The God of the Hive (12 page)

Back now where we had started, Goodman sat down on a fallen tree, studying the rambling structure on the far side of the clearing: tree in front, shed behind, a glimpse of orchard at the back. After a minute, I sat beside him. Even with a clear head, the meadow resembled the dwelling-place of some mythic creature. Could there possibly be a deed somewhere with Robert Goodman’s name on it? I thought it more likely that the aeroplane had delivered us to another world, one in which official land deeds and telegraph lines did not exist.

“The whole story sounds terribly alarmist and melodramatic, I know. But short of giving you all the details, and the names”—
which would absolutely guarantee that you did not believe me
, I mentally added—“it’s the bald truth.”

“Good. So you won’t be leaving momentarily?”

“Not if you don’t mind having us, for two or three more days.” If nothing else, I owed it to Javitz to let his leg heal before moving him.

“Good,” he repeated, adding, “‘Dull would he be of a soul who could pass by/A sight so touching in its majesty.’” I stared, then followed the line of his gaze: A hundred feet away stood a magnificent stag, its antlers each showing six or seven points. The creature’s liquid eyes studied us with as much interest as we studied him.
Majesty
was the word.

Which was, again, that of Wordsworth. “‘Westminster Bridge’?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I were mad. “No, red deer.”

And so saying, the little blond man set out across his meadow, causing the stag to leap away and me to grin at my companion’s retreating back. The stripped sapling rested across his shoulder like a rifle barrel. Or the first support for a child’s swing.

I thought it safe to leave the two men with the child for a bit longer—indeed, Estelle seemed happier with either of them than she did with me—and the walk had begun to loosen my sore muscles, so I skirted the edge of the meadow and followed what looked like an overgrown horse-track to the west. In twenty minutes, I came to the house that explained the estate.

A square, unfussy Georgian box of a house in the middle of an abandoned garden, weeds growing through the gravel of its drive. The boards across all the ground-floor windows and some of the upper storeys suggested that it was vacant. I circled it, seeing no sign of life.

A broken gutter-pipe had been recently repaired, although not painted—and I thought this might explain Goodman’s presence. A country estate whose family did not wish it to deteriorate entirely would want it cared for; permitting this odd sort of man with a love for simple things to make a home nearby was a sensible precaution.

Although he was an unusual sort of caretaker, I reflected as I turned back towards the meadow. His accent and education spoke of the officer class, but his skills confirmed his claims of ambulance service. One might assume that some physical shortcoming had disqualified him from active service, but he showed no signs of infirmity now.

One of the small objects on Goodman’s wall of decoration was a bronze Croix de Guerre. It could have belonged to anyone, of course—he had not
personally worn any of the twenty-three horse-shoes on the wall either—but I suspected it was his, even though governments did not often give medals to lowly ambulance drivers.

In any case, a man living in the deep woods six years after Armistice had probably not had an easy War. But then, I had known that since the moment I saw those old eyes in the young face.

Back on the dead tree, I sat massaging my neck, stiff from yesterday’s violence and the source of my persistent headache. It was just as well he hadn’t agreed that we should leave, I thought: I’d have collapsed before we reached the crash site.

Goodman came down the front steps and went over to the enormous tree, retrieving a garden fork that he had left leaning against its trunk. He absently patted the trunk, a gesture remarkably similar to my mother’s touch on the
mezuzah
at our door, then headed towards his little walled vegetable garden beside the shed.

My eyes went back to the tree. I had seen no sign of fairies. Perhaps it was instead Yggdrasil, the World Tree where the gods hold court. Although that was an ash, and this an oak. And the dark preoccupation with Norse mythology belonged to Reverend Thomas Brothers, not Robert Goodman.

The name opened a door in my mind and out flowed all the anxiety and speculation that I had kept dammed up when talking to our rescuer. If Brothers was not dead, where had he gone, and who was helping him? Should I have directed a telegram to Chief Inspector Lestrade, to inform him that Holmes’ suspect was at large in the wilds of Scotland? Or would that simply further endanger the child?

Thoughts chased around my head, making my skull ache again, and I was glad when Goodman reappeared around the side of his motley construction with a full bushel basket. I climbed from my perch and went to the house, where I found Estelle setting out another dollies’ tea-party, this time with Javitz, the two deer Goodman had given her, and a two-inch-tall rabbit, crude but rich in personality. She had given the American the porcelain cup of honour, making do herself with an acorn, and was chattering happily about a doll she had at home. I could only wonder at the indomitability of the very young.

I settled to the tangle of dried beans in want of shelling, and she instantly trotted over with two acorn cups, giving me one. I thanked her, and she presented the other to Goodman, watching in anticipation for his reaction. Javitz shot me a father’s amused grin, while I wondered how one was to play the game, but Goodman did not hesitate. He raised his cup to his lips, took a noisy sip, and swallowed, the very picture of satisfaction. The verisimilitude of his act made me glance involuntarily at my own tiny woodland cup and to wonder, for an instant, if his might not contain actual tea.

Chapter 21

a ÷ (b+c+d) + e − (½ c)

M
ycroft decided on Monday that the election of the Labour government might have a larger role in his current predicament than he had originally allowed; however, because it was not entirely to blame, he only deducted half of it.

He thought it was Monday, although it was difficult to be certain. Distressingly difficult. He had the impression that some of his food and drink contained sedatives—not a lot, just enough to make him drowsy. He hoped so. Humiliating to think that mere solitude might affect the control of his mind.

The room provided only two sources of external stimulation: the window overhead, and the gaolers.

In the roof a dozen feet over his standing head was a sky-light, four feet square, of translucent glass—or rather, regular glass that had been whitewashed at some time in its history, now darkened by decades of grime and generations of passing birds. He rather wished that the man wielding the brush had been less diligent, and thus provide a prisoner with a tiny glimpse of the sky. Instead, he had a featureless square that became visible at dawn then faded at dusk, propelling a diffuse patch across floor and walls in the hours between. (Logically, this prison might be constructed with an outer roof and fitted with an artificial light that rose and fell, confusing his time sense and rending the regularity of his
meals false—but that would be elaborate and to what purpose? The very idea was diabolical and intolerable, and in that direction lay a path to madness.)

Yesterday (was it yesterday?) a faint scratching from above had caused his heart to race, but it had only been pigeons. And every so often, if he lay staring up for long enough, a quick shadow would pass across the whitened glass; once it had been an entire flock of birds, which played across his internal vision for a long time.

As for the gaolers, there were two. The younger one with the City shoes came in the mornings. His athletic stride sent brisk echoes down the corridor outside, hard heels making impact on the worn surface. The older, heavier, slower man who wore scuffed boots and had a slight hitch in his stride was in charge of the afternoons and most late-night visits.

In either case, food and drink were placed in a tiny pass-through that was walled about on the corridor side. Mycroft pictured a sturdy metal-lined box fastened against a hole cut in the wall, its top unlatching to deposit the food and refill the cup. One morning he’d kept the cup to see what would happen, and his gaoler—the younger man—had simply poured the water onto the floor of the pass-through and left.

The younger man, twice at the beginning, had trailed a faint aroma of bay rum after-shave. The older man smelt of gaspers and had the phlegmy cough that went with them. Neither responded to his questions, although the younger man would pause to listen.

The younger man interested Mycroft considerably.

The food and drink (drugged or no) were delivered at regular intervals: seven in the morning, three in the afternoon, and eleven at night—he could hear Ben tolling from the Houses of Parliament. The morning delivery in the sharp shoes was timed as precisely as the quick Soot-steps: within two minutes either way of seven. The older man was more lax, especially last thing at night, when the eleven o’clock “meal” often preceded the three-quarter ring of the bells. But no matter the time or the footsteps, what his gaolers brought was the same: a bread roll, a boiled egg, a cup of water, and an apple. That morning, the apple had been an orange. He had spent nearly an hour fretting over the significance before deciding just to eat the dratted thing.

Breaking open the peel had at least improved the smell, for a while.

His prison was in the top floor of an unused warehouse near the river, whose traffic he could occasionally hear. The shade of the bricks combined with the direction of the clock meant that if he was turned loose, he could point directly to his prison. The débris in the corners and the floor-boards indicated that over the years the space had held a variety of goods: tea leaves and turmeric, a palimpsest of dye-stuffs, the gouges of metal parts. He’d found a fragment of Chinese porcelain, which came in handy, and a William IV farthing coin, which was less so.

The district outside was moribund—he could barely discern the vibrations of daytime activity rising from below—and that alone had made him hesitate to attempt breaking the window: If he did manage to break it, no one would hear his calls, and the cold nights pouring in might finish him off. In any event, the only thing heavy enough to do the job was his toilet bucket, and he preferred not to empty its contents onto the floor.

His mind was wandering, yet again. He pulled his thoughts from useless speculation and re-addressed himself to the schoolboy algebra on the wall.

a ÷ (b+c+d) + e − (½ c)

The first letter drew his eyes, yet again.
a
for
Accountant
, as a child’s book might have it. Had Damian ever drawn a book of ABCs for the child? Estelle was her name,
e
for Estelle—no,
e
stands for Mycroft Holmes, who calls himself an accountant, the man who oversees the books of the British Empire.

In recent years, his bookkeeping—the financial and political balance sheets of nations—had begun to take on elements of the ethical as well. What in earlier years had been a fairly straightforward enterprise, as black and white as numerals on a page, slowly took on shades of grey, and even colour. He had come to recognise that a government bound up in its own purposes required an outside mediator. Even if the government did not acknowledge its need. Even if Mycroft Holmes was an ironic choice for the arbiter of ethics.

He went back to the formula on the wall, staggering a bit as he got to his feet, and scratched another element:

a ÷ (b+c+d) + e − (½ c) − (f)

Absently sucking the bloody patch on his finger—the scrap of porcelain was adequate against mortar, but viciously sharp—he thought about the
f. f
was the sum of those times when Mycroft Holmes had acted at deliberate cross-purposes to his government. He had always thought of it as acting directly for the king, by-passing the evanescent Prime Ministers, but in fact, the choices had been his alone. Three times in his career, he had stepped beyond the mere gathering of Intelligence, taking into his hands a decision that others were incapable of making; twice he had used his authority to further his own interests.

The third time he would have done so was cut short, four days ago (he thought) by an armed abductor at the very gate of New Scotland Yard.

Not that Mycroft Holmes had any ethical dilemma with playing God. He could look his conscience in the face; if there were elements in his past of which he was not proud, he was content that he walked the line of justice.

No: What had begun to concern him this past year was the face in the looking-glass—the thinning hair, the sagging jowls, the old man looking back, even though he was barely seventy.

It was all very well and good for Mycroft Holmes to play God, but who was to say that the next man, the man who took his place in the accounting house, would have as untarnished a conscience?

Chapter 22

O
n Monday, my headache had retreated to the back of my head, although sudden motion made me queasy. I told myself that another day of rest would not be the end of the world, and put aside any plans for leaping into action.

After breakfast, Goodman presented Estelle with a second lively wooden rabbit and a fully articulated three-inch-tall bear with leather thongs for joints.

In the middle of the morning, he finished making a crutch for Javitz out of the sapling. He had trimmed the split top to make a rest, added rags, then neatly bound the padding with buckskin. It rode so easily under the big man’s arm, the sapling might have been grown for that express purpose.

After lunch, Goodman returned to the nearby village for the shopping he had requested. He took with him my letter to
The Times
, enclosing a pound note and the request that they run a message for me until the money was used up. The message was designed to attract the eye of an amateur beekeeper like Holmes: