The Women, pt. 3
Title: The Women
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Ritchie films), Sherlock (BBC)
Rating: Currently G, could be R in later parts
Warnings: Some racism (from a 19th C. character)
Notes: The unquenchable so_shhy promised to write me notes from a multi-Sherlock crossover orgy if I set up the scene. I am easily led by temptation.
Summary: Irene and Mary are each more than the other expects; Mycroft tries to take control of the situation.
(Part One on my journal)
(Part Two on so_shhy's journal)
Mary felt quite composed. Alright - a little ruffled, perhaps, and on guard, but certainly she had not given in to hysterics. Once the officers’ footsteps had faded she let the silence hang between her and the coquettish Miss Adler. Only for a moment, while Mary flattened her hair and re-pinned her hat and checked her sleeves for any dust or crinkles. Her heart rate had nearly returned to normal by the time her preening was over. She folded her hands in front, straightened her back and cleared her throat.
"It's a pleasure to meet you too, Miss Adler, even in such unfortunate circumstances."
"Indeed," the other woman glanced quickly around the cell as she stood up. It was, at least, clean and with only a faint odor from previous occupants. In fact, it smelt more normal to Mary than the offices above, which had felt too fresh to be real and the air too chilled.
"And you?" Mary asked, taking a couple of steps forward. "Are you here about a missing husband too?"
"Mmm, he isn't quite so lucky," Miss Adler strode forward with tiny clips of her heels. Her nails appeared to be lacquered with a vivid, peachy gold and Mary avoided looking at the deep cleft visible between her breasts. She tilted her head a little. "I imagine you must be feeling some confusion. About where you are, what's going on…?"
"I was pushed out of a train on my honeymoon, Miss Adler, a little jail cell with some friendly company is not a hardship."
The other woman raised on carefully preened eyebrow. "Doctor Watson brings his work home with him, then?"
"Safer to say it follows him home," Mary replied.
Miss Adler's laugh was low and pretty, like water in a dark cave.
"Well?" Mary asked. “Will you tell me something about yourself?” she cleared her throat, rubbing her hands together as if they were standing in a warm drawing room instead of a prison.
"Not really the time for pleasantries,” Miss Adler turned away, dipping one hand into her jacket pocket to retrieve what looked like a rectangular, glass-fronted cigar case. She brushed her thumb across the surface as if to clear it of dust. “What year is it, Mrs Watson?”
Mary sighed. It seemed she had not found herself an ally, but just another mad person. Perhaps she was locked not in a gaol cell at all, but in an asylum, having lost time from her memory and reality from her eyes. “It’s 1892,” she said dryly. “Would you like to know the name of the King and the capital of England while you’re at it?”
“Eight-teen-ninety-two,” though Mary couldn’t see her face because the woman’s back was turned, it sounded as if Miss Adler was smiling. “Now isn’t that a puzzler,” she looked over her shoulder at last. “I received a text this morning, Mrs Watson - like a telegraph,” she added, and looked back at her glass box. “It reads, ‘Alternate realities plausible. Seek safehouse - SH’.”
“Sherlock Holmes,” Mary said at once. She put her hand to her mouth. “You’re saying he’s alive?” Did John know about this? Is that where he’d gone this morning?
“One version of him is,” Miss Adler replied, still with her back to Mary. “Tell me, do you recognise this voice?” she held up the glass case, which seemed to be glowing with an unearthly light. From its locality there suddenly came a crackle as if from a phonograph.
“-don’t see how-“ the voice echoed around the cell and Mary just managed to contain a gasp. “-we could try -why didn’t that sod give us a clue how to work this contraption-they’re coming back, hide it! Holmes hide it!”
Miss Adler turned around at last to look at her. By the narrowness in her eyes and lips, she had guessed the answer to her question from the whiteness in Mary’s face.
“That was my husband,” Mary whispered. “How did you do that? What is that box?”
“That was a recording I made when I attempted to telephone Sherlock Holmes soon after receiving his message,” Miss Adler explained. She paused, “You know what a telephone is?”
Mary nodded quickly.
“Well, that was not the John Watson with whom I am acquainted,” the woman thumbed something on her machine and put it back in her pocket. “You are clearly more familiar with him. By the difficulty he and whoever he was speaking to had operating the phone at the other end, I would say both of them are from the same century as you.”
“The same century,” Mary echoed under her breath. She reached out for the tiled wall to keep herself upright and shook her head. Everything she’d seen outside - the strange London, the queer clothes, the recording from a tiny box - was it so impossible to believe? “I think neither of us are mad, or both of us,” Mary muttered, mostly to herself.
She twitched as there came a sharp rap at the door and then the sound of it unbolting. An officer stood there with a resigned look on his face. "Your lawyer’s on the way, ma'am. Phoned to say someone will be picking you up in half an hour, once she sorts out the paperwork with the DI."
"Oh, Lestrade's decided to let me go?" Miss Adler said with exaggerated surprise. "But I thought I was the only suspect in the disappearance of Mr Holmes."
"I’m sure he knows better than me how much trouble you are to hold," the officer grunted.
Miss Adler smiled and strode to the door. As she passed, Mary grabbed her elbow. "Wait. Take me too."
The woman eyed her from under subtly painted lids, "Sorry, dear, but I've got to leave the DI something to keep occupied."
Mary gritted her teeth. How dare she, how dare this trollop dismiss Mary so easily? Were they not on the same side, did they not both want the return of their menfolk? "I can help," she insisted.
"You have helped. You've given me proof of the first half of Sherlock's text," the woman said brightly. "Sit down and don't upset yourself further."
Mary tightened her grip. "I can show you how I got here. From my century. If I can pass one way, why wouldn't your quarry be able to go the other? Or further afield? If this is the first you've learned of such travel, then you need all the expertise you can garner."
Miss Adler held her gaze for a long silence, but Mary glared back with all her strength. At last the woman nodded and turned to the officer. "Take me to Lestrade.”
---
After Miss Adler had left her, Mary was collected and taken upstairs to be callously questioned by Donovan - the African woman with the uncultured accent, man’s trousers and an unfeminine pout. She seemed convinced that Mary was involved in the disappearance of Mr Sherlock Holmes. The local Holmes, anyway. The photograph she waved under Mary’s nose was of a clean-shaven, white-skinned fellow who Mary had never met. He bore not the slightest resemblance to the hellion who had been John’s first love (Mary was no fool - she had never wanted to usurp Mr Holmes, especially now he was just a memory that John seemed to grow more fond of with time). But Miss Adler seemed to have hinted at some larger mystery; this place was not just a new country, but a new version of her own London. This narrow-eyed creature could be Sherlock Holmes, but not as Mary knew him.
Though on the recording, John had been speaking to a living version of Mary’s local Sherlock. What miracle was that? Was the original rascal alive, or was there a third variety flitting around? For a moment Mary hoped it was the latter, and then felt intensely guilty. No matter his eccentricities, Holmes had been a good man and she wouldn’t wish death on him.
At first she had tried to sit quietly and answer Donovan’s questions with the least amount of confusion, but she had stopped repressing her curiosity soon enough. It was too amusing to aggravate the look on the detective’s face by asking for a definition of every unfamiliar word and playing with the lamp switch as if she’d never seen it before (there had been incandescent bulbs at John and Mary’s favourite theatre for almost five years now). After ten minutes, a constable stuck his head into the room and told Donovan that Lestrade wanted an ‘update’. Mary presumed that meant tidings on new information, and knew Donovan would have nothing helpful to report. She smiled pleasantly as the fuming detective locked her into the interrogation room.
When she returned, Mary wasn’t taken back to the cell, but to a windowless waiting room with more struggling plants in pots and a small, angry family berating a young man who must have been just released from custody. Miss Adler sat on the hard chairs beside the door, but stood up when she saw Mary.
“You look like you’ve been having fun,” she said dryly, glancing over at Sergeant Donovan. Mary couldn’t repress a giggle.
“Are they letting me go?”
“Lestrade says you’re not to leave town. Of course, he didn’t say anything about vacating this century,” Miss Adler checked her purse, smoothed her coat and headed for the door. As she reached for the handle she was forced to step backwards as it swung open.
A sharp-nosed man in a perfect suit strode in. Though the style of the outfit wasn’t quite what Mary was familiar with, he looked in the vicinity of the men she normally interacted with at home; the controlled stiffness of his stance, the umbrella hooked over one arm, the patient disdain in his expression as he took in the room with one quick look.
“Miss Adler,” he nodded at the woman and turned to Mary, “And Mrs Watson.”
“And you’re Mycroft,” Mary said, her voice rising with delight. “I presume.” She wasn't sure how she knew - she hadn't even known there was a Mycroft homes in this world - but the haughtiness made it so patently obvious.
One of the man’s eyes twitched by the tiniest margin, and his closed lips were dragged into an unfathomable smile. After a moment of consideration he grasped Mary’s outstretched hand and squeezed it. “You’re a sharp one.”
“A nuptial necessity,” Mary sighed. “What can we do for you-?”
She was interrupted by Miss Adler, who had suddenly stepped in to block her from Mycroft’s reach, “I’m afraid we were just leaving, Mr Holmes. Would you step aside, or do I have to manhandle you?”
“Miss Adler,” any pretence of a smile vanished from Mycroft’s face, and he leaned forward on his umbrella, quite deliberately not getting out of the way. “Glad to see you got things, ahem, cleared up with Lestrade.”
“I knew it,” the woman stretched her neck out, teeth bared as if she longed to sink them into Mycroft’s cheek. “It was you who called the police, you puppeteer. I might have caught up with the kidnappers otherwise. I might have stopped them.”
“And here I heard you were found handcuffed to a bed.”
“I had that under control.”
“I assure you, you did not,” Mycroft drew back with a sneer as if Miss Adler’s vitriol was physically splattering on his face. “These people are not controllable, my dear girl. They are not… seducible. You have no power over them.”
“We’re not all impotent outside our personal domains,” Miss Adler narrowed her eyes. “Why did you tell Lestrade I was working for them?”
Mycroft brushed a bit of imaginary lint off his sleeve as if the conversation was boring him. “You slip back into London and three days later my brother walks off the radar. Hardly a complicated induction.”
“You got it backwards,” Miss Adler stuck her elbow out and Mary realised the woman wanted her to hold onto it, the way Mary hung off John’s elbow if the pavements were particularly busy. She did so and immediately felt silly, but it seemed impolite to let go. “They struck now because I was in London. They had to be quick because there's someone else on their tail, some sort of inter-dimensional police agent - he was the one who applied the handcuffs, if you must know, when I tried to get him to warm up to me. This was an in-and-out job, I was their third target and if I had gone after them I might have caught them up. Now their… their windows, their portals, whatever… are probably closed.”
“Do you think I’d be here if they were?” Mycroft countered.
Miss Adler smiled. “Thank you. That’s all I needed to know.”
Like a snake sliding through the undergrowth, she swerved around Mycroft’s figure with Mary dragging in her wake. Mary looked back at Mycroft, but the man didn’t watch them go. There was a hard set to his shoulders.
Outside in the flurry and noise of the strange London, Mary tried to slow her down. “What are we going to do?” she cried. “Mycroft - he knows about how I got here - about how John was stolen-“
“I know one of his scientists. Well, I know what she likes. From what I've heard, their scans can only broadly detect the energy signature the windows create,” Miss Adler hummed, not looking at her.
“But Mycroft may have servants, or soldiers, men who can help-“
“These people walk between worlds, Mrs Watson. They will not be susceptible to bullets or blackmail or international diplomatic wrangling. Mycroft’s no use to us.”
“No use? Are women in the future so hateful that they refuse a man’s help no matter how pressing their need?”
She found herself jerked to a halt and saw Miss Adler shift towards her. Before Mary knew what was happening, there was a sharp sting against her check and her head was knocked sideways, just on the verge of wrenching her neck. She gave a startled squeak and put her hand to her face.
“Mmm, you pink very prettily,” the woman purred at her, cocking her head to capture Mary’s shocked gaze.
“You slapped me!” Mary gasped.
“There’s no time for gentler lessons,” Miss Adler replied. “And you’re a fast learner, I know you can keep up. Now, are you going to help me, or would you rather go back to Mycroft and be put in a curtained room somewhere for your own protection?”
Mary almost refused both offers. The temptation to storm off, to find the window in the alleyway on her own and go home to the real London was incredibly powerful. But then what? What could she do alone? What if the window was closed?
Miss Adler was looking at her with an expression of complete confidence. It wasn’t condescending, but nor was it any patient. It said simply, your choice. Mary straightened up and took her hand away from her cheek. She noticed suddenly that she was almost half a head taller than Irene Adler. How odd that she hadn’t seen that until now.
“With you, please,” she said coolly. “But if you want to lay another hand on me, I warn you that my husband takes my safety very seriously,” she let contempt flicker in Miss Adler’s eyes before she elaborated. “He insisted I learn to box, wrestle and handle any type of blade I can lay my hands on. And as you say, I am a fast learner.”
Miss Adler’s red mouth widened into a cat’s smirk. “I’m starting to envy him, he seems to get the good ones in every universe. Shall we? My car’s waiting.”
That was the name of the vehicles that were everywhere, sleek descendents of the experimental automobiles John messed about with on occasion. Very well. Mary steeled herself for a nothing nauseatingly fast drive through the streets as she clung to Miss Adler’s elbow. The woman gave a huff of laughter and pointed down the street. “There. Kate’s waiting for us, can you see her?”
“Yes, I see her…” Mary frowned. She felt suddenly on edge. Her ears were ringing and she could smell hot iron. She raised her head. “Something’s wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
The smell was far stronger than it had been on Moorgate. Mary clutched tighter at Miss Adler’s elbow, and the woman looked at her sharply. “Mrs Watson, tell me what you see.”
The air pressure swelled and pressed in so quickly that they both cried out and put their hands to their heads as their eardrums were pressed to the limit. There was a chord in the air, resonating in and out of harmony for a brutally loud half-second and then fading. It was replaced by the screeches of brakes and crunches and terrified shrieks. Mary wasn’t even aware she had closed her eyes until she opened them again.
The dark grey vehicle was gone, as was the blonde Kate standing by its door. In fact, all the cars at the other end of the street were gone. And the black road, and the garish billboards with their half-naked girls holding bottles of coloured cordials - Mary saw instead familiar smoke stacks and a pair of horses rearing up to spill their trailing carriage all over the road, and buildings that were more brick than glass, and women in proper ankle-length skirts gasping and swooning into the arms of men in hats and decent moustaches-
Yet to her left and right and behind them, the street was just as it had been, and in the distance the sky was still the strange, massive towers of the future London. Mary swivelled her gaze back and forth, blinking at the place where bitumen became cobblestones. She felt bile rise in her throat at the sight of a dog’s head and front legs twitching on the ground, sliced neatly in half along the axis where the two centuries had collided. The sparking rear-end of a car had scraped to a halt along the cobbles, its cabin and driver no long attached. A woman in a bonnet - it might even have been the same governess who had passed Mary earlier in the day, before everything had gone mad - was standing at the edge of the divide, screaming the name of a child who must have been two steps ahead of her and was now more than a hundred years behind. Mary thought, Thank God they weren’t holding hands.
She felt Miss Adler shaking her roughly out of her dizziness and finally glanced down at the other woman. Her face beneath the elegant make-up was pale, but her expression had stayed sharp.
“Come back to earth, Mrs Watson,” she was saying, though thankfully she hadn’t gone so far as to slap Mary again. “Come on. We have to find the criminals who took your husband, you understand?”
“They’ve done this,” Mary breathed. “They will have the machines to fix it. Won’t they?”
Miss Adler didn’t answer, her jaws locked together. She grabbed Mary’s hand, glanced back at the growing panic once, and then pulled her back the way they’d come.
---
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Ritchie films), Sherlock (BBC)
Rating: Currently G, could be R in later parts
Warnings: Some racism (from a 19th C. character)
Notes: The unquenchable so_shhy promised to write me notes from a multi-Sherlock crossover orgy if I set up the scene. I am easily led by temptation.
Summary: Irene and Mary are each more than the other expects; Mycroft tries to take control of the situation.
(Part One on my journal)
(Part Two on so_shhy's journal)
Mary felt quite composed. Alright - a little ruffled, perhaps, and on guard, but certainly she had not given in to hysterics. Once the officers’ footsteps had faded she let the silence hang between her and the coquettish Miss Adler. Only for a moment, while Mary flattened her hair and re-pinned her hat and checked her sleeves for any dust or crinkles. Her heart rate had nearly returned to normal by the time her preening was over. She folded her hands in front, straightened her back and cleared her throat.
"It's a pleasure to meet you too, Miss Adler, even in such unfortunate circumstances."
"Indeed," the other woman glanced quickly around the cell as she stood up. It was, at least, clean and with only a faint odor from previous occupants. In fact, it smelt more normal to Mary than the offices above, which had felt too fresh to be real and the air too chilled.
"And you?" Mary asked, taking a couple of steps forward. "Are you here about a missing husband too?"
"Mmm, he isn't quite so lucky," Miss Adler strode forward with tiny clips of her heels. Her nails appeared to be lacquered with a vivid, peachy gold and Mary avoided looking at the deep cleft visible between her breasts. She tilted her head a little. "I imagine you must be feeling some confusion. About where you are, what's going on…?"
"I was pushed out of a train on my honeymoon, Miss Adler, a little jail cell with some friendly company is not a hardship."
The other woman raised on carefully preened eyebrow. "Doctor Watson brings his work home with him, then?"
"Safer to say it follows him home," Mary replied.
Miss Adler's laugh was low and pretty, like water in a dark cave.
"Well?" Mary asked. “Will you tell me something about yourself?” she cleared her throat, rubbing her hands together as if they were standing in a warm drawing room instead of a prison.
"Not really the time for pleasantries,” Miss Adler turned away, dipping one hand into her jacket pocket to retrieve what looked like a rectangular, glass-fronted cigar case. She brushed her thumb across the surface as if to clear it of dust. “What year is it, Mrs Watson?”
Mary sighed. It seemed she had not found herself an ally, but just another mad person. Perhaps she was locked not in a gaol cell at all, but in an asylum, having lost time from her memory and reality from her eyes. “It’s 1892,” she said dryly. “Would you like to know the name of the King and the capital of England while you’re at it?”
“Eight-teen-ninety-two,” though Mary couldn’t see her face because the woman’s back was turned, it sounded as if Miss Adler was smiling. “Now isn’t that a puzzler,” she looked over her shoulder at last. “I received a text this morning, Mrs Watson - like a telegraph,” she added, and looked back at her glass box. “It reads, ‘Alternate realities plausible. Seek safehouse - SH’.”
“Sherlock Holmes,” Mary said at once. She put her hand to her mouth. “You’re saying he’s alive?” Did John know about this? Is that where he’d gone this morning?
“One version of him is,” Miss Adler replied, still with her back to Mary. “Tell me, do you recognise this voice?” she held up the glass case, which seemed to be glowing with an unearthly light. From its locality there suddenly came a crackle as if from a phonograph.
“-don’t see how-“ the voice echoed around the cell and Mary just managed to contain a gasp. “-we could try -why didn’t that sod give us a clue how to work this contraption-they’re coming back, hide it! Holmes hide it!”
Miss Adler turned around at last to look at her. By the narrowness in her eyes and lips, she had guessed the answer to her question from the whiteness in Mary’s face.
“That was my husband,” Mary whispered. “How did you do that? What is that box?”
“That was a recording I made when I attempted to telephone Sherlock Holmes soon after receiving his message,” Miss Adler explained. She paused, “You know what a telephone is?”
Mary nodded quickly.
“Well, that was not the John Watson with whom I am acquainted,” the woman thumbed something on her machine and put it back in her pocket. “You are clearly more familiar with him. By the difficulty he and whoever he was speaking to had operating the phone at the other end, I would say both of them are from the same century as you.”
“The same century,” Mary echoed under her breath. She reached out for the tiled wall to keep herself upright and shook her head. Everything she’d seen outside - the strange London, the queer clothes, the recording from a tiny box - was it so impossible to believe? “I think neither of us are mad, or both of us,” Mary muttered, mostly to herself.
She twitched as there came a sharp rap at the door and then the sound of it unbolting. An officer stood there with a resigned look on his face. "Your lawyer’s on the way, ma'am. Phoned to say someone will be picking you up in half an hour, once she sorts out the paperwork with the DI."
"Oh, Lestrade's decided to let me go?" Miss Adler said with exaggerated surprise. "But I thought I was the only suspect in the disappearance of Mr Holmes."
"I’m sure he knows better than me how much trouble you are to hold," the officer grunted.
Miss Adler smiled and strode to the door. As she passed, Mary grabbed her elbow. "Wait. Take me too."
The woman eyed her from under subtly painted lids, "Sorry, dear, but I've got to leave the DI something to keep occupied."
Mary gritted her teeth. How dare she, how dare this trollop dismiss Mary so easily? Were they not on the same side, did they not both want the return of their menfolk? "I can help," she insisted.
"You have helped. You've given me proof of the first half of Sherlock's text," the woman said brightly. "Sit down and don't upset yourself further."
Mary tightened her grip. "I can show you how I got here. From my century. If I can pass one way, why wouldn't your quarry be able to go the other? Or further afield? If this is the first you've learned of such travel, then you need all the expertise you can garner."
Miss Adler held her gaze for a long silence, but Mary glared back with all her strength. At last the woman nodded and turned to the officer. "Take me to Lestrade.”
---
After Miss Adler had left her, Mary was collected and taken upstairs to be callously questioned by Donovan - the African woman with the uncultured accent, man’s trousers and an unfeminine pout. She seemed convinced that Mary was involved in the disappearance of Mr Sherlock Holmes. The local Holmes, anyway. The photograph she waved under Mary’s nose was of a clean-shaven, white-skinned fellow who Mary had never met. He bore not the slightest resemblance to the hellion who had been John’s first love (Mary was no fool - she had never wanted to usurp Mr Holmes, especially now he was just a memory that John seemed to grow more fond of with time). But Miss Adler seemed to have hinted at some larger mystery; this place was not just a new country, but a new version of her own London. This narrow-eyed creature could be Sherlock Holmes, but not as Mary knew him.
Though on the recording, John had been speaking to a living version of Mary’s local Sherlock. What miracle was that? Was the original rascal alive, or was there a third variety flitting around? For a moment Mary hoped it was the latter, and then felt intensely guilty. No matter his eccentricities, Holmes had been a good man and she wouldn’t wish death on him.
At first she had tried to sit quietly and answer Donovan’s questions with the least amount of confusion, but she had stopped repressing her curiosity soon enough. It was too amusing to aggravate the look on the detective’s face by asking for a definition of every unfamiliar word and playing with the lamp switch as if she’d never seen it before (there had been incandescent bulbs at John and Mary’s favourite theatre for almost five years now). After ten minutes, a constable stuck his head into the room and told Donovan that Lestrade wanted an ‘update’. Mary presumed that meant tidings on new information, and knew Donovan would have nothing helpful to report. She smiled pleasantly as the fuming detective locked her into the interrogation room.
When she returned, Mary wasn’t taken back to the cell, but to a windowless waiting room with more struggling plants in pots and a small, angry family berating a young man who must have been just released from custody. Miss Adler sat on the hard chairs beside the door, but stood up when she saw Mary.
“You look like you’ve been having fun,” she said dryly, glancing over at Sergeant Donovan. Mary couldn’t repress a giggle.
“Are they letting me go?”
“Lestrade says you’re not to leave town. Of course, he didn’t say anything about vacating this century,” Miss Adler checked her purse, smoothed her coat and headed for the door. As she reached for the handle she was forced to step backwards as it swung open.
A sharp-nosed man in a perfect suit strode in. Though the style of the outfit wasn’t quite what Mary was familiar with, he looked in the vicinity of the men she normally interacted with at home; the controlled stiffness of his stance, the umbrella hooked over one arm, the patient disdain in his expression as he took in the room with one quick look.
“Miss Adler,” he nodded at the woman and turned to Mary, “And Mrs Watson.”
“And you’re Mycroft,” Mary said, her voice rising with delight. “I presume.” She wasn't sure how she knew - she hadn't even known there was a Mycroft homes in this world - but the haughtiness made it so patently obvious.
One of the man’s eyes twitched by the tiniest margin, and his closed lips were dragged into an unfathomable smile. After a moment of consideration he grasped Mary’s outstretched hand and squeezed it. “You’re a sharp one.”
“A nuptial necessity,” Mary sighed. “What can we do for you-?”
She was interrupted by Miss Adler, who had suddenly stepped in to block her from Mycroft’s reach, “I’m afraid we were just leaving, Mr Holmes. Would you step aside, or do I have to manhandle you?”
“Miss Adler,” any pretence of a smile vanished from Mycroft’s face, and he leaned forward on his umbrella, quite deliberately not getting out of the way. “Glad to see you got things, ahem, cleared up with Lestrade.”
“I knew it,” the woman stretched her neck out, teeth bared as if she longed to sink them into Mycroft’s cheek. “It was you who called the police, you puppeteer. I might have caught up with the kidnappers otherwise. I might have stopped them.”
“And here I heard you were found handcuffed to a bed.”
“I had that under control.”
“I assure you, you did not,” Mycroft drew back with a sneer as if Miss Adler’s vitriol was physically splattering on his face. “These people are not controllable, my dear girl. They are not… seducible. You have no power over them.”
“We’re not all impotent outside our personal domains,” Miss Adler narrowed her eyes. “Why did you tell Lestrade I was working for them?”
Mycroft brushed a bit of imaginary lint off his sleeve as if the conversation was boring him. “You slip back into London and three days later my brother walks off the radar. Hardly a complicated induction.”
“You got it backwards,” Miss Adler stuck her elbow out and Mary realised the woman wanted her to hold onto it, the way Mary hung off John’s elbow if the pavements were particularly busy. She did so and immediately felt silly, but it seemed impolite to let go. “They struck now because I was in London. They had to be quick because there's someone else on their tail, some sort of inter-dimensional police agent - he was the one who applied the handcuffs, if you must know, when I tried to get him to warm up to me. This was an in-and-out job, I was their third target and if I had gone after them I might have caught them up. Now their… their windows, their portals, whatever… are probably closed.”
“Do you think I’d be here if they were?” Mycroft countered.
Miss Adler smiled. “Thank you. That’s all I needed to know.”
Like a snake sliding through the undergrowth, she swerved around Mycroft’s figure with Mary dragging in her wake. Mary looked back at Mycroft, but the man didn’t watch them go. There was a hard set to his shoulders.
Outside in the flurry and noise of the strange London, Mary tried to slow her down. “What are we going to do?” she cried. “Mycroft - he knows about how I got here - about how John was stolen-“
“I know one of his scientists. Well, I know what she likes. From what I've heard, their scans can only broadly detect the energy signature the windows create,” Miss Adler hummed, not looking at her.
“But Mycroft may have servants, or soldiers, men who can help-“
“These people walk between worlds, Mrs Watson. They will not be susceptible to bullets or blackmail or international diplomatic wrangling. Mycroft’s no use to us.”
“No use? Are women in the future so hateful that they refuse a man’s help no matter how pressing their need?”
She found herself jerked to a halt and saw Miss Adler shift towards her. Before Mary knew what was happening, there was a sharp sting against her check and her head was knocked sideways, just on the verge of wrenching her neck. She gave a startled squeak and put her hand to her face.
“Mmm, you pink very prettily,” the woman purred at her, cocking her head to capture Mary’s shocked gaze.
“You slapped me!” Mary gasped.
“There’s no time for gentler lessons,” Miss Adler replied. “And you’re a fast learner, I know you can keep up. Now, are you going to help me, or would you rather go back to Mycroft and be put in a curtained room somewhere for your own protection?”
Mary almost refused both offers. The temptation to storm off, to find the window in the alleyway on her own and go home to the real London was incredibly powerful. But then what? What could she do alone? What if the window was closed?
Miss Adler was looking at her with an expression of complete confidence. It wasn’t condescending, but nor was it any patient. It said simply, your choice. Mary straightened up and took her hand away from her cheek. She noticed suddenly that she was almost half a head taller than Irene Adler. How odd that she hadn’t seen that until now.
“With you, please,” she said coolly. “But if you want to lay another hand on me, I warn you that my husband takes my safety very seriously,” she let contempt flicker in Miss Adler’s eyes before she elaborated. “He insisted I learn to box, wrestle and handle any type of blade I can lay my hands on. And as you say, I am a fast learner.”
Miss Adler’s red mouth widened into a cat’s smirk. “I’m starting to envy him, he seems to get the good ones in every universe. Shall we? My car’s waiting.”
That was the name of the vehicles that were everywhere, sleek descendents of the experimental automobiles John messed about with on occasion. Very well. Mary steeled herself for a nothing nauseatingly fast drive through the streets as she clung to Miss Adler’s elbow. The woman gave a huff of laughter and pointed down the street. “There. Kate’s waiting for us, can you see her?”
“Yes, I see her…” Mary frowned. She felt suddenly on edge. Her ears were ringing and she could smell hot iron. She raised her head. “Something’s wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
The smell was far stronger than it had been on Moorgate. Mary clutched tighter at Miss Adler’s elbow, and the woman looked at her sharply. “Mrs Watson, tell me what you see.”
The air pressure swelled and pressed in so quickly that they both cried out and put their hands to their heads as their eardrums were pressed to the limit. There was a chord in the air, resonating in and out of harmony for a brutally loud half-second and then fading. It was replaced by the screeches of brakes and crunches and terrified shrieks. Mary wasn’t even aware she had closed her eyes until she opened them again.
The dark grey vehicle was gone, as was the blonde Kate standing by its door. In fact, all the cars at the other end of the street were gone. And the black road, and the garish billboards with their half-naked girls holding bottles of coloured cordials - Mary saw instead familiar smoke stacks and a pair of horses rearing up to spill their trailing carriage all over the road, and buildings that were more brick than glass, and women in proper ankle-length skirts gasping and swooning into the arms of men in hats and decent moustaches-
Yet to her left and right and behind them, the street was just as it had been, and in the distance the sky was still the strange, massive towers of the future London. Mary swivelled her gaze back and forth, blinking at the place where bitumen became cobblestones. She felt bile rise in her throat at the sight of a dog’s head and front legs twitching on the ground, sliced neatly in half along the axis where the two centuries had collided. The sparking rear-end of a car had scraped to a halt along the cobbles, its cabin and driver no long attached. A woman in a bonnet - it might even have been the same governess who had passed Mary earlier in the day, before everything had gone mad - was standing at the edge of the divide, screaming the name of a child who must have been two steps ahead of her and was now more than a hundred years behind. Mary thought, Thank God they weren’t holding hands.
She felt Miss Adler shaking her roughly out of her dizziness and finally glanced down at the other woman. Her face beneath the elegant make-up was pale, but her expression had stayed sharp.
“Come back to earth, Mrs Watson,” she was saying, though thankfully she hadn’t gone so far as to slap Mary again. “Come on. We have to find the criminals who took your husband, you understand?”
“They’ve done this,” Mary breathed. “They will have the machines to fix it. Won’t they?”
Miss Adler didn’t answer, her jaws locked together. She grabbed Mary’s hand, glanced back at the growing panic once, and then pulled her back the way they’d come.
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