Free A Monstrous Regiment of Women by Laurie R. King Page A

sodden outer garments and looked for a place to drape them. Holmes held out a hand.
    “Give them to me; I’ll hang them in the airing cupboard.”
    He opened a narrow panel in the wall and took some clothes hangers from the metal-lined space. I went to look over his shoulder, and found a vertical ventilation shaft about two feet across, into which he had set a length of metal pipe as a clothes rail.
    “Emergency exit?” I asked, peering into the depths.
    “Only in a considerable emergency. There is a bar forty feet down that ought to stop one from actually entering the furnace, although whether or not a person could remove the four screws from the access panel before being roasted or asphyxiated, I have yet to determine. I estimate that it is possible, but I have actually attempted it only when the furnace was cool. However, it is an eminently successful means of drying wet clothing.” He closed the door. “Tea, coffee, wine, or soup?”
    We decided on the last three, the wine splashed into the tinned soup to enliven it, and while he pottered with kettle, pan, and gas ring, I lit a fire and looked around, fetching up at one of the paintings, a large, too-perfect evocation of hills, trees, and sheep.
    “This is a Constable, isn’t it?” I asked him. “And who did the shipwreck?” This latter was a powerful, savage scene of pounding waves and drunken masts—like the Constable, very dated in its romanticism, but technically superb.
    “That’s a Vernet.” His voice came muffled by cupboard doors as he shovelled about looking for edibles.
    “Ah yes, your great-uncle.”
    “His grandfather, actually. Do you prefer turtle or cream of tomato?” he asked, emerging with two tins.
    “Whichever is newer,” I said cautiously.
    “Nothing has been here longer than three years. However, a comparison of the respective dust layers would seem to indicate that the tomato is half the age of the other.” He eyeballed them judiciously. “Perhaps eighteen months.”
    “The tomato, then. Did you bring everything in through the back of that wardrobe?”
    “Hardly, Russell. I arranged the rooms, then bricked up the wall behind.”
    “It’s nice, Holmes. Cosy.”
    “Do you think so?” He sounded pleased, and standing with a spoon in one hand and a jagged-topped tin in the other, all he needed to complete the picture of domesticity was a lace apron. I was much taken aback by this utterly unexpected side of Holmes—I had never known him to be so much as conscious of his surroundings, save where they intruded on his work, and to have him admit to a deliberate choice and arrangement of household furnishings—well, I was taken aback.
    “It was an experiment,” he explained, and returned to his soup tin. “I was testing the hypothesis that one’s surrounds influence one’s state of mind.”
    “And?” I prompted, fascinated.
    “The results are hardly conclusive, but I did find that after seventy-two hours here, I seemed to be less irritable, more rested, and had a higher threshold of distraction than after seventy-two hours in the Storage Room.”
    The ‘Storage Room’ was the first of his bolt-holes I had encountered, an ill-lit, ill-furnished, claustrophobic survival space in the upper floors of a large department store. Seventy-two hours in it would have sent me raving into an asylum.
    “You don’t say,” I commented mildly, and shook my head.
    “Yes, quite interesting, really. I intend to work the results into a monograph I’ve been writing, ‘Some Suggestions Concerning the Long-Term Rehabilitation of Felons.’ ”
    “Rehabilitation through interior decoration, Holmes?”
    “There is no call for sarcasm, Russell,” he said with asperity. “Drink your soup.”
    There followed a meal even odder than my breakfast/tea of eight hours previous, consisting of cream of tomato soup liberally dosed with Madeira, rock-hard water biscuits, two cold boiled eggs, half an orange that had begun to ferment, a slab of