Read Online The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor by Laurie R. King - Free Book Online Page A

behind. I found men and women who were not intimidated by my proud, rough-cut mind, who challenged and fought me and were not above reducing me sharply to size when criticism was due, and a couple of them were even better than Holmes at the delivery of a brief and devastating remark. Both for better and for worse, one received considerably more of their attentions during the war years than after the young men returned. I found that I did not miss Holmes as much as I had feared, and the intense pleasure of being away from my aunt went quite far to balance the irritation of the chaperonage rules (permission required for any outing, two women in any mixed party, mixed parties in cafés only between two o’clock and five-thirty in the afternoon, and then only with permission, etc., etc.). Many girls found these rules infuriating; I found them less so, but perhaps that was only because I was more agile at climbing the walls or scrambling between hansom roof and upper window in the wee hours.
    One thing I had not expected to find at University was fun. After all, Oxford was a small town composed of dirty, cold stone buildings filled with wounded soldiers. There were few male undergraduates, few male dons under the age of retirement, few men, period, who were not Blighty returns, fragile and preoccupied and often in pain. Food was scarce and uninteresting, heating was inadequate, the war was a constant presence, volunteer work intruded on our time, and to top it off, half the University societies and organizations were in abeyance, up to and including the dramatic society, OUDS.
    Oddly enough, it was this last gap in the Oxford landscape that opened the door of communitas for me, and almost immediately I arrived. I was in my rooms on the first morning, investigating on all fours the possibility of repairing a bookshelf that had just collapsed under the combined weight of four tea chests of books, when there came a knock on my door.
    “Come in,” I called.
    “I say,” a voice began, and then changed from enquiry to concern. “I say, are you all right?”
    I shoved my spectacles back onto my nose and dashed the hair out of my face with the back of my hand, and caught my first sight of Lady Veronica Beaconsfield, all plump five feet one inch of her, wrapped in an incredibly gaudy green-and-yellow silk dressing gown that did nothing for her complexion.
    “All right? Of course. Oh, the books. No, they didn’t fall on me; I lay on them. I don’t suppose you have such a thing as a screwdriver?”
    “No, I don’t believe I do.”
    “Ah well, the porter may. Were you looking for someone?”
    “You.”
    “Then you have found her.”
    “Petruchio,” she said, and seemed to pause in expectation. I sat back on my heels amongst the strewn volumes for a moment.
    “Come on, and kiss me Kate?” I offered. “What, sweeting, all amort?”
    She clapped her hands together and squealed at the ceiling. “I knew it! The voice, the height, and she even knows the words. Can you do it à la vaudeville?”
    “I, er—”
    “Of course we can’t use real food in your scene where you throw it at the servants, not with all the shortages, it wouldn’t be nice.”
    “May I ask…?”
    “Oh, sorry, how stupid of me. Veronica Beaconsfield. Call me Ronnie.”
    “Mary Russell.”
    “Yes, I know. Tonight then, Mary, nine o’clock, my rooms. First performance in two weeks.”
    “But I—” I protested. But she was away.
    I was simply the latest to discover the impossibility of refusing to cooperate in one of Ronnie Beaconsfield’s schemes. I was in her rooms that night with a dozen others, and three weeks later we performed The Taming of the Shrew for the entertainment of the Men of Somerville, as we called them, and I doubt that staid college of women had ever heard such an uproar before, or since. We gained several male converts to our society that night, and I was soon excused the rôle of Petruchio.
    I was not, however, excused from