The Language of Bees Read online

  “Holy Christ, that was cold! Was the geyser working when you bathed?”

  “I looked at the device and decided not to risk an explosion.”

  “Well, save your penny, it doesn't work anyway. Brrr. And shaving-cold water is why I grew a beard in the first place, when I couldn't afford hot water—they sell it in shops, in Shanghai—and I grew tired of savaging my jaw-line with a razor. It looks as if I'll now have a full beard rather than just the trimmings.”

  “One does indeed dread the pull of the blade against cold skin.”

  “I can't see you in a beard.”

  “I have worn one from time to time, when a case suggested it. I cultivated a goatee in America before the War, but the longest I had a full beard was when I travelled in the Himalayas. The sensation of its removal, in an open-air barber's in Delhi with half the street bearing witness, was exquisite.”

  “America, eh? Where did you go?”

  “Chicago, for the most part.”

  “Do you think these bed-clothes have been laundered in the last month?”

  “I should doubt it.”

  “Perhaps I'll sleep on top of them.”

  “The night is warm.”

  “And use my clothes as a pillow.”

  “Head lice can indeed be a nuisance.”

  “You sure you don't want a small night-cap, to help you sleep?”

  “Damian, I—”

  “Yes, yes, you're right. Clear-headed.”

  “Shall I get the lights?”

  “No! Leave them. For a bit. If you don't mind.”

  “As you wish.”

  “So. Did you go to New Jersey? When you were in America?”

  “I passed through on my way from New York, that is all.”

  “I went there once. With Mother. When I was nine.”

  “Which would have been 1903?”

  “That's right. Why?”

  “1903 was the year I left London for Sussex.”

  “And took up beekeeping.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you truly not know?”

  “About you?”

  “About me, about her, about…”

  “Your mother was a remarkably clever woman. Too clever, I fear, for the men in her life. What she told me, I believed.”

  “Wanted to believe.”

  “I did not wish to be sent away. I… was very fond of your mother. She was an extraordinary woman.”

  “She was lonely. A son can only do so much.”

  “I fear she may have been too clever for her own good, as well.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “Not so easy, no.”

  “In any case, good night.”

  “I shall turn off the—”

  “Leave it! One of them, if you don't mind. The small one.”

  “As you like. Good night, Damian.”

  Wrestling with Angels (1): The boy born of the Elements

  went up to the high mountains, and there

  he stood before the waiting Angels and said,

  “Take me, I am yours, do with me as you will.”

  Testimony, I:5

  I WOKE WHEN THE TERRACE GREW LIGHT, GROANING with the aches brought by alcohol compounded by hard stones. Was it Hippocrates who declared that moonlight affected the moistures of the brain, and drove a person mad? Certainly, it did one's body no good.

  I staggered to the kitchen to make strong coffee. At seven o'clock I picked up the telephone and asked to be connected with the Monk's Tun inn.

  “Hello, is that Johanna? Oh, Rebecca, good morning, this is Mary Russell. Could you— What's that? Oh, thank you, it's good to be back. Could I ask you to take a message to Lulu? Tell her she needn't come out today—in fact, not to come out until she hears from me. Oh no, everything is fine, I'd just prefer she not come out for a few days. That's right, Mrs Hudson is due back Saturday, and I'm sure she'll want Lulu's help then. Thanks. Oh, and give my greetings to your aunt.”

  I spent the morning settling into the quiet, amiable house, and finished up the accumulated correspondence. Feeling virtuous, I dropped the letters on the table near the front door and went to don clothing similar to what I had worn the previous afternoon, digging out a small rucksack from the lumber room and tossing into it another impromptu picnic, a few tools, some paper, and a pencil.

  If Holmes was off dealing with one mystery, there was no reason I couldn't turn my mind to the one left behind.

  The empty hive was on a lonely southerly slope in the lee of a stone wall, as remote as any spot on the Downs. On the other side of the wall was the ancient burial mound; in the distance was a branch of the South Downs Way, one of the prehistoric foot-highways that weave across England and Wales. Towards the sea, figures moved along a rise in the ground: striking, how human beings tend to cluster together rather than spread themselves over stretches of emptiness such as this.

  As I quenched my thirst with the bottle of water I had brought, I studied the empty hive. It was typical of those Holmes used, with three stacked segments, the two larger making up the hive body, and a shallower segment on top called the super. All three segments contained sliding frames on which the bees made their comb; when these were full, other supers would be added on top, to satisfy the bees' desire to build upwards. Somewhere between the segments there would be a queen excluder, to segregate the larger queen and her eggs from the comb to be harvested.

  When the bottle was empty, I went down on my knees for a scrutiny of the hive's empty doorway.

  No sign of mice, a common problem with hives. No litter of dead bees in the forecourt of the hive, and Holmes would have mentioned the presence of the destructive wax moth. So far as I knew, the paint was the same used on all the hives, and the construction was of a kind with at least two others. I prised off the top, set aside the tinkling bells, and began to examine the frames. The fragrance was dizzying. Even though I was not particularly enamoured with honey, the temptation to rip into a segment and pop a wad of ambrosia into my mouth was powerful.

  However, I did not want to tempt a neighbouring hive into a raid, introducing bad habits where there were none, so I left the comb whole.

  It took some time to slide up each frame, and some muscle to wrestle aside the sections. I shone my torch around what remained. No moths, no death, just full comb and emptiness, as if the entire hive, queen to drones, had heard the Piper's flute and taken off into the blue. I put down my torch and reached for the bottom section's first frame, to return it to its place.

  “Did you find anything?” enquired a voice.

  I dropped the weighty frame onto my foot, stifled an oath, and swung around to glare at whatever holiday tripper had come to me for his entertainment.

  He was a small, round man, clean-shaven and neatly dressed in worn tweeds and a soft hat. His arms were resting atop the dry wall, his chin propped on his fists. Clearly he had been watching me for some time while I had stood, top over tea-kettle with my head in the box.

  Before I could send him on his way—the public footpath might be nearby, but this was decidedly not on it—he straightened. “Mrs Holmes, I presume?”

  “More or less. Who—”

  “Glen Miranker; at your service.”

  “Ah. The bee man.”

  “As you say. My housekeeper told me that you and your husband had returned. I rather expected to see him out here before this.”

  “He has been called away. But you're right, he came out to look at the hive immediately we got back on Monday evening.”

  “Did he have any thoughts?”

  “Holmes generally does. But in this instance, he didn't share them with me.”

  “Am I right in believing that you are not familiar with the apiarist's art?”

  “Merely an untrained assistant,” I admitted. “However, I thought I might look at the hive and see if anything caught my eye. When we were here Monday, it was nearly dusk, and he only got as far down as the super.”

  I reached for the f
rame again, but as if my words had been an invitation, the man stretched out on the wall and then rolled over it, picking himself up stiffly from the ground and grabbing my torch. I waited as he conducted a close examination of the nooks and crannies, then I resumed sliding the laden frames into place.

  “You have rather a lot of swarm cells here,” he noted.

  “As your letter to Holmes said, they swarmed,” I noted dryly.

  “But I checked the hive less than three weeks ago.”

  I glanced at his aged back, bent over the hive, and wondered how he had managed to unload the boxes by himself. Perhaps he didn't. Perhaps it had been more than three weeks ago.

  When I shifted the boxes, he made no effort to help, confirming my suspicions that his back was not fully up to the task. Instead, he inspected, delivering all the while a lecture on the craft of beekeeping such as even Holmes had not inflicted on me. I heard about varieties of bee and methods of hive construction, chemical analysis of the wax and the nutritional composition of various sources of honey, several theories of communication—Holmes' “subtle emanations”—and how the temper of the hive reflected the personality not only of their queen, but of their keeper.

  “Which is what makes this particular hive so very intriguing,” the man said. By this time I had returned all three sections to their former setting, and he was prone with one cheek on the grass, examining the hive's foundations. I obediently struggled to tip the heavy box off of the ground. “Your husband's bees tend to be eight parts methodical, one part experimental, and one part equally divided between startling innovation and resounding failure.”

  “Er, you mean that his techniques are either innovative or failures?”

  His head came around the side of the hive. “No, I mean the bees themselves. Reflecting his personality, don't you know?”

  “I see.”

  He paused to stare off into the distance; my muscles began to quiver. “I recall him describing how he had introduced a peculiar herb out of the Caucasus Mountains that he'd heard had an invigorating effect on the honey. The bees took to it with great enthusiasm, made an effort to spread that herb's nectar evenly throughout the combs, became disconsolate when the flowers began to fade. Unfortunately, as it turned out, the taste of the honey itself was absolutely revolting. Rendered the year's entire production unpalatable.” He shook his head and continued his minute examination.

  “So, are you suggesting that this hive's madness is a reflection of some aspect of their keeper?”

  He sat up, startled, and I gratefully allowed the hive to thump to the ground. “No. No, no, no, I shouldn't have said it has anything to do with him.”

  I laughed at the vehemence of his protest. “I'm only joking, Mr Miranker. I should say it's every bit as likely that the hive decided it didn't like the subtle emanations coming from the burial mound across the wall.” That outrageous theory silenced him for a moment, and I gathered my things to leave.

  But not before he contributed a final shot. “One is always rather concerned when a hive fails to thrive,” he mused. “In Yorkshire and Cornwall they believe that when bees die, the farmer will soon leave his farm.”

  I shivered, and said sharply, “It's just as likely the bees deserted because nobody bothered to ‘tell’ them Holmes was away and would return. In any case, if a season is so bad the bees die, I should think it a sign that the farmer's crops were suffering as well. Good day to you, Mr Miranker,” I told him, and made my escape.

  Ridiculous, to feel a sharp frisson of disquiet because of this old man and his folk stories.

  I spent the rest of the day walking: up to my own farm, where I looked from a distance and decided I did not wish to spend any more of the day in conversation, and then west towards the Cuckmere. I passed the Wilmington Giant—225 feet of enigmatic figure carved into the chalk hillside—and crossed the Cuckmere to Alfriston, to enjoy a restorative cup of tea and a scone nearly as good as Mrs Hudson's. When I had retraced my steps over the bridge, I turned south on the narrow track through Litlington and West Dean. Birds sang, despite the lateness of the season, and the lush countryside soothed my parched skin and my thin-stretched spirit.

  I came home sunburnt, footsore, and at peace. What is more, since I had the forethought to stop at The Tiger on my way through the village, I was well fed.

  I bathed and put on a silk robe I had bought in Japan, and while the kettle boiled, I went to the library in search of a congenial book. What I wanted was a novel, but there were few of those and none I had not read.

  The room looked just as it had when we walked out of the house in January, since Mrs Hudson would not dare to disturb the arrangement of objects—which Holmes claimed was precise and deliberate. The only change was the small mountain of neatly stacked newspapers, which doubtless contained every Times and Telegraph issued since we had left: A sheet of foolscap stuck out every so often, counting down the months in Mrs Hudson's handwriting.

  The sight reminded me that, with Lulu away, the newspapers would be accumulating in the box at the end of the drive. While my tea was steeping, I went out to retrieve the four papers—two afternoons, two mornings, all delivered by a boy from Eastbourne many hours after they hit the streets in London—and started to add them to the mountain, then changed my mind. Instead, I took them with the tea onto the terrace, to while away the day's last light.

  Little appeared to have changed in the past eight months. Politics were fermenting, the coal unions gathering themselves for another attempt at a living wage. I was mildly disappointed to find no further letters concerning suicidal or riotous Druids, but perhaps my interests were too specialised.

  However—the light was almost gone by the time I reached the small box at the bottom of the page and I nearly overlooked it—two men had been charged with conspiring to commit mayhem at Stonehenge on the solstice. That reminded me, I'd meant to hunt down the original articles about the riot, and the suicide in—had it been Dorset?

  I found the paper that I had read on the train in the kitchen, waiting to receive the next batch of potato-peelings or coffee grounds. Fortunately, the Letters page was still intact:

  Dear Sirs,

  I write in urgent concern over the sequence of events, the near-riot between two opposing ideologies at Stonehenge following the desecration by suicide of one of our nation's most spectacular monuments, down in Dorset. When one reflects upon the popularity of peculiar religious rituals among today's young people, one can only expect that such shameful events will continue, growing ever more extreme, unless nipped in the bud. Need we wait until the Druids return human sacrifice to Stonehenge at midsummer's night, before we mount even casual guard upon the nation's prehistoric treasure sites?

  A Wiltshire Farmer

  Dorset. The only prehistoric site I knew there was the Cerne Abbas Giant, a rude version of my neighbouring Giant that I had passed that afternoon.

  My curiosity roused, I went back to the library to heave the stack around until I unearthed the middle of June. I turned up the lights and started with the day after the solstice, 22 June.

  The outraged farmer's “near-riot,” it seemed, had been a loud argument culminating in a shoving match between six middle-aged people in sandals and hand-spun garments and a group (number not given) of earnest young people. The details were not exactly clear, but it would appear that the older traditionalists objected when the younger people proposed to stand in the light that fell through the standing stones, that they might absorb the sun's solstitial energies. Their elders had been strongly protesting, ever since the two groups had gathered with their blankets (and, one suspected, warming drinks) the night before, that the light needed free access to its recipient stone. So two of the young men elected to force their interpretation of the ritual on their elders, and thus became the men being charged with mayhem.

  Every bit as ridiculous as I had anticipated. And if the farmer had exaggerated the pushing contest into a riot, what of the “suicide” in Dorset?
/>   He gave no date, but I thought a Druid would probably choose to commit self-sacrifice on the summer solstice—although granted, my only evidence of his religious inclinations was from the farmer. I paged through the papers of 23 June, then 24, and came across no mention of Dorset or Druids. I reached for the 25th, then put it down and went back to the days before the solstice—perhaps the body had lain there for some time?

  20 June, 19 June: nothing. This seemed peculiar. I knew The Times treasured its quirky letter-writers, but surely they wouldn't have published one that made up its references out of whole cloth?

  But there it was, on the afternoon of 18 June, under the headline, Suicide at Giant:

  Two visitors to the giant figure carved into the chalk at Cerne Abbas, Dorset, this morning were startled to discover a blood-soaked body at the figure's feet. The woman, who appeared to be in her forties, had blue eyes, steel spectacles, bobbed grey hair, and no wedding ring. Police said that she had died from a single wound from an Army revolver, found at the body, and that her clothing suggested she was a visitor to the area.

  The brief article ended with a request that anyone who might know this person get into touch with their local police, but the description could have been one in ten women in England. A sad death, but hardly one worth sitting up over.

  I folded the paper and switched off the desk lamp, curiosity satisfied: The solstice had nothing to do with any death, nor did Stonehenge. I made to rise, then stopped with my hands on the chair's arms. Had they identified this poor woman?

  Sometimes, curiosity can be an irritating companion.

  I turned the light back on and took up the one day during that entire week in June that I had not read. Of course, that was where it waited:

  The woman found at the Cerne Abbas Giant at dawn on 18 June has been identified as Miss Fiona Cartwright (42) of Poole. Miss Cartwright was last seen on 16 June when she told friends she was meeting a man who had need of a type-writer for his advertising business. Friends said Miss Cartwright had been despondent of late.

  A solitary woman, out of employment, had to be one of the most melancholy persons imaginable.