Part 2 (1/2)
Mrs Hudson, on the other hand, did make a fuss over the split lip, but then, that was Mrs Hudson.
Now the sun was going down. With a sigh, Russell rolled the magazine into her pocket and trudged across the darkening Downs towards home. At least her cousin would not be there. Her aunt's only son did not visit often. He was at university, up in Edinburgh, and found the long trek to the south coast beyond tedious. He was a bully and a bore, and it was no surprise at all that after eight months of war, he had not enlisted.
She would, in an instant, if women were allowed to fight. Back in February, she had tried to enlist in the VAD, having her eye on an ambulance at the Front, but she was turned down as being too young. In the weeks that followed, she'd been compiling a false ident.i.ty in order to apply again-but then she met Sherlock Holmes. And it didn't take long to realise that if she were to disappear into VAD training, he would find her, and she would be dragged back to Suss.e.x in ignominy. Still, working with him, it no longer seemed so vitally important to get to France.
Her cousin displayed no such urge to serve anything or anyone outside his own interests.
It had been a mistake, to voice the thought aloud when he showed up unexpectedly Sat.u.r.day morning. She had managed to retain her self-respect (if not her sense of inviolability) by neither backing down nor giving him the usual subservience; however, it was just as well that her aunt had intervened. She'd been eyeing the fireplace poker, and it probably wouldn't be easy for a girl of fifteen to explain away a battered cousin or claim self-defence, not with the victim's mother there to call it murder.
But her aunt had intervened-by ”accidentally” treading on the spectacles where they lay on the hearth-rug-and her cousin had returned to Scotland, leaving behind him an atmosphere of even greater tension than before.
Impossible to explain any of this to Holmes or Mrs Hudson. Instead, Russell wired together her gla.s.ses, dressed in long sleeves for a few days, and comforted herself with the knowledge that in two weeks, neither relative would be able to lay hands on the inheritance.
6.
”Mrs Hudson? Mrs Hudson! Where has the woman-”
”I'm just here, Mr Holmes, no need to bellow.”
”Ah, there you are. Have you had word from Russell? She said she'd be here this morning. This is Sat.u.r.day, is it not? The experiment is only half finished.”
”She probably decided she couldn't face the stench.”
”What was that? Don't mutter, Mrs Hudson.”
”I said,” the housekeeper called from the bottom of the stairs, ”no, I haven't heard from her.”
”Very well, if she arrives, she will find me in the laboratory.”
Half an hour later, the telephone sounded. Mrs Hudson answered, and after a brief conversation, walked up the stairs to rap on the door. A stifled oath and a tinkle of broken gla.s.s joined the sulphurous miasma that trickled into the hallway. She made haste to speak at the closed door.
”That was Mary's aunt ringing, to say the child's under the weather and won't be coming today.”
The housekeeper made it as far as the half-landing when the door came open. Yellow smoke billowed outward. ”Don't tell me she's fallen yet again? We must buy the girl some proper footwear.”
”I gather she's ill.”
”Ill? Russell?”
”Perhaps it was the idea of breathing the air in your laboratory.”
”Pardon? Mrs Hudson, you mustn't mutter like that.”
This time, the housekeeper did not reply: She had spoken quite loudly enough for him to hear.
As she antic.i.p.ated, her silence brought him out to the top of the stairs. But instead of a demand that she repeat her statement, or a query as to the symptoms of his apprentice, he frowned, and asked one of his favourite sort of questions, enigmatic and to all appearances trivial.
”Tell me, Mrs Hudson, would you consider naivete a flaw in intelligence, or merely in experience?”
”Mr Holmes! Naivete is in no sense a flaw. Innocence is a charming and fragile virtue. We should all be much better off if we could preserve it through life's tribulations.”
His grey eyes looked at her without seeing her: a familiar sensation. ”Hmm. Fragile. Yes.”
”Why do you ask? Are you calling me naive? Or is this about Mary?”
But her employer merely retreated into the reeking laboratory.
Mrs Hudson shook her head and went to prop open the front door, in hopes the additional ventilation might save the upstairs wallpaper.
When Mary returned the next day, neither of the people in the house thought she looked at all well.
Mrs Hudson's response was to cook for her.
Holmes' interest took a more circuitous route.
7.
The May night was quiet. Sherlock Holmes sat nursing his pipe, long legs stretched out on the ground, surrounded by his hives. Two hundred and nine-nine days since War was declared. Fifty-four days since Mary Russell had come across him on the hillside, watching bees and considering suicide.
It would be difficult to say whether War or Russell was having the greater impact on his life.
The air was warm and still-the poor wretches huddled in the trenches seemed to be having a Sunday night's respite from the guns. The hives gave out a pleasing hum as the night watch laboured to cool their charges within. The new queen Russell had helped him install had made a successful maiden flight and looked to prove herself fruitful; he'd check the frames in a day or two, to see how soon he might think about a harvest.
The colony never showed the slightest mistrust of their replacement queen, delivered by his own Almighty Hand. A beekeeper's success often rested on the imperceptibility of his meddling.
Perhaps that should be Rule Four of beekeeping.
People wondered why the Great Detective kept bees. The question should have been, why didn't everyone keep bees? Endlessly entertaining, intellectually satisfying, beekeeping was philosophy made manifest, theories about behaviour (human and bee) given concrete shape. The study of bees-the triumvirate of queen, drone, and worker-was a study of mankind. It provided a continuation of his life's work of keeping the country running smoothly, free of crime and disruption.
Both tasks required an attention to detail, a willingness to get one's hands dirty-and an acceptance that sometimes one got hurt.
He put away his pipe. As he climbed to his feet, brus.h.i.+ng off his trousers, the odd thought occurred to him that Maurice Maeterlinck, that greatest of literary beekeepers, had also met a youthful muse in his later years.
One might a.s.sume, however, that Maeterlinck did not then set off across his French countryside at midnight carrying a burglar's bag, and dressed in black clothing.