The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [133]
Clarissa Ledger was a Huxley—cousin of some sort to Thomas Henry, “Darwin's Bulldog,” whose grandson Aldous looked to be the literary world's latest enfant terrible. Clarissa Ledger was also C. H. Ledger, M.D., D. Phil, one-time Warden of St Hilda's, author of fourteen books on religious topics ranging from Chinese Taoism to the Sufis of the Arabian peninsula, a woman of enormous curiosity, determination, physical courage (I had seen her initiation scars from a two-year sojourn in the mountains of East Africa), and mental agility, all of which persisted into her eighty-seventh year. To her immense irritation, her body's infirmities meant that now, the world must come to her.
I found her at home, as usual on a Sunday, returned, fed, and rested after attending early Communion at one or another of the rich array of Oxford churches. This morning it had been St. Michael's, which she pronounced “deliciously gloomy,” and delivered a wickedly perceptive and academically precise flaying of the rector's homily, making me snort with unkind laughter. Her attendant granddaughter shook her head in disapproval, and served us cups of weak tea and tasteless biscuits before leaving us to our talk.
Professor Ledger gazed mournfully down at the liquid in her cup. “One of the medicine men pronounced on the evils of strong drink, which caused my family to unite against me and deny me coffee. I think they are hoping it may have a calming effect on my tongue as well.”
“I remember your coffee. Perhaps they are merely hoping to preserve the china from dissolving altogether.”
“I threatened to move bag and baggage back to the desert, but they did not take the threat seriously.” She looked up from her cup, and fixed me with a beady blue gaze. “If you receive a wire from me demanding assistance, know to bring your passport with you.”
I laughed—slightly uncomfortably, I admit, since it was exactly the sort of thing this old lady would do. “Or, I could bring you coffee from time to time.”
“That might be better, Mary. I'm not sure how my bones would care for sleeping on the ground now.”
We talked for a while about adventures, and I told her about my time in India earlier that year, and about the spring in Japan. I thought she might disapprove of the interference such investigations had on my academic career, but she saw past that to the riches of experience. Eventually, she asked me what brought me to see her.
“I need to know about the Black Mass.”
“Not here,” she said immediately. “If you want to talk about that, we need to be in the sunshine.”
I found myself smiling at her. “How would you feel about punting?”
Her wizened face lit up. “So long as I am not in charge of the pole, I should love it.”
So in the end, I did spend the day messing about in a boat. Her granddaughter and I trundled Professor Ledger around to St Hilda's in a Bath chair, chatting all the while about northern India. Once there, it was no effort at all to transfer her slight weight onto one of the college's boats, which had been draped with cushions and rugs to rival Cleopatra's barge. The granddaughter added food and drink sufficient to an Arctic expedition, a large umbrella, and a parcel of smelling salts and aspirins. I stepped onto the stern, rolled up my sleeves, and pushed away upstream, the granddaughter's voice still calling instructions from the bank.
A punt is twenty-four feet of low, blunt-ended boat propelled by dropping the end of a young tree into the river bottom, leaning on it with precision, then snapping the dripping pole up, hand over hand, until all sixteen feet of it are clear of the water. Several hundred of these repetitions go into a day's entertainment. It is a skill that, once learnt, comes back naturally, although after a long hiatus, disused muscles protest.
We dawdled around the cricket grounds, past the Sunday throng sunning themselves at the Botanic Gardens, dodging amateur boats-men and the seal-like heads of boys swimming in the high, mud coloured water. The sun-dappled contrast to last night's rainy preoccupation with a series-murderer