The Language of Bees (5 page)

“Damian. As you read, Mycroft has arranged the assistance of one of France’s more capable defence attorneys. I have an appointment with him in the morning, and we shall then go to Ste Chapelle and meet the lad.”

Did
we
include, or exclude, me? If the latter, would he not have said
he and I?

“But, Holmes, why didn’t you set off immediately you received the letter?”

“I did, in fact, telephone to Mycroft to say that I would leave instantly, but he talked me out of it. He thought I might be more effective if I waited until we had some data with which to work, but beyond this, he pointed out that, if the boy was coming out from under the influence of drugs while in gaol, he would not thank me for seeing him for the first time in that condition. And although I am not accustomed to permitting the personal to influence my investigations, in the end, I had to agree that it might be better to wait until the boy had his wits about him.”

Somewhat mollified, although not altogether convinced, I picked up my knife and began thoughtfully to cover a piece of bread with near-liquid butter.

“Does he know?” I asked. “The boy?”

“Hardly a boy,” he pointed out. “He knows now.”

“How long
…?”

“I have no idea when or even if his mother told him about me. Mycroft was forced to explain the situation to the
avocat
. He in turn told Damian, but apparently Damian showed no surprise at my name. Which could also be due to his mental state. Or, I suppose he may have never heard of Sherlock Holmes.”

“If a tribe of desert nomads in Palestine knows the stories,” I said—
which had been the case during our winter sojourn there—“the chances are good a young man in France has come across them.”

“I fear you are right.”

“So, has any progress been made in the intervening days?”

“It looks,” he said, with a mingled air of apprehension and satisfaction, “as though the evidence against him rests largely on a single eyewitness.”

I understood his ambiguity. The testimony of a witness, a person there to stretch out a finger in court and declare the defendant’s guilt aloud, was a powerful tool for the prosecution. On the other hand, placing the entire weight of a murder trial on one human being could easily blow up in the prosecutor’s face. All the defence had to do was find some flaw in the accuser himself—criminal history, financial interest, flawed eye-sight—and the case began to crack.

If the legal person Mycroft had found to represent Damian Adler was indeed capable, I suspected that the man would be more than experienced with the techniques of destroying testimony.

Relief, a trace of optimism, and a faint stir of air cheered our dinner, and we spoke no more that night about either Adler,
fils
or
mère
.

But as I laboriously, one-handedly, dressed for bed in my stifling room, that word
responsibilities
came back to nag me, and the real question finally percolated to the surface of my mind: Why tell me about Damian? Why hadn’t Holmes simply announced that he would be away for a time? Or not even bothered with an announcement—just disappeared, with nothing but a brief note or a message left with Mrs Hudson? God knew, he’d never hesitated to do that before.

Although the thought of waking one morning to find him simply gone would not have been an easy one. Since the shooting, I had come to lean very heavily on his presence. While resenting it at the same time.

I cradled my arm, looking away from my reflection in the glass. Had his response when I asked about his delay been a glibly prepared speech, designed to conceal his worry? Did he believe that I was so fragile that I might not withstand abandonment? Had my admittedly
precarious mental state left him with no choice but to bring me along?

Certainly, Mycroft’s reference to “your current responsibilities” suggested that both Holmes brothers saw my need for comfort as equal to a prisoner’s need for aid.

Which led to the conclusion that Holmes felt there was nothing for it but to reveal to me one of the most private and distressing episodes of his life. To lay out his most personal history, while it was still raw and unformed, to my eyes. To allow my presence to rub salt into the wounds of what he had to consider one of his most abject failures.

I should go home, immediately. I should pack and call a taxi, leaving a brief note to preserve my own self-respect, and to provide a bulwark for the shreds of Holmes’ dignity.

And yet…

I could not shake the notion that there had been a degree of relief underlying his chagrin. Almost as if the humiliation was a thing to be borne for a greater cause, to be got through quickly. But for what?

I found myself considering the previous summer, the beginnings of the case involving the child whose letter had recently reduced me to tears. My arrival at Holmes’ house that day had been unexpected: I found him in disguise and about to depart, intending to slip off before I could become enmeshed. But why had he not simply taken an earlier train? That case—so nearly missed entirely—became a cornerstone of our subsequent partnership, firm foundation for a tumultuous year.

Had Holmes, deliberately or unconsciously, lingered that afternoon so that I might find him?

Was his present uncharacteristic solicitude for my tender state a means of ensuring my presence here?

I did not feel all
that
precariously fragile. Granted, I was not at my best, but surely he could see that I was finding my feet again? That I was not about to fall to pieces if left alone?

I raised my gaze to the looking-glass before me. I was nineteen
years old. During recent months, I had proven myself strong, adult, and capable, not only to myself, but to Holmes—my teacher, my mentor, my entire family since I stumbled across him on the Downs, four and a half years before.

During the winter, the balance of our relationship had begun to shift, from apprentice and master to something very close to partnership. Several times I had even wondered if some deeper link was not in the process of being forged between us.

Holmes was a master of avoiding undesirable situations. If he had seen my recovery, and chose to discount it, then it followed that he wanted me here. That this steely, invulnerable man, once mentor, now partner, still friend, had his own reasons for laying his vulnerability at my feet, as a man kneels to expose the nape of his neck to his sword-wielding sovereign.

Another memory came back to me then, bringing a wash of foreign air through the sultry room. It came from Palestine, in February, shortly after the Hazr brothers and I had ripped Holmes from the hands of his Turkish tormentor. As we parted ways, the elder Hazr, Mahmoud—silent, deadly, and himself bearing scars of torture—had been moved to make a rare incursion into personal speech:
Do not try to protect your Holmes, these next days. It will not help him to heal
.

I nodded, and finished my preparations for bed. As I lay down on the lavender-scented sheets, I reflected that Holmes and I seemed to have a habit of forcing unpalatable decisions on one another.

The Tool (1):
The scrap of other-worldly metal sent the
boy was of the four Elements: the earthy stuff that gave it
substance, the fire that twice shaped it, the water that
twice received it, and the air through which it arrived
.
Testimony, I:2

T
HE DAY WAS ALREADY HOT WHEN WE SET OFF for the
avocat’s
office the next morning, the city air close and unhealthy against us. The sling chafed at my neck; my light dress was soon damp, as was my hair beneath the summer hat. Things were no better inside the legal gentleman’s office, where the stifling air was compounded by the man’s unbounded energy. He put us in chairs and then strode up and down the carpet, gesticulating and thinking aloud in fluent if accented English until the heat he seemed to generate made me light-headed.

Fortunately, we had not much time before the train left. His secretary came in with his hat in her hand, and bundled us off into a taxicab to the station. Monsieur Cantelet talked the whole time, Holmes listening intently, ready to seize the scraps of information being tossed on the freshet of words.

Holmes had been following the case, albeit at a distance, for a week
already
, and his occasional phrase of explanation helped me piece together the central facts: Damian Adler had been arrested for the murder of a drugs seller; the man sold mostly morphine and hashish, and Damian was known to be one of his customers; the two men had an argument in a bar that ended in a fistfight, although there was some disagreement as to whether the fight had been over the man’s wares or a girl. In any event, two days later, the man was found in an alleyway, unconscious and bleeding from a head wound. He died in hospital; the police asked questions; the answers led them to Damian.

The evidence against him included the presence of morphine and hashish in his room, signs of a fight on his face and hands, and the clear accusation of a witness.

M Cantelet ran through all this with a light-hearted enthusiasm, which seemed odd, if not inappropriate, until he began to tell us about the witness. “The gentleman’s veracity has been questioned,” the lawyer said happily in his musical accent. Said witness, it seemed—one Jules Filot—was known to his more jocular intimates as an habitual snitch and manufacturer of evidence on demand, which explained his nickname: “Monsieur Faux.”

M Cantelet did not think that it would take a great effort to smash the case against Damian Adler. His private detective had spent the days since Mycroft’s request for assistance had been received insinuating himself into the life of M Filot, and would make himself available to us at mid-day. In the mean-time, we were to be permitted an interview with the prisoner, at the gaol.

“By great good fortune, M Adler had the sense not to admit to the crime.”

“He says he’s innocent?” Holmes asked.

“The young man neither admits nor denies, merely says he does not remember. Ideal, for my purposes.”

Ideal it might be, but less than wholly reassuring for us.

Ste Chapelle was a tiny village, which I had already determined that morning by the fact that it did not appear on any of the hotel’s maps. The town gaol was down the street from the station and across from a
tiny café. It was, in fact, the local
gendarme’s
front room, little more than a small bedroom with bars across the windows and a square of glass set into its stout wooden door. The
gendarme
made note of our names in a record-book, unbolted the door, handed us a couple of stools, and left us alone.

I did not want to be there, but I did not know how to absent myself. I took a deep breath, and followed M Cantelet inside.

The young man, who stood with his shoulder touching the window-bars, looked startlingly like Holmes in a masterful disguise: thin to emaciation and pale as the walls, but with the same beak nose, the same long fingers, the same sense of wiry strength.

There, the similarity ended: Holmes’ uncanny gift for tidiness was replaced by perspiration stains and the stench of old sweat; where Holmes was controlled even when excited, this younger version was vibrating with tension. His eyes darted about the room, his fingers plucked incessantly at shirt buttons and fraying cuffs. He was either nervy to the edge of a break-down, or still emerging from prolonged drug use.

The
avocat
, shifting to an equally energetic French, marched across the cell with his hand outstretched. The young man put out his hand, but his blank stare suggested a lack of comprehension. Surely he was fluent in French?

After a time his grey eyes wandered away from the voluble
avocat
to rest on me. It was a shock, because these were Holmes’ eyes—same shape, same colour, same height above mine—but dull, with pain or confusion or even—hard to imagine—a lack of intelligence. I found myself searching for a glimpse of mind beneath the flat gaze, but there was no flash of wit, merely the weary perseverance of an animal in distress.