The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [36]
Unless he had decided to follow the bees off into the blue.
For lack of other fiction, I reached for Holmes' copy of Eminent Victorians, and took myself to bed.
Wrestling with Angels (2): In that moment of
submission, the heavens opened upon the boy and the
Light spilled in, filling him to overflowing.
And when the boy came down from the high mountain,
he found he had been marked by the Lights, and that he
bore on his body forevermore the stigmata of divinity.
Testimony, I:5
DAMIAN, I SHOULD THINK YOU'D HAD ENOUGH pacing about during the day. Couldn't you sit down for a few minutes?”
“Did you have to lodge us in a less comfortable place than the one we were in last night?”
“This is absolutely safe.”
“That depends on what you are guarding against. Suffocation clearly isn't a concern with you.”
“You dislike being enclosed?”
“I dislike risking asphyxiation.”
“Your tension suggests claustrophobia. Which, now I consider it, would also explain the degree of agitation you showed at the gaol in Ste Chapelle. I thought at the time it was taking unduly long for the drugs to pass from your system; you might have told me before we came here.”
“I'm not claustrophobic!”
“If you say so.”
“I'm fine. Here, I'm sitting down. Now can we talk about something else?”
“I will admit, I had expected to have some results for our labours by now.”
“It's hopeless, isn't it?”
“Certainly today's lack of results calls for a reconsideration of method for tomorrow.”
“Maybe she got it in her mind to go to Paris. Or Rome. She once asked me about Rome.”
“Recently?”
“A year, year and a half ago.”
“It would help if you could estimate how much money she might have taken with her.”
“I told you, I don't keep track of money, Yolanda does. It's how … it's one way I prove that I trust her. All I know is, she didn't take anything from the bank, but she may have hoarded any amount of cash. She likes cash.”
“Or she could have had another bank account entirely.”
“Yes, so? Look, I do trust her. I gave her my word when I married her, that she could live her life as she wished. She's my wife, and the mother of my child; if it makes her feel better to have her own bank account—her own life—it's her affair.”
“Most generous of you.”
“Damn it, I knew it would be a mistake to bring you into this.”
“Damian—Damian! Sit down. Please.”
“I want some air. I'll be back in an hour.”
“Wait, I need to let you out.”
“Better now?”
“Look, I'm sorry, I get… when I get upset it's best for everyone if I just take a walk. And it doesn't help that I'm not painting. Painting bleeds off a lot of steam.”
“Or drinking.”
“I'm not drunk.”
“Do you ‘get upset’ often?”
“No more than any other man. Why do you ask?”
“How did you come to have contusions on your hands and a scratch across your face?”
“My hands are always bashed about, but a scratch—you mean this?”
“It was less than a day old when I saw you in Sussex Monday night.”
“What are you saying? Are you accusing—”
“I am merely asking—”
“—me of doing something—”
“—how you came—”
“—to my wife? To—”
“—to bear signs—”
“—my child?”
“—of violence.”
“How could you believe that I would harm either of them?”
“I did not say that I so believe. Damian, think: I do not know you. Circumstances have made us virtual strangers. Were you a stranger in fact, come to me saying that his wife and child had vanished yet he didn't want to go to the police, that is the first question that I should have to ask.”
“Did I kill my wife, you mean?”
“Did you?”
“You think I would have come to you—you, of all men—for help, if I had done that myself? For God's sake, man, I'm a painter, not an actor!”
“You are the child of two performers, a man and a woman practiced in easy deception and assumed faces. I put it to you again: Did you harm your wife?”
“No! No, no, no, for God's sake you have to believe me. I would not harm Yolanda, I would not touch a hair on Estelle's precious head, not if I was drunk or insane with drugs I would not. I would sooner—I'd sooner cut off the hand I paint with