The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [39]
Yesterday (was it yesterday?) a faint scratching from above had caused his heart to race, but it had only been pigeons. And every so often, if he lay staring up for long enough, a quick shadow would pass across the whitened glass; once it had been an entire flock of birds, which played across his internal vision for a long time.
As for the gaolers, there were two. The younger one with the City shoes came in the mornings. His athletic stride sent brisk echoes down the corridor outside, hard heels making impact on the worn surface. The older, heavier, slower man who wore scuffed boots and had a slight hitch in his stride was in charge of the afternoons and most late-night visits.
In either case, food and drink were placed in a tiny pass-through that was walled about on the corridor side. Mycroft pictured a sturdy metal-lined box fastened against a hole cut in the wall, its top unlatching to deposit the food and refill the cup. One morning he’d kept the cup to see what would happen, and his gaoler—the younger man—had simply poured the water onto the floor of the pass-through and left.
The younger man, twice at the beginning, had trailed a faint aroma of bay rum after-shave. The older man smelt of gaspers and had the phlegmy cough that went with them. Neither responded to his questions, although the younger man would pause to listen.
The younger man interested Mycroft considerably.
The food and drink (drugged or no) were delivered at regular intervals: seven in the morning, three in the afternoon, and eleven at night—he could hear Ben tolling from the Houses of Parliament. The morning delivery in the sharp shoes was timed as precisely as the quick Soot-steps: within two minutes either way of seven. The older man was more lax, especially last thing at night, when the eleven o’clock “meal” often preceded the three-quarter ring of the bells. But no matter the time or the footsteps, what his gaolers brought was the same: a bread roll, a boiled egg, a cup of water, and an apple. That morning, the apple had been an orange. He had spent nearly an hour fretting over the significance before deciding just to eat the dratted thing.
Breaking open the peel had at least improved the smell, for a while.
His prison was in the top floor of an unused warehouse near the river, whose traffic he could occasionally hear. The shade of the bricks combined with the direction of the clock meant that if he was turned loose, he could point directly to his prison. The débris in the corners and the floor-boards indicated that over the years the space had held a variety of goods: tea leaves and turmeric, a palimpsest of dye-stuffs, the gouges of metal parts. He’d found a fragment of Chinese porcelain, which came in handy, and a William IV farthing coin, which was less so.
The district outside was moribund—he could barely discern the vibrations of daytime activity rising from below—and that alone had made him hesitate to attempt breaking the window: If he did manage to break it, no one would hear his calls, and the cold nights pouring in might finish him off. In any event, the only thing heavy enough to do the job was his toilet bucket, and he preferred not to empty its contents onto the floor.
His mind was wandering, yet again. He pulled his thoughts from useless speculation and re-addressed himself to the schoolboy algebra on the wall.
a ÷ (b+c+d) + e − (½ c)
The first letter drew his eyes, yet again. a for Accountant, as a child’s book might have it. Had Damian ever drawn a book of ABCs for the child? Estelle was her name, e for Estelle—no, e stands for Mycroft Holmes, who calls himself an accountant, the man who oversees the books of the British Empire.
In recent years, his bookkeeping—the financial and political balance sheets of nations—had begun to take on elements of the ethical as well. What in earlier years had been a fairly straightforward enterprise, as black