The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [6]
The amusement grew on his features, until it began to look almost like triumph. The lips parted, and when he spoke, the timbre in his voice reminded one that his mother had been a famous contralto.
“Hello, Father,” he said.
First Birth (3): The boy's mother breathed her last
when the full moon lay open in the sky, a round and
luminous door to eternity.
Testimony, I:1
I MET DAMIAN ADLER ON THE SAME DAY HIS FATHER did, in August 1919. Damian was twenty-four then, I was nineteen, and Holmes at fifty-eight had only discovered a few days before that he was a father. It was not a happy meeting. At the time, none of us were happy people. None of us were whole people.
Apart from it bringing peace to the world at last, 1919 was not a year one would like to repeat. Its opening had found us in ignominious flight from an unknown and diabolically cunning enemy—we told ourselves we were merely regrouping, but we knew it was a rout. Mycroft, who held some unnamed and powerful position in the shadier recesses of His Majesty's Government, had offered us a choice of retreats in which to catch our breath. For reasons I did not understand, Holmes gave the choice over to me. I chose Palestine. Within the month, he was taken prisoner and tortured to the very edge of breaking. On our return to England, Holmes' body was whole, but his spirit, and our bond, had been badly trampled.
When I looked at him that spring, all I could see was that my choice had put that haunted look into his eyes.
Then at the end of May, we finally met our enemy, and prevailed, but at the cost of a bullet through my shoulder and the blood of a woman I had loved on my hands.
When Holmes looked at me that summer, all he could see was that his past had put that drawn look of pain and sleepless nights on my face.
Thus, that August of 1919 found the two of us wounded, burdened by guilt, short-tempered, and—despite living under the same roof while my arm recovered—scarcely able to meet each other's eyes or bear the other's company. Certainly, we both knew that the intricate relationship we had constructed before our January flight from England lay in pieces at our feet; neither of us seemed to know how to build another.
Into this tense and volatile situation fell the revelation that Holmes had a son.
Mycroft had known, of course. Holmes might keep his finger on the pulse of every crime in London, but his brother's touch went far beyond England's shores. Mycroft had known for years, but he had let slip not a hint, until the day the young man was arrested for murder.
Two unrelated letters reached us towards the end of July 1919. The first was for Holmes; I did not see it arrive. The second followed a few days later, addressed to me, written by a child we had rescued the previous year. The simple affection and praise in her laboriously shaped words reduced me, at long last, to the catharsis of tears.
A door that had been tight shut opened, just a crack; Holmes did not hesitate.
“I need to go to France and Italy for six weeks,” he told me. Then, before I could slam the door shut again, he added, “Would you care to come with me?”
Air seemed to reach my lungs for the first time in weeks. I looked at him, and saw that, in spite of everything, in Holmes' mind our partnership remained.
Later that evening, sitting on the terrace while the darkness fell, I had asked him when we were to leave.
“First thing in the morning,” he replied.
“What?” I stood up, as if to go pack instantaneously, then winced and sat down again, rubbing my shoulder beneath its sling. “Why the rush?”
“Mycroft always needs things done yesterday,” he said. Far too casually.
“This is another job for Mycroft?”
“More or less.”
By this time, my antennae were quivering. An off-hand attitude invariably meant that Holmes was concealing something of which I would disapprove. However, as I watched him reach for the coffee pot to refill a near-full cup, it seemed to me his discomfort had a deeper