Laurie King: Pirate King: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

“You need some face paint,” I noted. “Did you come up with a distraction?”

“I need more than face paint. I’m the distraction.” She yanked off the voluminous garment, revealing a sight that had the girls strangling mid-song. She whirled around, tassels flying, to wave them back into full voice, although in truth they found it difficult to produce music past the choking laughter in their throats.

“A belly dancer ?” I exclaimed. “Where on earth did you find that … costume?”

“It was in one of the boxes. Mrs Hatley didn’t think it was appropriate for the girls, so we hid it away. Do you think it’s distracting enough?”

The question was, would it be so universally distracting that it would turn every man over the wall to stone, prisoners and guards alike? “Well, if we put you at one end of the wall, I can go across at the other end and simply tip them on their faces. Maude?” I called. “I hope you have a good supply of paint.”

I distributed the various scarves, cloths, and towels to the girls whose garments lacked hoods, demonstrating how they could be wrapped. I hid Annie’s platinum locks under the folds of a brightly embroidered table-runner, then stood back to study the result. I could only hope it didn’t give any of our men a heart attack.

I motioned the girls to come together around me, and when the song came to an end, I quickly explained, “Annie’s going to catch the guards’ attention so our men can overcome them and get their weapons. Once the men are free, they’ll come here and we’ll all go down together and make our way to the nearest city gate. We will have guns at the beginning and at the end of the group, so you need to stick together between them. If there’s any shooting, jump into the nearest doorway and get as small as you can.

“Ready?”

They weren’t, of course – what normal person considers herself ready for a daring armed race through a strange and hostile city? But none of their protests were of any import, so when the next song got under way – the oddly appropriate pirates’ song that begins, With cat-like tread, upon our prey we steal -I waved my hands and glowered at the chorus until they began to chime in, and were soon singing as if their very lives depended on it.

Annie and I took up positions at opposite ends of the dividing wall. We had heaped a table and bench on top of each other, to give her the height to display her … self, while at my end I had another bench, sufficient to help me scramble over. She knelt in place. I looked at her, and nodded.

She stood. The girls were singing their hearts out- the household soundly sleeps -and Annie rose from above the parapet, stretching her arms high, moving to the tempo. She was too thin for a proper belly dancer and had no clue how to mimic the sinuous sway of the original, but somehow I did not imagine that would matter to her audience.

I began to count, and got as far as “two” before the violin descended into a parrot-squawk of discord. I raised my head above the stones, saw nothing but the backs of many heads, and swung myself over.

Holmes recovered first: A heart-beat before my feet hit the rooftop, his hand was swinging the violin hard into the face of an open-mouthed guard. As it made contact, I leapt for the back of another. In an instant the roof was a battlefield tumult of shouts and cries and grunts and bellowed commands and the single blast of a revolver as the pent-up masculine frustrations of twelve British citizens and a French cook exploded on the heads of the four guards.

In thirty seconds it was over. Daniel Marks continued to batter the man at his feet with – oddly – a fringed velvet pillow, but the man’s unconscious sprawl suggested that some more solid implement had gone before.

“Are there other guards?” I demanded.

As if in answer, the door crashed open and a big man came through it, moving fast, shotgun up and ready. Holmes stuck out a foot; our chief constable caught the falling guard with a tea-pot as he went by; Bert delivered the coup de grâce with a flower pot: as neat a piece of choreography as I had seen off the screen.

Except: The shotgun went off as it hit the ground.

And a wail of pain rose up from the women’s side.

I launched myself over the wall, seeing nothing but a scrum of galabiyyas and dish-towels. I hauled away shoulders until I had uncovered the victim, and saw – oh God, I knew who it would be before I got there – Edith, huddled over, one hand plastered against the side of her face.

She was breathing. “Edith, let me see. Is it your eye?” God, I should never forgive myself, if-

Annie enfolded the panicking mother’s hands in hers, and I gently peeled away the child’s bloody hands, expecting a terrible sight.

But an eye looked back at me, stark with alarm but undamaged. And the blood seemed lower. I wiped my sleeve across the young cheek, and went light-headed with relief at the neat straight slice across the top of the cheekbone.

Around me, nineteen females drew simultaneous breaths. “Someone give me a handkerchief,” I requested, and dabbed at the wound with the delicate white scrap. The ooze was already slowing.

“Ooh,” groaned Mrs Nunnally, “my poor baby, look at that, there’s going to be a scar!”

Mrs Hatley tried to assure her that, no, it would heal nicely, but I had seen the flash of hope behind the blood. “No, she’s right,” I said. “That’s almost certain to leave a scar.” The expression on the child’s face was undeniable: pride. I gave the wounded warrior a hand up, and said solemnly, “Yes, you’re going to have a nice handsome scar. People will ask about it for years.”

The men began to spill over the wall. As they came, each was led to the small mountain of clothing we had brought up from below, and each was draped, painted, and covered to give him a semblance of belonging here. The last one over was Bert-the-Constable, holding a familiar Purdy shotgun; Annie grabbed his hand and pulled him to one side for an urgent briefing.

As the trickle of scrambling men slowed, I climbed onto the bench to peer over the wall. Five guards lay trussed and gagged, dragged into a shady patch. Two were conscious and angry, two were half-conscious. One would be lucky to live ’til evening.

I went back to where Annie was handing Bert a cloth and Holmes was making a head-wrap out of a length of curtain. As I pawed through the much-diminished pile of clothing, hoping to find something other than one patched galabiyya the colour of goat dung, Bert’s Cockney voice stated the obvious. “That shot will bring attention. We must go.”

“You two bring up the rear,” Holmes ordered the two agents. When they protested, he simply picked up the shotgun he’d left leaning against the wall and disappeared down the stairway. I dropped the disgusting robe over my head, checking that I could reach through it for my weapons, then turned to this singular assortment of lovely young women and comically ugly men.

I overrode the gabble of conversation with a trio of brief declarative sentences, capped by a pair of imperatives. “We have to hurry. We’ll all go together through the city to the gate. Once we’re outside the walls, the Army will see us and we’ll be safe. If shooting starts, get into a doorway. And don’t say a word to anyone.”

Then I stepped through the doorway before the questions could begin, although I heard Fflytte’s voice behind me, raised in protest that a mere assistant should give the orders, and why were all the women in men’s dress? But Hale shut him up before I had to, and we poured down the stairways to the courtyard. Male exclamations and female explanations rose up at the sight of the boots, the piano, and the two tied guards, but I turned and brutally squelched it.