The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [14]
Damian's eyes would not meet ours. They wove their way along the doorway, up the vine shrouding the front of the house, along the street outside, while his fingers picked restlessly at his clothing. In the bright light, the bald tracing of scars could be seen beneath his short-cropped hair, and it suddenly came to me that this was not merely a drug-addled derelict, nor some nightmare version of Holmes, but a soldier who had given his health and his spirit in the service of France. He was lost, as so many of his—my—generation were. It was our responsibility to help him find himself again.
The woman watched us approach, and as M Cantelet launched into speech with the gendarme, she touched Damian's arm and spoke briefly in his ear before stepping forward to intercept Holmes.
“Pardon me,” she said in accented English, raising her voice against that of the avocat. “You are, I think, Damian's father?”
“The name is Holmes,” my companion replied. “This is my … assistant, Mary Russell.”
“I am Hélène Longchamps,” she said. “An old friend of Damian's. I own a gallery in Paris. Come, you will buy me a coffee and we will talk. Damian, you sit here, we will have the boy bring you a croissant.”
Mme Longchamps, it transpired, had known Damian Adler since before the War. She had sold a score of his paintings, for increasing amounts of money, and what was more, she had cared for him: bullied him into painting, fed him when he was hungry, gave him a bed and a studio in her country house. And threw him out whenever he showed signs of drug use.
“You understand,” she told Holmes, “he changed after the War. Oh, we all changed, of course, but I am told that a head injury such as his often has profound effects on a person's mind. From what I could see, more than the injury, it was the drugs. They take hold of a man's mind as well as his body—certainly they did so with Damian. And now it takes only a moment's weakness, a brief coup de tête or a dose of un-happiness or ennui or simply a party with the wrong people, and it swallows him anew. And when that happens I become hard. I refuse him help. I say, ‘You must go to your friends, if that is how you wish to live,’ and I withhold any monies from his sales, and I wait. We have done this three times in the thirteen months since he came out of hospital and became a civilian. And three times he has returned to my door, laboriously cleaned himself of drugs, and begun to paint again.”
“Why do you do this?” I had to agree with the suspicion in Holmes' voice: A well-dressed, older woman with a talented and beautiful young addict was not a comfortable picture.
But she laughed. “I am not after a pretty bed-warmer, sir. I knew his mother, before she died, and I knew Damian from when he was five or six years. I am the closest he has to an elder sister.”
“I see. Well, madame, I thank you warmly for assisting the boy. I should like—”
She cut him off. “If you want to help the boy, you will leave him here.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“M 'Olmes, I imagine you will propose to take Damian back to l'Angleterre, n'est çe pas?”
“I should think it would not be altogether a bad idea to remove him from the source of his temptations,” Holmes said stiffly.
“But yes, it would be a bad idea, the worst of ideas. The boy must find his own way. I know him. You do not. You must believe me when I tell you that attempting to shape a future for him will guarantee failure. You will kill him.”
She leant forward over the tiny table, quivering with the intensity of her belief. The effect was that of a small tabby facing down a greyhound, and it might have been laughable but for those last four words.
Holmes studied her. Even the avocat across the way fell silent, turning to see what both the gendarme and Damian were watching so intently.
Mme Longchamps sat, as implacable as any mother.
Holmes looked over at his son, and then he nodded. Mme Longchamps closed her eyes for a moment, then looked at me and gave me an almost shy smile in which