Sussex, 1991

By Andrea Johnson

Some women preserve love letters; my mother preserved objects that must have reminded her of my father.

Two months after my mother's death, I did my best to organize the flotsam and jetsam of her life into treasures to keep, items that ought to be thrown away, and those honorable relics that should be donated to libraries and universities and museums in memory of a long and useful life.

It was proving harder than I expected to dismantle the Sussex cottage where I spent my childhood. Here I sat in the attic storage room, surrounded by the memorabilia of my childhood and my brother's, all out in the open. This old traveling trunk, however, had been hidden away in a corner. When I opened it, it too was filled with cardboard boxes and memories. Others would classify much of it as junk, but I knew much better.

That thick two-inch bolt rusted onto its nut, stuck to the corner of the wooden puzzle box, had once masqueraded as a white king in my parents' chess game. Its predecessor had rolled overboard during their long, slow cruise to the Middle East in December of 1918.

What strange paths fate took.

If my mother had chosen Ravenna instead of Palestine, my own life might have taken a very different path. But Yisroel it was she desired, and there it was my parents met and made blood brothers of Ali and Mahmoud - Alistair Hughenfort and his cousin, Lord Marsh, he of the intense dark eyes, stubborn chin and banked fires.

The one man, after a certain amount of teasing and testiness, was to became my tutor in stealthy movements through secret passageways, partner and protector in adversity and adviser in love. The other was my grandfather-in-law, though he is recorded in Debrett's as a great-uncle. He died a hero during World War II and I knew him largely through my parents' and Ali's stories and photographs. My husband, they said, was very like him.

I sat on my heels, examining the artifacts of my parents' travels across four continents and more than 30 years of marriage.

Here was one carved ivory chopstick - had my mother perhaps used this to arrange her long hair at the costume ball they had attended during their 1924 voyage to India? A man's emerald stickpin I recognized immediately as belonging to my father. He had worn it often when dressed in evening attire.

In another cardboard box, labeled "Irene," I found a magnificent emerald necklace, suitable for a king's courtesan. If they belonged to the woman I thought they belonged to, that was indeed what she had been.

My maternal grandmother Judith had also worn an emerald necklace. That necklace was stored in a safe secreted behind a Renoir at Justice Hall, awaiting the day I would present them to my beloved granddaughter. Irene's emeralds had been relegated, with that combination of respect and arrogant disdain that was so typical of my mother, to a dusty jewelry box in an old attic.

She had existed, so her artifacts had been preserved; she had been supplanted, so her artifacts had been nearly forgotten.

After 1915, my mother had been "the woman."

I chuckled and set the jewelry box and Irene Adler Norton aside.

The coin with the hole drilled through it, heavily worn on one side and scratched with the name "Ian" on the other, I handled with more reverence. My father had worn it on his watch for decades, fingering the coin like worry beads. It was years after my father's death that my mother finally told me about Ian Norton, the son my father couldn't save.

Irene Adler Norton left my father while pregnant and raised their son unaware of his blood or his origins. The confused young man had grown up and done his duty in the Great War and, like so many of that Lost Generation, had numbed the pain of those mad memories with cocaine and heroin. When Ian went off on a month-long binge in Prague, Irene came to my father and asked him to help their son.

My father did his best. He found Ian in an opium den and dragged him away. As my mother recalled, he tried brute force, gentle persuasion, logic, charm, vigorous physical exercise and endless nonsensical monologues on arcane topics ranging from the differences between 300 types of tobacco and the true history of Stonehenge to wrest Ian from the bosom of his addiction.

"He tried to fit more than 25 years of fatherhood into that week," my mother said, bitterly. "But Ian had a hollow in his heart that nothing could fill - thanks to Irene."

In the end, it was all for naught. Ian, my father's lovely lost son, the half brother I never knew, ended his sad life in an alley with a bullet to his head.

As a reminder and a reproach Ian's mother left Sherlock Holmes the "lucky" coin their son had worn on a chain round his neck; a photograph of a dark, nervous-looking young man in a World War I uniform; and the emeralds she had worn to the theater the night they had conceived their son.

I looked long and hard at the photo of the young man, wondering if I should find him familiar. There were resemblances, certainly, in those sharp, ascetic features to my father, to my own brother.

My brother Jack, closely guarded and gently sardonic, was cautious of entanglements until he fell headlong in love with a Russian violinist 30 years his junior.

"Like father, like son," my mother had said with a dry chuckle.

My brother and his Olga honored the memory of both his father and half-brother by calling their first-born son, born the year before, Ian. My mother had traveled to New York City ten months before to see this latest grandson.

Mother told me later how she had felt holding Ian Sherlock Mycroft Holmes, how she had inspected the long, sensitive fingers, the long, scrawny body, the tuft of dark hair on his head, and gazed into eyes that were, unlike those of most babies, gray and focused on her from the start.

Later, they took her to the opera, which Jack and Olga loved and which my mother merely pretended to enjoy. But their 7-year-old daughter Marina, a lovely gray-eyed child with waist-length auburn hair and her mother's round Slavic face, sat rapt beside her 90-year-old grandmother, so transported by Tristan and Isolde that she nearly forgot to breathe.

"It's a little like a treasure hunt," my mother explained when I visited her at the Sussex cottage. "I love you for yourselves of course, but every once in a while I see a piece of him in one of you."

I smiled a little, looking for pieces of myself in the photograph of the first Ian. Resemblances were there, I suppose, but, most of all, he reminded me of the boy I had kissed in 1943 and sent off to war.

Hector, the postman's son, had been killed in action during his first week in the Pacific. Had Hector been that young, that achingly fresh and innocent? Yes, of course, he had - barely 18. Wars were plotted by grandfathers and fought by teenage boys convinced of their own immortality.

"He never forgot you, Ian," I whispered, tracing the photo with a gentle finger. "And neither will we."

I put the emeralds, and the coin, and the photos back in their cardboard box and closed the lid.

In another box were three odd stones - "the paltry stones of my defense," my mother had grandly labeled them. She had been imprisoned for more than a week in a cellar when she was 21, forcibly injected with heroin, and convinced that her life would come to an end before it really began. In that cellar she had remembered Ian, she said, and how she had used him to hurt my father one evening when they stayed in a bolthole with a Vernet on the wall. It had been unforgivably wicked, she said, to use Ian to keep an old hound off the scent of her attraction to him. In that cellar she also remembered my father, his bravery in defeating his own addictions, his generosity in waiting for a gawky half-American girl child to grow into womanhood, and she acknowledged at last her desire to find completion within his arms.

When at last he came for her my mother thought it was her death approaching. In a panic, she gathered her pebbles to mount her last defense. But then Holmes, and not her captor, emerged from the shadows. It was in that moment, she said, that her inner defenses as well as her outer began to crumble entirely away.

"I had loved your father since the day I met him," she told me. "And I will love him until the day I die."

"How romantic," I sighed (I was very young when she told me the story, after all.)

"Oh, no," my mother said. "It was no dime novel romance. He was a part of me, you see."

"I don't care if you're embarrassed," I said stubbornly. "It's far more romantic than Gone With the Wind. You should write it down, Mother."

A gaggle of girlfriends and I had sighed over this movie extravaganza at a theater the Saturday before, much to my father's disgust.

At first my mother looked exasperated with my adolescent romanticism - but then her face softened and her eyes developed a far-away expression.

"You know, your father was rather dashing," she said with a slight smile.

Fifty years later I cradled her paltry stones in the palm of my hand, stroking my thumb over their rough edges.

My dashing father was a hard act for any man to follow, but my own husband did his best.

Appropriately enough, the seventh Duke of Beauville asked me to marry him in the land of my ancestors, when both of us were grimy with the dirt of a week-long trek through the desert and were wearing the disguise of Bedouin Arabs.

Our mission for the Foreign Office had been a long and fruitful one - too long, I fear, to tell here, though it led to the establishment of the country of Israel.

But, if ever I could have forgotten Jerusalem, my Lord Duke made it completely impossible when he said, amid the aftermath of a street riot:

"Whaddaya say, kid? Now that we've saved the world, will you come away with me and be my love?"

"You're such a complete ham, Gabe," I said, certain he was teasing.

But then he stepped forward, wrapped his arms around me like a vice, and his mouth came down on mine like a revelation.

The world he claimed to have just saved literally spun beneath my feet.

"Marry me, Judy," he whispered when we came up for air, his wicked green eyes shining for once with sincerity instead of deviltry. "I do adore you so."

Six weeks later, I did. Like my parents' union, it may not have been a marriage of conventional bliss, but it has never been dull.

Someday, when I am in my dotage, I might find time to recount our investigations into the actions of nefarious London criminals, our summer collaboration with our friends Lord Peter and Harriet Wimsey, and various eventful missions for the Foreign Office. Perhaps I might even find time to write the tale of the Haunted Stradivarius, the one and only mystery my brother Jack solved on his own.

But first, I thought, what duty do I owe to my parents?

I looked thoughtfully at the collection of manuscripts that sat at the bottom of the open traveling trunk. My mother always swore she would not usurp Dr. Watson's role as my father's biographer but at some point she must have changed her mind. I counted at least 15 volumes of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell.

I was lost in thought when I heard the clomping of boots on the creaky floorboards. Ah. My son and granddaughter had grown impatient with their assignments. I pushed my glasses up my nose, stacked the manuscripts in a neat pile, in chronological order, and opened the first to its opening page.

My mother's tight, cramped handwriting was difficult to read, but I deciphered it with the ease of long practice.

"I think Gram saved every arcane journal published during the last 60 years," my son and firstborn announced as he entered the room. "And filed them under a system only she understood. I know you wanted to make a grand donation in her name to the Bodleian, Mum..."

"Actually, I think I may have another idea for some of the family heirlooms, Gabriel," I told him.

Gabriel's a dear boy, if somewhat phlegmatic. His brother Michael is far more adventurous.

I watched with amusement as Lord Gabriel, one day to be the eighth Duke of Beauville, sneezed and stirred up a cloud of dust. He suffered from allergies. I suppose it was not kind of me to require his assistance in organizing his late grandmother's library.

"But not all of them," his daughter said anxiously as she followed her pater into the dusty storage room. "You won't give them all away, will you, Grandmama? I should like to work on her unpublished monograph on the Letter of Mary when I'm worthy of it, of course. Gram made it all sound so fascinating."

I regarded her with proud and possessive eyes. This grandchild, all arms and legs and shy earnestness, a 15-year-old with my father's gray eyes and my mother's strawberry blonde hair and passion for theology, was my great joy these days.

She'd been named Amira, an uncharacteristically sentimental nod of Gabriel's towards my parents' sojourn in Palestine. So far the Hon. Amira Mary Judith Hughenfort seemed to be living up to the name.

My Amira had both brains and spirit, with an emphasis on the brains. With a little more seasoning, and some time out from under her father's thumb, I knew she'd be a woman to be reckoned with.

"It may not be authentic after all, Amira," my son cautioned. "Despite what Gram said."

"I think it is," Amira retorted. "Why shouldn't a woman have been one of the Apostles? She was a great Jewish leader."

I smiled and held up a hand.

"And one day maybe you'll prove it," I assured her. "Your gram would have wanted you to be its keeper. Don't worry, Amira, darling. The Letter of Mary is not destined for the Bodleian."

"Thank you, dearest Grandmama," Amira said, beaming at me. For a moment, I caught my breath. Her smile was exactly like my mother's.

"No, thank you, darling," I said, grateful for the gentle reminder that the generations would continue, despite the inevitability of time's passing and the aging of the body.

"Ah, Mother," Gabriel said gently, having caught some trace of sadness in my eyes. "I know it's hard for you."

"She was past ninety, but I don't think one is ever ready to lose one's mother," I said quietly.

"I know. I'll miss her too. But she had a long, full life, didn't she? And maybe now she's with your father."

"Maybe so," I said.

I took a deep breath and looked down at the manuscript.

"What do you have there?" Gabriel asked, gesturing towards the manuscripts.

"A legacy, perhaps," I said mysteriously.

I remembered a promising mystery writer I had heard read her manuscript at a writer's conference in America. Ms. King was, I had been interested to learn, a very distant cousin of my mother's. I was no mystery writer, but perhaps these manuscripts could be turned by her into entertaining novels that would honor my parents' long and extraordinary partnership and teach my children and grandchildren something of who they were. But how would I get her to write about them instead of her very interesting lesbian detective?

Telling her who I was seemed too obvious. I must find something to pique her interest, something to set her on fire with a passion for detection...

I would think very carefully on the matter. For now, it was time to celebrate instead of mourn.

"Come here, granddaughter," I said, gesturing towards Amira. "Sit beside me."

I watched her face come alive with intelligence and curiosity as I read the opening paragraphs.

"I will tell you the story of a beekeeper's apprentice. It started one day in 1915, at the start of the first world war. Here is how she began: 'I was fifteen years old when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him...'"