Afterwards, Mycroft lit a small fire while Holmes filled glasses with our preferred varieties of digestif. Our host settled into the largest of his chairs, and began to talk about a recent problem that had come across his desk.
“Actually, it concerns a woman who made me think of you, Mary. Not that you’re anything like her—mannish sort of thing, drove an ambulance during the War and never wanted to take off the uniform afterwards. No, what amused me was that when the woman was, oh, fourteen or fifteen, she signed up for the Scouts using just her initials so they’d think she was a boy. And when they found out and objected, she refused to be put off.”
“She sounds like my type, all right. Did the Scouts let her in?”
“Her mother ended up forming the Girl Guides for her to play soldier in.”
“Too bad, it would have improved Baden-Powell’s boys no end.”
“You may be right. But now the woman—Lintorn-Orman is her name, Rotha Beryl Lintorn-Orman, which sounds like a rather strained anagram for…what? A northernly tribal moron? Not a nonthermal lorry rib? Rent a labyrinth or—”
Holmes broke in. “Mycroft, was there a point to this?”
“Yes, namely, that the Lintorn-Orman woman has a bee in her bonnet—not that she wears a bonnet—about Reds and foreigners. That they’re overrunning Britain, ruining the place, undermining the values of Empire, and we have to get rid of them. To a certain point she’s right—none of us want to see the Bolshevik flag over Buckingham Palace—but having an entire policy of ‘Us Good, Them Bad’ does little more than create a magnet for trouble-makers. Most of my colleagues consider her just another flash-in-the-pan crackpot, and Labour openly laughs at the idea, but in two years, she’s got thousands signed up as British Fascists, all of them eager to raise Cain about something.”
“Didn’t that group kidnap the Communist Pollitt?” Holmes asked.
“And marched on London during Empire Day.”
I had to interrupt. “And this woman made you think of me…why?”
“It was a tightly limited analogy, I assure you, resting on the single point of her childhood antic. I cannot imagine you espousing a cause that lacks a carefully thought-out platform. This woman has nothing but her passions. So taken with the Mussolini people in Italy that she starts up her own party of Fascists—without noticing that if she tried to do anything of the sort in Italy, the Blackshirts would slap her silly and shove her back in the kitchen.”
I nodded solemnly. “Alas, a lack of common sense is not an exclusively male prerogative.”
Holmes stepped in with some question about Italy’s Fascist lunacy, and I listened with half an ear as I thought about Rotha Lintorn-Orman. I had heard the name—it did rather stand out—and although I agreed that she sounded a bit maternally indulged, I also thought she was one of those who had tasted adventure and self-respect during the War, and fit poorly back into the status quo afterwards.
But, wasn’t this the second mention of the Italian leader in as many days? I stirred, and spoke up without thinking.
“Ronnie’s uncle the Marquess admires the Fascists, too. Oh, sorry—I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Mycroft did not seem to mind. “I have begun to think this may be the direction towards which much of the country, if not the world, is headed.”
Mycroft had been described, many years before, as a man who “audits the books in some of the government departments.” Strictly speaking, this was true—except that the auditing he did was less that of sums on a ledger than it was the trends, costs, and vulnerabilities of international politics. If Mycroft Holmes saw movement in a political realm, it was there—or it would be.
But, Britain? This rational, benevolent nation in the hands of men like Mussolini or the Marquess of Selwick? Inconceivable. If it came to that, I’d rather be inside Bedlam.
With the thought of that great grey institution, I retreated again from the conversation, letting it break and ebb in the room around me like waves on the shore.
Bedlam had not been at all what I expected. I had ventured in, anticipating a cold stone mausoleum seething with the violent, the unrestrained, and the suicidal, kept under control by brutal and uncaring attendants. No doubt some institutions were exactly that—the county asylums, I suspected, were given considerably less money and little say in which inmates they could hand back to their families.
But when it came to Bethlem Royal Hospital, the word asylum was not entirely spurious. I had seen its inmates treated with gentle skill, given medical care and warm food by people who were willing to talk, and to listen. They were kept occupied with labour, but not too harshly. They were urged to test their own limits, but only by degrees. I personally would be driven to lunacy by the place, but would not a fragile mind benefit from the warm cotton-wool of placid activities and regular hours?
The one thing I regretted was that I’d left without seeing Lady Vivian’s room. I had no doubt that, as a more or less permanent resident, she had accumulated both rights and possessions. None of her fellows had mentioned seeing her drawing or painting, although three years ago, she’d had both the materials and the dexterity to produce a charming Pierrot for young Simon. Perhaps she’d left a new row of sketch-books on a shelf. Perhaps the images mounted on her wall would have given me a hint as to where she’d gone.
That last sketch-book back in Selwick, the one with the missing pages from the year of her beloved brother’s death, had suggested that her art was going in some interesting directions. Mere dashes of the pencil to suggest an object emerging from the page, given substance in soft hints of colour…
I glanced at Holmes with a smile: straight-combed hair, perfectly knotted tie, deep maroon silk dressing-gown. Crisp lines down the front of his trousers; polish on his shoes. Mycroft was the same: there was nothing soft or uncertain in his entire apartment, apart from three chair-cushions and my own dressing-gown.
The two were going on about Mussolini again, the unexpected fervour with which his country had embraced him, how economic pressures and Great War losses could shape a country’s wishes and expectations, how a harsh message of patriotic destiny and racial superiority could get a nation to overlook a brutal murder and clumsily staged cover-up. How his seizing of power did not bode well for the Adriatic region.
I found it difficult to imagine a Fascist march through the rich, rolling Italian countryside. Black shirts against the new corn; raised fists before the silvery leaves of olives. That blunt jaw of Il Duce against the soft…
I blinked as my thoughts stuttered to a halt. Blunt: soft. Crisp: velvets. Shapes appearing through the mist. Patterns began to rearrange themselves in my mind: a sketch-book in a time of retreat. Treasures pinned to a wall. A mask, a name…
A name?
I struggled out of my chair and hurried back to Mycroft’s library, flipping rapidly through his enormous world atlas. When I found the page I wanted, I ran my finger west from the blue ink of the water…then stopped. Yes!
I looked up at the man in the doorway. Holmes in his crisp shirt and sleek dressing-gown.
“Trevisan isn’t Cornish,” I said.
“Very well.”
“I know where she’s gone.”
“Lady Vivian?”
“Where she thought would be safe. There’s only one place it could be.”
He looked at the map, reading the name upside-down. “Treviso?”
“Not quite.”
A place so soft, its buildings floated in the mist. A place where roads were water and pavements were bridges. An upside-down world with foundations of wood holding walls of stone, where power was soft and beauty hard, where superstitions were truth and truth was invisible. A place whose citizens were masked even when they wore their own faces.
Oh, Holmes was going to hate this.
“I think she’s gone to Venice.”
Chapter Seventeen