The Mary Russell Companion (35 page)

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Art in the Blood: A Beekeeper’s Gallery

Miss Russell being a true art lover, married to a man with “art in his blood”, it is only appropriate to invite her friends to express their affection for the Memoirs in their own fashion.  Some pieces in the Laurie King website’s “
Beekeeper’s Gallery
” are individual works, others form part of the ongoing
Russellscape panorama
, while some began as part of a contest:

“
Parrot King
” (a story given in the Companion) for example, was connected with the publication of
Pirate King:

Parrot King (Jenny Parks)

Illuminated MyStory

In the “
Illuminated MyStory
”, Russell’s friends were invited
to illuminate that tale (which is given here in this
Companion
.)  Sara McClelland’s can be
folded to publish as a book
:

Whereas Rori Shapiro expressed herself with a classical
Illuminated Manuscript
:

…and The Game goes ever on.

[1]
¹
  
La Vie des abeilles
(
The Life of the Bee
) by Maurice Maeterlink (1901, translated by Alfred Sutro).

[2]
   Mary Russell was born January 2, 1900.  Holmes’ birthday is celebrated on January 6 (Twelfth Night) although the actual year is a matter of fierce debate (cf footnotes 9 and 35).

[3]
   According to Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes retired to the Sussex Downs around the end of 1903, where he studies the life of honeybees.

[4]
   The Great War, as it was known, commenced in August 1914 and ended with an armistice on 11 November 1918. In the early months, after hundreds of thousands of soldiers had died on both sides, a stalemate quickly developed along the Western Front, as the embattled nations became literally entrenched. In the spring of 1915, the Allied forces commenced the Gallipoli campaign, an undertaking to seize the Dardanelles strait and capture Constantinople. The land forces quickly became stalled. By the campaign’s end in December 1915, with the ignominious withdrawal of the Allied invaders, over 100,000 men were dead, including 56,000–68,000 Turkish and around 53,000 British and French soldiers. In April 1915, the war was going poorly for England.

[5]
    Gorse is a low-growing shrub with yellow flowers and occasionally vicious thorns, native to England.

[6]
   Publius Virgillius Maro, better known as Virgil, was probably the greatest Roman poet of his era, 70 to 19 B.C.E., and his epic poem, the
Æneid
, is still read today. Following the adventures of the Trojan soldier Æneas, from the Trojan War to his landing in Italy and the founding of Rome, the
Æneid
has long been a staple of Latin literature. At 15, if Ms. Russell is still “wrestling with Latin verbs,” it is unlikely that she would be reading Virgil’s other masterworks, the
Eclogues
or the
Georgics
.  On the other hand, she was no doubt introduced to the
Georgics
before long, since Virgil has much to say there (Book IV) about the honeybee.

[7]
   The white cliffs are indeed chalk, laid down during the Cretaceous era, a million generations of tiny shelled creatures at the bottom of the sea, later pushed up to form the distinctive southern coast of England. Typically, chalk is studded with large nodules of flint, used as building materials throughout the Downs, including for the house of Sherlock Holmes.

[8]
   Or perhaps an American oath. It is unlikely that Ms. Russell learned such language from her mother.

[9]
   The debate rages on concerning the age of Sherlock Holmes.  His early biographer W. S. Baring-Gould gives him a birth date of January 6, 1854; Laurie R. King (in the e-book collection “Laurie R. King’s Sherlock Holmes”) questions this and suggests 1861 was more likely, making him 54 in 1915, if not younger.  See also the discussion below, note 45.

[10]
   The upper-class drawl is characterized by linguists as
non-rhotic
(that is, the “r” in words like “hard” is not pronounced). This form of speech became popular in southern England and the upper classes in the late 18
^th
century and has remained the standard for differentiation from the “received speech” patterns of the classic BBC English accent.

[11]
   In fact, he was not bored, but suffering from depression, as described by Holmes himself in “Beekeeping for Beginners.”

[12]
  This river is no doubt the Cuckmere, a small and meandering stream that cuts through the South Downs near Seaford.

[13]
  One can only speculate as to the relationship between this Tom Warner and the similarly beekeeping but clearly nefarious Josiah Warner of “A Venomous Death”, given here in this Companion.

[14]
   Again according to Holmes’ brief memoir, “Beekeeping for Beginners”, he thought at the time that Russell was yet another of the “fans” with which his life was plagued, even in his rural Downs retreat.

[15]
   “Three months ago”: Russell seems to have arrived in Sussex in January, 1915.  However, below she admits that she has not begun walking the Downs until February, no doubt due to recuperation from the injuries she sustained in the fall of 1914 in California. (
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
;
Locked Rooms
)

[16]
  Russell often sells Dr Watson short in the brains department, even after she gets to know him.  In fact, the image of Watson as a bumbler is more down to Nigel Bruce than Arthur Conan Doyle, who invariably presents Watson as, if not quite up to the standards of his flat-mate, plenty bright enough to hold his own. See also footnote 62.

[17]
   Although Laurie King has written of the difficulties in transcribing Russell’s handwritten memoirs, her own writing leaves something to be desired.  The initial manuscript version of
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
was hand-written, and the typist, confronted with this line, transcribed it with the remarkably evocative phrase, “…if that’s all that remains of the great detective Smird!”

[18]
   In “The Mazarin Stone,” an unnamed narrator declares that “Holmes seldom laughed, but he got as near it as his old friend Watson could remember.” Clearly, that statement is disproved here. A. G. Cooper, in “Holmesian Humour,” claims to have counted 292 examples of the Master’s laughter, while Charles E. Lauterbach and Edward S. Lauterbach, in “The Man Who Seldom Laughed,” compiled the following figures:

Smile: 103

Laugh: 65

Joke: 58

Chuckle: 31

Humor: 10

Amusement: 9

Cheer: 7

Delight: 7

Twinkle: 7

Miscellaneous: 19

Total: 316

[19]
  The word “teenager” was not in common use in 1915, although the versions “teen” and “teener” were found occasionally.  This, as with much of Russell’s memoirs, come with her having written them in her eighties.  Throughout, the language spoken is in the formal cadence of a woman in her ninth decade looking back at her youth, rather than the English actually spoken in the Twenties.

[20]
   In Latin, “homo” is
man
in the sense of
mankind
; “
vir
” refers strictly to the adult male, equivalent to the Greek terms
anthropos
and
aner
.
Vir
, meaning “husband,” is used chiefly in the legal phrase “et vir” (“and husband”).

[21]
   Ms. Russell did not yet know Holmes well. If she had read
The Martyrdom of Man
by Winwood Reade, that he recommends to Watson as “one of the most remarkable ever penned,” she might have learned that he had a more subtle and complex view of humanity, a subject worthy of study but not of scorn.

[22]
   Formal English custom requires that a proper introduction be made by a third party.

[23]
   It is not entirely clear whether Holmes is actually pronouncing it in an Irish accent, or if he is merely drawing out the name in his mouth.  If the former, perhaps this reveals something about Holmes’ past: Conan Doyle was born in Scotland, but both parents were Irish. If the two men were in some way blood relations, it could explain why Conan Doyle was chosen as Dr. Watson’s literary agent.

[24]
   This is a joke. Mary, the Mother of God, according to Anglican tradition, is the sinless peacemaker; Mary the Magdalene (not, incidentally, ever spoken of as a woman without virtue, much less a prostitute) is a disciple in her own right whose assertiveness is rewarded by being the first to speak with the risen Christ after the crucifixion.