The Language of Bees (55 page)

Had he remained where he was, I might have draped myself around him in gratitude and wept on his shoulder, but he had let go of my hand and picked up my valise, and was already taking our leave from the farmer, leading me from the warm kitchen to his waiting motor, talking over his shoulder all the time.

“You haven’t had any information from MacDougall?” I asked when he paused for breath. His motorcar was not as warm as the
farmer’s kitchen, but it was blessedly out of the wind, and the travelling rug he tucked over my knees was thick.

“He said to tell you the waiter had gone to see his mother, whatever that means, but that he’s going after him.”

I took a breath, and pushed away temptation. “Good man. I need to visit all the hotels and restaurants in town.”

“All the—that’ll take most of the night!”

“What, in a town this size?”

“Inverness is the door to the north,” he said, sounding reproachful. “Anyone going to northern Scotland passes through here.”

“Superb,” I muttered. “Perhaps we should begin with any ticket agencies that may be open.”

It was, as Clarty had warned me, many hours before I took to that bed fit for a queen. Even when I did, so cold through that I gasped with relief at the hot-water bottle against my feet, the physical warmth had no chance against the turmoil of my thoughts.

We had found no trace of them. I had looked at my last pair of the photographs Holmes had left me, loath to let go of them, but in the end decided that, from here on, the places I would be asking were so remote, any three strangers would attract notice: descriptions would suffice. I left the photographs with Clarty, so he could repeat the circuit of ticket agents and hotels during the daylight hours.

Friday morning, at dawn, I returned to the air field to do it all again.

If Inverness was a tenth the size of Edinburgh, Thurso would have a tenth the population of Inverness, too small a setting for Mycroft to have any sort of an agent: From here on, I was on my own. I had asked for a car to pick me up well before dawn, not wanting to rob Clarty of his already short sleep, and I could hear its engine chuckling on the street outside when I walked down the stairs of the boarding-house, so ill-slept I felt hung over.

The owner was there, looking fresh as a terrier, and greeted me a good morning.

“I don’t suppose you had any messages during the night, for me?” I asked her.

But she had not had a message to assure me that Holmes had resolved the issue on his own. Nothing to transform my Valkyrie ride through hell into a placid, unadventurous, puffing, ground-based train-ride back to the warm, dry, August-kissed South Downs. I would even process the honey from the other hives, I pledged, were it to absolve me from climbing back into that aeroplane.

But, no message, telegraphic, telephonic, or even telepathic.

I followed the obscenely cheerful driver out onto the rain-shined street, and he drove me to the hay-field.

Javitz was there before me, his young admirer lingering at a distance. My pilot looked no better than I felt. Still, his hands were steady as he poured me a cup from a thermal flask filled with scalding coffee.

He walked away and finished his check of our various levels by torch-light. I cradled the coffee to its dregs, and dropped the cup back onto the flask. When he came back, I handed it to him, and glanced up at the glass-wrapped passenger chamber with loathing.

Instead of offering me a hand, as he had before, he leant back against the wing and lit a cigarette. “It’s ninety miles, more or less, to Thurso,” he began. “That weather report you saw me with, back in London, warned me that the wind was building, and it’s out of the north-east. That’s why we came across the mountains from Edinburgh instead of following the coast-line.

“But from here on, we don’t have a choice. Even if we keep inland, we’ll get the wind. The weather’s going to be bad,” he said bluntly. “It’s expected to blow itself out by tomorrow, but today’s going to be rough. And when we leave Thurso, it’ll be worse.” He studied me in the half-light. “This could kill us.”

Since I had come to work with Holmes, I had spent rather more time than most women my age in contemplating my imminent death. Gun, knife, bomb—I had faced all those and survived. Death by fire would be terrible, and drowning awful, but relatively quick. Falling from a great height, however, with no control, no hope, no avoiding
the knowledge of a terrible meeting with the earth: That would be forever.

I swallowed: It would be easier, if I only
knew
. If I were certain that we were on the right track, that my presence in Orkney was the only hope for Damian and his Estelle, I would not hesitate to risk my life, or that of this brave man who had blindly done all I asked, and more. If I were sure …

I met his eyes. “I can’t lie to you. There is a good chance that we are chasing a wild goose. We may get to Orkney and find our quarry has never been there, never had any intention of going there. And before you ask, yes, I knew it before we left London. My partner and his brother both disagree with me, and are hunting elsewhere.

“Two things I am certain about: One, that I
could
be right. And two, we only have today. Right or wrong, tomorrow will be too late for two lives, one of those a child. If I could fly this machine myself, I would. If your professional judgment decides that it is insane to go into the air today, I’ll see what I can do by train.”

Javitz tossed away his cigarette end and said merely, “Okay. Let’s see how things look in Thurso. Lad,” he called. “Help us get the machine turned around.”

When the ’plane was facing the other way, he handed me up, then scrambled past me into his own seat. Our eager helper took up his position at the front, and when Javitz gave him a shout, he yanked the prop with all his young strength and passion. Instantly, the roar of the engine assaulted our ears. The boy whipped away the chocks, and we bumped down the deserted field before the sun cleared the horizon. The head-lamps of an arriving motor-car sought us out, but we were already throwing ourselves at the clouds.

The furs and rugs were cold and damp; they never did actually warm up.

They say that a woman in labour enters a state in which time is suspended and the sensations she is undergoing become dream-like. Men attacked by ferocious beasts claim to enter a similar other-worldly
state of grace, when their horror and pain become distant, and oddly unreal. I know, having flown that day from Inverness to Thurso, that a person can only hold so much sheer terror before the mind folds itself away.

We were shaken by giant hands every one of those 150 miles, tossed about and batted up and down. Sometimes we flew above unyielding ground; other times we were suspended above cold, white-licked sea; once we flattened ourselves against a young mountain that loomed abruptly out of the clouds. That time, Javitz emitted a string of distracted curses, and I curled over with my hands wrapped around my head, whimpering and waiting for a ripping impact and nothingness.

The engine roared on.

I retreated into myself and wrapped the world around my head like the travelling rugs. We bounced and rattled and I felt nothing—not until the unending noise suddenly halted and the ’plane ceased its inexorable press against my spine. We both came bolt upright, flooded with panic for three interminable seconds of silence before the engine caught again and the propellers resumed. The shoulders before me were bent over the controls so tightly I thought the stick was in danger of shearing off; my throat felt peculiar, until I found I was keening with the wind.

We followed railroad tracks along the coast, up a river, and through mountains to another river. The ground below settled somewhat, although the wind relented not a whit, and I eyed the green fields and the river with love, knowing that they would be marginally softer than the mountains and warmer than the sea.

Finally, a gap in the clouds permitted us a glimpse of open water with a small town at its edge.

Then the clouds obscured it; at the same moment, the engine spluttered into silence for a terrifying count of four, then caught again.

It did it once more when the town was directly to our right. This time the silence held long enough that the machine grew heavy and tilted, eager to embrace gravity. Javitz cursed; I made a little squeak of a noise; with a sputtering sound, the propeller found purpose again.

If Thurso was too small for an agent of Mycroft Holmes, it was also too small for an air field. However, it did have an apparently smooth and not entirely under-water pasture free of boulders, cattle, and rock walls—Javitz seemed to know it, or else he spotted it and was too desperate to survey the ground for other options. The house beside it had sheets hanging out to dry; as we aimed our descent at the field, I noted numbly that, in the space of a few seconds, the laundry flipped around to cover roughly 200 of a circle’s 360 degrees.

We splashed down, skidded and slewed around, and came to rest facing the way we had come. Javitz shut down the motor and we sat, incapable of either speech or movement, until we became aware of shouting. I raised the cover, and a red-faced farmer pulled himself up. “Wha’ the bliudy ‘ell’re yeh playing at, yeh blooten’ idjit?” the man shouted. “Ye think p’raps we enjoy scrapin’ you lot off’n our walls? May waif thought he’d be comin’ threw the sittin’ room winda—c’mere and A’ll kick yer— Captain Javitz? Is that you?” His hard Scots suddenly lost a great degree of its regionality.

“Hello there, Magnuson. Sorry to give your wife a fright, it wasn’t half what we gave ourselves.”

“Jaysus be damned, Javitz, I’d not have thought it even of you. Oh, miss, pardon me, I didn’t see you.”

“Quite all right,” I said. One might have thought I would be growing accustomed to life in a state of fear and trembling, but my voice wasn’t altogether steady. Nor were my legs, when I made to stand.

Javitz and I staggered into open air. The rain had stopped, but the sea-scented wind beat at us and made the aeroplane twitch like a fractious horse. The farmer, Magnuson, eyed it as if it were about to take to the air on its own—not, in fact, an impossibility.

“Come inside and we’ll see about finding you rooms until this blows over.”

Javitz shook his head. “We’ll tie her down and find some petrol. As soon as I’ve cleared the fuel line, we’ll be away.”

“Never!” the other man roared. “My wife would have my guts for garters if I let Cash Javitz take off into this hurricane.”

“No choice, I’m afraid.”

I interrupted. “Mr Magnuson? I’m Mary Russell, pleased to meet you. Pardon me for a moment. Captain Javitz, what the devil made it do that?”

“Probably a scrap of the same rubbish we picked up on that load of fuel in York.”

“But that time the motor just stopped, not stopped and started.”

“This’ll just be something that worked itself down to the fuel line.”

“How long will it take you to clear it?”

“An hour at the most. We should pick up petrol, too, while we’re here.”

“And you honestly feel we can resume after that?”

“Don’t see why not.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes! For Chr—for heaven’s sake, it’s just the fuel
line.” Just
the fuel line.

“Very well. Mr Magnuson, can you tell me, is this wind apt to be worse, or better, later in the day?”

“I can’t imagine it getting worse.”

“Would you agree, Captain Javitz?”

He studied the sky, sniffed the air, and said, “It should settle a little by nightfall.”

“We can’t wait that long, but I believe we can afford to spend a few hours here. I pray you can fix that sputter before we set off over water. You do that, I’ll go into town and see if there’s a telegram waiting.”

“If you say so,” Javitz said, but the relief was clear despite the words.

“I shall be back by noon, one o’clock at the latest. Will we still reach Kirkwall by mid-afternoon?”

“If we don’t, neither of us will be in any condition to worry about it,” he said.

“Er, right. Mr Magnuson, could I trouble you to direct me to the general post office?”

Magnuson did better than that; he summoned a friend, who motored me there.

Thurso was more a village than a town, some four thousand
inhabitants looking across fifteen miles of strait at the Orkney Islands. The harbour was small, which explained why the larger boats I had glimpsed earlier were slightly north of the town itself. Despite its size, Thurso appeared busy and polished, possibly because the fleet had not that long ago moved its training exercises into Scapa Bay in the Orkneys, spilling a degree of prosperity onto this, the nearest mainland town.

The neighbour with the motor-car was happy to act as my taxi for a couple of hours. We started at the post and telegraph office, where a harried gentleman informed me that no, there was nothing for me, however, a tree had taken out the telegraph line somewhere to the south, and service had only just been restored. Could I try again in an hour?

I climbed back inside the motor-car, and asked the driver if the day’s steamer to Orkney had left.

“Might not, considering this wind,” he answered, and put the motor-car into gear for the short drive along the water.

There, at last, I caught scent of my quarry. My description of Brothers had the ticket-seller shaking his head, and mention of a child the same, but when I asked about a tall bearded individual with an English accent, his face brightened.

“Ach, yais, him. Peculiar feller. He was here airlier.”

“Just him? Not another man and a child?”

“No, just the one.”

I did not know what to make of that. Had Brothers gone ahead? Had he taken the child instead of Damian, leaving Damian trailing desperately behind? Or was Damian operating independently, for some unknown reason?

“Which day was that?”

“Airlier,” he repeated, as if I were hard of hearing.

“What, you mean
today?”

“That’s right.”

“Good heavens. Has the steamer for Orkney left yet?”

“That’s her there,” he said, pointing.

The first good news since we’d left York. I threw a thanks over my
shoulder, touching the pocket that held my revolver as I moved in the direction of the waiting boat. Then I heard the man’s voice tossed about on the wind.