a country house gathering where cocaine flowed. Ah-but here was an appropriate interruption to the heavy silence: I read aloud the latest turn in the Leopold and Loeb sentence hearing, two young men who had murdered a boy to alleviate tedium, and to prove they could.
Holmes turned a page.
A few minutes later, I tried again. “Here's a letter to
He might have been deaf.
I shot a glance at the letter that so engrossed him, but did not recognise either the cream stock or the pinched, antique writing.
I set down the newspaper long enough to read first Mrs Hudson's letter, which I had to admit was more tantalising than informative, then Mycroft's brief missive, but when I reached their end, Holmes was still frowning at the lengthy epistle from his unknown correspondent. Kicking myself for failing to bring a sufficient number of books from New York, I resumed
“They are swarming,” Holmes said.
I looked up from the newsprint to stare first at him, then at the thick document in his hand.
“Who- Ah,” I said, struck by enlightenment, or at least, memory. “The bees.”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “You asked what it meant, that the hive had gone mad. It is swarming. The one beside the burial mound in the far field,” he added.
“That letter is from your beekeeper friend,” I suggested.
By way of response, he handed me the letter.
The cramped writing and the motion of the train combined with the arcane terminology to render the pages somewhat less illuminating than the personal adverts in the paper. Over the years I had become tolerably familiar with the language of keeping bees, and had even from time to time lent an extra pair of arms to some procedure or other, but this writer's interests, and expertise, were far beyond mine. And my nose was too stuffy to detect any odour of honey rising from the pages.
When I had reached its end, I asked, “How does swarming qualify as madness?”
“You read his letter,” he said.
“I read the words.”
“What did you not-”
“Holmes, just tell me.”
“The hive is casting swarms, repeatedly. Under normal circumstances, a hive's swarming indicates prosperity, a sign that it can well afford to lose half its population, but in this case, the hive is hemorrhaging bees. He has cleared the nearby ground, checked for parasites and pests, added a super, even shifted the hive a short distance. The part where he talks about ‘tinnitusque cie et Matris quate cymbala, circum’? He wanted to warn me that he's hung a couple of bells nearby, that being what Virgil recommends to induce swarms back into a hive.”
“Desperate measures.”
“He does sound a touch embarrassed. And I cannot picture him standing over the hive ‘clashing Our Lady's cymbals,’ which is Virgil's next prescription.”
“You've had swarms before.” When bees swarm-following a restless queen to freedom-it depletes the population of workers. As Holmes had said, this was no problem early in the season, since they left behind their honey and the next generation of pupae. However, I could see that doing so time and again would be another matter.
“The last swarm went due north, and ended up attempting to take over an active hive in the vicar's garden.”
That, I had to agree, was peculiar: Outright theft was pathological behaviour among bees.
“The combination is extraordinary. Perhaps the colony has some sort of parasite, driving them to madness?” he mused.
“What can you do?” I asked, although I still thought it odd that he should find the behaviour of his insects more engrossing than dead Druids or the evil acts of spoilt young men. Even the drugs problem should have caught his attention-that seemed to have increased since the previous summer, I reflected: How long before Holmes was pulled into that problem once again?
“I may have to kill them,” he declared, folding away the letter.
“Holmes, that seems a trifle extreme,” I protested, and only when he gave me a curious look did I recall that we were talking about bees, not Young Things or religious crackpots.
“You could be right,” he said, and went back to his reading.
I returned to
* The events of those months may be found in
2
an omen when, at the very height of her birth pangs, one
of the celestial celebrants plummeted to earth in a stripe of
flame that hit the pond with a crash and a billow of steam.
It was still hot, after hours in the water
Testimony, I:1
WE HAD LEFT OUR HOME ON THE SUSSEX COASTLAND one freezing, snow-clotted morning back in January, to return on a high summer afternoon when the green-gold countryside was as full and fragrant as a ripe peach in the palm of one's hand.
I was pleased that we had caught the Seaford train rather than the one to Eastbourne. This meant that, instead of motoring through an endless terrain of seaside villas and sunburnt holiday-makers, we quickly shook off the town to cross the meandering tidal reaches of the Cuckmere, then threw ourselves at the steep hill onto the Downs.
Sussex had always enchanted me, the mix of sea and pasture, open downland giving way to dark forest, the placid face of beach resorts cheek by jowl with the blood-drenched site of the Norman conquest. Daily, one encountered history protruding into modern life like boulders from the soil: Any foundation dug here was apt to encounter a Bronze Age tool or a Neolithic skeleton; ancient monuments dotted the hillsides, requiring ploughs and road-builders to move around them; place-names and phrases in the local dialect bore Medieval, Norse, Roman, Saxon roots. In this land, in the hearts of its people, the past was the present: It did not take much imagination to envision a local shepherd in winter-bearded and cloaked beneath his wide hat, leaning on a crook-as Woden, the one-eyed Norse god who disguised himself as a wanderer.
The motor that had coughed and struggled its way up the hill now seemed to sigh as it entered the tree-lined downgrade towards East Dean. Holmes shifted and reached for his cigarette case, and the abrupt motion, coming
