The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [96]
“Perhaps you might assemble a list of those items with evidentiary potential, so we could reflect on those?”
“Er …”
“You have done so? Very well, proceed.” He clasped his hands behind his back, the cane dangling behind him like an elephant's tail, and listened.
“He draws from the Old and New Testaments, Gnosticism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, alchemy, and a variety of mythologies, with an especial interest in the Norse. I'd say he's read a number of works on mysticism, from Jung's psychological theories to William James's Gifford Lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience. The sorts of books I saw in Damian's house. The author claims, as I said, that he was born during a meteor shower, but there was also a comet in the sky—which could be actual fact, or a sacrifice of accuracy in favour of mythic significance. And come to think of it,” I mused, “that design they use, which I took for a spot-light, could be a stylised comet.
“He has travelled—he mentions France and Italy, the Far East, and the Pacific. He honours and, I think, finds inspiration in the mixed heritage of Britain. In two or three places, he employs artistic metaphors. And, I, well…” I exhaled. “There are eight drawings by Damian in the book.”
We navigated the crossing of Piccadilly and Park Lane and were well into Hyde Park before Mycroft spoke. What sounded like a tangent went in fact directly to the heart of what I had been telling him.
“My brother permits few people inside his guard. Four people in his first sixty-three years, I should say: myself, Dr Watson, Irene Adler, and you. For those inside his affections, Sherlock's loyalty is absolute. In another man, one might call it blind. Any one of us four could commit cold-blooded murder, in Trafalgar Square, in broad daylight, and he would devote every iota of his energy and wit to proving the act justified.”
“And now there are five.”
“I have not seen my brother and my nephew together, but I should not be surprised to find Damian added to the fold.”
We paced in silence for a time, until I responded with an apparent tangent of my own.
“Has Holmes told you what happened in San Francisco this past spring?”
“He mentioned that you had received unexpected and disconcerting information concerning your past.”
“I doubt he couched it that mildly. I discovered that pretty much everything I thought I knew about my childhood was wrong. That after my family died, I shut my life behind a door and forgot it. Literally. ‘Disconcerting’ isn't the word—I felt as if the ground beneath me had turned to quick-sand. It has left me doubting my own judgment. Doubting whether or not to trust anyone else.”
“Including Sherlock.”
“Him I trust, if anyone. And yet, I can't help thinking that Damian's mother deftly outflanked him. Twice.”
“Yes, although when Sherlock met her, he assumed her to be a villain, when in fact she was not. That is quite a different thing from falling for the schemes of a villain one believes innocent.”
“You think he could not be deceived by Damian?”
Another lengthy silence, then he sighed. “You think Damian wrote this book?”
“Do you know his birthday?”
“The ninth of September, 1894.”
The Perseid meteors would have been finished; I should have to find if there were any comets that year. “What about his mother? Did she die on a full moon?”
“She died in June 1912, but I do not know the precise day. This is in the book?”
“To answer your question, I hope Damian had nothing to do with Testimony beyond the drawings. But if I can't trust my instincts, I have to use my head. And my head tells me that there are points I cannot ignore.”
“Perhaps you had better list them.”
“The moon, to begin with: It's in nearly all his paintings, two men near him died around the full moon, and now his wife. The house where he was born had a pond—I've seen a drawing. The author of Testimony