The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [78]
The surprise of the statement half woke me, or I seemed to half wake, and when I looked over at Holmes I had the oddest impression that there was a drop of rain on his cheek.
Impossible, of course. I am now quite convinced that it was a dream, although the visual impression was vivid, if blurred through myopia. I mention it, not as historical truth, but as an indication of the complex state of my unconscious mind at the time... and, as I mentioned, because of the events it foreshadowed.
The Game, Afoot
We must disentangle, therefore, what now is obscure.
ake, russell,” said a voice in my ear. “The game’s afoot!” The room was dark but for the flame of the Bunsen burner, and the air smelt of coffee.
“Cry ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!’ ” I muttered grumpily to complete Henry’s speech. Once more unto the breach, and all that.
“Indeed. But I fear that the game after whom the greyhounds strain is us. Up, now, drink your coffee. It may be some long time before your next hot drink. And your clothing—everything warm you own, while I return our borrowed goods to your neighbour. Perhaps,” he added, “you might purchase another bottle of this ghastly brandy before your near neighbour returns. No light, now, we must be invisible.”
By the time he returned I was dressed as a young man and held my heaviest boots in my hands.
“I shall put these on at the outer door. Mr. Thomas has excellent hearing.”
“You know the building better than I, Russell, but I had thought to leave from the other end. Your corner here will be under observation from the street.”
I sipped gingerly at the steaming coffee while I thought, and gri-maced at the taste.
“Couldn’t you have washed out the beaker before you made coffee in it? It tastes like the sulphur I was using yesterday. It’s a good thing I wasn’t experimenting with arsenic.”
“I smelt it first. A little sulphur is good for the blood.”
“Spoils the coffee.”
“Don’t drink it then. Come, Russell, stop dawdling.”
I gulped half the scalding drink and poured the rest into the hand-basin.
“There is another way,” I suggested thoughtfully, “one that avoids both the street and the back alleyway, and I doubt that anyone who hasn’t studied a medieval map of the area would know about it. It de-bouches into an absolutely foul yard,” I added.
“That sounds ideal. Do not neglect to bring your revolver, Russell. It may be needed, and it does us no good in your drawer with that disgusting cheese.”
“My lovely Stilton; it’s almost ripe, too. I do hope Mr. Thomas enjoys it.”
“Any riper and it will eat through the woodwork and drop into the room below.”
“You envy me my educated tastes.”
“That I will not honour with a response. Get out the door, Russell.”
We crept noiselessly through passages and hallways, into an attic where I used my new picklocks on the connecting door, and into a kind of priest’s hole that had lain undisturbed for 250 years until the previous summer, when the fiancé of one of my housemates found a reference in a letter in the bowels of the Bodleian, searched it out, and landed a readership for his efforts. At one point we took to the dan-gerously slick roof, two inches of snow over ice. Finally Holmes hissed at me.
“Are you lost, Russell? We’ve been nearly twenty minutes in this labyrinth.