The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [22]
“Even though she is going to abandon the hive anyway?”
“The lust for murder is not a rational thing. In queens, it is an instinctual response.”
I went up to Oxford a few weeks later. Both Holmes and Mrs. Hud-son went on the train with me, to deliver me to my new home. We walked by the Cherwell and down to the Isis to feed the ill-tempered swans, and back by way of Mercury’s fountain and the silent, brooding bell named Tom to the station. I embraced Mrs. Hudson and turned to Holmes.
“Thank you,” was all I could come up with.
“Learn something here,” he said. “Find some teachers and learn something” was all he could say, and we shook hands and walked off to our separate lives.
he oxford university I came up to in 1917 was a shadow of her normal, self-assured self, its population a tenth of that in 1914 before the war, a number lower even than in the years following the Black Death. The blue-coated wounded, wan and trembling be-neath their tanned skins, outnumbered the black-robed academics, and several of the colleges, including my own, had been given over to housing them for the duration.
I expected great things of this University, many of which it gave me in abundance. I did find teachers, as Holmes had ordered, even before the remnant of male dons trickled back from France, having left parts of themselves behind. I found men and women who were not intimidated by my proud, rough-cut mind, who challenged and fought me and were not above reducing me sharply to size when criticism was due, and a couple of them were even better than Holmes at the delivery of a brief and devastating remark. Both for better and for worse, one received considerably more of their attentions during the war years than after the young men returned. I found that I did not miss Holmes as much as I had feared, and the intense pleasure of being away from my aunt went quite far to balance the irritation of the chaperonage rules (permission required for any outing, two women in any mixed party, mixed parties in cafés only between two o’clock and five-thirty in the afternoon, and then only with permission, etc., etc.). Many girls found these rules infuriating; I found them less so, but perhaps that was only because I was more agile at climbing the walls or scrambling between hansom roof and upper window in the wee hours.
One thing I had not expected to find at University was fun. After all, Oxford was a small town composed of dirty, cold stone buildings filled with wounded soldiers. There were few male undergraduates, few male dons under the age of retirement, few men, period, who were not Blighty returns, fragile and preoccupied and often in pain. Food was scarce and uninteresting, heating was inadequate, the war was a con-stant presence, volunteer work intruded on our time, and to top it off, half the University societies and organizations were in abeyance, up to and including the dramatic society, OUDS.
Oddly enough, it was this last gap in the Oxford landscape that opened the door of communitas for me, and almost immediately I ar-rived. I was in my rooms on the first morning, investigating on all fours the possibility of repairing a bookshelf that had just collapsed under the combined weight of four tea chests of books, when there came a knock on my door.
“Come in,” I called.
“I say,” a voice began, and then changed from enquiry to concern. “I say, are you all right?”
I shoved my spectacles back onto my nose and dashed the hair out of my face with the back of my hand, and caught my first sight of Lady Veronica Beaconsfield, all plump five feet one inch of her, wrapped in an incredibly gaudy green-and-yellow silk dressing gown that did nothing for her complexion.
“All right? Of course. Oh, the books. No, they didn’t fall on me; I lay on them. I don’t suppose you have such a thing as a screwdriver?”
“No, I don’t believe I do.”
“Ah well, the porter may. Were you looking for someone?”
“You.”
“Then you have found her.”
“Petruchio,” she said, and seemed to pause in expectation. I sat back on my heels amongst