Laurie King - The God of the Hive

Voices reached me, from a distance:

Damian, into my left ear: “I’m to stop him from going over. Father said. Mycroft needs him.”

Holmes, from somewhere behind me: “I’m coming, Russell!”

From farther away, Mycroft shouting: “Hang on to that man!”

And Goodman, saying without words, Please. Please .

My eyes filled with tears before I put my hands on Damian’s shoulders and peeled him away.

Two men vanished off the side of the bridge, with a single splash.

Holmes brushed me aside, gun in hand, to crane over into the river. Mycroft followed, cold with fury, incapable of speaking to me. Soon the bridge was swarming with uniformed constables who ran down the banks with torches, waiting for the bodies to surface on the outgoing tide.

I picked up the hat from the rail, noticing that it was missing its feather, and dropped it over the side. The pale straw was visible for an instant, then it passed out of the lamp-light and was gone.

At the far end of the bridge, where I headed to tell Billy that we would not need his skills, another object caught my eye: a small rubber ball that had rolled down the lip of the footway until it came to rest against some dry leaves. That, I put in my pocket.

The mortal remains of Peter James West were discovered a week later, among the debris at the side of the river near Tilbury. Of Robert Goodman, there was no trace.

The Green Man’s tale is one of mythic sacrifice. The figure personifies growth, the vegetation that springs up so joyously in the spring only to be brutally mowed down in the autumn. He is vitality personified, short-lived yet eternal, a cycle of life and apparent death.

When Peter James West disappeared over the bridge into the Thames, his passing left a vacuum in the Empire’s array of power, and any vacuum brings disorder to things around it.

Mycroft was there, inevitably, to breach the holes and restore order, although without West-for it had been he who went into the water-the extent of his machinations proved almost impossible to uncover. The Labour government was voted out a few weeks later following a piece of highly dubious political chicanery that bore all the hallmarks of West’s office. Holmes claimed that his brother did not blame me for the overthrow of a government, but I did not entirely believe him. In any case, it was a long time before I was to have an easy conversation with my brother-in-law.

When I told Estelle that her friend Mr Robert was gone, she threw herself upon me and wept, and I found that under the impetus of her tears, my own were loosed as well. She wept again when Damian told of her mother’s death, three days later on the train to Edinburgh.

In Edinburgh, we met the Holland steamer. The first passenger to disembark was a small, intense woman who stormed from the boat like a red-headed fury, both relieved at the safety of her former patient, and irate at her own failure to protect the man who, clearly, was more than a patient to her. From Edinburgh, we travelled to Wick, there to stay in a house hired outside of the town. I found it remarkably restful, to sit before the fire, helping Estelle with her lessons and reading an accumulation of old newspapers, drinking strong Scottish tea in the morning and strong Scots whisky in the evenings.

There we stayed until Lestrade left a message for us in the agony column, assuring us that Damian had been cleared of all suspicions. But by that time, Damian was in no hurry to be back in London. And the doctor was considering the benefits of packing up her locum practice for good and moving south.

Between one thing and another, Holmes and I did not return to Sussex until the third week of October, having been diverted by events along the way (none of which surprised me: Holmes has always been a remarkable magnet for problems). At long last, we settled back into our home, and had nearly a week’s peace before I drove to Eastbourne to pick up Damian and Estelle. They were spending a few days with us before leaving for Paris. Where, as Damian pointed out, a young woman of mixed heritage might be granted the freedom to be herself: Paris was not blind to skin colour and eye shape, but it found other attributes to be of greater concern.

Holmes and I both expected that before long, Dr Henning would join them there.

It was the last day of the month, All Hallow’s Eve, and as I helped load their luggage, the rain that had held out all day spat down around us. Estelle shrieked, Damian laughed, and we quickly bundled into the car to motor up onto the Downs.

“Is this a new motorcar, Mary?” Estelle asked.

“It is indeed. Do you like it?”

“It’s lovely. May I honk the horn?”

“When we reach the house, you may.”

“I can play jackstones now,” she told me.

“You can? That’s very clever of you.”

“She worked at it for hours,” Damian said. “She has the determination of a bulldog.”

At the house, the horn duly sounded, I bundled them all inside and finished the unloading myself. When all was inside and the motor secure, I went up and changed, coming down with damp hair and the exhilaration of storm in my blood.

Estelle was sitting in front of the fire, working her way through a demonstration of jackstones. Her small hand was remarkably efficient, her concentration, as her father had said, extraordinary. She was singing under her breath, her voice tiny but true, her own words set to the tune of “John Barleycorn” that Goodman had taught her.

She came to an end of the stones and jumped to her feet, her grey eyes shining.

“Uncle Mycroft sent me a present,” she declared. “Papa said I had to wait until we were here before I opened it.”

“Well, you’re here.”

She seized my hand and dragged me towards the kitchen.

Among the bags and valises we brought from the motorcar at the station were a pair of boxes which, on closer examination, were not actually from Mycroft, but which had been posted the previous week to his London address. One was a wooden cigar box addressed to me; the other was a wooden tea crate with Estelle’s name on it.

Damian had picked up one of Mrs Hudson’s knives, only to have it snatched from his hand with loud protests. While she was finding him a screw-driver, I picked open the twine on my own parcel and curiously looked at the contents: a lump of some hard black substance the size of a child’s fist, and another fire-stained object the size of my thumb. I picked up the heavy black stuff to examine it more closely, to be distracted by Estelle’s exclamations at her box.

Wood-shaving spilt onto the kitchen table when the top came free, revealing a small curve of some rich brown colour. Damian brushed it off before handing it to his daughter: a delicate wooden disc, some two inches wide, made of oak. Another lay in the shavings beneath it, and another, then: a tea-cup into which a man’s fingertip would barely fit.

I watched, slack-mouthed, as the child and her father unpacked an entire tea-set of hand-carved, exquisitely finished wooden plates and cups, sugar bowl and milk jug. The tea-pot itself was a perfectly round oak gall with a curved-twig handle and a hollowed-reed spout.

Mrs Hudson had started to brush together the spilt shaving when she noticed a foreign object among them. She placed it to one side and continued her brushing, but I looked at it, and my hand went out to pick it up.

A feather. Specifically, the primary flight-feather of a tawny owl.

I looked at Holmes. Our eyes were simultaneously drawn to the heavy, cold lump I still held in my other hand, and I convulsively let the object fall back into its box. I could not suppress a shudder of revulsion as I slapped down the lid and reached for the twine.