The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [134]
It was, I think, about three in the morning when I jerked up in my bed, my pulse thudding thickly in my ears, my breath coming as fast as if I had sprinted upstairs. I had been dreaming, not the Dream, but a confusing mixture of things real and imagined. A shadowy face had leered at me from the bookshelf in the corner, half-hidden by blonde hair, and held out a clay pipe in a twisted hand. “You know nothing!” the figure cackled in a voice both male and female, and laughed horri-bly. His/her gnarled fist tightened over the pipe, which I knew to be one of Holmes’, and then opened.
Shards bounced slowly about the floor. I stared despairingly at the shattered pipe and knelt down to retrieve the pieces, in hopes of glueing it together again. Some of the larger bits had rolled underneath the bookshelf, and I had to lie down to reach them. As I felt around, my hand was suddenly seized, and I shot upright in terror with a fading im-age of the bookshelf in my mind’s eye. It had been a section of history, the titles all on Henry VIII.
I groped for a light and my spectacles and lay back until my cold sweat dried and my heart no longer pounded in my chest. I knew that I could never get back to sleep after that, so I reached for my dressing gown and went to make myself a cup of tea.
In a few minutes I was sitting, inhaling the comforting steam, and thinking about the nightmare. It was very rare for me to be aware of dreams, other than the Dream, and I could not remember having an-other nightmare since my family had died. What was the purpose be-hind this one? Some of its elements were obvious, but some were not. Why, for example, was the hidden blonde both male and female, when I invariably thought of my adversary as female? The smashed pipe was an easily understood image of my intense, nearing frantic anxiety about Holmes, and bookshelves were such a part of my life that I could hardly imagine any part of me, even a dream, omitting them. But why were the books on history? I held no great passion for recent history, and due to my erratic schooling English history was a relative stranger. What was King Henry doing in front of my eyes? That obscene, gout-ridden old man with his numerous wives, all of them sacrificed to his desire for sons, as if it were their fault and not that of his own syphilitic self. What would Freud make of that dream, I wondered, with Holmes falling be-neath the misogynist king, to the echoes of a man/woman’s laughter? It was the sort of thing that would have made Dr. Leah Ginzberg lean for-ward in her chair with a Germanic “Ja, and then?” I sighed into the silent room and reached for my books. If I had to be up at three o’clock in the morning, I might as well make some use of it, Henry VIII or no. I settled myself to work, but all morning the dream kept intruding, and I would find myself staring blankly at the wall in front of me, seeing the spines of those books. Henry VIII. What did that mean?
I worked on, and in the afternoon I went out to take coffee in the covered market before an afternoon lecture, and I ended up ordering a large meal I had not known I wanted until I had walked into the tan-talising smell of frying bacon. Two meals, actually, and pudding— more food than I had taken at one sitting at any time since Mrs. Hudson had been feeding me.
Somewhat bloated, I left the market stalls and walked up Turl Street for the afternoon lecture, only to find my steps slowing as I ap-proached the Broad. I stopped. Henry VIII. When in ignorance, con-sult a library. With few qualms I abandoned the enquiry into Second Dynasty Burial Texts and turned right instead of left. (The familiar loi-tering and