The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [1]
Over the next couple of weeks I read through those manuscripts, all the time expecting to find the answer to the puzzle of who had sent them to me, waiting for it to leap out like some written jack-in-the-box, but I found nothing—nothing, that is, but the stories, which I read with equal parts enjoyment and eyestrain.
I did try to trace the shipper through UPS, but all the agent at the New York office where the parcel had originated could tell me was that a young man had brought it in, and paid cash.
With considerable puzzlement, then, I folded the cloak, dressing gown, and manuscripts away and stashed the trunk in my closet. (The emeralds I put in a safe-deposit box at the bank.)
There it sat, month in and month out, for some years, until one bleak day after a too-long series of bleak days when nothing would grow under my pen and money pressures loomed, I remembered with a stir of envy the easy assurance of the voice from the manuscripts in the back of my closet.
I went to the trunk and dug out one of the piles of paper, took it to my study to read again, and then, motivated by despair as much as the roof that was leaking around my ears, set about rewriting it. Shame-faced, I sent it to my editor, but when she rang me some days later with the mild comment that this didn’t read like my other stuff, I broke down and confessed, told her to mail it back to me, and went back to staring at a blank page.
The following day she called again, said that she’d had a consultation with the firm’s lawyer, that she really liked the story, though she wanted to see the original, and that she’d like to publish it if I were willing to sign my life away in waivers should the actual author appear.
The battle between pride and roof repairs was over before it began. I do, however, have some self-esteem, and still considered the narratives in my possession, as I said, farfetched.
I don’t know how much truth there is in them. I don’t even know if they were written as fiction or fact, though I cannot rid myself of the feeling that they were meant as fact, absurd as it may be. However, selling them (with disclaimer) is preferable to selling that gorgeous necklace I will probably never wear, and surely if selling the one is acceptable, so is the other.
What follows is the first of those manuscripts, unadorned and as the writer left it (and, presumably, sent it to me). I have only tidied up her atrocious spelling and smoothed out a variety of odd personal short-hand notations. Personally, I don’t know what to make of it. I can only hope that with the publication of what the author called On the Segregation of the Queen (such a cumbersome title—she was obviously no novelist!) will come, not lawsuits, but a few answers. If any-one out there knows who Mary Russell was, could you let me know? My curiosity is killing me.
—Laurie R. King
As the result of no small effort in the stacks of the University of California library I have identified the quotations with which the author prefaced her chapters. They come from a 1901 philosophical treatise on beekeeping by Maurice Maeterlinck, entitled The Life of the Bee.
PRELUDE
Author’s Note
To this spot a sort of aged philosopher had retired....Here he had built his refuge, being a little weary of interrogating men....
Dear reader,
As both I and the century approach the beginnings of our ninth decades, I have been forced to admit that age is not always a desirable state. The physical, of course, contributes its own flavour to life, but the most vexing problem I have found is that my past, intensely real to me, has begun to fade into the mists of history in the eyes of those around me. The First World War has deteriorated into a handful of quaint songs and sepia images, occasionally powerful but immeasurably