I watched, slack-mouthed, as the child and her father unpacked an entire tea-set of hand-carved, exquisitely finished wooden plates and cups, sugar bowl and milk jug. The tea-pot itself was a perfectly round oak gall with a curved-twig handle and a hollowed-reed spout.
Mrs Hudson had started to brush together the spilt shaving when she noticed a foreign object among them. She placed it to one side and continued her brushing, but I looked at it, and my hand went out to pick it up.
A feather. Specifically, the primary flight-feather of a tawny owl.
I looked at Holmes. Our eyes were simultaneously drawn to the heavy, cold lump I still held in my other hand, and I convulsively let the object fall back into its box. I could not suppress a shudder of revulsion as I slapped down the lid and reached for the twine.
The black lump was a mass of meteor metal; the burnt object was the remains of an ivory haft.
I could not imagine the heat necessary to return that knife to its primary state.
I looked up to find Damian’s eyes on me. “What is that?” he asked.
“Oh, just a rock sample I asked for,” I said smoothly, reaching for the twine to bind the cover down tight.
I left the box on a high shelf, and we adults solemnly adjourned to the next room to join the dollies’ tea-party.
But late that night, Holmes and I left our sleeping family to walk down to Birling Gap and take the hotel’s skiff, rowing far out into the moonless water. There I undid the twine for a second time, and let what was left of Thomas Brothers’ knife vanish into the cleansing depths of the English Channel.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Tammy Albee and Chris Sagar for the Russellisms in chapters 12 and 63; to Dick Griffith for helping me hot-wire an old car; to Linda Fitzpatrick of Fife’s Scottish Fisheries Museum and Louisa Pittman (former “Mate,” future PhD, current humble student) for giving me a boat (on paper, anyway); to Adrian Muller for sharing his family and his Dutch; and to the gents at the Hiller Air Museum for nursing along my Bristol Tourer.
For Patricia Toner and all the other readers who helped raise funds for Heifer International’s beehive project, and her husband, Richard Luther Sosa (who is both better-looking and of stronger stuff than his namesake), and daughter, Meghann Toner (who should have been the doctor).
And a hive-full of thanks to Zoë Elkaim, Vicki Van Valkenburgh, Bob Difley, Alice Wright, Erin Bright, Wanda Kalgren, Nikki Rowe, and Caitlin Rowe, for their generosity and cleverness in keeping together all the manifold nooks and crannies associated with www.LaurieRKing.com. Bless you, ladies and gent, I couldn’t have done it without you.
About the Author
LAURIE R. KING is the New York Times bestselling author of ten Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, and the acclaimed novels A Darker Place, Folly, Keeping Watch, and Touchstone. She is one of only two novelists to win the Best First Crime Novel awards on both sides of the Atlantic. She lives in northern California, where she is at work on her next Russell and Holmes mystery.
The God of the Hive is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Laurie R. King
Map copyright © 2010 by Jeffrey L. Ward
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King, Laurie R.
The god of the hive : a novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes / Laurie R. King.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90768-1
1. Russell, Mary (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women private
investigators—England—Fiction. 3. Holmes, Sherlock (Fictitious
character)—Fiction. 4. Holmes, Mycroft (Fictitious character)—Fiction.
5. Married people—Fiction. 6. Fathers and sons—Fiction.
7. Granddaughters—Fiction. 8. Conspiracies—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3561.I4813G64 2010
813′.54—dc22
2009052807
www.bantamdell.com
v3.0
The God of the Hive: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Page 34