The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [128]
“There he is, gentlemen, the great Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Savior of nations, the mind of the century, God’s gift to humanity. Gentlemen, I leave you to him.”
Our eyes met in a brief flash, and I saw in them both approval and apprehension, and a farewell. I turned on my heel and stalked away down the wharf. Watson must have started after me, because I heard Holmes’ sharp, high-pitched, and infuriating drawl stop my friend and uncle dead in his tracks.
“Let her go, Watson, she’ll have none of us. She’s off to make her mark on the world, can’t you see?” His voice sharpened further into a querulous cry that must have carried to the other side of the river. “And God help any man who gets in her way!”
With these searing words on my coattails I rounded the corner and set off to find a cab. It was the last I was to see of him for two months.
Separation Trial
She is alone in the world, in the midst of an awakening spring.
ack at oxford, I threw myself furiously into my studies. I had missed nearly a month, and although the Oxford program is not dependent on classes and attendance at lectures, one’s absence is noted and strongly disapproved. My maths tutor was away, illness of some kind, and I was secretly grateful not to have that pressure. The woman who tutored Greek was also away, vanished into maternity over the Christmas holidays. By dint of working flat out for three weeks I managed to redeem myself in the eyes of my remaining supervisors and felt that I had caught up to my own satisfaction as well.
I changed that spring. For one thing, I no longer wore trousers and boots, but filled my wardrobe with expensive, austere skirts and dresses. I had, as I feared, alienated Ronnie Beaconsfield, and lacked the energy to regain her friendship, but instead made an effort to make contact with the other girls in my year. I found I enjoyed it, although after a few hours their talk made me impatient for my solitude. I took long walks through the streets and the desolate winter hills around Ox-ford. I took to attending church, particularly Evensong at the cathe-dral, just to sit and listen. Once I went to a concert with a quiet young man from my patristics lecture. The music was Mozart, and well played, but halfway through, the shining genius and the pain of it made it im-possible to breathe, and I left. The young man did not ask me again.
My written work changed, too. It became even more precise, less tolerant of other, softer viewpoints, more ruthlessly logical: “Brilliant and hard, like a diamond” was a remark from one reader, not alto-gether approving.
I drove myself. I ate less, worked invariably into the early hours of morning, drank brandy now to help me sleep. I laughed when a librar-ian at the Bodleian suggested, only half joking, that I might move into the stacks, but my laughter was a polite, brittle noise. I became, in other words, more like Holmes than the man himself: brilliant, driven to a point of obsession, careless of myself, mindless of others, but without the passion and the deep-down, inbred love for the good in humanity that was the basis of his entire career. He loved the human-ity that could not understand or fully accept him; I, in the midst of the same human race, became a thinking machine.
Holmes himself, on his farm in the south downs, was retreating from the world into softness and bewilderment. Mrs. Hudson cut short her expedition to the Antipodes and returned home in late February. Her first letter to me was brief and shocked at the state she had found Holmes in. Subsequent letters neither accused nor begged, but pained me even more deeply when she simply stated that Holmes had not been out of bed one day, or that he was talking about selling his hives. Lestrade had set guards on the cottage at all times. (He had tried to do the same for me, but I had baited him and eluded