The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [15]
Holmes walked back across the road to where his son sat. “Mme Longchamps suggests that I return to England and let you get on with it. Is this what you wish?”
Damian did not actually answer, not in words, but the look he gave the woman—grateful, apologetic, and determined—was a speech in itself. Holmes reached into his breast pocket and sorted out a card.
“When you feel like getting into contact, that is where to reach me,” he said. “If I happen to be away, the address on the reverse is that of your uncle. He will always know where I am.”
Damian put the card into his coat pocket without looking at it; something about the gesture said that he might as easily have dropped it on the ground. Holmes put out his hand, and said, with an attempt at warmth, “I am … gratified to have made your acquaintance. The revelations of this past week have been among the most extraordinary in an already full life. I look forward to renewing our conversation.”
Damian stood and walked over to Mme Longchamps. Holmes' face was expressionless as his hand slowly fell, but Mme Longchamps would not have it. She put her hands on the boy's shoulders and forced him around.
“Say au revoir to your father,” she ordered.
He looked at Holmes with an expression of hopelessness and regret, a look such as a ship-wrecked man might wear when, seeing that help would not arrive, he chose to let go of his spar. I was only nineteen and was well supplied with problems of my own, but that look on his face twisted my heart. “Adieu,” Damian said.
“I am very sorry,” Holmes told him. “That your mother never told me of your existence.”
Damian lifted his head and for the first time, the grey eyes came to life, haughty and furious as a bird of prey. “You should have known.”
“Yes,” answered Holmes. “I should have known.”
He waited. For weeks. I went back to my studies, but whenever I came down from Oxford, I saw how closely Holmes watched the post, how any knock at the door brought his head sharply around.
In the end, it was Mme Longchamps who wrote, in early December, to say that she was desolated to tell him, but Damian had gone back to his ways, and that no-one had seen him for some weeks. She assured Holmes that Damian would find her waiting when he grew fatigued of the drugs, and that she would then urge him to write to his father.
It was the only letter Holmes had, from either of them. In March, when she had not replied to two letters, he began to make enquiries as to her whereabouts.
He found her in the Père Lachaise cemetery, a victim of the terrible influenza that followed on the Great War's heels.
M Cantelet's investigator was immediately dispatched to Ste Chapelle, but Damian was gone. Cantelet and others searched all of France, but the trail was cold: No gallery, no artist, no member of the Bohemian underworld had heard news of Damian Adler since January. Even Mycroft failed to locate his nephew.
Holmes' lovely, lost son vanished as abruptly as he had appeared.
Until one summer evening in August 1924, when he stood in the middle of our stone terrace and said hello to his father.
The Tool (2): A Tool that is shaped and used assumes a
Power of its own. This Testimony is a Tool a history,
and a guide, that its Power may work on others.
Testimony, I:2
MY HAND WAS STILL BRACED ON Holmes' ARM, where I had steadied myself after walking into him, and I felt the shudder of effort run through him: Being controlled is nowhere near the same as being unfeeling.
But he could not control his voice, not entirely; when he spoke he was hoarse as a man roused from a long sleep. “God, boy. I thought you were dead.”
“Yes,” Damian said simply. “I'm sorry.”
Holmes started towards him, his hand coming out; instead of taking it, Damian stepped forward and embraced him. After the briefest hesitation, Holmes returned the greeting, with a fervour that would have astonished all but a very few of his intimates. Indeed, one might have thought Holmes had instigated the gesture, with Damian its more reluctant participant.
I moved towards the