The God of the Hive: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

by King, Laurie R.

  During the afternoon, he juggled for her, four round oak galls, then threw himself into a game of hide-and-seek that had us both grinning with Estelle’s infectious giggles. Later, they went out to fetch the day’s eggs from the hen-house, stopping on the way to examine a flower of some kind.

  “Let Nature be your teacher,” Goodman said—or rather, pronounced.

  “I don’t go to school yet,” Estelle told him.

  “It is never too early to have a teacher. Or too late,” he said, with a note of surprise.

  “How is Nature a teacher? Does she stand in front of a classroom with a stick?”

  “I believe Mr Wordsworth merely meant that we can learn much from the world around us.”

  “Is Mr Wordsworth a friend of yours?”

  “We have many friends in common, Mr Wordsworth and I. Such as the hedgehog you shall see this evening.”

  Their voices trailed off then, in the direction of the hen-house.

  * * *

  Dusk. The mouth-watering odour of baking wheat permeated the universe, and although I had been up and around, I was again on the settee in front of the fire. Estelle and Goodman were seated side by side in the open doorway, waiting for a hedgehog to emerge after a saucer of milk. Every so often he reared back his head to look at her; he seemed fascinated by the shape of her eyes.

  “There it is!” Estelle squeaked.

  “Shh, don’t frighten him. Not to worry, he’ll come back in a minute. See, there’s his nose, sniffing to make certain the world is safe.”

  “We won’t hurt it.”

  “Hedgehogs are shy.”

  “What does shy mean?”

  “Shy is when a person is frightened of many things.”

  “I’m shy.”

  “Ha! I don’t think that’s so.”

  “I’m frightened of aeroplanes.”

  “That only makes you sensible.”

  “I’m afraid of our neighbour’s dog. It’s big.”

  “That’s probably sensible, too.”

  “Are you scared of anything, Mr Robert?”

  “Look, he’s finished the milk and is looking around for more. Greedy thing.”

  “Shall we give him more?”

  “No, we don’t want him to forget how to find his own food. Milk is a treat, not dinner.”

  “What do hedgehogs eat?”

  “Roots. Grubs.”

  “Ew.”

  “Carrots are roots. You ate those.”

  “Because Mama says I have to be polite and eat what I’m given.”

  “You don’t like carrots? Then I won’t serve them again.”

  “But I don’t eat grubs.”

  “True. But a hedgehog likes them. He would probably say ew if you offered him a chocolate biscuit.”

  “Let’s try!”

  “Ah, the scientific approach. No, I don’t wish to introduce him to the taste of chocolate. What if I’m wrong and he likes it, and that one morsel condemns the poor creature to spend the rest of his life in unrequited longing for the taste of chocolate?”

  “You talk funny, Mr Robert.”

  “People before you have told me that.”

  “So, are you frightened of anything?”

  “Logic and persistence—I fear you will go far in this world, Estelle Adler.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  He sighed. “Fear,” he said, and turned to look down at the child by his side. “I am afraid of fear.”

  Then he jumped to his feet. “If you can say the word pipistrelle, I will take you to watch the bats come out.”

  Evening, and I might have curled up to sleep fully clothed except it had occurred to me that children required putting to bed. Estelle and Goodman were in front of the fire, he on the floor with Damian’s sketch-book on his knee, she stretched with her belly across the tree-round he used for a foot-stool, narrating the drawings for him. I had found the book in my rucksack, astonished that it had survived this far, and leafed through its pages before I gave it to her, making sure it contained none of his detailed nudes or violent battle scenes. Some of the drawings I had found mildly troubling, but doubted a small child would notice.

  “That’s Papa,” she said. “His face doesn’t look like that, much.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Goodman replied, and I had to smile: Damian’s self-portrait might have been an interspecies breeding experiment, his face oddly canine down to the suggestion of fur.

  “And that’s Mama,” she said.

  “She’s very pretty.” I must tell him about Estelle’s mother, I thought. Tomorrow.

  “Papa says I have her hair.”

  “Doesn’t she miss it?” he asked.

  It took her a second to understand the joke. Then she giggled and called him silly, explaining that her Mama had her own hair, of course!

  A vivid picture of that heavy black hair spilling over a cold slab flashed before my eyes; I shuddered.

  The sound of a page turning, and then silence. I knew what sketch they were looking at, since I had lingered over it myself.

  Estelle, yet not Estelle. In this portrait, Damian was looking forward through time to put an adult shape on his small daughter’s face. One might have thought it was Yolanda, from the clear Chinese cast to the features, but no one who knew Holmes could possibly mistake the imperious gaze from those grey eyes.

  “I think that’s Mama,” the child said, sounding none too certain.

  “No, it’s you,” Goodman said.

  “I don’t look like that.”

  “You will. Your Papa thinks you will.”

  She leant forward, her nose near to touching the page.

  “He loves you very much,” Goodman said.

  “I love him, too. Mr Robert, is Papa all right?”

  “Yes.” Goodman’s voice was absolutely certain, and my fingers twitched with the impulse to make a gesture against the evil eye.

  Estelle did not respond, not immediately. Instead, a minute later I heard her feet cross the room, and opened my eyes to find her standing beside me, the sketch-book in her hand. “Can you take this out for me?” she asked.

  I pushed myself upright, taking the book. She pointed to the drawing of her older self and ordered, “Take it out.”

  I only hesitated for a moment before deciding, with the complete lack of logic that had permeated the last two days, that if Damian had wanted the drawing, he shouldn’t have let himself be duped by the charlatan who had murdered his wife. I reached down to my boot top for the knife I kept there, ran its razor-sharp point along the edge of the page, and handed it to her.

  I thought Goodman was not going to accept it. He swallowed, shaken by the gift, before reaching out and taking it by the edges. After a moment, he stood and took it to the decorated wall. “Where should I put it?” he asked her.

  She pointed at a handsbreadth of bare wood. Instead, he removed the bundle of feathers that marked the wall’s focal point, and mounted the drawing in its place.

  She watched solemnly, then asked, “Is that the kind of feather that’s in your hat?”

  “The very same,” he said, and began to work one of them free.

  “Why do you wear a feather in your hat?”

  “Ich habe einen Vogel,” he replied.

  I choked, and he cast me a twinkle of his green eye.

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “It means I have a bird. Or at least, one feather of a bird. And now so do you. This is for you,” he said to her. “It’s from the owl who lives in the big tree. She sometimes gives me one of her feathers, to thank me for sharing my mice with her.”

  She fetched her hat and brought it to me, demanding that I work the feather into the hat’s crown.

  I did so, trying not to laugh all the while: The colloquial English for the German Ich habe einen Vogel is I have bats in my belfry.

  When the feather was installed, I suggested it was time for bed. Rather t
o my surprise, she accepted the command, although when she was tucked into the makeshift bed, the hat and its feather stood on the floor beside her head.

  She wished us both good-night, and curled up with her face towards the wall, banishing my own thready memories of prolonged stories and prayers and glasses of water.

  At long last, I was free to take to my own bed. I removed my shoes and sat on the window-seat I had been assigned, then realised that Goodman was still in the bedroom doorway, his eyes on the sleeping child. He felt my gaze, and turned to look at me. His eyes were liquid with tears. “‘A simple child,’” he said, “‘that lightly draws its breath/And feels its life in every limb …’”

  Then turned and walked out of the house into the night.

  Slowly, I arranged the wraps over my legs.

  My paternal grandmother had been much taken by the poems of Wordsworth, the bard of the Lake District, and had read and recited them, over and over, when I was at her house in Boston. Thus, my mind could now supply the line about the child that Goodman had left off:

  What should it know of death?

  Chapter 19

  On Tuesday at half past five, Reverend Thomas Brothers’ taxi stopped in front of a house in St Albans. His left arm was in a sling, his overcoat rested on his shoulders, but he was in better condition than he’d anticipated, after the long journey south. The town itself pleased him, built as it was on the blood-sacrifice of a Roman: The site was propitious. “This town was known as Verulamium,” he told Gunderson, who had closed the taxi door and was now paying the driver. “It was the most important Roman town in the south of England. Named after an executed soldier, martyred as a Christian in the year 304.”

  “Yes, sir,” the man replied.

  Gunderson had never been the most responsive of employees. Still, he’d been surprisingly efficient, during these past months. Perhaps it was time to give him a small rise in salary.

  Gunderson picked up their valises and followed Brothers up the steps, waiting as the door-bell clanged inside. The door came open, and Brothers stepped up, his right hand already out.

  “We meet at last,” he said, for the man could not possibly be a servant, not in that suit. “Thank you, sir, for your longtime assistance to the cause.”

  The man with the white streak in his hair replied, “Reverend Brothers, how do you do?” He took Brothers’ hand, although he still had his gloves on against the chill of the house. “Gunderson, you can leave those bags here. Come to the back, Mr Brothers, I have the fire going.”

  Gunderson took the coat from his employer’s shoulders, and accepted Brothers’ hat and scarf.

  When Gunderson came into the garden room, where the curtains were drawn and the air was cool despite the glowing gas fire, Brothers was well launched in his explanation of what had taken place over the past two weeks. He had claimed the chair nearest the heat, and allowed the other man to hand him coffee, accepting it as he might have from a servant. It was clear that Brothers considered himself the important person in this room, the other two mere worshippers at the altar of Thomas Brothers.

  He poured out his heart to his two acolytes, blissfully unaware that heresy was in the offing.

  Then he paused, and gave an embarrassed little laugh. “I have a confession to make, sir. I have to admit that I do not recall your name. I’m sure you told me, but I meet so many people, and our communications have been of the sort that names were not used.”

  The man with the white streak in his hair had not, in fact, ever given Brothers his name. Nor had he shown himself to Brothers, although he’d gone to the man’s church once, early on, just to be sure that Brothers did not rave too outrageously in public. “Peter James West,” he said, putting out his still-gloved hand for another, ceremonial clasp.

  “I am so glad to get this chance to talk with you, Mr West. You and Gunderson have been my faithful friends, my helpmeets, as it were, ever since I arrived in November. So I hope that you can help me find my way to understanding the events of this past week. I know we expected considerable results from the events of Friday, and I was at first deeply puzzled, even dispirited, at what appeared to be the failure of my sacrifice. However, as Testimony says, ‘The greater the sacrifice, the greater the energies loosed.’ I have had some days to meditate on it, and I should like to put before you my thoughts, to see if you are in agreement with my understanding. And also to get your thoughts about where I might go, since England looks to be a bit hot for me at the moment. I was thinking perhaps America, where they—”

  “Brothers, I’m sure Gunderson is as tired of this nonsense as I am.”

  Brothers gaped at him. “What was that you said?”

  “You heard me. I put up with your claptrap because it made you such a useful tool. I brought you from Shanghai because of it.”

  “You brought—for heaven’s sake, West, don’t be absurd!”

  “Your name came to my attention last August, when I was searching for potential weak spots in a colleague. Your former wife provided a link—she’d married an artist in Shanghai, who I discovered was my colleague’s nephew. That made you useful.”

  “Do you mean Damian Adler? The man has no family, he told me so himself.”

  “Then he lied. However, we all know that you are in the habit of hearing only what you wish to hear, which makes your companionship, at times, most trying. So instead of your filling the air with verbiage, let me tell you a story.

  “Certain government agencies keep themselves in the shadows. Some men regard this as an opportunity, others a responsibility. I work in such an agency, but I have an associate possessed by an overly grand and unfortunately archaic sense of his own importance. His presence is obstructive, for those of us concerned with this country’s ability to move into the Twentieth Century, but he is as thoroughly entrenched as Buckingham Palace itself.

  “Three years ago, I discovered his flaw. Ironically enough, its very existence kept me from doing a thing about it. Then thirteen months ago, I found a wedge beneath his massive façade: I happened to see a letter he had received from Shanghai, addressing him as ‘uncle’ and referring to a service rendered years before. The nephew was writing to ask for my colleague’s assistance in establishing British citizenship, for himself and his new family.

  “I immediately set into action a full investigation of this man and his wife. Which led me to you, with your small congregation of gullible spinsters and other neurasthenics. You received a letter in August from Sicily, suggesting that England was a rich but untapped bed of theological synthesis? You thought it came from Aleister Crowley, but it was, in fact, from me. I was prepared to offer further incentives, including a situation that would drive you from Shanghai under threat of arrest, but in the end, you readily seized on the idea of transplanting your harebrained theories to the land of your fathers, and were here before the Adlers arrived.

  “I paved the way for you. I suggested where you could find an assistant such as Mr Gunderson here. I helped him arrange for your change of identity, your house, and hiring a church hall. And I stood by as your delusions took you over, and you began to slaughter various useless people in search of—whatever it was you imagined you would find.”

  “I don’t—” Brothers said. “What do you … I mean to say, Why?”

  “My … colleague has always appeared absolutely righteous, untouchably ethical, unquestionably moral. A god among lesser mortals. I’d thought at first I might use the bohemian morality of his nephew—a drugs party, perhaps, or an orgy—to lift the edges of that mask. All I needed was an event linked to my colleague that might plant a seed of doubt among his even more self-righteous superiors. One small doubt was all I needed, but you—good Lord, you gave me a harvest of them! I have to hand it to you, Brothers, I’d never expected to have it so easy—a few minor adjustments to the evidence, and the nephew became the chief suspect for Yolanda’s death. I owe you and your mad theories considerable thanks.”

  “Mad! But, the Transforma
tive—”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake. Let me see your knife.”

  “My—you mean the Tool?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “Mr Brothers, let me see it for a moment, please?”

  The voice was so reasonable that Brothers automatically reached for his collar, to loosen his clothing and retrieve the holy object he wore always near his skin. He withdrew it from its soft, thick leather scabbard, dark with decades of his body’s sweat, and contemplated the wicked object. “I don’t know that you should touch it,” he told West. “It is an object of considerable power, and your hands are not—oh!”

  West took a quick step back.

  The three men gazed at the ivory hilt protruding from Thomas Brothers’ shirt-front.

  In no time at all, the energies of Thomas Brothers were freed to explore the Truths of the life beyond.

  BOOK TWO

  Sunday, 31 August–

  Thursday, 4 September

  1924

  Chapter 20

  Sunday morning, the last day of August, I woke from my cushions beneath the window to the sensation of being watched. Closely watched. By a child bent so low over my face, I could feel her breath on my right cheek. Which was about the only part of me that didn’t ache.

  “Good morning, Estelle,” I said without opening my eyes. “Did you want something?”

  “I’m hungry,” she said. “And Mr Javitz is snoring.”

  The American did have a prodigious snore, which I had been given cause to admire all the night long. I gingerly pushed away the muchabused fur coat that had been my bed-clothes on the window-seat; with motion, all the previous day’s contusions made themselves felt, from wrenched ankle to bruised scalp. The previous evening, mine host had examined the glass cuts along my back, putting three quick stitches in one of them. I did not want to rise up; I did not want to cater to this child. If I moved, yesterday’s headache might return.