the place where, at the age of fourteen, you experienced the horrendous crash that killed your mother, your father, your brother, and nearly you. It would be decidedly odd if you were not fearful. What concerns me is that your degree of apprehension seems excessive. Those dreams, whatever their message, clearly spring from powerful roots."
"But these dreams have nothing to do with the accident. They're nothing like the Dream I used to have when I was a child --- the one I told you about. There's no motorcar, no family. No fire or explosion, no road or cliffs. Not the same at all."
He thrust the scrap of orange into one pocket, then drew his pipe from another and started packing tobacco into its bowl. As he rolled the top of the pouch shut, he remarked, "This faceless man of the second dream. He seems to alarm but not threaten."
"That's a fair description, yes."
"He does not reach for you, or harm you in any way?"
"He just appears, says 'Don't be frightened, young lady,' and leaves."
He paused with the brass lighter halfway to the bowl, and two sharp grey eyes locked on to me. "Young lady, or little girl?"
"Young --- No, you're right, it's little girl. How did you know that?"
"That was the phrase you used the first time you told me."
"Well, it scarcely matters."
"I shouldn't assume that," replied my husband, in his customary irritatingly enigmatic style, and concentrated on getting the tobacco burning. When he had done so, he let out a fragrant cloud and sat back, his legs stretched out before him. "What do you suppose it means by his being faceless? Is it literal, or is something obscuring his features --- a mask of some kind, perhaps, or heavy makeup?"
I gazed out over the sea for a minute. "I just think of him as faceless, but it could be a white mask, or bandages, or as you say, heavy makeup. Like those dancers we saw in Japan, only without the features accentuated. He's just . . . faceless." It was frustrating, trying to grasp a thing so firmly lodged in the dim recesses of the mind.
"And he appears in a white room."
"Yes, always."
"Tell me about the room."
"It's brightly lit, windowless, and crowded with an odd assortment of furnishings." I had already decided that this room was a place of importance to my subconscious mind, which had furnished it with elements from all the sides of my life. An almost mythic place, as it were, a sort of Platonic cave.
"But not the same as the locked rooms of the third dream."
"Oh, no, nothing like. Those are dim and solid, this is bright and, I don't know, soft somehow." Womblike, I thought --- other than the brightness.
"Ah," he said, and bit down on his pipe-stem with an air I knew well: The case was coming together in his mind.
For some reason, that gesture made me uneasy; I got to my feet to walk over to the railing, looking down at the lower decks, refusing to rise to his bait.
"It's a tent," he said after a minute.
"From my childhood? Not very likely, Holmes --- my mother wouldn't have been caught dead tenting. We did have a summer house, south of San Francisco, and although we left the servants behind when we went there, it was a far cry from roughing it."
"Not a holiday. Following the earthquake and fire, the parks of San
Francisco were covered with the canvas tents of refugees."
"I told you, I wasn't there during the earthquake."
"So where were you?"
"I don't remember --- I was six years old, for heaven's sake, and we moved around. England, most likely. Or Boston. Not in San Francisco."
"You were born in London, and lived in California fourteen years later; were you not resident in between?"
"On and off. Not the whole time," I said, far more decisively than I felt. Did anyone pay much attention to memories of childhood? Personally, I rarely thought about them.
"Where did you live when you were six years old, Russell?" he asked patiently.
"Oh, Holmes, leave it, do."
"Where, Russell?"
God, was the man out to drive me mad? "Boston, I think."
"Do you recall the house?"
"Yes," I said triumphantly, and turned to face him, my chin high. "A large brick mansion with a portico, a pianoforte in the parlour, and a stained-glass window over the stairway landing that used to cast its colours on the walls."
"Your house, or that of your grandparents?"
"Ours, of course." But the moment I said this, the stairway in memory became populated with a number of small white dogs, their fluffy bodies spattered magically with blue and red from the window. My grandmother's dogs.
No: I must have seen that when Grandmother came to visit.
Bringing her dogs with her? Reluctantly, I prodded at the memory, trying to locate a bedroom or nursery I could call my own; all I came up with was an uncomfortable trundle bed in a room that smelt of lavender.
Damnation. Why couldn't I remember such a simple thing?
My fingernails located a rough place on the wooden railing, and began to worry at it. "Honestly, Holmes? I don't know."
"Russell, I propose that in all likelihood you were, in fact, in San Francisco during the earthquake. That would explain the flying objects in the first dream, don't you think? And the soft white walls of the crowded room, a tent full of odds and ends rescued from a damaged or burning house."
"Damn it, Holmes, I was not there! Why are you so insistent that I was?"
"Why are you so insistent that you were not? Russell, you never speak of your childhood, do you realise that?"
"Neither do you."
"Precisely. Happy childhoods nurture memories; uncomfortable events cause the mind to wince away."
A splinter came abruptly up from the railing and drove itself into my finger. With a stifled oath, I sucked at the offending digit and shouted furiously around it, "I had a happy childhood!"
"Certainly you did," he retorted drily. "That is why you speak of it so freely."
"Later events made the memories painful."
"Russell, where did you live in 1906?"
"I'm going to go find a plaster for this finger," I told him, and went down the stairway at something close to a run.
I had a happy childhood.
I did not live in California during the quake.
And I did not intend to linger in San Francisco long enough to dig over what sparse portions of my past lay there.
Chapter Two
It is a characteristic difficulty of shipboard life that one cannot escape an interrogator or a boor for long. It is particularly true when one is sharing rooms with one's interrogator.
So it was that the next morning, Holmes knew as well as I did that the dreams had not plagued me during the night. I did dream of the locked rooms, but for the first time since we had left Japan, the flying objects nightmare did not arrive to jerk me gasping from my bed.
The other two dreams persisted. The faceless man had returned, although he had stood clearly outlined in the doorway of a tent, and had not spoken. Still, his presence had not been as troublesome as before. Instead, that night and the following, the enigmatic concealed rooms became the focus for my sleeping mind, dimmer yet ever more sumptuously laid beneath the dust of disuse.
Had I been in the city as a child of six? Had I felt the earth leap and split, watched half the city go up in flames in the worst fire America had ever seen? The disappearance of the first dream forced me to consider the possibility that Holmes was right, for it seemed almost as if, by naming the demon, he had stolen its authority.
Later in the afternoon of our last full day at sea, another image came to me that confirmed Holmes' interpretation beyond a doubt.
The day was warm and bright and, passing under the ship's white canvas sun awnings, I was suddenly visited by a vision of my mother, wearing men's trousers, a ridiculous wide-brimmed straw hat with an enormous orange silk flower, and a delicious, self-mocking grin. She was turning from an open fire with a cast-iron skillet in one hand, a large spoon in the other, the bright canvas of an Army tent behind her; for a moment it was as if a door had been thrown open, permitting me, along with that tantalising glimpse, all the sensations the room-dream held: a thud of heavy sound beneath the crisp noise of breaking glass, a sharp thrill of terror, the feel of arms wrapping around me, and over it all an angry red haze. Then the door slammed shut, and I stood motionless for a long time, until a child ran past and broke my reverie.
It was, I knew without question, real. For that brief glimpse of recovered memory, I could forgive Holmes any degree of meddling. I could even admit to him that he was right: I had been in San Francisco during the earthquake, a child of six.
Why, however, had I pushed away all memory of the event?
We came at last to my childhood home, the West's biggest, youngest city, which spread over the end of a peninsula between ocean and bay. Eighty years ago, a ship coming through the Golden Gate would have seen nothing but a handful of Indian shacks clustered around a crumbling mission. Then, in 1848, John Marshall picked up a gleaming lump of yellow metal from a creek near Sutter's Mill, and the world came pouring in.
I had relatives in that first wave, victims of gold fever who worked claims, made fortunes, and lost them again. I had other relatives who joined the second wave of those who supplied and serviced the miners; their fortunes were more slowly made, and not as quickly lost. But unlike the others who now reigned supreme in the state of California, my grandfather had clung to his East Coast roots: Although he had built a house in San Francisco, it had been on Pacific Heights, keeping its distance from the showy Nob Hill mansions of Hopkins and Stanford; and although he had kept his holdings and remained a financial power on the West Coast, he had also bowed to his wife's demands that they return to the civilised world of Boston to raise their children, and thus loosed his hold on Californian political authority.
Still, my restless iconoclast of a father had claimed San Francisco as his home, declaring his independence by settling his Jewish-English wife in the family house there, and taking control of the family's California business interests. My father loved California, that much I knew, and I remembered him speaking of San Francisco as The City, a phrase that from my mother's lips meant London. I remembered almost nothing about the place itself, but I looked forward to making The City's acquaintance before I turned my back on her for good.
Thus it was that on a morning in late April, seventy-five years after the gold rush began, I stood on the deck and saw the Gate that had welcomed my father's people, smooth hills bracketing the entrance to the bay --- green now following the winter rains, but golden in summer's long drought. Stern gun placements protruded from the hills on either side, but as we entered the Golden Gate and followed the curve of the land to our right, the white-walled city that carpeted a dozen or more hills came into view, its myriad piers and docks stretching long fingers out into the bay.
Our pilot took us in to one gleaming set of buildings not far from the terminal where ferries bustled in and out. We eased slowly in, coming to rest with a barely perceptible judder; ropes were cast and tied; the crowds on board and on land pressed towards each other impatiently, while behind them rough stevedores lounged among the lorries and heavy wagons, smoking and making conversation. The first officials started up the board walkway; as if their uniforms made for a signal, the passengers turned and scurried for their cabins.
Holmes and I waited until the crowd had thinned, then went below to gather our hand luggage and present ourselves for collection.
The only hitch was, no one appeared to be interested in our presence. We sat in the emptying dining room where the purser had told us we might wait, Holmes smoking cigarettes, both of us watching out the windows as the disembarking passengers went from a torrent to a stream to stragglers. I glanced at my wristwatch for the twentieth time, and shook my head.
"It's been nearly an hour, Holmes. Shall we just make our own way?"
Wordlessly, he crushed his cigarette out in the overflowing tray, picked up his Gladstone bag, and paused, looking out of the window.
"This may be your gentleman," he noted. I followed his gaze and saw a portly, tweed-clad, sandy-haired gentleman in his thirties working his way against the flow of porters down the gangway. Sure enough, he paused at the top to make frantic enquiries of the purser, who directed him towards our door. A moment later he burst into the room, red-faced and breathless, his hat clutched in his left hand as his right was extended in our direction.
"Miss Russell? Oh, I am so terribly sorry at the delay --- the boy I sent to watch for the ship's docking appears to have a girlfriend in the vicinity, and he became distracted. Why didn't you have someone 'phone me? Have your bags been taken off? Hello," he inserted, his hand pumping mine, then moving to Holmes. "Good afternoon, Mr. Holmes. So good to meet you. Henry Norbert, at your service. Welcome to San Francisco. And to you, Miss Russell, welcome back.
Come, let's get you off the ship and to your hotel." He clapped his soft hat back onto his head, scooped up my bag, and urged us with his free hand in the direction of the doors.
"Why an hotel?" I asked. "Surely we can stay at the house?"
Norbert stopped and removed the hat from his head again. "Oh. Oh, no, no, I wouldn't think that's a good idea. No, you'd be much more comfortable at a hotel. I've made reservations for you at the St Francis. Right downtown, just around the corner from the offices."
"Is there something wrong with the house?"
The hat, which had been rising in the direction of the sandy head, descended again. "No, no, it's still standing strong, no trouble there. But of course, it's not terribly habitable after all these years."
I opened my mouth to protest that he'd been told to get it ready for us, then decided there was little point: Clearly, I should have to see for myself, and decide if the house was in fact uninhabitable, or simply uncomfortable after ten years of standing empty. Probably hadn't had the dust-cloths cleared away. I closed my mouth again, Mr Norbert's hat resumed its head, and we allowed ourselves to be herded gently from the ship and into a gleaming saloon car that idled at the kerb.
Eighteen years ago, I reflected as we drove --- almost exactly eighteen years ago --- this city had been reduced literally to its very foundations. There was no sign of that catastrophe now. The busy docks gave way to a land of high buildings and black suits, then to the commercial centre. We passed between shop windows bright with spring frocks and alongside a square that had patches of spring flowers around a high pillar with some sort of winged statue at the top. Then the motor turned again, dodged the rumbling box of a cable-car, and drifted to a halt before a dignified entranceway. Liveried men and boys relieved us of our burdens, and we followed Mr Norbert through the polished doors to the desk.
The equally polished gentleman behind the desk greeted us by name, with professional camaraderie, as if we were longtime guests instead of newcomers known only through our local escort. Another, even more dignified, man lingered in the background, casting a gimlet eye on the desk man's efficiency. While Holmes signed the register, I asked Mr. Norbert if his office had received any messages for me.
"Hah!" he exclaimed, and dug into the breast pocket of his suit for a thick packet of letters. "Good thing you asked, I'd have had to come back across town with them when I got home."
I flipped through them --- three from Mrs. Hudson, Holmes' longtime housekeeper although more of an aunt to me, several from various friends that she had sent on for us, a post-card from Dr. Watson showing Paris. Norbert noticed the disappointment on my face.
"Were you expecting something else?" he asked.
"I was, rather. It must have been delayed."
Back in Japan I had decided that the one person I wished to see in
San Francisco was Dr Leah Ginzberg, the psychiatrist who had cared for me after the accident, in whose offices I had laboriously begun to piece together my life. I had written to tell her that I was going to be passing through the city, and asked her to write care of Mr. Norbert.
Perhaps the mail from Japan was unreliable.
"Well, I'll certainly have my secretary check again," he said. "Perhaps it'll come in the afternoon delivery. Now, I'll have most of your paperwork together in the morning; if you'd like to come to the offices first thing, we could have a look."
"I could come now, if that's convenient."
"Oh," Norbert said, "it's not, I'm afraid. There were some problems with the records of the water company shares, I had to send them back for clarification. But they promised to have them brought to me no later than nine in the morning. Shall we say nine-thirty?"
There did not seem to be much of a choice. I told him I'd see him at half past nine the following morning, and he shook our hands and hurried off.
Holmes had finished and was waiting for me, but before we could follow the boy with the keys, the dignified man who had been lingering in the background eased himself forward and held out his hand. "Miss Russell? My name is Auberon. I'm the manager of the St
Francis. I just wanted to add my own personal welcome. I knew your father, not well, but enough to respect him deeply. I was sad to hear of the tragedy, and I am glad to see you here at last. If there's anything I can do, you need only ask."
"Why, thank you," I said in astonishment. Holmes had to touch my arm to get me moving in the direction of the lifts.
In our rooms, while Holmes threw himself onto the sofa and began ripping open letters, I stood and studied the neatly arranged bags and realised that, between the hasty packing of our January departure from England and a most haphazard assortment of additions in the months since then, there was little in those bags that would impress a set of lawyers and business managers as to the solidity and competence of the heiress whose business they had maintained all these years. To say nothing of the long miles that lay between here and the final ship out of New York. I did have a couple of gorgeous kimonos and an assortment of dazzling Indian costumes, but my Western garments were suitable for English winters and two years out of date, which even here might be noticed. I wasn't even certain the trunk contained a pair of stockings that hadn't been mended twice.
"Oh, what I could do with that Simla tailor of Nesbit's," I muttered, interrupting my partner's sporadic recital of the news from home.
"Sorry?" said Holmes, looking up from his page.
"I was just thinking how nice it would be if women could get by with three suits and an evening wear. I'm going to have to go out to the shops."
"Sorry," he said again, this time intoned with sympathy rather than query.
I gathered my gloves and straw hat, then checked my wrist-watch. "I'll be back in a couple of hours, and we can have a cup of tea. Anything I can get you?"
"Those handkerchiefs I got in Japan were quite nice, but the socks are not really adequate. If you see any, I could use half a dozen pair."
"Right you are."
Down at the concierge's desk, I asked about likely shops, receiving in response more details than I needed. I thanked the gentleman, then paused.
"May I have a piece of paper and an envelope?" I asked. "I ought to send a note."
I was led across the lobby to a shrine of the epistolary arts, where pen, stationery, and desk lay waiting for my attentions. I scribbled a brief message to Dr. Ginzberg, explaining that an earlier letter appeared to have gone astray, but that I hoped very much to see her in the brief time I would be in San Francisco. I gave her both the hotel address and that of the law offices for her response, signed it "affectionately yours," then wrote on the envelope the address I still knew by heart and handed it to the desk for posting.
The doorman welcomed me out into a perfectly lovely spring afternoon. Far too nice to be spent wrangling with shopkeepers, but there was no help for it --- no bespoke tailor could produce something by nine-thirty tomorrow morning. Grimly, I turned to the indicated set of display windows on the other side of the flowered square and entered the emporium.
An hour later, I was the richer by three dignified outfits with hats to match, two pairs of shoes, ten of silk stockings, and six of men's woollen socks. I arranged to have everything delivered to the St. Francis and left the shop, intending to continue down the street to another, more exclusive place mentioned by the concierge for dresses that did not come off a rack. But the sun was so delicious on my face, the gritty pavement so blessedly motionless underfoot, that I decided a brief walk through the flowered square would be in order.
Union Square was full of other citizens enjoying the sunshine. The benches were well used, the paths busy with strolling shoppers and businessmen taking detours. Few children, I noted --- and then a sound reached me, and my mind ceased to turn smoothly for a while.
A rhythmic clang, a rumble of heavy iron wheels, the slap and whir of the underground cable: That most distinctive of San Francisco entities, a cable-car, rumbled up Powell Street, its warning bell ringing merrily as it neared Post.
The combined noises acted like the trigger phrase of a hypnotist: I dropped into a sort of trance, staring at the bright, boxy vehicle as it passed. It paused to take on a passenger, then grabbed its ever-moving underground cable again to resume its implacable way down the centre of the street towards the heights. Before it had disappeared entirely, a passer-by brushed past me, waking me from the dream world. I turned away from the tracks and began walking fast, head down, crossing the flower-bedecked square and fleeing up streets with whichever crowd carried me along.
I was dimly aware of changes: the standard odours of a downtown shopping district --- petrol, perfume, perspiration --- gave way to more exotic fragrances, chillies and sesame oil, roasting duck and incense.
Then a splash of colour caught my eye, and I raised my head to look around me. A row of bright paper lamps danced in the spring breeze, strung between two equally colourful buildings. The streets were oddly discordant, strongly remembered yet utterly foreign, as if I'd known the idea of the place, but not the reality. I walked on, but after a while the streets changed again. The air became redolent of garlic, tomato sauce, and coffee. In a short time, those smells faded beneath the air of a waterfront, and suddenly I had run out of land.
I stood on the edge of a wide, curving roadway fronting a row of piers that bustled with machines and men, loading and unloading ships from a dozen countries. Wagons and lorries came and went, few business suits appeared, and the air smelt only of sea and tar.
Reassuringly like London, in fact.
After a while I began to walk along the waterfront road, turning towards the western sun. It felt good on my face, as the unmoving ground felt good beneath my feet, and the muscles of my legs took pleasure in the fact that they could stride out without having to turn and retrace their steps every couple of minutes. The claustrophobic air of shipboard life slowly emptied from my lungs, and I thought, maybe it actually was some "curious aversion to the ship itself" that had inflicted the insomnia on me. That and lack of exercise.
I stopped to watch some fishermen at work, all high boots and loud voices, repairing holes in their nets while wearing sweaters more hole than wool. The fresh, powerful smell of fish and crab rose up all around me, to fade as I continued on. An Army post intruded between me and the water for a time, then allowed me back, and with the water before me, a dark round mountain rising from the northern shore and the island of Alcatraz before me, I stretched out my arms in the late sun, half inclined to shout my pleasure aloud, feeling a smile on my face. I turned to survey the rising city --- and it was only then I noticed the length of the shadows the buildings were casting.
"Damn," I said aloud instead: I'd told Holmes I'd be back for tea.
I crossed the waterfront road to re-enter the city, and in a couple of streets I spotted a sign announcing public telephones. At least three languages mingled in the small room, an appropriate accompaniment to the Indian, English, and Japanese coins I sorted through in my purse. At last I found some money the girl would accept and placed a call to the St. Francis. Holmes did not answer, nor had he left a message for me, so I left one for him instead and walked out of the telephone office nursing a small glow of righteousness: Had I been at the hotel at the declared time, I told myself, I'd only have been cooling my heels waiting for him to return from heaven knows where.
I continued south, which I knew was the general direction of downtown --- it is difficult to become seriously lost in a city with water on three sides. And I was beginning to take note of my surroundings again, raising my eyes from the pavement to look around me. This was a more heavily residential area, the houses both older and larger than they had been in the area I had fled through, the residents less strikingly regional. As the ground rose, steeply now in a delicious challenge to my leg muscles, the houses began to retreat from the public gaze behind solid walls and gated drives. Street noises diminished with the loss of restaurants and shops, the trees grew taller and more thickly green, and the paving stones underfoot were more even although the number of pedestrians was markedly reduced.
The hilltop enclave might have had a moat around it and signs saying Important Persons Only. From here, the bank manager's driver could take his employer to the financial district and easily return in time to run the man's wife to her luncheon date downtown. There was no risk of roving gangs of boisterous children here, or late-night revellers walking noisily past by way of a short-cut home.
Even the air smelt of money, I thought, crisp and clean.
I looked up smiling at the house opposite, an unassuming brick edifice of two tall stories, and nearly fell on my face over my suddenly unresponsive feet.
I saw: snippets of red-brick wall and once-white trim set well back from the street, now nearly obscured by a wildly overgrown vine and an equally undisciplined jungle of a garden; a grey stone garden wall separating jungle from pavement, in want of repointing and somehow shorter than it should be; one set of ornate iron gates sagging across the drive and a smaller pedestrian entrance further along the wall, both gates looped through with heavy chains and solid padlocks; the chain on the walkway gate, which for lack of other fastening had been welded directly onto the strike-plate --- the very strike-plate that had reached out to gash open my little brother's scalp when he had tripped while running through it.
There was no mistaking the shape of the house: My feet had led me home.
Chapter Three
I don't know how long I stood there in the fading light, gawping at the house. I do know that it was nearly dark when a hand on my shoulder sent me leaping out of my skin in shock
I whirled and found myself face-to-face with a tall, thin, grey-haired gentleman with sharp features and sharper grey eyes. I expelled the breath from my lungs and let my defensive hand fall back to my side
"Holmes, for goodness' sake, do give a person some warning."
"Russell, I've been standing behind you clearing my throat noisily for several minutes now. You appeared distracted."
"You might say that," I said grimly
"Am I to assume this is your family's house?"
I turned back to look at what was gradually becoming little more than a blocky outline against the sky. "I couldn't have told you for the life of me where it was, but my feet knew. I looked up and there it was."
"Do you wish to go in?"
"I don't have a key," I said absently, then caught myself. "Not that the lack of a key would stop you. But frankly, I don't think your lockpicks would do much good against the rust on those padlocks."
"The wall, however, is easily scaled. Shall we?" So saying, he bent and hooked his hands together to receive my foot. I eyed the top of the stones, which indeed were scarcely five feet tall, although my memory of them was high --- my childhood memory, I reminded myself. The wall was not set with glass or wire, and certainly there would be no watch dog in that jungly front garden
I set the toe of my shoe into Holmes' hands, braced my hands on his shoulder and the wall, and scrambled over the top with stockings more or less intact. He followed a moment later, brushing invisible dust from his trousers
The walkway was buried under a knee-high thicket of weeds; five feet from the gate, the path disappeared entirely behind the press of branches from the shrubs on either side. Still, the drive was open, and we sidled along the wall until we reached it, then picked our way up the weed-buckled cobbles to the house
The street-lamps had come on, but so thick was the vegetation, their light made it to the house's façade in fits and starts, allowing us a glimpse of downspout here, a patch of peeling trim there, the lining on a set of drapes through a grimy downstairs window
We followed, initially at any rate, the path of least resistance, and continued along the drive that ran down the side of the house. The windows here were similarly closed and uninformative, the once-trim roses that followed the wall between our house and the neighbours (the…Ramseys?) a thicket that reached thorny claws out to our clothing
At the back of the house, the drive continued to a carriage house where my father had kept his motorcars. Holmes went on, standing on his toes to peer through the high windows, then came away
"Nothing there," he said, but of course there was nothing inside; my father's last motor had gone off a cliff and exploded in a freshly filled tank of petrol
We stood looking at the impenetrable garden in back of the house
"Do you want to push through that?" I asked him
"As there's no particular urgency, perhaps we ought to play the
Livingstone-in-blackest-Africa rôle when we've had a chance to don thorn-proof outer garments."
"And snake-proof boots," I added. As we turned back towards the front, I shook my head in disgust. "The garden must have received some rudimentary attention, but it doesn't appear as if anyone has been inside the house for years. I thought there was an arrangement to keep the place up."
"I'd have thought it desirable, from a property manager's point of view. Undoubtedly your Mr Norbert will know why."
"He's got some explaining to do; no house should be allowed to get into this condition. It's a wonder the neighbours haven't complained."
"Perhaps they have," Holmes commented --- but not, as I first thought, about the shocking condition of the paint. A motorcar had pulled up in front of the gate, and now I heard two doors slam shut as a pair of powerful torches probed the drive
"You there," shouted a voice whose tones would carry the same authority the world around. "Come out here at once."
"The constabulary have arrived," Holmes said unnecessarily, and together we moved to obey the command
Our dress, our demeanour, and our accents soon had the torch-light diverted from our faces into a kinder illumination, and our claim to be the house's concerned but keyless owners was not instantly discounted. One of the policemen even came up with an orange crate from somewhere, so I could climb with dignity back over the fence. The last shred of suspicion fluttered away after we had been taken to the hotel and been recognised by the doorman. We thanked the two policemen for their concern over the property, and then I put to them the question that Holmes had raised mere moments before they had arrived
"Before you go, may I ask? Which of the neighbours reported our presence? I'd like to thank them for their concern, don't you know."
The two burly men looked at each other; the older one shrugged
"It's the old dame across the street. She's kinda taken the house under her wing --- 'phones the station every so often to have us chase kids out before they can get into mischief."
"I do understand. Sleepless old lady with nothing better to do. She'll be disappointed we weren't stealing the doorknobs."
The two laughed and took their bulky blue selves away. Holmes and
I made for the dining room, for our long-delayed meal. As we passed through the ornate foyer, it occurred to me that it was no longer necessary to search out a looking glass to straighten hair mussed by the hours out-of-doors. A benefit of my new, if inadvertent, hairstyle --- Holmes loathed it, but I was not altogether certain that I did
To our surprise, we were offered --- quietly --- wine with our dinner. It was local, but unexpectedly good, and although my appetite had yet to return, Holmes consumed his meal with approval. After our coffee, we went back outside for a turn under the lamps of Union Square
"Holmes, I take it you followed me all this afternoon."
He was expecting the question, or rather, the question behind it, because he answered without hesitation. "I am concerned about the effect that coming to this place is having on you, yes."
My hand slipped away from his arm. "You were worried about me?"
"Not worried, simply curious to see where you would go. I thought it possible that, as one of your beloved psychological types might say, your sub-conscious would direct your steps."
"Indeed." A few more paces, and my hand went back through his arm. "Holmes, I honestly don't know what to make of it. I remember this city, and yet I do not. Before I found the house, I'd have sworn I didn't even know what part of the city it was in. How can that be?"
"I believe," he said after a moment, "that the process of discovering your ties to the place is one of the reasons we are here."
We finished our walk in silence, and went up to our rooms. The bed was soft and had the novelty of standing on an unmoving floor, and to my surprise and relief, the night passed in blessed dreamlessness
I was at Mr Norbert's offices at the appointed hour dressed in one of my new frocks, my silk-wrapped legs taking note of the current length of hemline. Between the Cuban heels and the curl of hair that barely touched my ears, I resembled a person who cared about fashion
Norbert welcomed me into an office that would have satisfied the stuffiest of London solicitors, all dark wood and leather. It was his office, for this man, despite being scarcely ten years older than I, was now the senior partner in the august firm that had served my father in life and after. The elder Norbert and his contemporary partner had both succumbed in the influenza epidemic of 1919, leaving the son of one and a twenty-year-old grandson of the other in charge. Norbert had done his best to fill the impressive surroundings, but I thought that even now he was slightly intimidated, and would have been more comfortable among lighter, more modern furnishings
Still, my London solicitors had never voiced a complaint about his handling of my California affairs, and I knew them to be scrupulous:
The senior partner of that firm had been in love (secretly, he thought) with my mother, and had transferred his loyalty wholeheartedly to her daughter
I settled into my chair, accepted the compulsory cup of weak American coffee, and made meaningless small talk for precisely three and a half minutes before Norbert eased us into business matters
My California representatives had long been pleading that I apply my attentions to the holdings I had inherited in the state; having seen the house, I could only pray my other possessions were not as derelict. However, it soon appeared that the need for my presence was more for the sake of long-term decisions, re-investments and liquidations that I alone could make. What most of them boiled down to was, if I wasn't going to take an active rôle in the running of this factory, that company, and the other investment, I should sell my interests and move on
Which was just what I had in mind
We set up a number of appointments for the coming days so I could meet with my managers and directors. Looking at the brief synopses of figures Norbert laid before me, one after another, I had to agree: Electrical companies and copper mines did not run themselves for too long before they began to suffer from inattention, and thousands of acres of land adjacent to the recently discovered oil fields in southern California weren't going to join the boom without some help
At the end of a long morning, Norbert pushed back in his chair with a sigh and stood. "Time for another cup of coffee," he pronounced, and went out of the door. I heard him speaking with his secretary for a moment, heard too the flush of distant waters a minute later. He returned with the secretary on his heels
He poured the watery brown liquid, offered cream, sugar, and biscuits, then settled for a carefully measured five minutes of closing conversation. I broke it after one
"Mr. Norbert, I have to say you've done wonders with the entire estate. It couldn't have been easy, at this distance." I laid my spoon into the bone-china saucer. "However, that makes it all the more puzzling that the house has been allowed to go to ruin." I told him the outline of our adventures the previous evening, and he produced little noises of distress at our meeting with the police. I ended by repeating my comment about the state of the house, which observation he met with a sympathetic shake of the head
"Terrible, isn't it?" he agreed, looking not in the least shame-faced
"Such a pity. But I hadn't much of a choice, really; the will was very clear on that."
"The will," I repeated
"Yes, your father's will. Parents', I should say. Don't tell me you haven't seen it?"
"When I was fourteen, I must have done. Not since then."
"Oh, my, no wonder you're a little confused. And here I was hoping you might enlighten me on the matter. Hold on just a sec." He reached forward to toggle a switch on his desk-telephone, and said into the instrument, "Miss Rand, would you please bring me a copy of the Russell will?"
Miss Rand duly appeared with the bound document, handing it to Norbert, who passed it over to me. He sat back while I undid the ties and settled in to read it
It proved to be one of the odder such that I had ever read. I went through the document closely, wondering why I had not seen it before --- I was certain that it had not been among the stack of papers I had gone through when I had taken over my father's estate at the age of twenty-one. My eyes lingered on the two signatures at the bottom, my father's strong and unruly, my mother's neat as copperplate, and then went back to an earlier page
"What does this mean, ‘to ensure that no one unaccompanied by a member of the immediate family be granted access to the house for a period of twenty years after the date of this signing'?"
"Just that. It's actually quite straightforward, as these things go: If your father died, your mother inherited. If they both died, as sadly happened, you and your brother would inherit the house, however, no one else other than you, your spouses, and your children would be allowed to set foot in it except in your presence for twenty years after the --- what was the date of signing? --- yes, the fifth of June, 1906. It goes on to say that the house is exempt from the remainder of the disbursements until, as I said, the fifth of June, 1926 --- a little over two years from now. Now you're here, you and your husband are welcome to do what you like to the house. Except permit others inside without your being physically present, or to sell it before the given date."
"But why?"
"My father, who of course drew up this will, did not see fit to tell me the reasoning behind its details before he died," he replied, with the bemused attitude of one who had himself written so many odd wills that he no longer questioned them. "However, the requirement of the codicil is crystal clear, although it leaves to the discretion of this legal firm the means of ensuring that the house remain undisturbed. Within days of your father's unfortunate demise, my father, as head of the firm, arranged for a single lady relative of his to take the house across the street, Agatha Grimly is her name --- she's my great step-cousin or something of the sort. Miss Grimly was later joined by her unmarried nephew. She was a schoolteacher most of her life, so she's got eyes in the back of her head. The nephew is a little dim-witted, but quite clear as to his job. They receive a bonus each time they run strangers off the property, which happens two or three times a year --- the first time was within a few days of her taking over, the most recent --- apart from last night's, of course --- was a couple of months ago. And they live under the threat of losing their comfortable position were they to let an intruder slip past them. Frankly, it's a little game we play --- I occasionally hire someone to try to break in, to see if he can get by them. They probably assumed you and your husband were such."
I supposed it was sometimes necessary that a solicitor not be too curious about his client's purposes. Clearly, my father had intended that no one get into that house but family. The why of that intent did not enter into Norbert's realm, merely the how. I gave a mental shrug and closed up the will
"You may keep that, if you like," he said. "I have two other copies, one of those in a vault down the Peninsula. The lessons of 1906," he explained with a grimace. "We're still struggling with the consequences of City Hall burning."
He then reached into his desk's central drawer and drew out a lumpy, palm-sized brown-paper envelope, its flap glued down and signed across by my father's distinctive hand. Its contents gave off a slight metallic tick as he laid it onto the glossy wood of the desk
"If you need assistance with cleaning ladies," he went on, "gardening services, anything, I hope you'll call on me. We do have a gardener come in once a year, to keep the front from becoming an offence to the neighbours --- although as that is questionable under the will, I go down and stand watch while they work, always, to ensure that none of them approach the house itself. In the same way, my father supervised the cleaners who came in the week after the accident, when it became apparent that you . . . that the house would have to be closed up. He was never absolutely certain, because strictly speaking the codicil indicated that he should have allowed the milk in the icebox to go bad and the moths to get into the carpets, but he decided that protecting the client's assets allowed for a degree of flexibility. He may even have consulted with a judge on the matter, I don't remember. However, that is neither here nor there. I'll 'phone Miss Grimly, and let her know that you're coming --- wouldn't want you to be arrested again."
I stood up, tucking the folder under my left arm and putting out my right hand
"Thank you, Mr. Norbert. Although as I indicated, I have no intention of doing anything other than preparing the house for sale as soon as possible."
"Whatever you choose, I am at your service," he answered, shaking my hand. He retrieved the lumpy brown envelope and handed it to me with a small laugh. "Don't forget this --- you'll be climbing over the walls again."
"Certainly not," I agreed, and slipped the envelope into my pocket
As we made our way to the door, I asked him, "Do you by any chance know how far the fire reached, in 1906?"
"I remember it vividly --- I was seventeen then, and spent the whole time digging through rubble and helping people rescue their possessions from its path. The entire downtown burned. The only things left standing were the U.S. Mint down on Mission Street, a few houses on the peak of Russian Hill, and a handful more on Telegraph --- everything else was gone, churches, saloons, Chinatown, and as I said, City Hall with all its records. But if you mean your house, the flames were stopped at Van Ness when the Army dynamited the entire length of it. Three blocks down from yours."
"I see. Thank you." I paused at the door, and reluctantly asked the question that had been hovering over me the entire time in his office
"Mr. Norbert, this may sound odd, but do you know if I was here during the earthquake? Actually during it, I mean?"
"Sure you were. My father took me to check on your family the day the fire died down. That would have been the Saturday. Took most of the day to track you all down to the park where you were staying, but I remember your mother, making us coffee on an open fire as if she'd done it that way her whole life." His face took on a faraway look, and he smiled slightly. "She was in trousers and a pair of men's boots, but she wore the most extraordinary hat, with an enormous orange flower pinned to one side. It was as if she was thumbing her nose at the discomfort and fear all around her. She was an impressive lady, completely undaunted."
The pale hat with the orange flower dominated my vision as I took my leave of the lawyer and wandered towards the busy thoroughfare of Market Street. Trolleys and traffic were thick there, and the other streets met it at odd angles. Idly, my mind still taken up with the vision of the hat, I watched an ex-soldier with one leg negotiate his crutches through a flurry of female office workers in bright frocks
Why would my father have written that codicil into his will?
When I put the question to Holmes some time later, he tossed the will onto the room's desk and shook his head. "There is no knowing at this point. But I agree that it is an oddity worth looking into."
Holmes had spent the morning getting the lay of the city, returning to the hotel with a sheaf of maps and scraps of paper scribbled with telephone numbers and addresses. He dug through the sheets now until he had found the detailed map; a green pencil had traced the streets to form an uneven outline around a large chunk of the Peninsula's eastern half, including all of the downtown. When I saw the straight line running more than a mile along Van Ness, I knew instantly what the pencil mark meant
"This is the part that burned?"
"Wooden buildings, spilt cook-fires, broken water lines," he listed succinctly. "The city burned for three days, and almost nothing was left standing inside the line."
"Must have been absolute hell."
"You truly don't remember?"
"Oh, Lord, Holmes. I don't remember anything but my mother cooking over a campfire. Surely a child of six years would recall an event like the city burning?" I was beginning to feel as if someone had just pointed out to me that I was missing a leg. "Even a person with amnesia must be aware of some . . . gap."
"I don't know that I should term it amnesia, precisely --- that condition is extremely rare outside of ladies' fiction, and generally stems from a severe head injury. In your case I venture that it is the mind choosing to draw a curtain across the memories of your early childhood, for any number of reasons."
That I liked even less, the idea that my traitorous mind chose the cowardly option of hiding from unpleasant memories. "Holmes," I said abruptly, "last night you said that the process of discovery may be the reason we came here. What did you mean by that?"
"My dear Russell, think about it. Had you merely wished to rid yourself of your business entanglements in California, you could have done so in London with a command to your solicitors and a flourish of signatures. There would have been no need to traverse half the globe for the purpose. Instead, for the last three years you have delayed making decisions and refused to give direction until things here had reached a state of near crisis. And when my brother asked us to go to India, it seemed natural to you that we continue around the world to come here, although in fact it is both out of the way and considerably disruptive to our lives. What other reason could there be but that some well-concealed urge was driving you here, with purpose?"
A part of my mind acknowledged that he was right. The larger portion held back, unwilling to believe in such transparent machinations
There was something else as well: Holmes was eyeing me with that awful air of expectancy he did so well, as if he had placed an examination question and was waiting for me to follow my preliminary response with the complete answer. He believed there was more in the situation than I perceived; were I to ask what it was, he would make me work for the answer
That was more than I could face at the moment. Instead, I stood up briskly
"I want to go look at the house. Norbert gave me the keys. Would you like to join me?"
"Shall we take lunch first?"
"I'm not really hungry. You go ahead, if you like, and join me later."
"No, I shall go with you," Holmes said. We assembled our possessions, and at the door he paused to ask, "Do you have the keys?"
"Of course," I said. "They're in my . . . No, they're not. What have I done with them? Oh, yes, here they are."
I had left the brown envelope on the foot of my bed, I saw, and went back to pick it up. As I turned back to the door, I thought about the walk before me and the condition of the house --- and, no doubt, its facilities --- at the end of it. "I'll be with you in a moment, Holmes," I said, and stepped into the marble-and-gilt room. When I had finished, I dried my hands, patted my hair (unnecessarily --- the bob minded neither wind nor neglect) and strode to the door
"The keys?" Holmes reminded me
"They're --- Damn it, where have I put them now?" I spotted the manila rectangle, half hidden between the mirror and a vase of flowers, and picked it up curiously: The wretched thing eluded me so persistently, it might have been possessed. With a spasm of irritation, I ripped it open and tipped its contents into Holmes' outstretched palm. His long fingers closed around the simple silver ring with half a dozen keys that ranged from a delicate, inch-long silver one to an iron object nearly the length of my hand. I tossed the scraps of paper in the direction of the trash basket, and marched out into the corridor
Twice on the way I took a wrong turn; both times I looked around to find Holmes standing and watching me from up the street. The first time he had a frown on his face, the second a look of concern; when we finally reached the house itself he stopped before the wide gate, studying the keys in his hand
"Russell, perhaps it would be best for me to enter first."
"Open the gate, Holmes."
He raised his eyes to my face for a moment, then slid the big iron key inside the padlock's hole and twisted. The metal works had clearly been maintained --- oiled, perhaps, on the gardener's yearly visits --- and the key turned smoothly
I stepped onto the sunken cobblestones of the drive, my nerves insisting that I was approaching the lair of some creature with teeth and claws. I could feel eyes upon me, and not simply those of the guardian neighbour across the street. Yet there was no movement at any of the windows, no evidence of traffic apart from the footprints and crushed vegetation Holmes and I had left the day before. With Holmes at my back I walked towards the front door --- and nearly leapt into his arms with a shriek when the branches above us exploded with sudden motion: three panicked doves, fleeing this invasion of their safe sanctuary
I forced a laugh past my constricted throat, and gestured for Holmes to precede me to the door
The solid dark wood was dull with neglect, the varnish lifted in narrow yellow sheets where the years of rain had blown past the protective overhang of the portico. Thick moss grew between the paving tiles; an entire fern grotto had established itself in the cracks where stonework met door frame. I heard the sound of the tumblers moving in the lock, a sound that seemed to shift my innards within me. Holmes turned the knob without result, then leant his shoulder against the time-swollen wood, taking a sudden step across the threshold as the door gave way
The dark house lay open to us. I looked over Holmes' shoulder down the hallway, seeing little but a cavern; steeling myself, I took a step inside. As I did so, the corner of my eye registered an oddly familiar rough place in the frame of the door, about shoulder height
I stopped, one foot on either side of the threshold, and drew back to examine it
A narrow indentation had been pressed into the surface, some four inches in height and perhaps half an inch wide. Screw-holes near the top and the bottom, and a gouge a third of the way down from the top where someone had prised the object out of the varnish that held it fast. A mezuzah, I thought, and suddenly she was there
My mother --- long rustling skirt and the graceful brim of a hat high above me --- pushing open the glossy front door with one hand while her other came up to brush the intricate carved surface of the bronze object. A blessing on the house, laid at the entrance, mounted there by command and as recognition that a home is a place apart. My Jewish mother, touching it lovingly every time she entered. And not only my mother: My fingertips remembered the feel of the carving, cool arabesques protecting the tightly curled text of the blessing within
My hand reached out of its own volition and smoothed the wood, indented, drilled, splintered, puzzling
"What have you found?" Holmes asked
"There used to be a mezuzah on this door. My mother's father gave it to her, the year I was born. It was his first overture after the offence of her marriage, her first indication that she might be forgiven for marrying a Gentile. And as it turned out, his last, since he died a few months later. It meant a great deal to her. And it's gone."
"Perhaps Norbert senior took it down, for safekeeping?"
"I shouldn't think it would occur to a Gentile to remove it."
"And your mother herself wouldn't have taken it down?"
"Not unless she didn't plan to return. And they died on a weekend trip to the Lodge --- our summer house down the Peninsula. We intended to be back in a few days."
"A friend, then, who removed it, knowing what it meant to her?"
"Perhaps." I fingered the wounded frame again, wondering. I knew none of her friends. I had a vague idea that one or two women might have visited me in hospital after the accident, but I had been injured and orphaned, and in no condition to receive their comfort. Their letters that reached me in England went into the fire unanswered, and had eventually stopped
Oddly, although the missing object should by rights have increased my apprehension, in fact the brief vision of my mother moving through the door-way served to reassure me, as if her hand had smoothed the back of my head in passing. When I turned again to the house, it was no longer the lair of a dangerous beast, merely empty rooms where once a family had lived
The interior looked like something out of Great Expectations, an interrupted life overlaid with a decade of dust. The gilt-framed looking glass in the entrance hall bore a coat of grey-brown fuzz, the glass itself gone speckled and dim. I stood in the door-way to the first room, my mother's morning room, and saw that the furniture had been draped with cloths before the house was locked up, all the windows and curtains tightly shut. The air was heavy with the odors of dust and baked horse hair, unaired cloth goods, and mildew, along with a faint trace of something burnt
Holmes crossed to the nearest windows and stretched his hand to the curtains
"Careful," I warned, and his tug softened into a slow pull, so that the dust merely held in the air instead of exploding back into the room
A drift of trembling black ashes in the fireplace was the sole indication of the house's abrupt closure. Everything else lay tidy: flower vases emptied, ash-trays cleaned, no stray coffee-cups, no abandoned books. This had been my mother's favourite room, I remembered, and unlike the formal back parlour had actually been used for something other than the entertainment of guests. She had arranged the delicate French desk (one of the Louis --- XIV? XV?) so that it looked out of the window onto what had been a wisteria-framed view of the bird-bath, and was now a solid green curtain. She'd loved the view, loved the garden, even keeping yearly journals of its progress --- yes, there they were, pretty albums bound in silk that she'd pored over, writing the names of shrubs planted and sketching their flowers, recording its successes and failures in her precise script so unlike my own scrawl. I turned away sharply out of the room; as Holmes followed me, he gently shut the door, cutting off the watery sunlight and plunging the hall-way back into gloom
The entire house was a stage set with dust-coloured shrouds. The long dining-room table was little more than a floor-length cloth punctuated by the regular bumps of its chairs, its long tarpaulined surface set with three blackened candle-sticks. The music room was home to a piano-shaped mound and a small forest of chairs; the pantry, its door giving way reluctantly to a third key on the ring, lay waiting, the house's silver, crystal, and china neatly arrayed in their drawers and on their shelves
In the dim library, Holmes gave a grunt of disapproval at the smell of must. This had been my father's study, where he had kept accounts and written letters, typing with remarkable facility on the enormous Underwood type-writer, its mechanism so heavy my child's fingers could barely propel the keys to the ribbon. The Underwood, like the desk and the two chairs in front of the pristine fireplace, was draped; the carpets here had been rolled up against the wall, and emanated a faint trace of moth-balls
The stillness in the house was proving oppressive. I cleared my throat to remark, "How many acres of dust-covers do you suppose they used?"
Holmes merely shook his head at the disused and mouldering volumes, and went on
As we worked through the rooms, various objects and shapes seemed to reach out and touch my memory, each time restoring a small portion of it to life: The looking-glass near the door, for example, had been a wedding present that my mother hated and my father loved, source of much affectionate discord. And the fitted carpet in the back parlour --- something had happened to it, some catastrophe I was responsible for: something spilt? An upturned coffee tray, perhaps, and the horrified shrieks of visiting women --- no, I had it now: Their horror was not, as my guilty young mind had immediately thought, because of any damage to the carpet, but at the hot coffee splashing across my young skin, miraculously not scalding me. My eye was caught by a peculiar object on the top of a high credenza: an exotic painted caricature of a cat, carved so that its mouth gaped wide in a toothy O. But shouldn't there be a flash of yellow, right where that stick in the middle . . . ? Ah, yes: Father's joke. He'd found the cat in Chinatown and fixed a perch across its open mouth, then arranged it on the precise spot where my mother's canary, which was given the occasional freedom of the room, liked to sit and sing. How Levi and I had giggled, every time the bird opened its mouth in the cat's maw
As I worked my way through the rooms, there was no entirety of recall, merely discrete items that sparked specific memories. I felt as if some prince was working his way through the sleeping events of my childhood, kissing each one back to life. Or tapping them like a clown with a trick flower that flashed miraculously into full bloom
Not that I'd ever much cared for clowns, nor had I been one for fairy tales: The passivity of that sleeping princess had annoyed me even when I was small
Only when we reached the very back of the ground floor and Holmes pushed open a swinging door did I discover a place that felt completely familiar, wall to wall: the kitchen. No cloth shrouds here, just white tile, black stove, shelved pots, a row of spoons and implements. The wooden table where I'd sat down with plate, glass, and homework. The icebox (unchanged from my infancy) from which I'd taken my milk, tugging at its heavy door. The pantry, startlingly equipped with foodstuffs: biscuits and coffee in their tins, flour in its bin, preserves in jars that had gone green beneath their wax seals
Ghosts are most often glimpsed at the corners of one's vision, heard at the far reaches of the audible, tasted in lingering scents at the back of one's palate. So now the house began to people itself at the furthest edges of my senses: A wide-bottomed cook, her back to me, laid down the wooden spoon she was using to stir a pot and bustled away through a door. It happened in one short instant at the very corner of the mind's eye, and she was gone when I turned my head, but she lived in my mind. Then at the base of the door I noticed a trace of long-dried soil, and with that, through the window in the upper half of the door, a much-abused, sweat-dark hat the colour of earth seemed to pass: the gardener
His name had been . . . Michael? No, Micah. I'd loved him, I knew that without question, although I remembered next to nothing about him. He had rescued a bird for me one time; the neighbour's cat had pounced and feathers flew and I --- small then, perhaps four, sitting on the back steps (Were there back steps on the other side of that windowed door? I crossed to the window: yes, two of them, leading down to what had once been a neat gravel path-way) --- I had screamed in full-throated protest at the sight, bringing Micah around the corner with one hand clamping down his hat and the other holding a rake, his stumpy legs so close to running that the very sight of him silenced me. The cat shot away into the shrubbery; Micah gathered the bird, gentled it, placed it in my sheltering hands where it lay for a time, stunned but not injured. Its heart thrummed nonstop, astounding the palms of my hands, until suddenly it jerked into life and launched itself into the air, flitting into the branches of the apple tree, then away
I looked down at those hands, two decades older. Curious, the means by which memories were stored. The door-frame mezuzah, the bird, both lay in the skin of my hands. Why was the mind said to have an eye and not a hand, or a tongue? Perhaps touch, taste, odour, sound were linked to the heart rather than the intellect. Certainly both of these tactile memories I had retrieved carried with them profound and specific emotional charges, the one of homecoming, the other of competent authority, both of them immensely reassuring
I raised my eyes to the grubby window, and in that instant it was as if the kitchen door flew open and the sun spilt into the room. I knew, beyond a doubt, what I wished to do: I would clean the house, restore it, remove the decay to which my neglect had condemned it; and I would find the people who had been here, friends and workers, and talk to them all, weaving myself back into the tapestry of community. For too long, I had turned my back on my past. Holmes was right: I had brought us here for a reason
Feeling as if I had cast off a heavy and constricting garment, I spun on my heel to go in search of Holmes, to tell him what I had decided, and nearly fell over him. He was stooped to look into a small mirror placed awkwardly on the wall
"Holmes, I --- " I began, and then I took in his attitude, that sharpening of attention that put one in mind of a dog on scent. "What is it?"
"Does this not seem to you an odd location for a looking-glass?"
"For a man your height, certainly. But even in America, few cooks are over six feet tall."
"Yes, yes," he said, waving away my explanation. "I mean the placement itself."
Once my attention was drawn to it, I could see what he meant. It was a round glass set in an octagonal frame, somehow Chinese looking, but a looking-glass used by servants to check their appearance before entering the house would surely be located near the swinging door, not above the long bench used for pots and dishes on their way to the scullery. I took his place before it, bending my knees to bring my eyes to a more normal level
"It's also too small to see one's entire face in it," I noted in surprise
"Queer," he agreed, opening and shutting the cabinets to survey their contents
"Could it be intended as a means of keeping one eye on the back
door while working at the bench?" I speculated, but unless it had
shifted over the years, its only view was the cook-stove, and there was
no sign of a prop fallen from one side. While I was craning this way
and that, taken up by the minor puzzle, Holmes continued on his circuit
of the room
"Did your family have a resident pet?" he asked, back again near the swinging door
He was squatting before a roughly glazed porcelain vase or bowl that sat on the floor at the base of the wall. Six inches at its widest and five inches high, it was primitive in craftsmanship but oddly graceful --- and precariously placed, considering the traffic there would have been in and out of the door
"I don't believe we did. We had a canary, but cats made my brother sneeze, and my mother disliked dogs."
I could see why he asked, for when I picked it up to examine it, beneath the dust the mineral deposit left by a pint or so of evaporating water was unmistakable. Still, it was an odd utensil for the purpose, its sides narrowing at the top to an opening that would prove awkward for feline muzzles. Too, surely it would have been better placed in the corner between the sink and the back door, or even inside the scullery. I put it back where I had found it and cast my eyes around the kitchen for anything else out of place. All I could see was a long dead pot of some unidentifiable herb withered on a windowsill --- no doubt an oversight on the part of Norbert's cleaners, not a deliberate peculiarity
"Was your cook Chinese?" Holmes asked
"I shouldn't have thought so," I told him. As with most Western cities, the Chinese community in San Francisco was closely hemmed by judicial ordinance and societal expectations. They were allowed to run laundries, make deliveries, and perform menial labour, but a Chinese cook in a private home would have been unusual
"You don't remember," he said, not a question
"I am sorry, Holmes," I snapped. "I'm not being deliberately uncooperative, you know."
But even as I said it, his question had woken a node of memory; the ghost stirred again, that ample-bodied figure moving from stove to scullery. A cook: But now that I thought about it, the woman had been wearing loose trousers, and soft shoes. And a tunic, but colourful, not a thing a menial worker would have worn for hard labour
"Mah," I breathed in wonder. "Her name was Mah. And Micah was her brother."
"Who is Micah?"
"Our gardener. He rescued a bird from the neighbour's cat one time. He wore a sweaty soft hat, and he used to bow when he gave my mother a bouquet from the flowerbed. And . . . and he used to make me laugh with the way he talked. He called me ‘missy.'"
"Did he wear a queue?" Holmes' voice was soft, as if not to disturb my attention
"He . . ." I began to say no, he wore a hat, but again my hand knew the truth of the matter: my small fingers wrapping curiously around a smooth, glossy rope of plaited hair, hot from the sun. But the sensation seemed very distant, as if overlaid by something else. "Bless me, he did. His hair was once in a long plait all the length of his back, but that was a very long time ago. Later I just remember the Western hat, and that he dressed like anyone else."
"No doubt after the emperor was overthrown in 1911, your gardener would have joined the rest of the world in cutting the queue and taking on the laws and customs of his adoptive land. Before that, his assuming Western dress would have been dangerous for his family in China."
"That's why Chinatown seemed different," I exclaimed
"How is that?"
"The streets. I remember them as filled with people in strange dress --- funny hats, the queues, foreign clothes. But yesterday most of them were dressed like the rest of the city."
"And their children will now be going to public schools, and their laws will be those of America."
"But how on earth did you know? That he was Chinese, I mean?"
"The mirror, the water, the pot-plant. There is a Chinese belief that the psychic energies within a room can be shaped by the judicious use of objects that embody the elements. Something to do with the dragons under the earth. Symbolic, of course, but a belief in patterns of electromagnetic energies across the face of the earth is common --- one need only note the prehistoric hillside carvings in Peru, the song-lines among the aboriginals of Australia, and the ley-lines across England."
I braced myself for a set piece on one of Holmes' many and invariably arcane interests, but that seemed to be the extent of his lecture for the time being. With a last glance around, he went out the swinging door, leaving it standing open. A moment later I heard his feet climbing the stairs.
Excerpted from LOCKED ROOMS © Copyright 2005 by Laurie R. King. Reprinted with permission by Bantam, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
 Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
Click here to get the audiobook from Audible.com.
Back to top.
|
