The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [53]
Up through Glamorgan we walked and rode and walked again, into Gwent and then Powys, turning west now into the hilly greensward that curled up towards the Brecon Beacons, all hill farm and bracken fern, terraces and slag heaps and sheep. The shepherds eyed us with mistrust as we rumbled past, although their thin, black, sharp-eyed, sus-picious dogs, lying with bellies pressed to the ground, as alert as so many pessimistic evangelists to snatch back a straying charge, spared us not a glance. As we passed through the villages and hamlets children ran shrieking to the road, and then stood in silent wonder staring up at our red, green, and gold splendour, their fingers in their mouths and their bare feet spattered with mud.
Wherever we went, we performed. While the children watched, I juggled, pulled colourful scarves from their colourless pockets and ha’pennies from dirty ears, and when we had the attention of their mothers, Holmes would come out of the pub wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and pull out his fiddle. I told the fortunes of women who had none, read the cracked lines on their hard palms and whispered vague hints of dark strangers and unexpected wealth, and gave them stronger predictions of healthy children who would support them in their old age. In the evenings when the men were present their wives looked daggers at me, but when their ears were caught by “me Da’s” ready tongue, and when they saw that we were moving on for the night, they forgave me their husbands’ glances and remarks.
On the second day we passed the police roadblock, receiving only cursory abuse since we were going into the area being guarded, not coming out. On the third day we passed the Simpsons’ camping site, went on a mile, and pulled off into a side track. I cooked our tea, and when Holmes remarked merely that he hadn’t thought it possible to make tinned beans taste undercooked, I took it that my cooking was improving.
When the pans were clean we lit the oil lamp and closed the door against the sweet dusk, and went again through all the papers Connor had given us—the photographs and the typed notes, the interviews with the parents, statements from witnesses on the mountain and from the senator’s staff in London, a glossy photograph of Jessica taken the previous spring, grinning gap-toothed in a studio with its painted backdrop of a blooming arbour of roses. Page after page of the material, and all of it served only to underline the total lack of solid evidence, and the family’s coming financial emasculation, and the brutal, staring fact that all too often kidnappers who receive their money give only a dead body in return, a corpse who can tell no tales.
Holmes smoked three pipes and climbed silently into his bunk. I closed the file on the happy face and shut down the lamp, and lay awake in the darkness long after the breathing above me slowed into an even rhythm. Finally, towards the end of the short summer’s night, I dropped off into sleep, and then the Dream came and tore at me with its claws of blame and terror and abandonment, the massive, sham-bling, monstrous inevitability of my personal hell, but this time, be-fore its climax, just short of the final moment of exquisite horror, a sharp voice dragged me back, and I surfaced with a shuddering gasp into the simple quiet of the gipsy caravan.
“Russell? Russell, are you all right?”
I sat up, and his hand fell away.
“No. Yes, I’m all right, Holmes.” I breathed into my hands and tried to steady myself. “Sorry I woke you. It was just a bad dream, worry about the child, I guess. It takes me that way, sometimes. Noth-ing to be concerned about.”
He moved over to the tiny table, scratched a match into life, and lit a candle. I turned my face away from him.
“Can I get you anything? A drink? Something hot?”
His concern raked at me.
“No! No, thank you,