A Monstrous Regiment Of Women by King Laurie R

Author:King, Laurie R. [King, Laurie R.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Historical, Adult, Thriller, Crime
ISBN: 9781439560839
Google: kDdIPgAACAAJ
Goodreads: 104737
Publisher: Paw Prints
Published: 1995-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Sunday, 9 January-Thursday, 13 January

Man for the field and woman for the hearth:

Man for the sword and for the needle she:

Man with the head and woman with the heart:

Man to command and woman to obey;

All else confusion.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I left the next morning for Oxford with a strong sense of brushing the dust from my boots. I would push it all from me, all the upset and confusion of Margery’s apparent duplicity and, behind it, the impossible occurrences of Thursday night. Not for me the tugs and pulls of Right Action, the flattery of being Margery’s personal tutrix, the courtly intrigue of the Inner Circle, the plotting and animosity of Marie. I did not feel any urge to take up my copy of Mysticism and find what Miss Underhill had to say about the physical side effects of mystical rapture, the bodily manifestations that could occur when the soul joined the Divine in a state of ecstasy. Like a child sick on too much chocolate, I wanted nothing more to do with it, and so I turned my back on London and returned to my own country.

The truth of it struck me as soon as I saw the spires of Oxford beginning to glimmer into solidity through the mist. This was, indeed, my home, as no other place was, or had been, or would be. I would buy a house here, I thought. What did I need with London? Or with Sussex, for that matter? Sussex could be for me what it had been for my mother, a summer cottage where I might play at farmer, but here, in this fold of earth between the rivers, this collection of buildings at once ethereal and human, was where my heart lay. Boar’s Hill, perhaps, or Marston. Holmes did not need me; far better to take the initiative and remove myself from his irritated, and irritating, presence. I would speak to an estate agent—after the twenty-eighth.

I crawled into my books and pulled the pages up over my head, emerging only when I was thrown out of Bodley in the evenings. It was too dark to read by the light of the street-lamps, so I had a quarter hour or so of simple, mindless movement in the cold, wet, dark air to my rooms. In the mornings, I carried an umbrella, that I might read while walking back to the Bodleian, and each day I slipped into the library’s miasma of old leather and damp wool with the incredulous relief of a caught fish being put back into its pool.

Even a fish must eat, however. On Wednesday, I rose briskly from my table to check a reference and was swept by a wave of nausea and dizziness. I grasped the edge of the table until it passed, and it dawned on me that I had not had a proper meal since—when, Saturday, Friday? And then, as if my body had been waiting for one sensation to push its way through to the surface,

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