The Beekeeper's Apprentice (47 page)

“I’m afraid the pen is dry, Patricia. There is a bottle of ink in the cupboard above the sink.”

There was a moment’s hesitation as she looked for a trick, but he sat patiently with the pen in his hand.

“Miss Russell, you get the ink.”

“Holmes, I—”

“Now! Stop snivelling, child, and get the ink, or I shall be tempted to put another hole in you.”

I stared at Holmes, who looked back at me calmly, one eyebrow raised slightly.

“The ink, please, Russell. Your tutrix appears to have us in a position of checkmate.”

I pushed my chair back abruptly to hide my surge of hope and went to fetch the bottle. I put it on the table in front of Holmes and took my seat. He pushed the paper away, unscrewed the top of the squat ink bottle, drew the ink up into his pen, and cleared the nib of excess ink by pulling it, first one side and then the other, against the glass rim of the bottle. He then laid the pen on the table, screwed down the lid, put the bottle to one side, picked up the pen again, pulled the final sheet of typescript back in front of him, held the pen over the paper, and paused.

“You know, of course, that your father also committed suicide?”

“What!”

“Suicide,” he repeated. He capped the pen absently and laid it on the table in front of him, picked up the ink bottle and fiddled with it for a moment, deep in thought, laid it aside, and leant forward on his elbows.

“Oh, yes, his death was suicide. He followed me to Switzerland af-ter I destroyed his organisation, arranged a meeting at the most soli-tary spot he could find, and came to meet me. He knew he was no match for me physically, yet he did not bring a gun. Odd, don’t you think? Furthermore, he arranged for a confederate to fling rocks at me afterwards, because he suspected that he would not take me with him into death. No, it was suicide, Patricia, quite clearly suicide.” In the course of this speech his voice had grown harder, colder, and his lips curled over her name as if he were pronouncing an obscenity. The re-lentless cadence of his words went on, and on.

“You say you have come to know me, Patricia Donleavy.” He spat out her name and wrapped it in scorn, facing her across the table. “I know you too, Madam. I know you for your father’s daughter. Your fa-ther had a superb mind, as do you, and as you did he left the world of honest thought and turned to the creation of filth and evil. Your fa-ther created a network of horror and depravity that exceeded anything these islands had ever before known, a web woven of all that the world of crime has to offer. His agents, ‘employees’ as you call them, robbed and murdered, drained families through blackmail, and poisoned men and women with drugs. Nothing was too squalid for your father, Patri-cia Donleavy, from smuggling and opium to torture and prostitution. And all the time—ah, the perverted, filthy genius of it!—all the time the good professor sat in his book-lined study and kept his delicate hands clean of it. Nothing touched him, not the agony or the blood or the stink of terror that spread out from his agents. Just like you, Madam, he was touched only by the profits of all that sordid puru-lence, and he bought his wife pretty dresses and played mathematical games with his little daughter in the drawing room. Until I came along. I, Sherlock Holmes, with my meddlesome ways. I carved the network into many small pieces and I turned the name Moriarty into a term of derision, so that even his daughter will not carry it openly, and finally, when there was nothing left of his life, when I had driven him into a corner from which he could not escape, I pushed him over the Reichenbach Falls and he died. Your father, Patricia Donleavy, was a festering sore eating into the face of London, and I, Sher—”

With a shriek of animal fury she broke. The gun rose and swung up to face Holmes, and I, my useless right hand lying limp on the table, picked up the heavy bottle of ink and threw it hard and straight at her hand. The room was split again by a flash and deafening report, and the gun flew spinning against the wall. She came out of the dark cor-ner in a dive for the pistol, and reached it a moment, just an instant, before I hit her in a massive, launched tackle that sent us crashing into the shelves, showering us with books and bottles and pieces of equip-ment. She was immensely strong in her madness and rage, and she had the gun in her hand, but I held her down with my entire body, and my hand hung with all its strength onto her wrist, to turn the weapon away from Holmes, slowly, so slowly against her impossible strength, and then came a confused jumble of impressions, of something slip-ping and my left hand holding a hot, empty palm just as a third and completely deafening explosion went off beside my head, and the shock of it went through me like a physical jolt. She stiffened beneath me in a curious protest, and coughed slightly, and then her right arm went limp and her left hand came down across my back. I lay stunned in her embrace for a moment until my eyes focussed on the gun, inches away from her arm, and I pushed the gun hard away from me so she could not reach it, and then thought, Oh my God, where had her second shot gone, and turned to see that Holmes was unhurt but something was wrong, something was suddenly very wrong with my right shoulder. And then finally the pain came, the immense, over-whelming, shuddering roar of pain that built and beat at me, and I flung out my hand to Holmes and cried aloud as thunder filled my ears and I slid down into a deep well of black velvet.

Return Home

Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarioushazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love.

ndless hours, what seemed weeks, washed in a sea of dark, muttering confusion, a labyrinth of blurred images and disconnected snatches of voices, speech from the other side of an in-visible wall. The Dream without end, horror without an awakening, casting about for solid ground only to be caught up again by the pain and flung back into the roaring, hissing blackness. My brother’s rumpled hair framed by the car window. Patricia Donleavy, gaunt and sick, lying in the spreading lake of incredibly red blood. A beaker of liquid copper sulphate, smashed bilious green and dripping slowly from the workbench above me. Donleavy again, standing above my hospital bed and offering to throw me from a cliff. Holmes, so still on the laboratory’s tile floor, one lonely hand curled about his head. Cold and fever burned me, and I lay consumed by a universe of shivering nightmares.

Slowly, stubbornly, my body began to reassert itself. Slowly the fever burnt itself out, flickered, and died; gradually the drugs were cut back; and late one night I swam up towards rationality, to lie on my back look-ing incuriously up into the room from a point just below the surface. A thin, shimmering film was fixed between me and the painted white ceil-ing, the white tile walls, the machinery above my head, the pair of grey eyes that looked calmly, quietly at me. I floated closer, bit by bit, and fi-nally the bubble softly burst, the thin membrane collapsed. I blinked.

“Holmes,” my lips said, though no sound entered the room.

“Yes, Russell.” The eyes smiled. I watched them for several minutes, remotely aware that they were somehow important to me. I tried to re-construct the circumstances, and though I could remember the events, their emotional overtones seemed, in retrospect, excessive. I closed my heavy-lidded eyes.

“Holmes,” I whispered. “I am glad you’re alive.”

I slept, and woke again to find the morning sun blazing painfully through the window. The fuzzy glare was broken in several places by darker shapes, and as I squinted at them a figure moved to the source of the light, and there was the swish of curtains being drawn. With the room now at a tolerable level of dimness I could see Holmes stand-ing on one side of the bed and a white-coated stranger on the other. White-coat laid firm, gentle fingers along the inside of my wrist. Holmes bent forward and settled my glasses onto my nose, then sat on the edge of the bed so I could see him. I could not move my head. He had shaved that morning, and I could see in intricate detail the pores of his hollow cheeks, the soft, powdery quality of the skin around his eyes, the slight sag to his features that told me he had not slept in some considerable time. But the eyes were calm, and a faint hint of a smile lay at the corner of his expressive mouth.

“Miss Russell?” I took my eyes from Holmes and looked at the doctor’s earnest young face. “Welcome back, Miss Russell. You had us worried for a while, but you’re going to be fine now. You have a bro-ken collarbone, and you lost a great deal of blood, but other than one more scar for your collection there will be no lasting effect. Would you care for some water? Good. The sister will help you. Just a bit at a time until you get used to swallowing again. Mouth taste better now? Fine. Mr. Holmes, you may have five minutes. Don’t let her try to talk too much. I shall see you later, Miss Russell.” He and the nurse went out, and I heard his voice going down the hallway.

“Well, Russell. Our trap caught its prey, but it nearly took you with it. I had not intended quite such a generous sacrifice.”

I licked my dry lips with a thick tongue.

“Sorry. Too slow. You hurt?”

“By no means, you reacted as quickly as I thought you might. Had you been slower her bullet might indeed have seriously disarranged my insides, but thanks to your father’s ideas concerning women on the cricket field, your good left arm saved me from anything more than a bruised rib and a missing flap of skin the size of your finger. I am the one to apologise, Russell. Had I been faster to my feet the gun would not have gone off at all, and you would have an intact collarbone, and she would be sitting awaiting charges.”

“Dead?”

“Oh yes, very. I shan’t trouble you with the details now, because the white-coated people would not be happy if I raised your pulse, but she’s dead and Scotland Yard is happily rooting about in her papers, finding things that will keep Lestrade busy for years. To say nothing of his American colleagues. That’s right, shut your eyes for a while; it is bright in here.” His voice faded. “Sleep now, Russ, I shan’t be far away.” The hard hospital bed rose up and wrapped itself around me. “Sleep now, my dear Russell.”

ow voices woke me in the afternoon. The room was still dim, and my shoulder and head throbbed beneath the stiff dressings. A nurse bent over me, saw that I was awake, thrust a ther-mometer into my mouth, and started doing other things to various parts of me. When my mouth was free again I spoke. My voice sounded strange to my ears, and the pull of muscles sent twinges into my collar-bone. The routine was all too tediously familiar.

“A drink, please.”

“Certainly, Miss. Let me raise the bed for you.” The low voices had stopped, and as she cranked the handle my field of vision gradually dropped from the ceiling above the bed to include the bed itself and my visitors, rising from their chairs in the corner. The nursing sister held the glass for me, and I pulled methodically at the straw, ignoring the hurt of swallowing.

“More, Miss?”

“Not now, thank you, sister.”

“Right-o, ring if you need me. Ten minutes, gentlemen, and see you don’t tire her.”

“Uncle John, your moustache is almost back to normal.” (
Dodder-ing old fool...
)

“Hallo, dear Mary. You’re looking a sight better than you were three days ago. They’re good doctors here.”

“And Mr. Holmes. I am happy to greet you more civilly than the last time we met.” (Mycroft’s expression of jovial bonhomie seemed faintly menacing.)

“Please, Miss Russell, I hardly think that formality is necessary or even appropriate, what with being welcomed into your boudoir and all.” The fat face smiled down at me, and I felt so tired. What were they doing here?