The Language of Bees

by Laurie R. King

  “It would appear as if your queen simply ignored the imperative to murder, and went about her business while the hive swarmed itself to death around her.”

  The hive died because the reigning queen and all twenty-one of her royal daughters were too soft-hearted for murder, and the hive could not summon sufficient numbers to maintain the brood.

  This struck me as highly significant, although of what, precisely, I could not immediately think. Mr Miranker, however, had moved past the reasons.

  “In any case, as I suggested to your husband, filling the hive with a new colony should be done soon. He could add a second hive-box, in the event that solitude has compounded the problem.” He sounded dubious about my theory.

  Mr Miranker was clearly more concerned with solution than theory. Holmes, I thought, would prefer to dig into the cause—but then I recalled his initial proposition of doing away with the entire hive. Perhaps even he would not permit philosophy to get in the way of agronomy.

  In any event, replenishing the hive was a task I was happy to leave to the professionals, since moving several thousand live bees around the countryside was not a challenge I cared to meet. Mr Miranker promised me that he would be on the watch for stray swarms that might appreciate a new home, and I said I would have Holmes arrange for a second hive-box at first opportunity.

  I bicycled the four miles home from Jevington, well pleased with my solution to The Case of the Mad Hive.

  Later, I carried the album of Damian's work onto the terrace to re-examine it by light of day.

  Were the macabre overtones of his later paintings figments of my imagination? Was my own solitude working to cloud my perception?

  One after another, I turned the pages, chewing my thumbnail in thought.

  No, I decided: I was not reading a nonexistent message. Damian Adler's paintings were truly mad—although whether they were the deliberately cultivated madness of Surrealism, or an internal madness rising of his own, I could not say.

  Studying them in the warm afternoon sunshine, however, I realised something else: Holmes would have asked the same questions.

  He would not have been satisfied with a mere catalogue of his son's artwork. He would have gone back to the source and investigated its roots, its influences, and its effects.

  And if Holmes had mounted an investigation, then somewhere he would have a case file. It might be an actual file-box, or an envelope stuffed with notes, or a document case tied and sealed with ribbons, but to his eyes, it would constitute records of a case.

  Unlike the album, I could not find anything resembling a case file.

  I searched for hours: in the laboratory, in the pantry, out in the honey shed, under the carpets. I tapped stones until my knuckles ached, pulled apart all the beds, looked inside every art book on the shelves.

  Near midnight, I eased my sore back and decided reluctantly that he had left it in a bolt-hole, or with Mycroft.

  I curled up in bed and closed my eyes, trying not to picture the lively features of Irene Adler as drawn by her son. Irene Adler, who had managed to get the best of Holmes in an early, and important, case. Irene Adler, whom he had sought out in France some years later, and, all unknowing, left with child. Irene Adler, whose musical life meshed with that of Holmes, an area of my partner's life in which I could not share, since my tin ear and my dislike—

  I sat bolt upright.

  Music.

  I trotted downstairs to the shelf in the sitting room where Holmes kept his gramophone records. Because I had no ear for music, it was a shelf I rarely went near, and anyone else, knowing Holmes' passion for these fragile objects, kept well clear of it, as well.

  Two-thirds of the way along the shelf was an inch-thick cloth-covered box of Irene Adler's operatic recordings. Inside, nestled between the second and third disk, was a manila envelope containing perhaps thirty pages.

  The first was a copy of Damian Adler's birth record. The second a Photostat copy of his enlistment in the Army. The third was an arrest form, dated 27 April 1918. The fourth recorded his admission to the mental asylum in Nantes, on 6 May 1918.

  He'd killed a fellow officer, ten days before.

  The Guide (1): A Guide is rarely a person whom society

  will invite to its garden parties. The boy's Guide appeared

  as a coarse bully with compelling eyes and the

  overweening pride of a man who has conquered

  mountains: It mattered not, for the Guide possessed

  both knowledge and wisdom.

  Testimony, II:1

  HOLMES HERE.”

  “Mycroft, have you heard anything from Damian?”

  “Sherlock, good evening. Where are you?”

  “Have you heard from Damian?”

  “Not since Saturday. Have you lost him?”

  “We came up to Town together on Tuesday, but he left the hotel early this morning, and had not returned when I came in tonight. I wondered perhaps if he had telephoned to you.”

  “No. Which hotel?”

  “The place in Battersea run by the cousin of my old Irregular Billy.”

  “Perhaps that explains it.”

  “His absence may have more to do with our activities yesterday than with the quality of our lodgings. I took him on a round of houses of ill repute.”

  “Is this related to our last telephone conversation, when you requested that I look into the wife's background?”

  “Precisely. Have you had any results?”

  “It's been little more than forty-eight hours. Sherlock—”

  “Mycroft, we must find her.”

  “I see that. And him.”

  “It is also possible that he received a message.”

  “You speak of the one in The Times agony column, couched as an advert for nerve tonic?”

  “I should have known you'd notice it.”

  “‘Addled by your family? Rattled by uncertainty? Eros has ten morning tonics for you to try on Friday.’”

  “That's the one, although one rather wonders that it was accepted, considering the double entendre. Damian appears to have met the man at the statue on Piccadilly Circus, at ten o'clock.”

  “Am I to understand, Sherlock, that you have spoken with the staff at the Café Royal?”

  “Damian took breakfast there early this morning, when he was given an envelope left for him two days earlier. He was later seen walking up Regent Street in the company of a man the porter did not know, a man of average height, in his forties, with dark hair, good-quality clothes, no facial hair, and a scar near his left eye.”

  “What do you intend to do now?”

  “I've left a message for Damian at the Battersea hotel. He may yet return there. I've been past his house twice today, but there are no signs of life. I am going there now—I'll break in and get some sleep, then search the place by daylight. I cannot think why it has proved so difficult to find any trace of a Chinese woman and her child.”

  “Do you wish me to summon Billy to assist you?”

  “We may have to, if it goes on for much longer.”

  “I understand. If Damian rings or sends a message, where can I reach you?”

  “At Damian's home, if you can manage to ring a code so I'll know it is you. After that, I'll telephone to you again tomorrow night-Saturday.”

  “Anything else you would like me to do?”

  “Nothing. Except, if the boy gets into touch, tell him … I can't think what you could tell him.”

  “I will convey your fervent best wishes.”

  “Something along those lines. Thank you, Mycroft.”

  “Take care, Sherlock.”

  The Guide (2): See the steps, lit clear: The boy, tormented

  in soul, wrestled with the Angels and took on their volatile

  essence. Thus, when he met his Guide, he was set alight,

  as a volatile substance lights at the mere touch of flame.

  Testimony, II:1

  I TRIED, SATURDAY MORNING, TO CONVINCE
MYSELF that two long-ago accusations of violence, against a man actively engaged in combat, were no great sin. Damian had not even been charged with the 1918 assault, in part because both men were drinking and witnesses disagreed over which man had started the fight. To compound matters, not only was Damian still convalescing from his wounds, he was a decorated hero (which I had not known) while the other officer was both hale-bodied and whole, and known to be belligerent when drunk: hence the verdict of shell-shock and a quiet placement in the mental hospital at Nantes, rather than a court martial. If Holmes was willing to discount Damian's past, if he was willing to agree that the officer's death had been an accident stemming from self-defence, who was I to disagree?

  I got up early from my sleepless bed and spent two hours resolutely finishing the job of emptying my trunks and hauling them to the lumber room. I made toast and attempted to settle to the newspapers, but my eye seemed constantly preoccupied with my discoveries of the night before, and kept catching on headlines concerning death and madness and adverts for honey. When my eye was caught by a personal notice that began with the word ADDLED, I shoved the paper away and went outside, wandering restlessly through the garden, feeling as if I had drunk several carafes of powerful coffee instead of a single cup.

  Around ten o'clock, I found myself in Holmes' room studying his unopened trunks, and decided to make a start on them before Mrs Hudson got back that evening. Half an hour later, with every inch of the room buried under the débris of long travel, I looked at the knot of worn-through stockings in my hand and came to my right mind.

  I was not Holmes' housekeeper; neither he nor Mrs Hudson would thank me for my labours.

  The reason for my uncharacteristic housewifeliness was, I had to face it, uneasiness: When I had turned the page in Holmes' file and seen the photograph of the dead officer, all I could think of was that the man looked like Holmes.

  Which was ridiculous. I was not worried, any more than I had been bored or lonely in my solitude. Clearly I needed something to occupy my time other than sorting socks. The best thing was to keep busy. I had intended to return to Oxford later in the week, to resume my life and my work there. Instead, I would go now.

  Although I decided to stop first in London and have a little talk with Mycroft. It was, I told myself, the sensible thing to do.

  Holmes' elder brother was looking remarkably well, for a man who had peered over the abyss into death the Christmas before. He'd dropped a tremendous amount of weight, and from the colour of his skin, actually spent some time out-of-doors.

  He brushed aside my compliments, admitted to a loss of “three or four stone” although it had to have been nearly five, then grumbled that bodily exercise was a tedium beyond measure, and commented that he had heard I joined the short-haired league.

  My hand went to my hair, removed when we were in India. “Yes, I needed to dress as a man. Holmes nearly passed out with the shock.”

  “I can imagine. Still, I never thought the Gibson Girl look suited you.”

  “Thank you. I guess. Were you going out?” I asked, taking in his brown lightweight suit.

  “It is of no importance,” he said. “After luncheon I have developed the habit of going for a turn around the park instead of taking a nap, as I used to do, but I shall happily delay that pleasure.”

  “No, no, I'm just off the train, I'd appreciate a breath of air.”

  With a grimace at the disappearance of an excuse for lethargy, Mycroft caught up his stick and straw hat and we descended onto Pall Mall, to turn in the direction of St James's Park.

  “Have you seen your brother?” I asked.

  “I have not seen him since January, although I spoke with him across the telephone twice, on Wednesday afternoon and again last night.”

  “Was he in London?”

  “I believe so. In any case, Wednesday's call was from Paddington, although that can mean anything.”

  “Or nothing.” Paddington Station sent trains in all directions north of London, but it was also a main connecting stop on the city's Underground. “What did he want?”

  “The earlier call was to request my assistance with an overseas element of an investigation.”

  Mycroft's oddly unfamiliar face—it now had bones in it, and the skin had gone slack with the loss of padding—was held in an expression I nonetheless knew well: noncommittal innocence. The quick mind inside the slow body was waiting to see if I knew what Holmes was up to before he revealed any more.

  “Let me guess: Shanghai.”

  Inside Britain, Holmes' sources of information were without peer, but once an investigation stretched past Europe or certain parts of America, his web of knowledge developed gaps. Mycroft, however, had spent his life as a conduit of Intelligence that covered the globe: When Holmes had need of information beyond his ken, he turned to Mycroft.

  Shanghai had not been a guess, and Mycroft saw that.

  “Yes, I was given to understand that young Damian had come to Sussex.”

  “Damian was there when we got in on Monday, then both of them were gone when I woke up Tuesday. I don't know where they were going, but last night I found Holmes' file on Damian, and I was … concerned.”

  “Concerned,” he mused, nodding at the ground.

  “Damian killed a man in 1918,” I blurted. “Not the same man he was accused of killing in 1919.”

  “In neither was he charged.”

  “You knew, about both of them?”

  “I did.”

  “Why …” I stopped: He hadn't told Holmes for the same reason he hadn't told him of Damian's existence in the first place. “Have you seen his paintings—Damian's?”

  “A few of them. I hear he has a small show at a gallery off Regent Street, I'd planned on going to that.”

  “He paints madness.”

  “I'd have thought that a common enough theme amongst modern artists.”

  “With more or less deliberation. But there's something profoundly unsettling about his work.”

  “Hmm,” Mycroft said.

  “What about last night's phone call?”

  “My brother was enquiring whether or not I had seen Damian.”

  “He's lost him?”

  “I don't know if ‘lost’ is the correct term, but Damian left the hotel where they were staying early on Friday morning, and as of eleven o'clock last night he had not returned. I believe Sherlock would have got a message to me, had the boy reappeared.”

  “I see. Well, in any case, I should talk with Holmes before I go up to Oxford, just to let him know where I am and see if he needs my assistance. Do you have any idea where he might be?”

  Mycroft reached into his breast pocket and took out a business card, crisply engraved on a startling bright red stock with an address on one of the lanes that connected with Regent Street. On its reverse, in Mycroft's handwriting, was another address: 7 Burton Place, in Chelsea.

  “I do not know where my brother is, but those are the addresses of Damian's gallery and his home. Either of those might be a good place to start.”

  I looked at him in surprise. “You've simply been carrying this around?”

  “When I heard that you were not with my brother, I knew it would not be long before you came looking.”

  I grinned and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, then reversed my direction.

  “What shall I do with your valise?” he called after me.

  I waved a hand in the air and broke into a trot.

  To my surprise, the gallery that sold Damian Adler's paintings was not some narrow and dingy upper-storey hole several streets “off” Regent Street, but a prosperous, glass-fronted shop a stone's throw from the Royal Academy. A bell dinged at my entrance. Voices came from behind a partition at the back and a sleek woman in her early forties poked her head around the wall, giving me a brief but penetrating once-over. I did not think that I impressed her overmuch, since I had not intended to enact a patron of the arts when I left Sussex. “I shall be with you momentarily,
” she said in a French accent.

  “I'm happy to look,” I told her. She went back to her conversation, which had to do with the delivery of a painting.

  The gallery had two rooms. The first displayed paintings, and a few small bronze sculptures, that would have been considered dangerously avant-garde before the War but were now just comfortably modern. I recognised an Augustus John portrait, and two of the bronzes were Epsteins. It was the next room that held the more demanding forms: one canvas made up of paint masses so thick, it could have been the artist's palette board mounted on the wall; three twisted sheets of brass that might be horses' heads or women's torsos, but in either case appeared to be writhing in pain; a gigantic, wide-brimmed cocktail glass tipped to pour its greenish contents into a puddle on the floor.

  I spotted the first of Damian's paintings immediately I came into the room. It was an enormously tall, narrow canvas, twelve feet by two, and appeared at first glance to have been sliced from a larger, more complete image: branches and leaves at the top, giving way to a length of marvellously realistic bark and, at the bottom, the clipped grass out of which the tree was growing.

  The centre of the image was a confusion of colours and shapes: a hand outstretched, a leg and foot dangling above the grass, and most troubling, a piece of a man's face with a staring, dead-looking eye. With a shock, I realised that I was looking at a strip, as it were, of a larger image, showing a man hanging from a tree—but if the eye was dead, that tensely extended hand was definitely not.

  In a lesser craftsman, I would have thought he had painted the eye badly; in a lesser mind, I might have assumed the artist did not know how a dead hand would hang. But this was Damian Adler, so I looked at the card on which the title had been typed:

  Woden in the World Tree

  If I remembered my Norse mythology, the god Woden—or Odin-had hanged himself for nine days in the tree that supported the world, so as to gain knowledge. Woden was blind in one eye.

  I nodded in appreciation, and moved to the next painting, that of a hand shaking itself in a mirror—clever, but nothing more. The one after that appeared to be a solid wall of leaves, meticulously detailed, until one noticed that the twin points of gleam to one side were eyes: The hidden image gradually resolved into the ancient pagan figure of the Green Man.