The Beekeeper's Apprentice (11 page)

I looked so hard at the black tower rising against the black night that my eyes began to quiver. I looked away slightly, and my eyes caught the faintest of changes in the air above the darkness. I let out a soft exclamation, and Holmes was up at once.

“Quick, Russell, up in the tree. Here we sit, blind as moles, while he’s so far back from the edge we can’t see him. Up, Russell. What do you see?”

As I climbed in the dark I watched the tower, and fifteen feet up the beam suddenly appeared—an intermittent flash from the back cor-ner of the folly, pointing over our heads at the low hills and the sea beyond.

“It’s there!” I scrambled down the branches, losing flesh. “He’s up there with a light—” but they were already off up the hill, their hand torches waving wildly in the darkness. I went after them, plunging across flower beds and around a fountain, and suddenly ahead of me the night exploded. Seventeen throats opened at the invaders, yaps and bays and blood-chilling snarls split the air, and the shouts of men, and then a tinkle of glass. I heard Holmes shouting to his companions, dogs began to yelp and howl, two voices coughed and cursed, a larger breakage of glass, and the sound of a door flung open. Electrical lights began to go on in the house, and I could see dogs fleeing in every direction. The first whiff of stink made me hold my breath until I got inside the door. Inside was all lights now, the main kitchen switches all on, the tower next to me blazing with light. I ran in that direction, hearing heavy feet above me on the stairs. They and the voices faded suddenly, and I pictured them on the roof.

A sudden thought occurred to me. There had been a good twenty seconds between the first alarm of the dogs and the time Holmes hit the steps. What if—? On the first-floor landing I ducked silently under the open stairway and waited, just in case. Suddenly a noise came from above, hushed, silent footsteps, hurrying down. I put my hand ready between the treads, caught sight of an unfamiliar shoe, and, praying it did not belong to Smith, Jones, or Barker, grabbed at it. A scream and a crashing fall that continued down the next flight of stairs were fol-lowed by shouts and steps from above. I unfolded myself slowly from my hiding place and went to see what I had done.

I stood at the top of the flight, looking down at the crumpled figure of Terrence Howell and feeling my stomach wanting to rise up out of my throat. Then Holmes stood beside me, and I turned to him, and his arm went around my shoulders as the two men pushed past us. I was shaking.

“Oh God, Holmes, I killed him. I didn’t think he’d fall that hard, oh God, how could I have done it?” I could feel the texture of the shoe leather impressed on my fingertips and see the tumble of limbs glimpsed through the steps. A voice came up to us.

“Ring for a doctor, would you please, Mrs. Barker? He’s got a bad bang on his head and a few broken bones, but he’s alive.”

Sweet, sweet relief flooded in, and my head suddenly felt light.

“I need to sit down for a minute, Holmes.”

He pushed me onto the top step and shoved my head down to my knees. His rucksack plopped down next to me, and I vaguely saw him pull a little bottle out of it. There was the pop of a small cork, and the concentrated reek of the morning’s experiment exploded into my nasal passages. I jerked back, and my head smacked hard onto the stone wall. Tears came to my eyes and my vision swam. When it cleared I saw Holmes, a stricken expression on his face.

“Are you all right, Russell?”

I felt my head delicately.

“Yes, no thanks to your smelling salts, Holmes. I can’t see much point in reviving someone quite so dramatically, though it does make a fine weapon against a pack of dogs.” Relief edged into his eyes, and his normal sardonic expression reappeared.

“When you’re up to it, Russell, we should see to Mr. Barker.”

I reached for his hand and pulled myself up, and we walked slowly up to the old man’s room. A fug of sweat and illness met us at his door, and the light revealed the pale, wet skin and unfocussed eyes of high fever.

“You sponge his face for a bit, Russell, until Mrs. Barker comes. I’m going to see what I can find in Howell’s room. Ah, there you are, Mrs. Barker. Your husband needs you. Come, Russell.” He swept past her anxious questions.

“What are we looking for?” I asked in his wake.

“A packet of powder or a bottle of liquid, one or the other. I’ll start with the wardrobe, you take the bathroom.” The bedroom was soon filled with mutters and flying articles of clothing, and the bathroom was awash with odours as I opened one after another of the multitude of scents, after-shave lotions, and bath soaps I found in the drawers. My poor nose was a bit numb, but I eventually found a bottle that did not smell right. I took it into the next room, where Holmes stood calf-deep in clothing, upended drawers, and bedclothes.

“Have you found anything, Holmes?”

“Cigarettes from Fraser’s of Portsmouth, boots with scratches over the arches. What have you there?”

“I don’t know, I can’t smell a thing anymore. Does this smell like
Eau d’Arabe
to you?” A quick sniff and he waded out of the room, the bottle held high.

“You’ve found it, Russell. Now to figure how much to give him.” He went to the stairs and poked his head over. “I say, Jones, is he awake yet?”

“Not a chance. It’ll be hours.”

“Ah well,” he said to me, “we’ll just have to experiment. Mrs. Barker.” She looked up as we came into the room, wet cloth in her hand. “Mrs. Barker, have you a small spoon? Yes, that will do. Russell, you pour, your hands are steady. Two drops to begin with. We’ll repeat it every twenty minutes until we see some results. Just slip it in be-tween his teeth, that’s right. Will he take some water? Good. Now we wait.”

“Mr. Holmes, what was that?”

“It was the antidote to the poison which is affecting your husband, Madam. It is sure to be quite concentrated, and I don’t want to harm him by giving too much, too fast. He will have to take it for the rest of his life, but with it he will never be ill like this again.”

“But, I told you he’s not being poisoned. I should be ill too, if he were.”

“Oh no, he’s not received any poison for over a year. He receives the antidote regularly, as do you, without harm. You told me that his manservant had been with him for many years. Did that include his time in New Guinea?”

“Yes, I believe so. Why do you ask?”

“Madam, one of my hobbies is poisons. There is a small number of very rare poisons that, once administered, reside permanently in the nervous system. They are never got rid of, but can be effectively blocked by the regular ingestion of the antidote. One of these poisons is popular with a tribe in the Sepik River area of New Guinea. It is manufactured from a very odd variety of shellfish native to the area. In an interesting serendipity, the antidote comes from a plant which is also found only in that area. Obviously, while your husband was there, his servant con-ducted his own research on the side. I suppose he will tell us eventually why he chose to turn traitor, but turn traitor he did, and made use of the poison last year. Your husband made telephone calls generally on market day, did he not?”

“Why, yes, how did you know? The Woodses were always driven to town by Ron, and I would either walk or go for a drive. And Howell—”

“Howell would take the dogs for a walk, would he not?”

“Why, yes. How—”

“They would go down to the woods; he would climb up to the tele-phone line and listen in on your husband’s conversations while the dogs gnawed bones. On the next clear night he would fail to adminis-ter the antidote, cloister himself up with his master, and slip up to the roof to signal the results of his spying to a confederate on the coast. Ah, I think it is beginning to work already.”

Two dazed eyes looked out of a pale face and fastened onto those of Mrs. Barker.

“My dear,” he whispered, “what are these people doing here?”

“Russell,” Holmes said quietly, “I believe we should see if we can help with moving Mr. Howell and leave these two good people. Mrs. Barker, I suggest that you guard this bottle most carefully until it can be analysed and duplicated. Good evening.”

We found the ambulance attendants working their way awkwardly down the narrow steps. At the front door Jones waited to let them out. A familiar cacophony came from the other side. Holmes reached into his rucksack for the small bottle, but I laid a hand on his arm.

“Let me try first,” I said. I cleared my throat, drew myself up to my full height (over six feet in those boots), and opened the door to face the pack. I put my hands on my hips and glared at them.

“Shame on you!” Seventeen jaws slowly shut, thirty-four eyes were glued to my face. “Shame on you, all of you! Is this any way to treat agents of His Majesty? Whatever are you thinking?” Seventeen faces looked at each other, at me, at the men in the doorway. The wolfhound was the first to turn tail and skulk away into the dark, the Yorkie with the blue bow the last, but they all went.

“Russell, there are unexplored depths to you,” murmured Holmes at my elbow. “Remind me to call you whenever there is a savage beast to be overcome.”

We saw the traitorous butler and his guards off through the gates and walked off down the dark road beneath the telephone line, and talked of various matters all the way home.

What is petty and vile is better than that which is not at all.

he barker problem was the first time Holmes and I collab-orated on a case (if one can consider it a collaboration when one person leads and the other follows instructions). The remaining days of the spring holiday went by uneventfully, and I returned to Oxford much invigorated by my hard labour under Patrick’s eye and by having bagged my first felon. (I ought perhaps to mention that the night’s work resulted in the capture of an even dozen of German spies, that Mr. Barker recovered his health, and that Mrs. Barker was quite generous in her payment for services rendered.)

When I returned to my lodgings house Mr. Thomas seemed to ap-prove of my appearance, and I know that I returned to maths, theo-logical enquiry, and the career of Ratnakar Sanji with renewed enthusiasm. I made it a point also to take exercise more often, walking into the hills surrounding the city (with a book in hand, of course) and did not find myself quite so exhausted when the year ended in June.

That spring and summer of 1918 was a time of intense emotions and momentous events for the country as well as for one female un-dergraduate. The Kaiser had begun his final, massive push, and the pinched and hungry faces around me began to look grim as well. We did not sleep well, behind our blackout curtains. And then, miracu-lously, the German offensive began to falter, while at the same time the Allied forces were taking on a constant flow of American transfu-sions, men and supplies. Even the huge and deadly May air raid on London did not change the increasing awareness that the German army was bleeding to death into the soil, and that after so many years of mere dogged existence, there was now a glimmer of future in the air.

I strode home in midsummer eighteen and a half years old, strong and adult and with the world at my feet. That summer I began to take an active interest in the running of my farm, and began to ask Patrick the first questions about farming equipment and our plans for the post-war future.

I found that in my absence Holmes had changed. It took a while to see that perhaps he was a bit taken aback by this young woman who had suddenly emerged from gangly, precocious, adolescent Mary Rus-sell. Not that I was outwardly very different—I had filled out, but mostly in bone and muscle, not curves, and I still wore the same clothes and braided my hair in two long plaits. It was in my attitude and how I moved, and how I met him eye to eye (in conversation, but nearly so in stature). I was beginning to feel my strength and explore it, and I think it made him feel old. I know that I first noticed caution in him that summer, when he went around a cliff rather than launch himself down it. That is not to say that he became a doddery old man—far from it. He was just a bit thoughtful at times, and I would catch him looking at me pensively after I had done some exuberant thing or other.

We went to London a number of times that summer to see her lim-ited wartime offerings, and I saw him move differently there, as if the very air changed him, making his muscles go taut and his joints loosen. London was his home as the downs never would be, and he re-turned relaxed and renewed to his experiments and his writing. If the summer before I went up to Oxford was one of sun and chess games under the open sky, my first summer home had a tinge of bitter in the sweet, as I realised for the first time that even Holmes was limited by mortality.