The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [45]
Still, she was right. There was nothing like hard labour to take one’s mind off of frustration.
He gave a glance back at the sleeping Damian, then set off across the lawn, rolling up his shirt-sleeves as he drew near the dock.
Work helped. But still, Monday was endless.
So it was that on Tuesday, shaking off the sensation of prison, Holmes trimmed his beard, changed some pounds to guilders at the house, put on his only suit (miraculous, that he had managed to retain his valise during the past week’s eccentric travels), and asked Dr Henning if, seeing as how he was taking the train to Amsterdam, there was any person to whom she might like a telegram sent.
Surely Wick would have noticed by now that their doctor was missing?
Chapter 24
The train to Amsterdam was small and antique. In a country more tolerant of dilapidation, this rural transport would have devolved into a threadbare state, but here it was so scrubbed it could only be considered worn.
Two other passengers boarded at the tiny station, a long-married couple (two wedding rings, worn thin) that Holmes would have dubbed “elderly” had he not suspected they were younger than he. They waited for him to enter, he gestured for them to go first, and all three might have stood on the platform being polite until the train pulled away had the conductor’s whistle not broken the old woman’s nerve. They took seats at one end of the car, and Holmes walked to the other, settling behind his newspaper.
It was a Dutch paper, bought as much for camouflage as to provide him with distraction during the journey, but the reaction of the old couple was telling: They had known him for a foreigner without him opening his mouth.
Three stops up, Holmes folded the paper and joined the disembarking throng of two office workers (one had the chronic stains of an accountant’s ink on his cuffs, the other’s fingers betrayed long hours on a typing machine). He followed the two as far as the station’s news stand, saw at a glance that the offerings here were no more sophisticated than the station at which he had begun, and returned to the train. At the last minute, he changed direction to fall in behind a louche young poet (the scrap of paper sticking from his pocket betrayed a sonnet) ambling towards the next car up, and boarded that one instead: not that he expected anyone to trace his movements, but Holmes had not lived to grow grey by neglecting to lay false trails.
He shook open the paper, making an effort to damp down his simmering impatience. There was no point in leaping from his seat at every stop to search for a copy of The Times. No point whatsoever. He would soon be in Amsterdam, and given a wide choice of international newspapers.
They would, he knew, contain nothing of interest. It was, after all, only Tuesday. Taking into account the presence of a child, and the sparse provisions of transportation out of Orkney, Russell might well still be working her way down from the northern reaches of Scotland.
The probability of finding a message from her in The Times agony column was decidedly thin.
On the other hand, there was Mycroft to account for. Holmes still found Russell’s report of a Scotland Yard raid on his brother’s flat hard to credit. Could it have been a false rumour? Chief Inspector Lestrade was obdurate, but the man had never before displayed signs of outright insanity.
This, thought Holmes, half ripping a page as he turned it, this was why he’d avoided family ties for so much of his career: It made matters so much more difficult. He felt a bit like the boat whose hull he’d attacked the previous afternoon, thick with barnacles and sea-washed débris. If he didn’t have Damian on his hands; if Russell didn’t have the child—
He grimaced, and violently folded away the newspaper. One might as well say that Russell was