The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [116]
It was a long game. I knew that he intended to duplicate my sur-prise victory, when I allowed the queen to fall in order to set up a trap in the hands of the commoners, but I refused to be manoeuvered. I drew him out, I kept away from his pawns, and used my queen with great caution, and eventually he seemed to change his tactics and laid another triangle of pincers to drive me into. I danced away from it, he relaid it farther back on the board. Again I avoided it and sent my re-maining rook down to place him into check. He evaded it, I brought up my queen in support, and then somehow in the excitement of clos-ing in I overlooked the board in front of me, and the pawn that had been weak man in the first, long-forgotten pincers movement was in my second rank, and then it was before me, newly born a queen.
“Regina redivivus,” Holmes commented sardonically, and proceeded to tear into the unprotected back side of my offence like a hailstorm through peach blossoms. I fell before his resurrected queen in a com-plete rout, was mated in half a dozen moves, and then it was my turn to laugh quietly and shake my head before I sobered.
“Holmes, she’ll never fall for it,” I objected.
“She will, you know, if the distraction is believable enough. The woman is proud and scornful, and her anger at our absence will make her incautious and all too willing to believe that Sherlock Holmes has failed to preserve his queen, that poor old Holmes stands alone, ex-posed and helpless.” He reached out and rocked the crown of the black king with the tip of his finger. “She will swoop in to pick me off,” he tapped the white queen, “and then, we have her.” He picked up the black pawn and rolled it around in his hands as if to warm it, and when he opened his hands the black queen lay there. He put her back onto the board and sat back with the air of a man concluding a lengthy and delicate business negotiation. “It is good,” he pronounced, “really very good.” His eyes gleamed in the last flicker of the lamp’s wick, with a curious, intense relish such as I had seen on his face the week before, when he was facing a young assailant with a large knife. Joie de combat, I supposed, and my heart quailed before this changed Holmes.
“It’s dangerous, Holmes,” I protested, “really very dangerous. What if she sees what we’re doing? What if she doesn’t play by the rules and just decides to wipe us both out? What if—” What if I fail? a voice wailed inside me.
“What if, what if. Of course it’s dangerous, Russell, but I can hardly spend the rest of my life rusticating in Palestine or tripping over bodyguards, can I?” He sounded quite pleased about it, but now that the time had come, I wanted to hide.
“We don’t know what she’ll do,” I cried. “At least let Lestrade pro-vide some guards at the beginning. Or Mycroft, if you don’t want Scotland Yard in on it, until we know how she’s going to react.”
“We may as well put an advertisement in The Times to inform her of our intentions,” he scoffed. “You ought to take up fencing, Russell, truly you should. It offers a most instructive means of judging your ad-versary. You see, Russell, I have a feel for my opponent now, I know her style and her reach. She has made some points off me in the game thus far, but she has also revealed her own faults. Her attacks have all been patterned on her perception of my nature, my skill at the game. When we return, she will expect me to continue dodging and parrying with my customary subtlety and skill. She knows that I will do so, but ...I shall not.Instead, I shall foolishly lower my blade and walk unguarded into her. She will stand back for a moment, to see what I am doing. She will be suspicious, then gradually convinced of my madness, then gloating before she strikes. But you, Russell,” he swept his robed arm over the board, and when he drew it back the black queen stood in the place of the white bolt-and-nut