The Language of Bees

by Laurie R. King

  The ice rattled as he raised the glass against his teeth. I took the gesture as confirmation.

  “It… happened during the three years you were away from London?” When all the world except his brother thought Holmes dead, although in fact he had travelled—to Mecca, to Lhasa, and to the south of France.

  “After Reichenbach Falls,” he agreed. “When I came down out of Tibet and was sailing for Europe, news reached me that Miss Adler—Mrs Norton—that Irene had been in a terrible accident, which took the life of her husband and caused her to retire from the stage. As I happened to be passing near Montpellier, I thought it… acceptable to call on her. I suppose I entertained the notion that, if grief had driven her to abandon her career, perhaps adding myself to the chorus of protest might make her reconsider. She had an extraordinary voice,” he added. “It was a pity to lose it.”

  “But it wasn't grief?”

  “No. She had sustained injuries, subtle, but definitive. When I found her, she was living on the fine edge of poverty, eking out a living as a voice coach. I was in no hurry to return to London, so I paused there for a time, helping her become more firmly established. I lent her sufficient funds to purchase a piano and a small studio, and amused myself doing odd jobs in the city, everything from research into some aspects of coal-tar to peeling carrots for a restaurant. During those months we became … friends.”

  I hastened to interrupt. “And it would seem that the news of the mysterious death of Ronald Adair in London reached you at about the time she …” Threw you out? Tired of you? In any case, discovered herself with child.

  “—told me she planned to return home to America,” he provided. “Alone. And as soon as I was back in London, the life of the metropolis closed over my head. Nine years passed. It seemed but the snap of a finger. Then I retired, and nine years turned into a chasm. Had she wished to communicate with me, she knew where I was. She had not. Thus, it seemed, the matter had been decided. One of the more foolish decisions of my life.”

  He stared into his glass, but he must have been thinking of the nine-year-olds he had known, if nothing else among the street urchins he'd dubbed his Irregulars. Had he ventured an overture, he might have met the boy then, on the edge of adolescence. Had he sought her out—and he would certainly have found her—he might have had another life. A life that did not include bees or a hermit's retreat on the Sussex Downs. Or an encounter with an orphan named Russell.

  “She was—going by Watson's story—a highly gifted woman,” I ventured.

  “In both talent and brains. I was twenty-seven years old when the hereditary king of what Watson chose to call Bohemia came to me, demanding that I retrieve an incriminating photograph possessed by this vain and scheming prima donna from New Jersey. I saw myself a god among men. An easy case, I thought, a satisfying payment in both gold and glory: A dab of paint, a change of costume, a dash of human nature, toss in a smidgen of distraction and a childish smoke-bomb, and voilà—I would take back this adventuress's tool of blackmail.

  “Except that she was not out for blackmail, merely self-preservation from her royal paramour. What is more, she was one step ahead of me all the way—including on my very doorstep, utilising my own tools of disguise. ‘Good evening, Mr. Holmes,’ she said to me.” He dropped his voice for her imitation of a man's speech, bringing an eerie trace of the woman into the room. “And even with the scent of her under my very nose, even as I put up my feet and crowed to Watson how clever I was, she was laying her own plans, carrying out her own solution.” He turned from the window, searching me out in the dim room. “You know she used me as a witness in her marriage ceremony to Godfrey Norton?”

  “I remember.”

  He laughed, a sound that contained amusement and rue in equal parts, and I saw his outline stir, heard the rustle of his clothing. Something small and shiny flew in my direction, and I snatched it from the air: a well-worn sovereign coin with a hole in it.

  “She paid me for my witnessing with that,” he said. “I assumed at the time that she had failed to recognise me, but later found that she well knew who I was, and was amused, despite the urgency of her distress. I carry it always, to remind me of my limitations. Here—I even had her autograph it for me.”

  He crossed the room and switched on the desk lamp. I held the coin under its beam, and there on the back side of it I saw the scratched initials IAN. Irene Adler Norton.

  I rubbed at the smoothness of the coin, oddly pleased that it served as a reminder of professional inadequacies and not of a person. I handed it back to him. He turned it nimbly over in his fingers, then clipped it back onto his watch-chain and tucked it away.

  “Let us go and eat,” he said, sounding relieved that the worst of the self-revelation was over.

  “Can we find a place out of doors?” I requested.

  “Paris is not at her best in the summer,” he agreed.

  When I had freshened and changed my dress, we left the hotel and walked down the street until we found a likely bistro, one that spread its tables onto the pavement.

  But after facts, and before relaxation, I required instruction. “Since the letter came,” I asked, “have you found any more about the charges against…?” I found it difficult to shape the phrase your son.

  “Damian. As you read, Mycroft has arranged the assistance of one of France's more capable defence attorneys. I have an appointment with him in the morning, and we shall then go to Ste Chapelle and meet the lad.”

  Did we include, or exclude, me? If the latter, would he not have said he and I?

  “But, Holmes, why didn't you set off immediately you received the letter?”

  “I did, in fact, telephone to Mycroft to say that I would leave instantly, but he talked me out of it. He thought I might be more effective if I waited until we had some data with which to work, but beyond this, he pointed out that, if the boy was coming out from under the influence of drugs while in gaol, he would not thank me for seeing him for the first time in that condition. And although I am not accustomed to permitting the personal to influence my investigations, in the end, I had to agree that it might be better to wait until the boy had his wits about him.”

  Somewhat mollified, although not altogether convinced, I picked up my knife and began thoughtfully to cover a piece of bread with near-liquid butter.

  “Does he know?” I asked. “The boy?”

  “Hardly a boy,” he pointed out. “He knows now.”

  “How long …?”

  “I have no idea when or even if his mother told him about me. Mycroft was forced to explain the situation to the avocat. He in turn told Damian, but apparently Damian showed no surprise at my name. Which could also be due to his mental state. Or, I suppose he may have never heard of Sherlock Holmes.”

  “If a tribe of desert nomads in Palestine knows the stories,” I said—which had been the case during our winter sojourn there—“the chances are good a young man in France has come across them.”

  “I fear you are right.”

  “So, has any progress been made in the intervening days?”

  “It looks,” he said, with a mingled air of apprehension and satisfaction, “as though the evidence against him rests largely on a single eyewitness.”

  I understood his ambiguity. The testimony of a witness, a person there to stretch out a finger in court and declare the defendant's guilt aloud, was a powerful tool for the prosecution. On the other hand, placing the entire weight of a murder trial on one human being could easily blow up in the prosecutor's face. All the defence had to do was find some flaw in the accuser himself—criminal history, financial interest, flawed eye-sight—and the case began to crack.

  If the legal person Mycroft had found to represent Damian Adler was indeed capable, I suspected that the man would be more than experienced with the techniques of destroying testimony.

  Relief, a trace of optimism, and a faint stir of air cheered our dinner, and we spoke no more that night about either Adler, fils or mè
re.

  But as I laboriously, one-handedly, dressed for bed in my stifling room, that word responsibilities came back to nag me, and the real question finally percolated to the surface of my mind: Why tell me about Damian? Why hadn't Holmes simply announced that he would be away for a time? Or not even bothered with an announcement—just disappeared, with nothing but a brief note or a message left with Mrs Hudson? God knew, he'd never hesitated to do that before.

  Although the thought of waking one morning to find him simply gone would not have been an easy one. Since the shooting, I had come to lean very heavily on his presence. While resenting it at the same time.

  I cradled my arm, looking away from my reflection in the glass. Had his response when I asked about his delay been a glibly prepared speech, designed to conceal his worry? Did he believe that I was so fragile that I might not withstand abandonment? Had my admittedly precarious mental state left him with no choice but to bring me along?

  Certainly, Mycroft's reference to “your current responsibilities” suggested that both Holmes brothers saw my need for comfort as equal to a prisoner's need for aid.

  Which led to the conclusion that Holmes felt there was nothing for it but to reveal to me one of the most private and distressing episodes of his life. To lay out his most personal history, while it was still raw and unformed, to my eyes. To allow my presence to rub salt into the wounds of what he had to consider one of his most abject failures.

  I should go home, immediately. I should pack and call a taxi, leaving a brief note to preserve my own self-respect, and to provide a bulwark for the shreds of Holmes' dignity.

  And yet…

  I could not shake the notion that there had been a degree of relief underlying his chagrin. Almost as if the humiliation was a thing to be borne for a greater cause, to be got through quickly. But for what?

  I found myself considering the previous summer, the beginnings of the case involving the child whose letter had recently reduced me to tears. My arrival at Holmes' house that day had been unexpected: I found him in disguise and about to depart, intending to slip off before I could become enmeshed. But why had he not simply taken an earlier train? That case—so nearly missed entirely—became a cornerstone of our subsequent partnership, firm foundation for a tumultuous year.

  Had Holmes, deliberately or unconsciously, lingered that afternoon so that I might find him?

  Was his present uncharacteristic solicitude for my tender state a means of ensuring my presence here?

  I did not feel all that precariously fragile. Granted, I was not at my best, but surely he could see that I was finding my feet again? That I was not about to fall to pieces if left alone?

  I raised my gaze to the looking-glass before me. I was nineteen years old. During recent months, I had proven myself strong, adult, and capable, not only to myself, but to Holmes—my teacher, my mentor, my entire family since I stumbled across him on the Downs, four and a half years before.

  During the winter, the balance of our relationship had begun to shift, from apprentice and master to something very close to partnership. Several times I had even wondered if some deeper link was not in the process of being forged between us.

  Holmes was a master of avoiding undesirable situations. If he had seen my recovery, and chose to discount it, then it followed that he wanted me here. That this steely, invulnerable man, once mentor, now partner, still friend, had his own reasons for laying his vulnerability at my feet, as a man kneels to expose the nape of his neck to his sword-wielding sovereign.

  Another memory came back to me then, bringing a wash of foreign air through the sultry room. It came from Palestine, in February, shortly after the Hazr brothers and I had ripped Holmes from the hands of his Turkish tormentor. As we parted ways, the elder Hazr, Mahmoud—silent, deadly, and himself bearing scars of torture—had been moved to make a rare incursion into personal speech: Do not try to protect your Holmes, these next days. It will not help him to heal.

  I nodded, and finished my preparations for bed. As I lay down on the lavender-scented sheets, I reflected that Holmes and I seemed to have a habit of forcing unpalatable decisions on one another.

  The Tool (1): The scrap of other-worldly metal sent the

  boy was of the four Elements: the earthy stuff that gave it

  substance, the fire that twice shaped it, the water that

  twice received it, and the air through which it arrived.

  Testimony, I:2

  THE DAY WAS ALREADY HOT WHEN WE SET OFF for the avocat's office the next morning, the city air close and unhealthy against us. The sling chafed at my neck; my light dress was soon damp, as was my hair beneath the summer hat. Things were no better inside the legal gentleman's office, where the stifling air was compounded by the man's unbounded energy. He put us in chairs and then strode up and down the carpet, gesticulating and thinking aloud in fluent if accented English until the heat he seemed to generate made me light-headed.

  Fortunately, we had not much time before the train left. His secretary came in with his hat in her hand, and bundled us off into a taxicab to the station. Monsieur Cantelet talked the whole time, Holmes listening intently, ready to seize the scraps of information being tossed on the freshet of words.

  Holmes had been following the case, albeit at a distance, for a week already, and his occasional phrase of explanation helped me piece together the central facts: Damian Adler had been arrested for the murder of a drugs seller; the man sold mostly morphine and hashish, and Damian was known to be one of his customers; the two men had an argument in a bar that ended in a fistfight, although there was some disagreement as to whether the fight had been over the man's wares or a girl. In any event, two days later, the man was found in an alleyway, unconscious and bleeding from a head wound. He died in hospital; the police asked questions; the answers led them to Damian.

  The evidence against him included the presence of morphine and hashish in his room, signs of a fight on his face and hands, and the clear accusation of a witness.

  M Cantelet ran through all this with a light-hearted enthusiasm, which seemed odd, if not inappropriate, until he began to tell us about the witness. “The gentleman's veracity has been questioned,” the lawyer said happily in his musical accent. Said witness, it seemed—one Jules Filot—was known to his more jocular intimates as an habitual snitch and manufacturer of evidence on demand, which explained his nickname: “Monsieur Faux.”

  M Cantelet did not think that it would take a great effort to smash the case against Damian Adler. His private detective had spent the days since Mycroft's request for assistance had been received insinuating himself into the life of M Filot, and would make himself available to us at mid-day. In the mean-time, we were to be permitted an interview with the prisoner, at the gaol.

  “By great good fortune, M Adler had the sense not to admit to the crime.”

  “He says he's innocent?” Holmes asked.

  “The young man neither admits nor denies, merely says he does not remember. Ideal, for my purposes.”

  Ideal it might be, but less than wholly reassuring for us.

  Ste Chapelle was a tiny village, which I had already determined that morning by the fact that it did not appear on any of the hotel's maps. The town gaol was down the street from the station and across from a tiny café. It was, in fact, the local gendarme's front room, little more than a small bedroom with bars across the windows and a square of glass set into its stout wooden door. The gendarme made note of our names in a record-book, unbolted the door, handed us a couple of stools, and left us alone.

  I did not want to be there, but I did not know how to absent myself. I took a deep breath, and followed M Cantelet inside.

  The young man, who stood with his shoulder touching the window-bars, looked startlingly like Holmes in a masterful disguise: thin to emaciation and pale as the walls, but with the same beak nose, the same long fingers, the same sense of wiry strength.

  There, the similarity ended: Holmes' uncanny g
ift for tidiness was replaced by perspiration stains and the stench of old sweat; where Holmes was controlled even when excited, this younger version was vibrating with tension. His eyes darted about the room, his fingers plucked incessantly at shirt buttons and fraying cuffs. He was either nervy to the edge of a break-down, or still emerging from prolonged drug use.

  The avocat, shifting to an equally energetic French, marched across the cell with his hand outstretched. The young man put out his hand, but his blank stare suggested a lack of comprehension. Surely he was fluent in French?

  After a time his grey eyes wandered away from the voluble avocat to rest on me. It was a shock, because these were Holmes' eyes—same shape, same colour, same height above mine—but dull, with pain or confusion or even—hard to imagine—a lack of intelligence. I found myself searching for a glimpse of mind beneath the flat gaze, but there was no flash of wit, merely the weary perseverance of an animal in distress.

  Then the hooded grey eyes came to Holmes. The head tilted in concentration, a gesture eerily like his father, and sense came into them. Curiosity, yes, but also animosity. I stepped aside, and suddenly he flushed. With colour came an unexpected beauty, the darkness of his lashes and the delicacy of his features making him for the first time utterly unlike Holmes.

  The avocat filled the silence nicely. “Capitaine Adler, it is not often that a man is given the opportunity to say this, but may I present your father? Monsieur Holmes, your son, Capitaine Damian Adler.”

  Neither man moved. The avocat cleared his throat. “Yes, well, I shall leave you two alone for a few minutes, while I speak with the gendarme about the case.”

  I made haste to follow him out of the cell.

  M Cantelet and I sat outside for a long time, waiting in the shade of a linden tree as village life went on before us. When Holmes emerged, he said nothing of what had transpired in that cell.

  He never did.

  We removed to a tiny hotel near the train station, where we were joined by M Cantelet's private investigator, M Clémence. The investigator was, it seemed, dressed for his undercover rôle, with flashy clothes, pencil-thin moustache, and oil-slicked hair parted in the centre, but he gave his evidence succinctly and showed no signs of the too-common shortcomings of the breed, which are an inflated self-confidence and an impatience with humdrum detail. I could feel Holmes relax a notch.