“Is this a new motorcar, Mary?” Estelle asked.

“It is indeed. Do you like it?”

“It’s lovely. May I honk the horn?”

“When we reach the house, you may.”

“I can play jackstones now,” she told me.

“You can? That’s very clever of you.”

“She worked at it for hours,” Damian said. “She has the determination of a bulldog.”

At the house, the horn duly sounded, I bundled them all inside and finished the unloading myself. When all was inside and the motor secure, I went up and changed, coming down with damp hair and the exhilaration of storm in my blood.

Estelle was sitting in front of the fire, working her way through a demonstration of jackstones. Her small hand was remarkably efficient, her concentration, as her father had said, extraordinary. She was singing under her breath, her voice tiny but true, her own words set to the tune of “John Barleycorn” that Goodman had taught her.

She came to an end of the stones and jumped to her feet, her grey eyes shining.

“Uncle Mycroft sent me a present,” she declared. “Papa said I had to wait until we were here before I opened it.”

“Well, you’re here.”

She seized my hand and dragged me towards the kitchen.

Among the bags and valises we brought from the motorcar at the station were a pair of boxes which, on closer examination, were not actually from Mycroft, but which had been posted the previous week to his London address. One was a wooden cigar box addressed to me; the other was a wooden tea crate with Estelle’s name on it.

Damian had picked up one of Mrs Hudson’s knives, only to have it snatched from his hand with loud protests. While she was finding him a screw-driver, I picked open the twine on my own parcel and curiously looked at the contents: a lump of some hard black substance the size of a child’s fist, and another fire-stained object the size of my thumb. I picked up the heavy black stuff to examine it more closely, to be distracted by Estelle’s exclamations at her box.

Wood-shaving spilt onto the kitchen table when the top came free, revealing a small curve of some rich brown colour. Damian brushed it off before handing it to his daughter: a delicate wooden disc, some two inches wide, made of oak. Another lay in the shavings beneath it, and another, then: a tea-cup into which a man’s fingertip would barely fit.

I watched, slack-mouthed, as the child and her father unpacked an entire tea-set of hand-carved, exquisitely finished wooden plates and cups, sugar bowl and milk jug. The tea-pot itself was a perfectly round oak gall with a curved-twig handle and a hollowed-reed spout.

Mrs Hudson had started to brush together the spilt shaving when she noticed a foreign object among them. She placed it to one side and continued her brushing, but I looked at it, and my hand went out to pick it up.

A feather. Specifically, the primary flight-feather of a tawny owl.

I looked at Holmes. Our eyes were simultaneously drawn to the heavy, cold lump I still held in my other hand, and I convulsively let the object fall back into its box. I could not suppress a shudder of revulsion as I slapped down the lid and reached for the twine.

The black lump was a mass of meteor metal; the burnt object was the remains of an ivory haft.

I could not imagine the heat necessary to return that knife to its primary state.

I looked up to find Damian’s eyes on me. “What is that?” he asked.

“Oh, just a rock sample I asked for,” I said smoothly, reaching for the twine to bind the cover down tight.

I left the box on a high shelf, and we adults solemnly adjourned to the next room to join the dollies’ tea-party.

But late that night, Holmes and I left our sleeping family to walk down to Birling Gap and take the hotel’s skiff, rowing far out into the moonless water. There I undid the twine for a second time, and let what was left of Thomas Brothers’ knife vanish into the cleansing depths of the English Channel.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Tammy Albee and Chris Sagar for the Russellisms in chapters 12 and 63; to Dick Griffith for helping me hot-wire an old car; to Linda Fitzpatrick of Fife’s Scottish Fisheries Museum and Louisa Pittman (former “Mate,” future PhD, current humble student) for giving me a boat (on paper, anyway); to Adrian Muller for sharing his family and his Dutch; and to the gents at the Hiller Air Museum for nursing along my Bristol Tourer.

For Patricia Toner and all the other readers who helped raise funds for Heifer International’s beehive project, and her husband, Richard Luther Sosa (who is both better-looking and of stronger stuff than his namesake), and daughter, Meghann Toner (who should have been the doctor).

And a hive-full of thanks to Zoë Elkaim, Vicki Van Valkenburgh, Bob Difley, Alice Wright, Erin Bright, Wanda Kalgren, Nikki Rowe, and Caitlin Rowe, for their generosity and cleverness in keeping together all the manifold nooks and crannies associated with www.LaurieRKing.com. Bless you, ladies and gent, I couldn’t have done it without you.

About the Author

LAURIE R. KING is the New York Times bestselling author of ten Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, and the acclaimed novels A Darker Place , Folly, Keeping Watch, and Touchstone. She is one of only two novelists to win the Best First Crime Novel awards on both sides of the Atlantic. She lives in northern California, where she is at work on her next Russell and Holmes mystery.