The Language of Bees (54 page)

“Stay right there. We need your weight.”

“Sorry?”

“If you get out,” he explained impatiently, “we’ll shuttlecock. Flip over.”

“I see.” I sat firmly in my seat, thinking heavy thoughts, until I heard voices from outside.

Two large men clung to the wings, the wind bullying us back and forth, while we came about and made our way back to the aerodrome. Only then was I permitted to climb down. I felt like going down on quivering knees to kiss the earth.

One of the men directed me to a café adjoining the air field, where I went in a wobbly scurry while the rain spat down and Javitz tied down the machine and contemplated the wounded undercarriage.

In the shelter of a room with a baking coal stove, I peered through the window and amended my thought: It appeared we would be making arrangements for repairs as well. Javitz and a man in a waterproof
were squatting on either side of the right wheel, peering at where the struts connected with the body.

I closed my eyes for a moment, then turned and looked at the waitress. “Would it be possible to have something hot to eat? It looks as though I shall be here for a while.”

She was a maternal sort, and ticked her tongue at my state. “We’ll get you something nice and warming,” she said, beginning with drink both hot and stout. I allowed her to slip a hefty and illicit dollop of whisky into the cup of tea before me, and downed the tepid atrocity in one draught. It hit me like a swung punching bag, but when the top of my head had settled back into place, I found that the impulse to pull out my revolver and begin shooting had subsided as well.

I placed the cup gently back into its saucer, took a couple of breaths, and decided that the day was not altogether lost. The men would fix the strut, the wind would die down, we would be in Orkney by nightfall.

And when we found that, in fact, Brothers had opted for Norway?

I would not think about that at the moment.

I reached for the tea-pot, and my eyes were filled with tweed: a man, beside the table; a small, round man in need of a shave, wearing a freckled brown suit and rather rumpled shirt.

“Miss Russell?” His accent was as Scots as his suit.

“Yes?”

“M’ name’s MacDougall. Ah’ve a message for yeh.”

“From?”

“Mr Mycroft Holmes.”

“Sit. Please. Tea?” For some reason, my tongue seemed limited to one-word sentences. But he sat, and the arrival of a second cup saved me the difficult decision of how to carry out my offer, so that was good. I watched him slip in and out of clear focus, and summoned my thoughts.

“He sent me a wire, askin’ me t’watch for an aeroplane. Wi’ the weather as it is, I’d gone home, but the man here rang me.”

“Mycroft. Yes. Good.”

“Er, are you altogether well, mum?”

My gaze slid towards the window, where the machine that had tried so hard to kill us sat, wet and complacent as men addressed themselves to its undercarriage. “It was a dilli—a difficult flight.”

The man’s gaze followed mine. “Ah can imagine. Ah know three men who’ve bein kilt flyin’—ye’ll never get me up in one a’them infernal machines.”

“Thank you,” I said coolly.

His eyes came back to mine. “Sorry. I’m sure they’re ever so much safer now, and your pilot’s sure ta—”

“You were saying,” I interrupted. “About Mycroft.”

“Yes. Well, Ah was the one took his orders Tuesday, to be looking for one and possibly two men and a bairn—and sorry to say we’ve seen nothing of them, although it was nobbut an hour after receivin’ the first wire that Ah had men at Waverley, Princes Street, and Haymarket—for the trains, yeh know—and at Leith for the steamers.”

So it is Bergen after all, I thought, that mad-man with his knife at the throat of—

“But while they were watching, Ah myself made the roonds of the restaurants in the toon. And Ah found they may have been here on Monday.”

“No! Really?” I said, frankly astonished. “But you’re not certain?”

“Not without a photograph. But two English men took luncheon at the hotel near Waverley Station on Monday, and the younger was tall and had a beard. And they had a bairn with them.”

“The child is with them?”

“So the waiter said.”

I felt like weeping with relief. “Waverley Station—where do trains from there go?”

“London, Glasgow, and the north of Scotland. But if you’re going to ask me to question the ticket-sellers, there’s little point, without a pho—”

I stood up fast, then grabbed at the table to keep from sprawling on my face. While the room spun around me, I said through gritted teeth, “Take me to that hotel.”

“Mum, I dinna think—”

“Do you have a motor?” I demanded.

“Yes, but—”

“I have photographs,” I told him, and began to hunt them out of my pocket when my eye was caught by a figure trotting across the tarmac towards us. I left my hand where it was; Javitz opened the door and stuck his head inside. Rain dripped from his hat.

“Miss Russell? We’re set to go, as soon as she’s fuelled up.”

I stood motionless, caught by indecision: I deeply mistrusted leaving a vital interrogation to others, even if the other was one of Mycroft’s… The tableau might have lasted forever—one dripping, one with her hand in her pocket, one waiting in apprehension—had the waitress not decided this was a good time to present me with my meal.

The aroma of meat and roast potatoes reached me where the motion did not. I pulled my hand from my pocket, then looked at the plate, and at her.

“I don’t think I’m going to have time to eat that. But if your cook could make me half a dozen bacon butties or fried-egg sandwiches to take with me, there’ll be a gold guinea if it’s here in four minutes. Mr Javitz, do you plan to stop again short of Thurso?”

“Inverness.”

“I’ll be with you as soon as the food is ready.” The two left, in opposite directions. I turned to Mycroft’s tweed-suited agent. “Mr…?”

“MacDougall,” he provided.

“Yes. Did you question the waiter about… anything?”

“Just if those men had been here.”

“Not about their behaviour, their temper?”

“Mr Holmes didna’ ask for that.”

“Well, I am asking. I need you to go back to the hotel with these photographs, and confirm that this was the older man, this the younger, and this the child—he has a fuller beard now, and she’s a bit older. I also need you to ask about the behaviour of the men—were they amiable or angry, did one of them seem drunk or drugged? Did they seem to be working in harness, or was one of them in charge and the other fearful, or resentful, or … You see what I’m asking?”

“Ah do.”

“Can you then find a way to get me that information at either Inverness or Thurso?”

“Ah’ve a colleague in Inverness, although Ah dunno if Ah’ll have the information by the time you reach there.”

“We shall probably be forced to spend the night at Inverness,” I told him. “Have your colleague there ask for us at the air field. And lacking Inverness, send a wire to the telegraph office in Thurso.”

A large, warm parcel was thrust into my arms by the breathless waitress, and I duly dug out the cost of the luncheon, laying one of the gold guineas on top. She wandered off, transfixed by the gleam in her palm. I thanked MacDougall and trotted back to the aeroplane, to share out the meal with Javitz and eye the repair on the undercarriage. It looked like a splint held in place with baling wire and sticking plasters; I opened my mouth, closed it, and climbed into my seat. We made it down the field and into the air without it breaking, so that was good.

The fur coat and rugs around my shoulders were almost adequate. The knowledge that the child was alive warmed my thoughts, but made little inroad on my icy toes.

The Stars (1):
The man was but a child when he heard
the message of the stars, seeing the precision of the link
between their paths and those of human beings
.
Testimony, IV:7

A
HUNDRED TWENTY MILES FROM EDINBURGH TO Inverness, and we fought the wind and rain every inch of the way. We followed the railway lines, which added miles but gave us sure guidance. As the clouds dropped ever lower, we did as well, until I feared we might meet an engine head-on. Javitz hunched over the controls, the juddering of the stick knocking through his body like a blow. Every so often, I saw him peer forward at the instruments, and I could tell when he braced his knees around the control stick to reach out and tap at the instruments.

The wind howled, the rain beat us sideways, the ’plane groaned and cracked, and even the wind clawing at the cover could not take away the stink of fear in my boxed-in space.

On a good day, we might have covered the distance in ninety minutes, but between the head-wind and being continually blown off course, it was twice that by the time we saw signs of a city below. The
number of times Javitz leant forward to rap at the gauges did not make my stomach any easier around the stony eggs and sloshing coffee.

We came down ominously close to dusk, slowing, dropping, teetering on the gusts. Javitz chose what appeared to be a mowed hayfield, although as we descended I noticed a faded red length of cloth nailed to a high post at the far end, tugged back and forth, tautly horizontal to the ground. He slowed us further, rising into a half-stand so he could see past the nose. No aerodrome here: If his undercarriage repairs failed, we would be grounded.

Then again, if the repairs failed on landing, further transportation might be the least of our worries.

Clearly, the danger was foremost on the pilot’s mind, as well. Javitz fought the machine for control, our low tanks and the 405 square feet of wing threatening to upend us before we touched down. When he did tap the wheels to the ground—gently, cautiously—the wind perversely refused to let us go, lifting and playing us on the razor’s edge of flipping over all the way down the field.

We came to a halt, wings still quivering, ten feet from the hedgerow at the field’s end.

Javitz peeled one hand off the control stick and cut the fuel.

Silence pounded at our eardrums. In a calm voice that sounded very far away, Javitz said, “I’m going to go get drunk now, if you don’t mind. I’ll meet you back here at dawn.”

“What—” I strangled on the word, cleared my throat and tried again. “What about the machine?”

“I’ll make arrangements.”

The arrangements came from the nearby house to meet us, in the form of a grizzled farmer and his strapping young son, the latter of whom was clearly the enthusiast. The lad stared from the aeroplane to the pilot in open admiration, while his disapproving father moved to tie our eager machine down to earth. I half-fell down the ladder, accepted the valise that Javitz thrust into my arms, and watched him march away down the field with the young man trailing behind, pelting him with unanswered questions.

After a minute, I realized an older man was standing at my side, and had asked me something. “Terribly sorry,” I said. “I could rather use a Ladies’, if you might direct me?”

I felt his hand on my elbow, propelling me in the direction of the building he’d come out of. He led me through a kitchen, showed me a door, and went away. I put down the valise, closed the door, and knelt to vomit into the tidy enamel lavatory.

When the spasm had passed, I stayed where I was for a time, shuddering with a combination of cold and reaction, emitting a noise that was part groan and part cry. Not unlike the noise the wind had made all afternoon around my head.

All right, I said after a minute. Enough. I got to my feet, washed my hands, splashed water on my face, and even went into my valise for a comb to restore my hair to order. When I came out, I felt approximately halfway to human.

Which was just as well: The man standing in the farmer’s kitchen was so out of place, he could only be Mycroft’s Inverness contact, colleague to Mr MacDougall.

“Mungo Clarty, at your service,” he declared. His name and speech patterns were Scots, although the accent originated two hundred miles to the south. He marched across the room with his hand extended, pumping my arm as if trying to draw water. “I’ve been instructed to make you welcome and get whatever you might want. And if you’re fretting over your pilot, I’ve sent a friend to look after him, in case he decides to get a bit the worse for wear. I’ve telephoned to a dear friend of mine, runs a lovely boarding-house in the town with more hot water than you could ask for, beds fit for a queen and a cellar second to none. Does that sound like what you’ll be needing?”