The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [132]
“Yes, and they are sure of themselves. I assume you are being watched.”
“I only saw them two weeks ago, two men and a woman. Very good, too. Five cars followed me down here. The lady has money.”
“We knew that.” His eyes studied my back. “Are you all right, Rus-sell? You’ve lost half a stone since January, and you aren’t sleeping.”
“Only six pounds, not seven, and I sleep as you do. I’m busy.” My voice dropped to a whisper. “Holmes, I wish this were over.” I felt him behind me and stood up abruptly. “No, don’t come near me, I couldn’t bear it. And I don’t think I can do this trip again. I’m fine when I’m in Oxford, but don’t ask me to come down again until the end. Please.”
Silence radiated off the man like heat waves, and the low, hoarse voice that came from him was a thing I had never heard before. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I understand.” He stopped, cleared his throat, and I heard him take a deliberate, long breath before he spoke again in his customary incisive tones.
“You are quite correct, Russell. There is nothing to be gained by it, and much to lose. To business then. I had copies of the photographs made for you. I gave the Roman numeral series to Mycroft, but neither of us can make any sense of it. I know it’s there. Perhaps you can dig it out. It’s that packet on the bench in front of you.” I took the oversized brown envelope and put it in an inner pocket.
“We must go back out now, Russell. And in about ten minutes we will begin again, and you will leave angrily before Mrs. Hudson can of-fer you any supper. Yes?”
“Yes, Holmes. Good-bye.”
He went back out into the sitting room, and I joined him a few minutes later. Within twenty minutes the sarcastic remarks were be-ginning to escalate, and shortly after six o’clock I slammed out of his cottage door without saying good-bye to Mrs. Hudson and sped off down the lane. Two miles away I stopped the car and rested my fore-head on the wheel for some time. It was all too real.
The Daughter of the Voice
It is so certain, then, that the new generation ... will do something you have not done?
he dreary weeks dragged on. My watchers remained dis-creet and I, absentminded. Trinity term began, and I was almost too busy to remember that my isolation was an act. Almost. Often at night I would start awake from bed or chair, thinking I had heard two soft taps at the door, but there was never anything. I moved in a woolly cocoon of words and numbers and chemical symbols, and spent my every spare minute in the Bodleian. Oddly, the Dream did not come.
Spring arrived, hesitant at first and then in a rush, heady, rich, long days that pushed the nighttime back into ever smaller intervals, the first spring in five free from the rumour of guns across the Channel, a spring anxious to make up for the cold winter, life bursting out from four years of death. All of England raised her face to the sun; or nearly all. I was aware of the spring, peripherally, aware that no one in the University save myself and a number of shell-shocked ex-soldiers was doing any work, and even I submitted to a picnic on Boar’s Hill and another day allowed myself to be dragged off for a punting expedition upriver to Port Meadow.
For the most part, though, I ignored the blandishments of my for-mer friends and current neighbours and kept my head down to work. That was the pattern for most of May, and it was the case on the day nearly at May’s end when the tight snarled threads of the case began to come loose in my hands.
Upon my return from Sussex I was faced with the problem of where to put the envelope Holmes had given me. I could no longer de-pend on the security of my rooms, and preferred not to carry it about on my person at every moment. In the end I decided that the safest place to hide it was behind one of the more obscure volumes around the corner from the desk where I habitually worked in the Bodleian. It was a risk, but short of buying a safe