The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [111]
It seemed that, in moments, these two would break into open violence. But before that happened, the man with the bruises cast a glance down at the sole remaining mourner. This time, the burly man’s hand was not smoothing his hair, but stretched over his head, open-palmed, waving sharply in a clear message to cease and desist.
The inward movement of the hard men and their prisoners slowed, then stopped. One at a time, the men bent to struggle with the handcuff mechanisms. The freed men and women, looking frightened, hurried to join their untouched fellows who had gathered at a safe distance. The larger group took them in, patting and touching their reassurance. Several of the women pulled off wigs that had been knocked awry; several of the men yanked at the ties in their stiff collars. When all their original members were reunited, they moved as one down the paths and out of the cemetery’s main entrance, where the original twenty-three mourners had long since fled.
When the band came to an end of the present song, it briskly launched into the first tune it had played on arrival. Now, green eyes blazing with the triumph of his rout, the blond Lord of Misrule brandished his baton in the air, stepped away from the gaping hole, and marched, high-kneed as before, across the grass in the direction they had come. The band jerked and trailed into his wake, motion making them play even more out of tune and off the beat. Some of the hard-looking men, now drawn together around the boxer, made as if to stop them, but the man made a cutting motion with his hand, then turned and walked away, stiff-spined with fury. The twelve looked at each other, then at the band, before turning to follow.
The band marched off. The woman with the handkerchief, weeping in earnest now, stumbled after all the others with her veil in her hand, a sad and solitary figure crossing a nearly deserted graveyard.
The two men who had loosed her from her captor came back down the rise, standing for a time beside the bare hole and its abandoned coffin, before even they turned to make their way towards the entrance.
The cemetery subsided into its state of calm Sunday afternoon peace.
The thrush on the high branch was moved to song, although the season for singing had been over for many weeks. His music spilled over the deserted cemetery for a long time before the approach of evening made itself felt, and he flew off in search of a resting place.
It was full dusk when the figure slipped away from the grand family vault.
Chapter 56
I found Holmes by the time-honoured method of strolling up the street and waiting for him to pounce on me. The familiar hsst came from the doorway of an antiquarian bookstore. It was not open for business, it being Sunday, but the proprietor was at work, his door propped open to counteract the drowsy effects of his accumulated centuries of wood pulp and printer’s ink.
Holmes had removed his cassock and lacy surplice, and set aside his piety along with the Book of Common Prayer. He physically jerked me inside and frowned at my funeral disguise, which was that of a dowdy young woman indistinguishable from any of Billy’s relatives. He commented on the effectiveness of the disguise, examined me for sign of injuries, berated me for driving away our foes before they could reveal their leader, and chided me for reducing the obsequies to a shambles—all of which were his way of expressing his pleasure in seeing me. The last of the accusations, however, I felt I should deny.
“That was not I, Holmes,” I protested.
He stopped. “It was not?”
“Well, not all of it.”
“Are you saying that Billy himself came up with the idea of having every one of his friends and relations who possessed vaguely