Read The Beekeeper's Apprentice Online
Authors: Laurie R. King
“Information. I needed to know what awaited me before making a decision. Had I found an armed reception party I’d have gone down and had Mr. Thomas telephone for the police. Am I correct in as-suming that you left the black smudge on the doorknob for me to find?”
“I did.”
“And the mud and leaves on the opposite window ledge?”
“The mud was there before I came. One leaf I added, as assurance that you should notice.”
“Why the charade, Holmes? Why risk my bones coming up the wall?”
He looked straight at me and his voice was dead, flat serious.
“Because, my dear child, I needed to be absolutely certain that de-spite being tired, cold, and hungry, you would pick up the small hints and act correctly.”
“The business of the note in my pigeonhole was hardly a ‘small hint.’ A bit heavy-handed for you. Why didn’t you ask Mrs. Hudson which room I was in? She has been to my rooms before.” There was something here I was just not seeing.
“I have not seen Mrs. Hudson for some days.”
“But—the food?”
“Old Will brought it to me. You may have seen that he’s more than just the gardener,” he added with apparent irrelevance.
“I surmised that some time ago, yes. But why have you been away—?” I stopped, and my eyes narrowed as various facts merged and his stiffness came back to me. “My God, you’re hurt. They tried to kill you first, didn’t they? Where are you injured? How badly?”
“Some distinctly uncomfortable abrasions along my back, is all. I’m afraid I may have to ask you to change the dressings at some point, but not immediately. The person who set the bomb thinks I’m dying, for-tunately. Some poor tramp was run over just after they took me to the hospital, and he’s there still, with bandages about his head and my name on his chart. And, I might add, a constable at his side at all times.”
“Was anyone else hurt? Mrs. Hudson?”
“Mrs. Hudson is fine, although half the glass in the south wall is out. The house is miserable in this weather so she’s off to that friend of hers in Lewes until repairs are made. No, the bomb was not actually in the house; they set it in one of the beehives, of all places. He, or they, must have laid it the night before, expecting it to catch me on my morning rounds. Perhaps he used a radio transmitter to trigger it, or else motion at the adjoining hives was enough. In any case, I can only be grateful that it did not go up in my face.”
“Who, Holmes? Who?”
“There are three names that come to mind, although the hu-mourous touch of using the hive is of a level I should not have cred-ited to any of the three. There are four bombers I have put away in the past. One is dead. One has been out for five years, though I had heard that he had settled down and become a strong family man. The second was let out eighteen months ago and has apparently remained in the London area. The third escaped from Princetown last July. Any one of the three could have been responsible for my bomb, which was profes-sionally laid and left very little intact evidence. Yours, however, is a different matter. A thing like that is as individual as a fingerprint. Not being entirely up to date on bombs myself, however, I need an expert to read this particular fingerprint. We shall take it with us when we go.”
“Where are we going?” I asked with considerable patience, I thought, considering the havoc I could see this was going to wreak on my plans for a lovely holiday.
“To the great cesspool, of course.”
“Why London?”
“Mycroft, my dear child, my brother Mycroft. He possesses the knowledge of Scotland Yard without the obsessional reticence of that good body, which tends to hoard information like a dragon its gold. Mycroft can, with a single telephone call, tell me the precise locations of our three possibilities, and who is the most likely author of your mechanism here. Assuming my attempted murderer still believes me to be in hospital, he would not connect you with Mycroft, as the two of you have never so much as met. We will be safe with him for a day or two, and we shall see what trail turns up. The scent in Sussex is, I fear, very cold. I did come up here as quickly as I could, but I was not in time to catch him at his work. I am sorry about that. You see before you a distinctly inferior version of Sherlock Holmes, old, rusty, and easily laid out.”
“By a bomb that nearly killed you.” His long, expressive fingers waved away my proffered excuse. “Do we go now?”
“I think not. He already knows the bomb did not go off. He will no doubt assume that you will be on full guard tonight—that you have not called the police already tells him that. He will bide his time to-night, and tomorrow either lay another bomb for you, or if, as I sus-pect, he is intelligent and flexible enough, he will be creative and use a sniper’s rifle or a runaway motorcar, should you be so foolish as to provide a target. However, you will not. We will be on the streets be-fore light, but not earlier. You may rest until then.”
“Thank you.” I tore my eyes from the bomb. “First, your back. How much gauze will I need?”
“A considerable quantity, I should think. Do you have it?”
“One of the girls down the hall is a hypochondriac with a nurse mother. If you can do your lock trick on her door as well as you did on that of my other neighbour we should be well supplied.”
“Ah, that reminds me, Russell. An early birthday present.”
Holmes held out a small, narrow package wrapped in shiny paper. “Open it now.”
I undid the wrappings with great curiosity, for Holmes did not nor-mally give gifts. I opened the dark velvet jeweller’s box and found in-side a shiny new set of picklocks, a younger version of his own.
“Holmes, ever the romantic. Mrs. Hudson would be pleased.” He chuckled and stood up cautiously. “Shall we try them out?”
Some time later we were back in front of my fire, richer by several square yards of gauze, a huge roll of sticking plaster, and a quart bottle of antiseptic. I poured him a large brandy, and when he took off his shirt I could see that I was going to need most of that gauze. I refilled his glass and stood assessing the job.
“We ought to let Watson do this.”
“If he were standing here I would. Get on with it.” He swallowed this second brandy neat, so I poured him a third, picked up the scissors, and paused.
“Personally I have found that the mind handles pain best if it is given a counterirritant to distract it. Aha, I have just the thing. Holmes, tell me about the case of the King of Bohemia, and Irene Adler.” Holmes was seldom beaten, but that woman had done it, with an ease and a flair that I knew still rankled. Her photograph stood on his book-shelf, as a reminder of his failure, and telling me about it would very pos-sibly distract him from his back.
At first he refused, but as I continued snipping and pulling off bits of sticking plaster, bandage, and skin, he began speaking through clenched teeth. “It began one night, in the spring of 1888, March I think, when the King of Bohemia came to my door to ask for some— dear God, Russell, leave me a bit of skin, would you?—some assis-tance. It seems he had been involved with a woman, a totally unsuitable woman from the point of view of a royal marriage, an opera singer. Unfortunately for him she loved him, and refused to return a photograph she possessed of the two of them in a position of obvious affection. This photograph he wanted back, and he hired me to re-trieve it.”
The narrative wound on as I doused and snipped and peeled, paus-ing often as his jaws clamped down and beads of sweat came to his brow. I finished before his account had ended, but he continued as I took his bloodstained shirt to the basin in the corner. With the end of the story, the final description of how she saw through Holmes’ dis-guises and with her new husband eluded both detective and monarch, he swallowed the last of the brandy and sat staring into the fire, breathing heavily.
I arranged the shirt in front of the coals to dry and turned to the exhausted man next to me.
“You need to lie down and sleep. Take my bed—no, I’ll not hear protest. You need to be on your stomach for a while, and you cannot sleep in a chair in that position. No, I refuse to accept gallant stupidity in place of rational necessity. Go.”
“Defeated again. I surrender.” With a wan imitation of his sardonic smile he stood and followed me. I pulled aside the bedclothes, and he slowly lowered himself forward into my bed. I gently pulled the blan-kets up over his naked shoulders.
“Sleep well.”
“You will need to wear a young man’s clothing tomorrow. I trust you have some,” he said around the pillow.
“Of course.”
“Take a small knapsack with a few things in it. We will buy cloth-ing if we are to be gone very long.”
“I will pack it tonight.”
“And write a note to Mr. Thomas, telling him you’ve been called away for a few days, that you understand Mr. Holmes has been in an accident. He is in my employ; he’ll understand.”
“In your—You are a devious man. Go to sleep.”
I wrote the note, including a request to ring Veronica Beaconsfield, telling her not to meet my train, and sat before the fire to braid my hair, which was dry at last. (The one drawback to long hair is washing it in the winter.) I studied the flickering coals as my hands slowly bound one-half of the fluffy cloud into a long plait that reached past my waist and tied a cord around the end. I had started on the other side when his voice came again from the dark corner, low and slurred with drink and sleep.
“I asked Mrs. Hudson once why she thought you wore your hair so long. She said it was a vestige of femininity.”
My hands went still. This was the first time in our acquaintance that he had commented on my appearance, other than to disparage it. Watson would never have believed it possible. I smiled down at the fire and continued the plait.
“Yes, she would think that, I suppose.”
“Is it true?”
“I think not. I find short hair too much fuss, always needing comb-ing and cutting. Long hair is much easier, oddly enough.”
There was no answer, but soon a gentle snore reached my ears. I took a spare blanket from the shelf and pulled it around me on the chair. My spectacles I laid on the little table next to me, the room re-treated into fuzziness, and I slept.
I awoke once, some hours later, stiff and uncertain of my surround-ings. The fire had burnt down, but I could see a figure seated at the window, wrapped in a blanket looking out at the night. I sat up and reached for my spectacles.
“Holmes? Is it—?”
The figure turned quickly toward me and held up a finger.
“No, hush, child, go back to sleep. I’m only thinking, as best I can without lighting my pipe. Go back to sleep for a while. I’ll wake you when it’s time.”
I laid my spectacles back onto the table, reached over to throw more coal on the fire, and settled myself again into the chair. As I drifted back into sleep, I experienced one of those odd and memo-rable dream-moments that lodge in the mind and, with hindsight, seem precognitive of events that follow. A phrase presented itself to my mind, with such stark clarity that it might have been in print be-fore my eyes. It was a remembered phrase, from the speculative or philosophical introductory chapter in Holmes’ book on bee-keeping. He had written, “A hive of bees should be viewed, not as a single species, but as a triumvirate of related types, mutually exclusive in function but utterly and inextricably interdependent upon each other. A single bee separated from its sisters and brothers will die, even if given the ideal food and care. A single bee cannot survive apart from the hive.”
The surprise of the statement half woke me, or I seemed to half wake, and when I looked over at Holmes I had the oddest impression that there was a drop of rain on his cheek.
Impossible, of course. I am now quite convinced that it was a dream, although the visual impression was vivid, if blurred through myopia. I mention it, not as historical truth, but as an indication of the complex state of my unconscious mind at the time... and, as I mentioned, because of the events it foreshadowed.
We must disentangle, therefore, what now is obscure.
ake, russell,” said a voice in my ear. “The game’s afoot!” The room was dark but for the flame of the Bunsen burner, and the air smelt of coffee.
“Cry ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!’ ” I muttered grumpily to complete Henry’s speech. Once more unto the breach, and all that.