The Language of Bees (11 page)

Then she returns to her hive where, if the beekeeper has his way, she spends the remainder of her days, never to fly, never to use her wings, never to see the sky again.

When one watches that queen, dutifully planting her eggs in the cells prepared for them, surrounded at every moment by attentive workers, fed and cleaned and urged to ever greater production, one can only wonder: Does she remember? Does some part of that mind live forever in the soaring blue, inhabiting freedom in the way a prisoner will imagine a rich meal with such detail his mouth waters? Or does the endless song of the hive fill her mind, compensating for the drudgery of her lot?

Perhaps that freedom is why the queen is the hive’s one true warrior, jealously guarding her position against her unborn rivals until the regal powers wane, her production falters.

But a queen does not die of old age. If she does not fall in royal battle, or of the cold, her daughters will eventually turn against her. They gather, hundreds of them, to surround her in a living mass, smothering her and crushing her. And when they have finished, they discard her lifeless body and begin the business of raising up another queen.

The queen is dead, long live the queen.

That is the way of the hive.

My attention was caught here by motion at the top of the book: a bee, come to explore the possibilities of the printed page. Or more likely, taking advantage of a temporary resting place, for her leg sacs bulged with pollen, a load that the most doughty of aeronauts might reconsider. She walked along the blue binding, as heedless of me as I was of the sky overhead; reaching the spine, she gathered herself and flashed off in the direction of the white Langstroth box thirty feet away, in the shade of Mrs Hudson’s beloved Cox’s Orange Pippin.

I pocketed the book and followed the bee.

Holmes had situated the hive to be warmed by the morning sun but shaded by the apple tree during the afternoon. I knelt nearby, avoiding a wasp that was working at a fallen apple, and watched the bees come and go.

The Langstroth hive was a wooden structure roughly twenty inches on a side. On the outside it was a stack of plain, whitewashed boxes, but within lay a technological marvel of precise measurements and moving parts, all of them aimed at providing the bees with such perfect surroundings, they would stay put and work. One hive could produce hundreds of pounds of honey, under the right conditions, from bees that would be just as pleased with a hollow tree.

At the bottom front of the box was a long entrance slit with a porch on which the workers landed. Or, as on this hot day, stood facing the outer world while whirring their wings enthusiastically—this was the draught that Holmes had written about, air pushed through the hive to exit, hotter and damper than it had entered, through vents
at the upper back. The sound this made struck the neophyte as a warning of high danger, as if the hive was about to erupt in fury and search for a human target for its wrath.

I knew Holmes’ bees well enough, however, to hear that this was merely the roar of a hard-working hive, putting away its wealth, one minuscule drop at a time—until the beekeeper ripped off the top of their universe and pillaged the community’s resources for his own savage needs.

One queen; a handful of males who spent their lives in toil-free luxury awaiting a call to shoot skyward in a mating flight; and thousand upon thousand of hard-labouring females, who moved up the ranks from nursery attendants to nectar-gatherers before their brief lives were spent. An organic machine, entirely designed to provide for the next generation.

Which when one thinks about it, is pretty much what all creatures are designed for.

And now, yet again, my thoughts had circled around to Damian Adler and his young daughter. In irritation, I rose and brushed off my knees: At last, Lulu’s bicycle had gone.

I used my key on the French doors from the terrace—as Lulu had noted, it was idiosyncratic for rural dwellers to lock a house with such care, but Holmes and I never knew when London would follow us home. In the kitchen, every surface gleamed. I put my empty bottle in the box under the sink and went to the sitting room to take off my boots.

It was very quiet. When was the last time I had been alone in this house? Unlike Lulu, Mrs Hudson lived here, so it would have been some rare occasion when she was away at market and Holmes was off doing whatever Holmes did. Years, probably, since I had been all by myself there for more than an hour or two.

Normally, one is only conscious of the room around one, but when no-one else is present, one’s awareness is free to fill all the spaces. I stood for a time and listened to the heavy old flint walls around me: silent; quiescent; welcoming. Passing from room to room, I threw open all the doors and windows. In the laboratory, I located a screw-driver,
and carried it and the
mezuzah
downstairs, to mount it on the front door-jamb. I touched it with my fingers, saying the prayer and welcoming it to its new home, then took myself out to a shaded corner of the terrace to read.

Bees feel joy, and outrage, and contentment. Bees play, tossing themselves in flight with no point but for the pleasure of the thing. And bees despair, when hopelessness and loss have become their lot.

A hive that loses its queen and has no other queen cells to raise up is dead, its future sterile. Workers may continue for a time, but soon listlessness and melancholy overcome them. Their sound changes, from the roar of energetic purpose to a note of anguish and loss. One of the workers may try to summon the energy of the hive and lay her own eggs, as if to conjure up the presence of royalty by enacting its rituals, but every member, drone to new-hatched worker, feels the end upon them.

For the bee, unlike the human, the future is all: The next generation is the singular purpose of their every motion, their every decision. Not for
Apis mellifera
the ethical struggles of individual versus community rights, the protest against oppression, the life-long dedication to perfecting an individual’s nature and desire. For the hive, there is no individual, merely the all; no present, only the call of the future; no personal contribution, only the accumulated essence of great numbers.

The sun sloped behind the roof, shadows crept through the orchard, and finally, I closed the covers of Holmes’ little book.

As I’d remembered, it was less “practical handbook” than philosophical treatise. As a girl of fifteen, it had meant little to me. Now, having known the man for nine years and been married to him for
three, I found the document astonishing, so revealing of this proud, solitary man that I was amazed he had given it for publication.

I no longer wondered why he had retired at such an early age; rather, I was grateful that he had turned his back on his fellow man, instead of letting bitterness overcome him.

The night air moved up towards the Downs, washing over sea and orchard. I breathed it in, and thought that henceforth, loneliness would smell to me like fermenting apples.

I left the book on a desk in the library and went to find a bottle of last year’s honey wine, a beverage not improved by longevity but containing nonetheless a breath of that summer.

The twelvemonth since Holmes bottled it had been an extraordinary one. The cases had pressed fast upon us, one after another, each with its singular cast of players: Miss Dorothy Ruskin, the mad archaeologist of Palestine, had come to our door a year ago less two days. No sooner had that investigation ended than we were pulled into a mystery on Dartmoor, and on that case’s heels we had entered a Berkshire country house inhabited by Bedouins. Afterwards, we had scarcely drawn breath before Mycroft had sent us to India and a middle-aged version of Kipling’s Kim; on our way homeward, after a foray into the affairs of the Emperor of Japan, we had landed in San Francisco, where lay the haunts of my own past.

One calendar year, filled with revelations, hardship, intense friendships, painful losses, and a view into my childhood that left me, three months later, shaken and unsure of myself. Another year like this one, and people would no longer comment on the age difference between my husband and myself.

I set the wine to cool while I closed up the house against the creatures of the night, then put together a plate of strong cheese, oat biscuits, and summer fruit. I spread some cushions and a travelling rug on the warm stones of the terrace and dined in solitary splendour while the colours came into the sky. I lay with the soft rug around me, watching the azure shift into indigo, and spotted the first meteors.

It was the annual Perseids shower. We’d seen their harbingers a few nights before when the sea mists lifted, silent lights darting across the heavens, as magical as anything in nature. Tonight the shower was at its height, and despite a near-full moon, their brightness and numbers lit the sky.

I fell asleep watching them, no doubt assisted by the better part of a bottle of wine.

Darkness:
When such a man comes of age
,
there comes a period of darkness, when emptiness and
disgust lie all about and there is no beauty in the world
.
The lump of meteor-metal the boy carried went cold
and empty of Power
.
Testimony, I:4

D
AMIAN, ANY MORE ALCOHOL AND YOUR WITS WILL be the worse for it tomorrow.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You will be upright and conversing, but hardly at your peak.”

“My wits were at a peak today, and what good did it do us?”

“I
did warn you that a round of the hospitals and morgues would be pure slog with little hope of success. If you were to permit the police—”

“No police.”

“I assure you I am capable of inventing a story to account for my enquiries into one Yolanda Adler.”

“I came to you because I thought it might let me avoid the police. If you can’t do it, say the word and I’ll go.”

“I am merely suggesting that using the established machinery of the official enquiry agents could save us time.”

“No police. Yolanda and Estelle have just begun to settle in here. To start out life with a police enquiry and a scandal would be too much.”

“I appreciate your concern. And I am willing to circumvent the police force in order to salvage your privacy. However, it will make things all the more difficult if I am saddled with a bleary-eyed and half-intoxicated partner on the morrow. I ask again, Damian, please stop.”

“Yes, all right. There. Happy?”

“Thank you.”

“It isn’t as if you had never indulged.”

“Yes, thanks to Watson, all the world knows my peccadilloes. Do you wish to bath first, or shall I?”

“You go ahead. Although I’d have thought we could afford something a bit grander than this hole with a shared bath down the hall.”

“Inconvenience is the price of invisibility.”

“Holy Christ, that was cold! Was the geyser working when you bathed?”

“I looked at the device and decided not to risk an explosion.”

“Well, save your penny, it doesn’t work anyway. Brrr. And shaving-cold water is why I grew a beard in the first place, when I couldn’t afford hot water—they sell it in shops, in Shanghai—and I grew tired of savaging my jaw-line with a razor. It looks as if I’ll now have a full beard rather than just the trimmings.”

“One does indeed dread the pull of the blade against cold skin.”

“I can’t see you in a beard.”

“I have worn one from time to time, when a case suggested it. I cultivated a goatee in America before the War, but the longest I had a full beard was when I travelled in the Himalayas. The sensation of its removal, in an open-air barber’s in Delhi with half the street bearing witness, was exquisite.”

“America, eh? Where did you go?”