The Language of Bees

“Shall I keep you company?”

“I should be very glad to have you join me on my self-imposed penance to the gods of excess,” he pronounced, and went to trade his black City suit for something more appropriate to a stroll through the park.

In light-weight and light-grey suiting, whose gathered waist-band emphasised its elephantine wrinkles, he took up a straw hat and held the door for me.

Neither of us spoke much as we passed by the open windows along Pall Mall, but once we were among trees, he asked, “Have you learnt anything from the book you purloined?”

“It's left a very nasty taste in my mouth.”

“I see.”

“Anyone who capitalises that many English nouns should be shot.”

“The author's diction offends you?”

“The author's arrogance and assumptions offend me. His dedication to the idea that all happenstance is fate offends me. His imprecision offends me. His images are both pretentious and disturbing. The sense of underlying threat and purpose are…” I heard myself speaking in the erudite shorthand the Holmes brothers used, and I cut it short. “He scares me silly.”

“Tell me how,” Mycroft said, equally capable of brevity. I walked for a bit, ordering my thoughts, before I went on.

“The book concerns the spiritual development of a man-one assumes the writer, although it is in the third person-from a boy born under signs and portents, through his dark night of the soul, to his guided enlightenment. It has four sections with eight topics each-eight is a number significant in many traditions, although it could mean nothing, here-and a concluding section that acts as a coda. What begins as standard nuttiness darkens in the middle. The fourth section-Part the Fourth, he terms it-concerns his ‘Great Work,’ which appears to be a mix of alchemy and, well, human sacrifice. Only two of his thirty-two topic headings are repeated: ‘Sacrifice,’ which is divided into its submissive and its transformative aspects, and ‘Tool.’ I'm not certain, but thinking about it, I wonder if the Tool could be a knife forged from meteor metal.”

“A sacrificial knife,” he said.

One who did not know Mycroft Holmes would have heard the phrase as a simple intellectual conclusion: I could hear not only the distaste, but the pain underlying that: He, too, had Yolanda Adler before his eyes.

“He doesn't say it in so many words,” I told him. “And when he mentions primitives cutting out and eating the hearts of their enemies, it sounded as if he took that as metaphorical, not literal. Everything in Testimony is couched in these pseudo-mythic terms; the author is deliberately crafting a holy scripture.”

“Megalomaniacs I have known,” he mused. “I believe you are familiar with Aleister Crowley?”

“His name has come up a number of times in the past few days.”

“So I would imagine, if that text of yours is representative of this circle's interests.”

“Holmes thinks that Crowley 's manifesto is in large part artifice, stemming from and feeding into an overweening egotism. If Crowley is God-or Satan, which for him amounts to the same thing-then how can his followers deny him his wishes, whether those be sex, or money, or just admiration of his poetry? If his desires are unreasonable, that's because he's a god; if he's a god, then his desires are reasonable.”

“A convenient doctrine,” Mycroft agreed.

“However, I should say that the author of Testimony may actually believe in his rigmarole. If Crowley is dangerous because shocking and scandalous behaviour is a way of convincing the gullible of his divinity, then this man would be dangerous because he actually believes he is divine.”

“May I assume that your presence here indicates an uncertainty as to the author's identity?”

“There are bits of evidence scattered throughout the thing, but I'm not sure how dependable even those are-he seems very willing to adopt a flexible chronology, even when it goes against good sense. For example, he claims a small meteorite fell into a pond outside the house as he was being born, and that his mother personally supervised its retrieval, but he then says the thing didn't cool for hours. Of course, most religious texts find symbolic truth more important than literal, just as kairos-time-when things are ripe-is more real than chronos-time, which is a mere record of events.”

“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 had no father and was raised by women; as an adult he was badly injured, went into some sort of a coma, and came out with what he