The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [52]
Three decades ago, he had made a decision that was not his to make. A decision that made everything possible. A decision that only he and one living man knew had been made. Before December, he’d managed to all but forget it, himself.
It was a beautiful thing, and a fragile thing, to place an empire’s moral welfare in the hands of one man. Six months ago, he had come face to face with the knowledge that it was also a terrifying thing, and foolish beyond belief.
a ÷ (b+c+d) + e − (½ c) − (f) = g
A koan, a conundrum, now beginning to disappear with the setting sun. If g was the man who had put e here, then it followed that g wanted to replace e. That g had looked at the rôle of the accountant and lusted after its authority—rather, its perceived authority, since the power behind e remained well hidden. And as soon as the g had been scratched onto the wall, Mycroft could only wonder that he was not yet dead.
Not that e objected to the delay of his death. Mycroft was actually growing accustomed to the hunger, and the cold, and even the stupefying boredom.
However, one possible explanation of his continued immobility was that in the outside world, g was busy assembling his weapons. That he was pulling together—call them m and s and n and i : Mary and Sherlock and Nephew and Infant. Adding to g’s side of the equation. Making e into a tool of his own.
Which raised the further question: Was this person e—this most ethical and moral of men—required to act on his suspicion? Was he obligated, as a servant of His Majesty, to remove a potential tool from enemy hands by using this bent nail to open a vein in his own wrist?
His grim thoughts broke off: a sound, where customarily there was none. It was too early for his evening visitation, too heavy for one of the pigeons, too near for street noise. He grabbed the solitary brick that his chip of porcelain and farthing coin had between them freed from the wall, then scrambled to his feet. Tightening his silken belt, he faced the approaching sound.
He wished that he might have been permitted to shave, before they came for him.
Chapter 28
On Wednesday, Goodman tried to teach Estelle jackstones. However, mature as her mind might be, her small hands lacked sufficient coordination to toss, snatch, and grab. She grew increasingly frustrated, and was not far from tears when he bundled the game back into its cloth bag and brought out his knife and a chunk of pine instead, asking her what kind of animal she wished him to carve next.
We were all relieved when she permitted herself to be distracted, to decide on a hedgehog.
So he carved Estelle a family of hedgehogs.
When I looked for him after lunch, he had disappeared again. Estelle and I gathered fallen apples from his orchard and managed to cook them without burning the place down. We helped Javitz hobble out to the garden, and had a fierce contest on who could spit a plum-pit the greatest percentage of their height (Javitz won). Fortunately, our host reappeared before I was driven to assemble an evening meal, bringing with him a Times, half a dozen fresh-baked scones, a bag of fresh-ground coffee, a jar of bilberry preserves, a piece of beef (which he would cook for us but not eat, as he had not eaten the sausages), a tiny silver hair-brush, and a diminutive pink pinafore.
My BEEKEEPING message was in the agony column, but no other.
* * *
On Thursday afternoon, our host walked to the lakeside village and returned with a box of soft chocolates, three varieties of cheese, two packets of biscuits, and that day’s paper.
My message was there—and, halfway down the far right side, another:
BEES may thrive in foreign lands yet, lacking protection, meet peril