The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [9]
“But it wasn't grief?”
“No. She had sustained injuries, subtle, but definitive. When I found her, she was living on the fine edge of poverty, eking out a living as a voice coach. I was in no hurry to return to London, so I paused there for a time, helping her become more firmly established. I lent her sufficient funds to purchase a piano and a small studio, and amused myself doing odd jobs in the city, everything from research into some aspects of coal-tar to peeling carrots for a restaurant. During those months we became … friends.”
I hastened to interrupt. “And it would seem that the news of the mysterious death of Ronald Adair in London reached you at about the time she …” Threw you out? Tired of you? In any case, discovered herself with child.
“—told me she planned to return home to America,” he provided. “Alone. And as soon as I was back in London, the life of the metropolis closed over my head. Nine years passed. It seemed but the snap of a finger. Then I retired, and nine years turned into a chasm. Had she wished to communicate with me, she knew where I was. She had not. Thus, it seemed, the matter had been decided. One of the more foolish decisions of my life.”
He stared into his glass, but he must have been thinking of the nine-year-olds he had known, if nothing else among the street urchins he'd dubbed his Irregulars. Had he ventured an overture, he might have met the boy then, on the edge of adolescence. Had he sought her out—and he would certainly have found her—he might have had another life. A life that did not include bees or a hermit's retreat on the Sussex Downs. Or an encounter with an orphan named Russell.
“She was—going by Watson's story—a highly gifted woman,” I ventured.
“In both talent and brains. I was twenty-seven years old when the hereditary king of what Watson chose to call Bohemia came to me, demanding that I retrieve an incriminating photograph possessed by this vain and scheming prima donna from New Jersey. I saw myself a god among men. An easy case, I thought, a satisfying payment in both gold and glory: A dab of paint, a change of costume, a dash of human nature, toss in a smidgen of distraction and a childish smoke-bomb, and voilà—I would take back this adventuress's tool of blackmail.
“Except that she was not out for blackmail, merely self-preservation from her royal paramour. What is more, she was one step ahead of me all the way—including on my very doorstep, utilising my own tools of disguise. ‘Good evening, Mr. Holmes,’ she said to me.” He dropped his voice for her imitation of a man's speech, bringing an eerie trace of the woman into the room. “And even with the scent of her under my very nose, even as I put up my feet and crowed to Watson how clever I was, she was laying her own plans, carrying out her own solution.” He turned from the window, searching me out in the dim room. “You know she used me as a witness in her marriage ceremony to Godfrey Norton?”
“I remember.”
He laughed, a sound that contained amusement and rue in equal parts, and I saw his outline stir, heard the rustle of his clothing. Something small and shiny flew in my direction, and I snatched it from the air: a well-worn sovereign coin with a hole in it.
“She paid me for my witnessing with that,” he said. “I assumed at the time that she had failed to recognise me, but later found that she well knew who I was, and was amused, despite the urgency of her distress. I carry it always, to remind me of my limitations. Here—I even had her autograph it for me.”
He crossed the room and switched on the desk lamp. I held the coin under its beam, and there on the back side of it I saw the scratched initials IAN. Irene Adler Norton.
I rubbed at the smoothness of the coin, oddly pleased that