The Language of Bees Read online

  Suddenly, the odour of honey was heavy in the air as Holmes began to prise up the frames of the super. Each was laden with dark, neatly sealed hexagons of comb, representing hundreds of millions of trips flown to and from the hive from nectar-bearing flowers. Abandoned now, with not a bee in sight.

  More than that, we could not see, although I knew that come morning, Holmes would be out here again, hunting for a clue to the hive's catastrophe. Now, he allowed the frames to fall back into place, and replaced the top.

  As I have said, I care not overmuch for Apis mellifera, but even I held a moment of silent mourning over the desolate rectangular box.

  “Dratted creatures,” Holmes grumbled.

  I had to laugh as I jumped down from my perch. “Oh, Holmes, admit it: You relish the mystery.”

  “I wonder if I can get a message to Miranker this evening?” he mused. “He might be able to come at first light.” He shot the white box an irked glance, then turned back across the Downs towards home. I fell in beside him, grateful that the moody silence between us had loosed its hold a degree.

  “Was that who wrote you the letter?” The signature had been less than precise.

  “Glen Miranker, yes. He retired and moved here last summer. He's a valuable resource.”

  To tell the truth, I'd never been able to pin down why Holmes found bees so fascinating. Whenever I'd asked, he would say only that they had much to teach him. About what, other than a flagellant's acceptance of occasional pain and perpetual frustration, I did not know.

  As we walked, he mused about bees—bees, with the sub-topic of death. Alexander the Great's honey-filled coffin, preserving the conqueror's body during the long journey back to Alexandria. The honey rituals of The Iliad and The Rig Veda. The Greek belief that bees communicated with the beings of the underworld. The use of honey in treating suppurating wounds and skin ulcers. An ancient folk custom called “telling the bees,” when a dead beekeeper's family whispered to the hives of their master's death. The infamous poison honey that decimated Xenophon's army-After a mile of this, I'd had enough of the macabre aspects of the golden substance, and decided to throw him a distraction. “I wonder if Brother Adam might not have some suggestion as to your hive?”

  The reminder of the dotty German beekeeper of Dartmoor's Buckfast Abbey cheered Holmes somewhat, and we left behind the shadow-filled hive to speak of easier things. When we reached the walled orchard adjoining the house, the sun was settling itself against the horizon, a relief to our dazzled eyes. The hives here were reassuringly loud as a thousand wings laboured to expel the day's heat and moisture, taking the hoarded nectar a step closer to the consistency of honey.

  I watched Holmes make a circuit of the boxes, bending an ear to each one before moving on. How many times over the years had I seen him do that?

  The first time was on the day we had met. Holmes and I first en-countered each other in the spring of 1915, when I was a raw, bitterly unhappy adolescent and he a frustrated, ageing detective with little aim in life. From this unlikely pairing had sprung an instant communication of kindred spirits. He brought me here that same day, making the rounds of his bees before settling me on the stone terrace and offering me a glass of honey wine. Offering, too, the precious gift of friendship.

  Nine years later, I was a different person, and yet recent events in California had brought an uncomfortable resurgence of that prickly and uncertain younger self.

  Time, I told myself: healing takes time.

  When he returned to where I was standing, I took a breath and said, “Holmes, we don't have to remain in Sussex, if you would rather be elsewhere.”

  He lifted his chin to study the colours beginning to paint the sky. “Where would I rather be?” he said, but to my relief, there was no sharpness in his question, no bitter edge.

  “I don't know. But simply because you have chosen to live here for the past twenty years doesn't require that we stay.”

  After a minute, I felt more than saw him nod.

  Communication is such a complex mechanism, I reflected as we rounded the low terrace wall: A statement that, at another time or in a different intonation, would have set alight his smouldering ill temper had instead magically restored companionship. I was smiling as my feet sought out the steps—then I nearly toppled down them backwards after walking smack into Holmes.

  He had stopped dead, staring at the figure that stood in the centre of our terrace, half-illuminated by the setting sun.

  A tall, thin man in his thirties with a trimmed beard and long, unruly hair, dressed in worn corduroy trousers and a shapeless canvas jacket over a linen shirt and bright orange cravat: a Bohemian. I might have imagined a faint aroma of turpentine, but the colour beneath the fingernails playing along the gaudy silk defined him as a painter rather than one of Bohemia's poets, playwrights, or musicians. The ring on his finger, heavy worked gold, looked positively incongruous. I felt a spasm of fury, that whatever this stranger wanted of us couldn't have waited until morning. He didn't even look like a client-why on earth had Lulu let him in?

  I stepped up beside Holmes and prepared to blast this importunate artist off our terrace and, with luck, out of our lives. But as I cast a rueful glance at the man by my side, the expression on his face made my words die unsaid: a sudden bloom of wonder mingled with apprehension—unlikely on any face, extraordinary on his. My head whipped back to the source of this emotion, looking for what Holmes had seen that I had not.

  Unlike many tall men—and this one was a fraction taller even than Holmes—the young man did not slump, and although his hands betrayed a degree of uncertainty, the set of his head and the resolute manner with which he met Holmes' gaze made one aware of the fierce intelligence in those grey eyes, and a degree of humour. One might even—

  The shock of recognition knocked me breathless. I looked quickly down at the familiar shape of those fingers, then peered more closely at his features. If one peeled away all that hair and erased five years, two stone, and the bruise and scratch along the left temple …

  I knew him. Rather, I had met him, although I should not have recognised him without Holmes' reaction to guide me. Five years earlier, the face before us had possessed a delicate, almost feminine beauty; with the beard, the weight, and the self-assurance, he could play a stage Lucifer.

  The amusement grew on his features, until it began to look almost like triumph. The lips parted, and when he spoke, the timbre in his voice reminded one that his mother had been a famous contralto.

  “Hello, Father,” he said.

  First Birth (3): The boy's mother breathed her last

  when the full moon lay open in the sky, a round and

  luminous door to eternity.

  Testimony, I:1

  I MET DAMIAN ADLER ON THE SAME DAY HIS FATHER did, in August 1919. Damian was twenty-four then, I was nineteen, and Holmes at fifty-eight had only discovered a few days before that he was a father. It was not a happy meeting. At the time, none of us were happy people. None of us were whole people.

  Apart from it bringing peace to the world at last, 1919 was not a year one would like to repeat. Its opening had found us in ignominious flight from an unknown and diabolically cunning enemy—we told ourselves we were merely regrouping, but we knew it was a rout. Mycroft, who held some unnamed and powerful position in the shadier recesses of His Majesty's Government, had offered us a choice of retreats in which to catch our breath. For reasons I did not understand, Holmes gave the choice over to me. I chose Palestine. Within the month, he was taken prisoner and tortured to the very edge of breaking. On our return to England, Holmes' body was whole, but his spirit, and our bond, had been badly trampled.

  When I looked at him that spring, all I could see was that my choice had put that haunted look into his eyes.

  Then at the end of May, we finally met our enemy, and prevailed, but at the cost of a bullet through my shoulder and the blood of a woman I had loved on my hands.

  When Holmes looked at me that
summer, all he could see was that his past had put that drawn look of pain and sleepless nights on my face.

  Thus, that August of 1919 found the two of us wounded, burdened by guilt, short-tempered, and—despite living under the same roof while my arm recovered—scarcely able to meet each other's eyes or bear the other's company. Certainly, we both knew that the intricate relationship we had constructed before our January flight from England lay in pieces at our feet; neither of us seemed to know how to build another.

  Into this tense and volatile situation fell the revelation that Holmes had a son.

  Mycroft had known, of course. Holmes might keep his finger on the pulse of every crime in London, but his brother's touch went far beyond England's shores. Mycroft had known for years, but he had let slip not a hint, until the day the young man was arrested for murder.

  Two unrelated letters reached us towards the end of July 1919. The first was for Holmes; I did not see it arrive. The second followed a few days later, addressed to me, written by a child we had rescued the previous year. The simple affection and praise in her laboriously shaped words reduced me, at long last, to the catharsis of tears.

  A door that had been tight shut opened, just a crack; Holmes did not hesitate.

  “I need to go to France and Italy for six weeks,” he told me. Then, before I could slam the door shut again, he added, “Would you care to come with me?”

  Air seemed to reach my lungs for the first time in weeks. I looked at him, and saw that, in spite of everything, in Holmes' mind our partnership remained.

  Later that evening, sitting on the terrace while the darkness fell, I had asked him when we were to leave.

  “First thing in the morning,” he replied.

  “What?” I stood up, as if to go pack instantaneously, then winced and sat down again, rubbing my shoulder beneath its sling. “Why the rush?”

  “Mycroft always needs things done yesterday,” he said. Far too casually.

  “This is another job for Mycroft?”

  “More or less.”

  By this time, my antennae were quivering. An off-hand attitude invariably meant that Holmes was concealing something of which I would disapprove. However, as I watched him reach for the coffee pot to refill a near-full cup, it seemed to me his discomfort had a deeper source than a need to manipulate me into cooperation. He looked genuinely troubled.

  A year before, I would have pressed and chivvied him until he gave it up, but after the events of recent months, I was not so eager to beat my mentor-turned-partner into submission. He would tell me in his good time.

  “I'll write Patrick a note, to let him know I'm away,” I said. Holmes hid his surprise well, simply nodding, but I could feel his eyes on me as I went into the house.

  The next day, the train had been crowded with summer merrymakers; the boat across the Channel was so heavy-laden it wallowed; the train to Paris contained approximately half the population of Belgium—none of whom were stopping in Paris. No-one in his right mind stopped in Paris in August.

  With this constant presence of witnesses, it wasn't until we stood in the hallway of our Paris hotel that Holmes slid his hand into his inner pocket and took out the envelope that had been teasing his fingers all day.

  “Read this,” he said abruptly, thrusting it at me. “I shall be in my room.” He crossed the corridor and shut his door. I waited for the boy to deposit my cases and receive my coin, then closed my own.

  I laid the letter on the desk, eyeing it as I unpinned my hat and stripped off my gloves. Mycroft's handwriting, the unadorned copperplate he used for solemn business. No postal franking, which meant that it had been delivered by messenger. The envelope had seen a lot of handling. I had an odd image of Holmes, taking it out of his pocket and reading it again and again.

  I sat down on the hard little chair before the decorative, unusable French desk, and unfolded the letter. It bore a date six days before—the day, I suddenly realised, that he had disappeared for many hours, to return even more preoccupied than usual.

  Dear Brother,

  In the autumn of 1894, half a year after you made your dramatic return to the London scene, I received a visit from a French gentleman whom I had met, briefly, some years before. His purpose was to urge me to travel to a village named Ste Chapelle, thirty miles south of Paris. As you well know, I do not travel, and told the man as much. He, however, put before me certain information that convinced me such a trip was necessary.

  At the other end of the journey was an American lady of your acquaintance, whose name I shall not put into writing, but with whom, as you had already informed me, you had a liaison. You were led to believe that she tired of your presence after some months, that she resolved to return alone to her native country.

  In fact, she did not return to the United States. Although she had become a British citizen after she married Godfrey Norton, after your departure, she moved to the village near Paris. There she bore a child.

  It was to Ste Chapelle that I went, there to meet her and the infant. A boy. She named him Damian, appending her own maiden surname. He appeared in lusty good health. Certainly, he sounded so.

  The lady wished me to know of the child, on the chance that something happened to her. She also swore me to a promise that you were not to be told while she was alive, and thereafter not until such time as I deemed it necessary. Her concern was that you not be, to use her word, distracted.

  The price of my agreement was that she accept a monthly stipend, that the boy might be raised without financial hardship. Reluctantly, she accepted.

  I came near to telling you in 1912, when she died, but at the time you were involved in the Mattison case, and that was followed by the Singh affair, and by the time that was over, you were in America preparing a case against Von Bork and his spy ring. There seemed no time when you were immune from distraction.

  I did keep a close eye on the young man following his mother's death. He was then eighteen, attending university in Paris. In 1914 he joined the French forces—he being more French than American—and served honourably, starting as a junior officer and ending up, in the autumn of 1917, a captain.

  He was wounded in January 1918, blown up in a barrage. He received a head wound and a cracked pelvis, spent a week unconscious, and was eventually invalided out.

  Unfortunately, he did not manage to get free of the drugs used to control the pain. Unfortunately, he fell into hard ways, and among evil people. And now, the reason I am forced to write to you in this manner: He has been arrested for murder.

  Stark details, and with your current responsibilities, no way to soften this series of blows. I have begun enquiries into the case against him, but as yet do not know the details—as we both know, the evidence may be so grossly inadequate, all he requires is legal support; on the other hand, it may prove so strong that neither of us can help him. I have arranged for one of the better criminal avocats to assume his case, but in any event, it is no longer my place to stand between you.

  I hope you will forgive me, and her, for keeping Damian from you. By all accounts he was a promising young man before the War, and before the scourge of drugs befell him. I should mention that, to go by his photograph, there is little reason to deny that he is yours.

  Tell me what I can do to assist you. He is being held in the gaol in Ste Chapelle, the town where he was born, thirty miles to the east of Paris.

  If you speak to him, please convey an uncle's best wishes.

  Mycroft

  P.S. I forgot to say: Damian is an artist, a painter. Art in the blood …

  First Birth (4): The meteorite was the boy's first

  plaything, his constant companion, as it remains to

  this day, reshaped and resubmitted to the fires to

  better suit his needs.

  Testimony, I:1

  DISTRACTED. THAT WAS A HELL OF A WORD.

  And why had Holmes waited nearly a week before setting off for France? I turned back to where Mycroft had written “
with your current responsibilities.” Did this mean me? Was it I that had kept Holmes from flying to the aid of his son?

  It took me some time to work up the nerve to cross the hallway. When I did, I found my friend and teacher at the open window, smoking and staring down at the darkening streets. Not a breath stirred. I sat on the hard little chair before his useless, ornate desk, and arranged the letter in the centre of its gilt surface.

  “Well,” I said. “That must have made you feel… ”

  “Guilt-ridden?” His voice was high, and bitter.

  Guilt, yes. But, to be honest, gratitude as well, that she had not forced him to re-shape his life, his career, around a child. And gratitude would have brought shame, and resentment, and righteous indignation, and anger. Then in the days since the news had reached him, no doubt curiosity and sadness, and a mourning of lost opportunities.

  “It must have made you feel as if you'd been kicked in the stomach.”

  He did not respond. The traffic sounds that had beat at the window when we first arrived were fading, replaced by the voices of pedestrians on their way to theatre or restaurant. It was quiet enough that I heard the faint shift of ice in the silver bucket that had accompanied our arrival.

  At the suggestion, I rose and went to fill a glass with ice, covering it with a generous dose of some amber alcohol from the decanter beside it. I carried it over to Holmes, who just looked at it.

  “Russell, I've known about this for the better part of a week. The time for a good stiff drink is well past.”

  “But I didn't know until now, and I think you can use this better than I.”

  He did not argue with my roundabout logic, simply took my offering. I went back to the chair.

  “This is Irene Adler's son that Mycroft is talking about?” I asked: facts first.