Beekeeping for Beginners (3 page)

5

One of the things Mary Russell liked about the man Holmes was his disinclination to fuss.

He was a most demanding friend, no question about that. Even their informal tutorials tended to veer into the realm of examinations—although she was never certain if he was testing her knowledge, or something more complex. Yesterday, for example, when he had her thrust a hand into the beehive: Was that simply a lesson in beekeeping? Or a test of her courage? Her dexterity? Her willingness to obey?

The entire bee episode had been enlightening, and disturbing. Holmes had revealed an unexpected pocket of softness—
Never cease to feel wonder
—atop the ruthlessness of regicide. She supposed
being cruel to be kind
was inevitable in the realm of animal husbandry, like culling the rooster-chicks or slaughtering the meat lambs: She lived on a farm, but she would never make a farmer. Still, the image of the steel forceps snapping down on that glossy full body lingered in her mind. And although she told herself she was being melodramatic, the act brought to mind those of his old cases where he’d demonstrated a god-like willingness to act as judge and jury, and even (by failing to interfere) executioner.

She looked down at the current issue of the
Strand
she had brought out here to read, containing the somewhat disappointing final episode of the story Dr Watson had called
The Valley of Fear
. It left a person with more questions than answers—but asking Holmes about them would be pointless, as he invariably claimed that the chronicler had rewritten them to his own purposes. Someday, she would meet the good Doctor, and ask him directly.

Somehow, she suspected that Dr Watson would be something of a fusser, filling the air with protests and queries. Unlike Holmes, who, once he’d presented his test or question, and once it had been answered to his satisfaction, let it be.

Of course, Sherlock Holmes had no need to fill the air with questions. The man could construct a complex theory out of minuscule scraps of data—as Dr Watson had put it in an early story,
“by momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man’s inmost thoughts.”
She’d known this since their first afternoon together, when he read her entire uncomfortable situation out of one brief phrase and a twist of the mouth: large inheritance; greedy aunt. His subsequent delicate (for Holmes) enquiry—that he tended towards a dim view of human nature, but had she written a will?—had required her to reassure him that, yes, she had a will, and no, her aunt would not benefit enormously from her niece’s death.

That settled, they had gone on to other matters.

Then, five weeks later—last Tuesday—she learned that she had not, in fact, spoken the complete truth. Her lie had been inadvertent, but because she thought it was the truth, it had satisfied him. He might never have had reason to readdress the question of wills and problematical relations.

Until she greeted him with an injured face.

To her gratitude, he took in the facial bruising with one quick twitch of an eyebrow—no exclamations or questions, just that raking glance and a return to the hive of bees.

But she was not surprised when later that afternoon, in a minor diversion to the flow of conversation, he’d brought the topic back around to dangerous relatives.

She knew him well enough already to anticipate the question, and to give him what he wanted without argument.

“When I asked you last month—” he began.

“The papers went down on the
Lusitania.
” She adjusted the small Bunsen flame and held the beaker over it. “You were about to ask about the will, is that right?”

“By way of confirmation.”

“Well, I signed all kinds of papers in February, including a will, and I thought that was that. But some of my father’s properties were in France and America, and it turns out that with the War, paperwork takes longer than the solicitor anticipated. He wrote me last week to say that some of the key documents were on the
Lusitania
. Which means that my will isn’t quite as complete as I’d thought. However, I have an appointment in two weeks—June first—to sign another set.”

“Good,” he said, and that was the end of that.

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 identity 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 Sussex 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 Saturday 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 glasses, 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 Saturday, 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 glass 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 anticipated, 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 naiveté a flaw in intelligence, or merely in experience?”

“Mr Holmes! Naiveté 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
naïve? 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, brushing 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 assume, however, that Maeterlinck did not then set off across his French countryside at midnight carrying a burglar’s bag, and dressed in black clothing.

8

I knew where my apprentice lived, of course. By then I knew a great deal about young Miss Russell, and not merely the workings of her singular, if untutored, mind. I knew of her family, the events surrounding their death, the situation in which they left her, including the financial. I knew who was living in her house and in the others on her estate. I knew her house would contain one canary and two human beings—they had no dog, the servants slept elsewhere, and the cats lived in the barn. I knew that both Russell and her aunt slept up on the first floor.

What I did not know, however, made for key gaps in my plans. I did not know if my one-sided view of the aunt was a true picture. I did not know what other elements might contribute to Russell’s situation. I did not know—not with absolute certainty—how Russell would react were she to learn that I had been here.

Nonetheless, when confronted by ignorance, I generally decide that if I cannot have knowledge, wisdom shall have to suffice.

And I was wise enough to know that Russell must not know of my meddling. I was also wise enough to suspect that for a healthy (and, more to the point, wealthy) young girl, ill-fitting shoes or no, to have a fall, a brawl, and an illness within the space of six weeks took some looking into.

I paused inside the kitchen, senses open.

The air smelt of dull cooking, and even by the moonlight spilling in the windows, I could see the shortcomings of the cleaning staff. Money had been spent here, and recently—the gas-burning cooker was an enamel showpiece that provided the only gleaming surface in the room. I did not for a moment imagine that the aunt’s pocket-book had paid for it.

Three doors opened off the kitchen: the one behind me, with a mud-room and two time-bowed stone steps to the yard beyond; one directly ahead, on swinging hinges; and a narrow one to the right.

I stepped to the right, into the pantry, eased the door shut, and turned on my handtorch.

The door was sufficiently snug that a kitchen towel along the bottom would block most of the light. I pushed one into place, then thumbed the electrical light switch to
ON
.

By and large, criminals are pulled by conflicting impulses: the wish to keep the tools of their crime close at hand, and the need to push them far enough away that they might readily be denied. A woman poisoning her rich niece would be torn between carrying the poison in her pocket at all times, and hiding it at the farthest reaches of the estate.

However, any relative of Russell’s was unlikely to be stupid. She would consider a hiding place with care, seeking a place where others did not venture. And although it was true that Russell was no cook, and thus nearly any location within the kitchen would be safe from her, a rational knowledge of this would not win out over an emotional need for concealment.

To say nothing of the servants, who were apt to burrow anywhere.

Except … inside an object that evoked the worst parts of any housemaid’s employment.

At the back of a collection of cleaning supplies stood a tin of stove blacking. It gave me a moment’s hope—one might have expected the blacking to be discarded once an enamelled cook-stove was installed—but prising open the top revealed nothing but a near-empty tin of blacking, an overlooked survivor of the former inhabitants.

I went on with my search. A methodical hour later, I admitted that I had been wrong about where the aunt had stored her poison. Either that, or I had been wrong about poison in the first place.

Perhaps girls of fifteen habitually injured themselves, and took ill? Russell appeared to be growing in fits and starts—hence her new but ill-fitting shoes—and no doubt a changing physique brought its own problems. Still, I had not noticed any particular clumsiness in her, and she had always seemed robust of health.

Or perhaps being thin myself, and hearty, I attributed that combination to the child?

I admit, apart from my Irregulars—the street boys I’d hired as eyes on the streets of London—I’d never had much to do with young people.

Over the next hour, I discovered the aunt’s stash of bank notes and a handful of valuable jewellery beneath a floor-board, a packet of Veronal sleeping powder in a downstairs medicine cabinet, and indications that a letter had recently been burnt in the sitting-room fireplace—which would have been of little interest, except it had then been battered into powder with the fireplace poker.

I learnt that Russell’s mother had an eclectic and sophisticated taste in reading material, although I suspected that some of the books had belonged to the father.

I found that the comfortable chair before the fire had been claimed by the aunt, and that Russell spent little time in the sitting room, or indeed in the entire downstairs. The aunt’s choice of reading matter was firmly in the realm of ladies’ fiction; her needlework was clumsy and suggested a problem distinguishing green from red; the new recording disks beside the expensive gramophone reflected music-hall taste.

The paintings on the walls were a similar mix of old and beautiful interspersed with new and jarring.

Also, the aunt snored.

After an hour in the ground floor, I had found nothing suggesting attempted murder. The stairs I eyed with suspicion: They were old enough that creaks would come with the slightest pressure, and I am not a small man.

The house had two full stories and a partial attic, which suggested that this was the flight of stairs Russell had fallen down, eleven days after we’d met. “Three steps from the bottom,” she’d told me ruefully as I’d strapped her wrist, that we might finish Friday’s experiment. At the time, I’d thought little of it—after all, a fall of three steps was hardly a life-threatening event, not for a young girl.

However, two accidents and a sudden illness were thought-provoking. That all three had struck on week-ends was beyond coincidence.

I lowered my knees with care onto the bottom step (resulting in, as I’d anticipated, a faint creak from the wood) and took out my high-powered lens and the torch. I found a faint line at the base of one of the third-step balusters. Which signified little in itself—except that there was a similar line in the haze of unwiped polish on the brass stair-rail near the wall. A faint line, and an infinitesimal wisp of silken floss, that a less experienced eye would have dismissed as a hair.

Even if Russell thought to look at the time, it might have appeared that a length of the aunt’s embroidery floss had accidentally become wrapped across the stairs.

Had she thought to look. But I suspected that the child, humiliated by a display of adolescent clumsiness before her trim, generally disapproving, and self-contained aunt—plus, if my growing hypothesis was correct, the woman’s bully of a son—had not thought to investigate. Or if she had, it was after she returned home, when the thread had been cleared away.

I was tempted to risk the stairs, to gain a closer look at this so-called guardian of my new—my only—my utterly unanticipated—young apprentice. But that would risk coming face to face with the young woman herself. And that, I feared, might be a form of humiliation she would find impossible to forgive.

I paused in the sitting room to study the framed photographs, then left the house for good.

The rest of the night I spent before the fire with a pipe and a tin of shag tobacco.