The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [83]
The tension subsided in the room, and the weariness crept back into my bones. I lightly fastened the dressings over Holmes’ back, picked up my glass, and lifted it to the two brothers.
“Gentlemen, I bid you good night. I trust our plans may wait until morning for their formulation?”
“When brains are fresher,” said Holmes, as if quoting someone whose opinions he considered suspect—Oscar Wilde perhaps. “Good night, Russell.”
“I trust, Holmes, that you will allow your body some rest tonight.”
He reached for his pipe.
“Russell, there are times when the infirmities of the body may be used as a means of concentrating the mind. I should be something of a fool were I not to take advantage of that phenomenon.”
This from a man who could not even sit back in a chair. I un-clenched my jaw and spoke with deliberate cruelty.
“No doubt that marvellous concentration explains why you neg-lected to include Watson in your calculations.” I regretted it as soon as the words were said, but I could not very well take them back. “Get some sleep, for God’s sake, Holmes.”
“I say again, good night, Russell,” he bit off, struck a match with a violence that must have hurt his back, and applied it to the bowl. I looked at Mycroft, who shrugged minutely, threw my hands in the air, and went to bed.
It was very late, or very early, when the smell of tobacco no longer drifted under my door.
The Problem of the Empty House
The massacre of the males...
was awakened by the shout of a street hawker in the grey morning, and as I lay there summoning the energy to find my watch, the gentle clatter of cup meeting saucer in the next room evoked certain possibilities. I dressed quickly in crumpled trousers and shirt from my knapsack and made my way to the sitting room.
“I hear I have not missed breakfast entirely,” I said as I entered, and stopped dead as I saw the third figure at the table. “Uncle John! But how...?”
Holmes vacated a chair and took his cup over to the window, where the curtains were still tightly drawn. He moved with care and looked his age and more, but there was no pain in his face, and his shaven chin and combed hair bespoke a degree of back movement that would have been difficult the previous day.
“I fear my long-time chronicler has taken a few of my lessons to heart, Russell. We have been run to earth.” His expression was of amusement and chagrin laid over something darker, worry, perhaps. He grimaced as Watson chuckled and buttered his toast.
“Elementary, my dear Holmes,” he said, and Holmes snorted. “Where would Mary be, if you were both in danger, but with you, and where would you go but to your brother’s? Have some tea, Mary,” he of-fered, and looked at me over his glasses. “Though I should like an apol-ogy for your telling me an untruth.” He did not sound hurt, only resigned, and it occurred to me that Holmes was well accustomed to de-ceiving this man, because he was, as I had said, not gifted with the abil-ity to lie, and thus quite simply could not be trusted to act a part. For the first time I became aware of how that knowledge must have pained him, how saddened he must have been over the years at his failure, as he would have seen it, his inability to serve his friend save by unwittingly being manipulated by Holmes’ cleverer mind. And when I continued the pattern, he only looked a mild reproach at me and beheaded a sec-ond egg. I sat down in the chair Holmes had left and put a hand on his.
“I am sorry, Uncle John. Really very sorry. I was afraid for you, and afraid that if you came here they’d follow you. I wanted to keep you out of it.”
He harrumphed in embarrassment and patted my hand awkwardly, pink to his bushy grey eyebrows.
“Quite all right, my dear, quite all right. I do understand. Just re-member that I’ve been watching out for myself for a long time now, I’m hardly a babe in the woods.”
And perhaps also, my mind continued, it was an unkind way to re-mind him that he had been displaced from Holmes’ side by an active younger person—a female