The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [42]
Book Two
INTERNSHIP
The Senator’s Daughter
The Vagrant Gipsy Life
Seize her, imprison her, take her away.
he monk’s tun case was, as I said, but a lark, the sort of non-case that even a dyed-in-the-wool romantic like Watson would have been hard put to whip into a thrilling narrative. The police would surely have caught Sylvester before long, and truly, thirty guineas and four hams, even in those days of chronic food shortages, were hardly the stuff of Times headlines.
Nonetheless, across all the tumultuous events of the intervening years that one case stands out in my mind, for the simple reason that it marked the first time Holmes had granted me free rein to make deci-sions and take action. Of course, even then I realised that, had the case been of any earthly significance whatsoever, I should have been kept firmly in my auxiliary role. Despite that, the glow of secret satisfaction it gave me lasted with a curious tenacity. A small thing, perhaps, but mine own.
Five weeks later, however, a case came upon us that put the Monk’s Tun affair into its proper, childish perspective. The kidnapping of the American senator’s daughter was no lark, but a matter of international import, dramatic, intense, a classic Holmes case such as I had not yet observed, much less been involved with, and certainly not as a central protagonist. The case brought into sharp focus the purpose surrounding my years of desultory training, brought forcibly home the entire raison d’être of the person Sherlock Holmes had created of himself, and moreover, brought me up against the dark side of the life Holmes led.
That single case bound us together in ways my apprenticeship never had, rather as the survivors of a natural disaster find themselves inextricably linked for the rest of their days. It made me both more certain of myself and, paradoxically, more cautious now that I had wit-nessed at first hand the potentially calamitous results of my unconsid-ered acts. It changed Holmes, too, to see before him the living result of his years of half-frivolous, half-deliberate training. I believe it brought him up sharply, to be confronted with the fact that he had created a not inconsiderable force, that what had begun as a chance meeting had given birth to me. His reappraisal of what I had become, his judgement of my abilities under fire, as it were, profoundly influ-enced the decisions he was to make four months later when the heav-ens opened on our heads.
And yet, I very nearly missed the case altogether. Even today my spine crawls cold at the thought of December without the mutual knowledge of the preceding August, for the groundwork of trust laid down during our time in Wales made December’s partnership possible. Had I missed the Simpson case, had Holmes simply disappeared into the thin summer air (as he had done with numerous other cases) and not allowed me to participate, God alone knows what we would have done when December’s cold hit us, unprepared and unsupported.
oward noon on a blistering hot day in the middle of Au-gust our haying crew reached the end of the last field and dis-persed, in heavy-footed exhaustion, for our homes. This year the easy camaraderie and rude high spirits of the Land Girls had been cooled by the presence of a man amongst the crew, a silent, rigid, shell-shocked young man—a boy, really, but for the trenches—who did no great work himself and who started at every sudden noise, but who served to keep us at our work by his mere distressing presence. Thanks to him we finished early, just before midday on the eighteenth. I trudged home, silently inhaled a vast meal in Patrick’s kitchen, and, wanting only to collapse between my clean sheets for twenty hours, instead took myself to the bathroom and stripped off my filthy Land Girl’s smock, sluiced off my skin’s crust of dust and chaff cemented there by sweat,