The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [5]
I watched Holmes make a circuit of the boxes, bending an ear to each one before moving on. How many times over the years had I seen him do that?
The first time was on the day we had met. Holmes and I first en-countered each other in the spring of 1915, when I was a raw, bitterly unhappy adolescent and he a frustrated, ageing detective with little aim in life. From this unlikely pairing had sprung an instant communication of kindred spirits. He brought me here that same day, making the rounds of his bees before settling me on the stone terrace and offering me a glass of honey wine. Offering, too, the precious gift of friendship.
Nine years later, I was a different person, and yet recent events in California had brought an uncomfortable resurgence of that prickly and uncertain younger self.
Time, I told myself: healing takes time.
When he returned to where I was standing, I took a breath and said, “Holmes, we don't have to remain in Sussex, if you would rather be elsewhere.”
He lifted his chin to study the colours beginning to paint the sky. “Where would I rather be?” he said, but to my relief, there was no sharpness in his question, no bitter edge.
“I don't know. But simply because you have chosen to live here for the past twenty years doesn't require that we stay.”
After a minute, I felt more than saw him nod.
Communication is such a complex mechanism, I reflected as we rounded the low terrace wall: A statement that, at another time or in a different intonation, would have set alight his smouldering ill temper had instead magically restored companionship. I was smiling as my feet sought out the steps—then I nearly toppled down them backwards after walking smack into Holmes.
He had stopped dead, staring at the figure that stood in the centre of our terrace, half-illuminated by the setting sun.
A tall, thin man in his thirties with a trimmed beard and long, unruly hair, dressed in worn corduroy trousers and a shapeless canvas jacket over a linen shirt and bright orange cravat: a Bohemian. I might have imagined a faint aroma of turpentine, but the colour beneath the fingernails playing along the gaudy silk defined him as a painter rather than one of Bohemia's poets, playwrights, or musicians. The ring on his finger, heavy worked gold, looked positively incongruous. I felt a spasm of fury, that whatever this stranger wanted of us couldn't have waited until morning. He didn't even look like a client-why on earth had Lulu let him in?
I stepped up beside Holmes and prepared to blast this importunate artist off our terrace and, with luck, out of our lives. But as I cast a rueful glance at the man by my side, the expression on his face made my words die unsaid: a sudden bloom of wonder mingled with apprehension—unlikely on any face, extraordinary on his. My head whipped back to the source of this emotion, looking for what Holmes had seen that I had not.
Unlike many tall men—and this one was a fraction taller even than Holmes—the young man did not slump, and although his hands betrayed a degree of uncertainty, the set of his head and the resolute manner with which he met Holmes' gaze made one aware of the fierce intelligence in those grey eyes, and a degree of humour. One might even—
The shock of recognition knocked me breathless. I looked quickly down at the familiar shape of those fingers, then peered more closely at his features. If one peeled away all that hair and erased five years, two stone, and the bruise and scratch along the left temple …
I knew him. Rather, I had met him, although I should not have recognised him without Holmes' reaction to guide me. Five years earlier, the face before us had possessed a delicate, almost