The lanterns dance, p.27
The Lantern's Dance,
p.27
The next room was a small office, efficient and spotlessly tidy. I was tempted—and Arjun had not explicitly forbidden me—but to rummage through the cabinet drawers was a more blatant intrusion than I was comfortable with.
Next was the library. The room felt like—it felt like home. A light-filled space with thick, old glass filling most of one wall, some of the panes set into doors that opened onto the garden with another, smaller terrace. A table and chairs awaited a working scholar.
The room’s other three walls were filled with books. Most were on history, geography, or travel, I saw, although there was a sprinkling of fiction in half a dozen languages. The fireplace here was small and simple, with two soft chairs, each with its own reading lamp and round leather ottoman. On the floor was another stunning carpet, this one in shades of turquoise, light green, and rose, the last colour picked up in the damask curtains that would cover the cold glass wall on a winter’s night. A colourful North African travelling rug was tossed over the back of a settee. A well-used writing desk in one corner—its surface littered with pads, pens, and silver-framed photographs—took advantage of the light from the windows.
I walked over to the desk—again, refraining from touching any of the actual work, which appeared to be notes of a trip into the Sudan. But the photographs, openly displayed, were surely fair game. Many were of Mme Holmes on her travels. Here she was as a slim, middle-aged woman in the tight sleeves and high collars of the 1880s, her hair gathered under a wide-brimmed straw hat, posing in front of the Suez Canal. And some twenty years later, a dignified figure in her seventies next to a Roman ruin I recognised from my time in Morocco. In another, she was ridiculously young although perfectly recognisable, no more than eighteen in a virginal white evening dress, standing beside Nicholas I of Russia. The photo next to the Czar’s was from the turn of the century, where she wore a shirtwaist and boater, with the pointed temples of some Indochinese city rising in the background.
Not all the photos showed this invincible lady. A few were group shots, mostly of men, again in places that appeared to be French colonies. I smiled as one caught my eye, and I picked it up to hold it to the light. General Hubert Lyautey—no, I saw, still a Colonel here, and not in Morocco where I’d met him, but in Madagascar, to judge by the weird outlines of the baobab trees in the background. He was standing with two other officers, one a young lieutenant as tall as he, the other a major who…
I frowned, and squinted more closely at the image—then gave a cough of laughter. The “major” was none other than Mme Holmes.
With that in mind, I went through the group photographs more closely, and found her in each and every one, though never again as an army officer. In two, she wore women’s clothing, but the majority found her clothed as a man.
And here, tucked back behind a frayed history of the Andaman Islands, was a second snapshot of Lyautey—now in a general’s uniform. He wore an expression startlingly similar to one I’d seen close up on the face of an English colonial governor, Edmund Allenby, who’d been all but exploding with mirth as he bent down to kiss the filthy, blood-stained hand of what was, to the eyes of the watching notables, a Bedouin lad. My filthy, blood-stained hand. Here, Lyautey seemed every bit as amused as Allenby had been, posing for the camera in some desert place between two figures in North African clothing. One was Mme Holmes, looking for all the world like a middle-aged Moroccan man with an equally entertained expression on “his” beardless face. The other…
The other was less successful in her disguise. She might have got away with those delicate eyebrows and soft mouth when she was ten years younger, but this picture was clearly of a woman in her mid-twenties dressed in a man’s burnous and turban.
Isabelle Eberhardt. Lyautey himself had told me about her: born Swiss, converted to Islam, and had spent most of her brief adult life moving among the bemused locals of North Africa. Like Gertrude Bell in her Arabian Desert, Eberhardt took full advantage of the good manners of her hosts, who were too polite to challenge a mad foreign woman’s choice of clothing or her interference in men’s affairs. Lyautey had come across the woman while he was moving to conquer Morocco, and had used her relationship with the local people to garner local intelligence as he planned out his next moves.
Local intelligence…
My hand slowly replaced the little silver frame on the shelf. My feet carried me in a circuit of the room while I studied the photographs and thought about the dates indicated by her clothing in each one. Thought about the languages of the books on her shelves, and the weapons in the sitting room, and the way she occupied men’s trousers and turbans with sure confidence. Remembering the games she had played with her father, and with her sons. The code she had used to write her journal. The kurta and abayya—men’s clothing—in the tea chest in Damian’s studio. The skill this woman had used her whole life, for disappearing in plain sight. Even from the eyes of her clever sons.
I had many reasons not to come back from the dead, she had told us. Depending on mutual friends to bring me news, she had written.
The guarded expression on her face when Holmes asked who her spies were.
Possibly even the reason that, once she embarked on that path, she would not have risked returning to her home, for fear of bringing outside dangers with her. Although, if she was good enough to avoid the attention of Mycroft Holmes…Or was this something else Mycroft had kept from us? I shook my head and returned to the kitchen, where I found Arjun arranging summer fruits on a tray.
“These ‘many projects’ of hers,” I said. “They seem to have taken her to Madagascar, Indochina, North Africa, Polynesia. All places of keen political interest to France. And in all of them, so far as I can see from the photographs in her study, she visited at times when pressures were building towards either war or annexation.”
He said nothing, merely adjusted the grapes among the late apricots and ruby-red plums.
“M. Ghosh, I am aware that France has a department in the Interior Ministry called the Deuxième Bureau. It is roughly the equivalent of Section 6 in England’s Military Intelligence.” More or less where Mycroft Holmes spent his days, although I did not tell him that.
I had many reasons not to come back from the dead.
Arjun opened the top of a packet of dates and began to arrange them among the fruit. He seemed to be smiling to himself.
“M. Ghosh. Is your employer…Was Mme Holmes…” I drew a breath, and tried again. “Is she a spy?”
He looked up then, as overflowing with delight and mischief as an Indian version of General Allenby. He said nothing. But his hand rose, one long index finger coming to rest across his mouth, nose to chin. Clever eyes shining, lips closed now and forevermore.
Well, I thought. This is certainly going to make for an interesting conversation, when next we see Mycroft.
Author’s NoteS
Holmes and India: Laurie King is not the only Sherlockian to have noticed the thread of India that runs through the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. And as is required by the principles of Holmesian scholarship (known as “The Game”), tiny details from the Doyle “canon” become foundations for a preferably vast and impressive edifice of interpretation. Such forays into academia occasionally even reach publication before collapsing under the weight of their own fancy. One of the more thoroughly engineered articles is Thomas Cynkin’s “Was Sherlock Holmes Raised in India?” (Baker Street Journal, vol 70, no 3)—which, despite evidence to the contrary in this current volume of the Russell memoirs, nonetheless manages to put forward some thought-provoking explanations for such things as the detective’s Buddhistic methods of meditation, his specialized knowledge of swamp adders and Indian tobaccos, and his remarkable failure to mention having passed through India on his way from Europe to Nepal.
On words: The vocabulary of a story like this can easily become so complicated as to be a distraction. Hence, “roti” and “chapati” are used instead of “paratha,” “luchi,” “naan,” or any of the myriad varieties of Indian flat bread that are eaten at different times in various parts of the country. Similarly, the simple “turban” covers the range of men’s headgear, from loose to tightly formal. Various words, including place names such as Chandernagore, Calcutta, and Bombay, here preserve the spelling used in Mary Russell’s era.
The matter of lascars: Race, prejudice, and skin color are touchy matters. There have always been people who disregard the whole idea of “race”; and, one fears, there always will be people for whom it matters. Many people of color, especially from America, found some relief in 1920s Paris, but the intersection of caste and color in India has a long history. Similarly, the “lascar” in British society was regarded by the white population in much the way the “Lascar scoundrel” of Conan Doyle’s “The Man with the Twisted Lip” is presented, as “a man of the vilest antecedents” (although, in fact, the man proves a reliable confederate for the person who actually hired him—that person being a white man happy to deceive even his own wife).
The Vernet genealogy: The extended Vernet family is every bit as convoluted as it appears in this story. “Claude” was known as Joseph, “Antoine Charles” as Carle, “Jean Émile”—or sometimes, “Émile Jean”—is dropped from before the name Horace. “Fanny” was the name of Camille’s mother and her daughter; Horace Vernet’s first wife and elder daughter were both named Louise; his second wife and younger daughter (who was born to the first) were both Maries. To complicate the “Louise” question further, Camille’s son Émile named his daughter Camille Elisabeth Louise—and, to top matters off, some genealogies give Camille a son named Louis, born in 1812, while others give her a daughter named Louise born in 1815. Under these circumstances, who would be surprised if Camille had another daughter in 1825, and named her Louise as well?
This is why Laurie R. King gave up academia and went into fiction, where the demands of footnotes are considerably fewer.
The art in Holmes’ blood: In “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter,” Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes revealing to Dr Watson (a man he has known and lived with for several years) that he has a brother who is also very clever, musing that “art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms,” and explaining that the artistic bent came with “a sister of Vernet, the French artist.” Doyle does not specify which of the many Vernets it was, but Mary Russell knows it is Horace.
Horace Vernet was famous for his remarkable powers of observation and incomparable memory. He would meditate long into the night on a painting, then attack it without studies, notes, or hesitation. His ability to block out the world was phenomenal, as was his willingness to put up with all kinds of discomforts in order to research a painting.
The 1839 photographic/painting expedition to North Africa that Arjun discovers and Lakshmi joins took place more or less as described. Horace Vernet, then fifty, was accompanied by the artist and recent convert to daguerreotype, Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet (twenty-two), along with Charles Burton (twenty-six), Vernet’s nephew by marriage. Details of their voyage can be found in Goupil-Fesquet’s 1843 illustrated publication Voyage en Orient fait avec Horace Vernet, or in the excellent two-part article by Michèle Hannoosh on “Horace Vernet’s ‘Orient’: Photography and the Eastern Mediterranean in 1839” from The Burlington Magazine, April and June 2016 (see the University of Michigan’s website).
Horace Vernet’s Arabs Travelling in the Desert shows the three men on camel-back, with a certain young servant boy looking on bemused in the background, while his 1835 Self-Portrait with Pipe presents Vernet looking distinctly Holmesian.
This Vernet led a tumultuous life even before he met young Lakshmi, having been born in the Louvre palace, then carried to safety three years later across the Tuileries courtyard amidst a hail of bullets during the French Revolution. His aunt went to the guillotine when he was five, and many of his paintings were thrown on the flames by the February Revolution of 1848.
And yes, he and his colleagues very probably sent back intelligence reports on their travels.
About Irene Adler: The “hiatus” of Sherlock Holmes from 221 Baker Street is generally agreed to have taken place between May 1891 and April 1894 (in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem” and “The Adventure of the Empty House”). Montpellier is mentioned, along with Nepal, but the record was silent on such matters as India, his mother, and any contact with Irene Adler beyond the Conan Doyle short story, “A Scandal in Bohemia”—until the Mary Russell memoirs began to come out. Damian and Estelle Adler are introduced in The Language of Bees and The God of the Hive.
This one is for my beloved friends at Bookshop Santa Cruz, who have been a major part of my life for more than half a century.
Acknowledgments
This tale of family links and influences owes much to the author’s own wider family, the community of people who surround and support the person who actually flings words on the page. As always, the hard-working folk of Bantam Books/Penguin Random House make me look good: Hilary Teeman and Caroline Weishuhn, Allison Schuster and Emma Thomasch, Kim Hovey, Melissa Folds, Carlos Beltrán, Rachel Kind, Kara Welsh, Jennifer Hershey, Kelly Chian, Mark Maguire, Pamela Alders, Pam Feinstein, Davina Bhanabhai, and a thousand others, from management to shipping. Thanks are due to Recorded Books, who put the words into readers’ ears, especially Brian Sweany and the voice of Mary Russell, Jenny Sterlin.
Behind the scenes, I owe more than I could ever return to my friends, cheering section, beta readers, and reference library for all things Russellian, Team LRK: Alice Wright, Merrily Taylor, Karen Buys, Sabrina Flynn, Erin Bright, John Bychowski, and all “The Beekeeper’s Apprentices” on Facebook. To Les Klinger, who knows his Beekeeper and is happy to share. My blessings on Mary Alice Kier and Anna Cottle from Cinelit, who keep the faith; on Alec Shane from Writers House, who always has my back; and on Sue from Interbridge, who keeps me online.
Bless, too, the booksellers and librarians, determined to keep back the dark and put words into the hands of readers.
And for all you readers, who clamor for Russell, yet support the other voices in Laurie King’s head: thank you, for bringing me to 2024, which marks thirty years since the first of the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes memoirs came out.
By Laurie R. King
Mary Russell
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
A Monstrous Regiment of Women
A Letter of Mary
The Moor
O Jerusalem
Justice Hall
The Game
Locked Rooms
The Language of Bees
The God of the Hive
“Beekeeping for Beginners: A Short Story”
Pirate King
Garment of Shadows
Dreaming Spies
“The Marriage of Mary Russell: A Short Story”
The Murder of Mary Russell
Mary Russell’s War and Other Stories of Suspense
Island of the Mad
Riviera Gold
Castle Shade
The Lantern’s Dance
Stuyvesant & Grey
Touchstone
The Bones of Paris
Kate Martinelli
A Grave Talent
To Play the Fool
With Child
Night Work
The Art of Detection
And
A Darker Place
Folly
Keeping Watch
Califia’s Daughters (as Leigh Richards)
Lockdown
Back to the Garden (a Raquel Laing novel)
About the Author
Laurie R. King is the award-winning, bestselling author of seventeen previous Mary Russell mysteries, a new series featuring SFPD cold-case Inspector Raquel Laing, the contemporary Kate Martinelli series, the historical Stuyvesant & Grey stories, and five acclaimed standalone novels. She lives in Northern California, where she is at work on her next Mary Russell mystery.
Facebook.com/LaurieRKing
Instagram: @LaurieRKing
Twitter: @mary_russell
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Laurie R. King, The Lantern's Dance
