“Oh, all—”
He did not let me finish, merely shouted in glee and threw his arms around me, so impetuous a gesture that it brought with it a flash of my long-dead brother.
And so I had said good-bye to my husband and set off on the Stella Maris with the Hon Terry and friends; twenty-two days of education in the subtle interactions of canvas and rope, tide chart and compass. I spent my days learning the language of wind in the sails and water in the seas, while scrambling to carry out orders. I spent my nights shovelling down huge servings of delicious food, then falling into my bunk to sleep like the dead. My hands blistered and went hard, my skin burned and went brown, while I learned about pulling in partnership, the proper way to throw my weight around, and just how deadly a gust of wind could be. When we were under sail, I was never entirely free of seasickness, but I did find that when I was busy enough, or exhausted enough, I could ignore it.
One night when we were halfway up the Tyrrhenian, with Sicily behind us and the outline of Sardinia yet to appear, it came to me that I had been quietly learning other lessons as well, from this man with no more intellect than a retriever. The Hon Terry was teaching me about friendship.
I had no family, other than the one I had made through Holmes. My few friends were from University, since I’d somehow never found the time to create more. But on board the Stella Maris, distracted by aching muscles and thirst and hunger, the bursts of shared laughter and effortless camaraderie opened my heart.
In turn, I found I was ever more impatient for the end of the voyage—or rather, for the person I hoped to find there.
It was ten years since the cool, War-time morning in 1915 when I stumbled across Mr Sherlock Holmes on the Sussex Downs. Ten years since the afternoon I’d met the woman who would become my surrogate grandmother. Mrs Hudson called herself a housekeeper, but from that first day, she was so much more.
In all the decade that had followed, all those long years when I came to know her worn hands, ageing face, and greying hair better than I knew my own, I never suspected that the heart beating under those old-lady dresses and old-fashioned aprons might belong elsewhere. Never suspected that she had been anything but a landlady-turned-housekeeper—until the past May, when a case brought to light a colourful, even shocking history. The history of a woman named, not Clara Hudson, but Clarissa. A history that came to claim her, and drove my Mrs Hudson from her home.
The thought of losing her had been more than I could bear. I pleaded to know where she was going, how she would get along, what she would possibly do without us. Her reply was less an answer than a vague observation—but as a straw, I would continue to grasp it until it crumbled.
It had been night. The motorcar that would take her away had been idling at the front door, and Mrs Hudson had paused in the act of pulling a pair of travelling gloves over those work-rough hands to consider my question. When she’d looked up, she had not looked at me, who loved her, nor at Sherlock Holmes, who had lived with her for more years than I had been alive. She had not even run her eyes over the doorway that she had polished, swept, and walked through for the past twenty years. Instead, straight of spine and with no sign of hesitation, she had lifted her head to gaze resolutely out into the darkness.
“Do you know,” she’d said thoughtfully, “I’ve always been fond of Monte Carlo.”
Twenty-two days after making our way out of the Venice lagoon, the Stella Maris was sailing, not alongside a coastline, but towards one. I was every bit as trim and brown as Terry had promised. Also, perpetually hungry, always thirsty, and profoundly tired of an endlessly moving deck beneath my feet.
Tired, too, of some of my fellow passengers—not Terry’s friends, but those of our host, DB. As a group, their humour was heavy-handed, their conversation patronising, and they proudly demonstrated their wit by using quotes that were either stale, or inapt, or simply wrong.
Such as DB’s proclamation now, as we drew near the Riviera coast: “And in the afternoon they came to a land where it was always afternoon.”
Terry and I winced, as if we’d heard an ill-tuned piano. I waited for Terry to continue the quote—with words Tennyson had actually written.
“ ‘All round the coast the languid air did swoon, breathing like one that hath a weary dream,’ ” he dutifully supplied.
“Wrong time of the month for a full-faced moon, though,” I noted. This, too, was part of the ritual, the two of us joining forces in the subtle mocking of ignorance.
It was probably a good thing we planned to disembark soon, before our mockery grew shameless. I gave DB a smile that I hoped looked friendly rather than apologetic, and went below to shove the last things into my valise. Terry followed, standing with his shoulder propped against the doorway.
“So, have you thought about stopping with us for a bit?” he asked.
I pushed my unruly hair out of my eyes, wondering where I had put my scissors. “Terry, you must be truly sick of me.”
“Mary Russell, I don’t know what I’ll do when you leave! Who else understands my jokes?”
I put on a puzzled expression. “Terry, have you been making jokes?”
“Har har.”
“Your friends laugh. More than I do, really.”
“Patrice laughs when he knows it’s supposed to be a joke, and Luca laughs because he doesn’t want to admit he missed it in English. Oh, do come along, just for a couple of days. It’ll be a new experience to talk to people without watching their heads bobble with the waves.”
“Oh, I couldn’t. The people you’re staying with will be plenty crowded with the four of you.”
“No, we’re at an hotel.”
“Really? What kind of Riviera establishment is open in midsummer?”
“Most of ’em do close—this one did, until a couple years ago. But the more guests they can pull in, the better the chance they’ll keep it open next year.”
“Why on earth would they want to?”
I got to my knees to check under the bunk for stray pens and wayward stockings, half-listening as Terry prattled about a note that caught up with him in our last port, from a friend extolling the virtues of summer holidays on the Cap d’Antibes. It seemed that the hotel there, which for its thirty-some-year history had indeed sensibly closed its shutters for the summer season, was recently talked into staying open by a handful of mad Americans with deep pockets and a perverse affection for broiling under the sun. They paid well, but considering the hotel’s plenitude of rooms, it would help, as Terry said, to round up a few more paying guests.
So: extend my leisure holiday, or return to empty Sussex?
First, the obvious question. “Who else is coming?”