Laurie King - The Language of Bees

The later frames were less perfect, and darker as the nectar changed colour with summer's ripening. In the frames to which the queen had been limited by the excluder frame, I could trace her progress: growing brood, ready for hatching; smaller pupae, still subsisting on their pollen store; then mere eggs, laid, supplied with food, and sealed into their wax wombs. After that, nothing.

I counted no fewer than twenty-one empty queen cells drooping around the bottom levels of the hive, their larger dimensions pushing the neat hexagons out of alignment. This seemed to me a rather high number, for each queen cell represented either a potential swarm, or a deadly battle between the reigning queen and the virgin upstart. Generally speaking, the queen ripped any royal larvae from their cells and murdered them. Holmes, or Mr Miranker, might be able to tell whether the infinitesimal marks in the wax of these cells had been made from without or within the cell, but I couldn't.

These frames, I put aside for Holmes.

Extracting the honey took me most of the day, and left me sweat-soaked and incredibly sticky, all my muscles burning, my skin, nostrils, and mouth permeated with the cloy of honey. All the while, bees plucked their way up and down the screens Holmes had installed on the shed's windows, teased by the aroma of riches ripe for plunder.

I finished about four o'clock: jars capped, machinery clean, frames set aside for the next use. There was one partial jar. I picked it up, stuck one grubby finger into the amber contents, and put the resulting glossy burden into my mouth.

The honey from mad bees tastes much like that of others.

I left the jar on the kitchen table and went upstairs to put on my bathing costume. I got out the bicycle, checked that the tyres were still inflated, and pedalled down the lane to the shore, where I found-as I'd hoped-that the day's holiday-makers were beginning to leave, trudging up the cliff-side steps as I went down. I crunched along the shingle towards the abandoned reaches, the round flints making a noise like a mouthful of wet marbles. Through some odd quirk of memory, the sound always called to mind my long-dead brother.

I laid my outer garments and spectacles on my folded bath-towel, then picked my way through the exposed low-tide pools to the water beyond. I paused, as I invariably did, to peer short-sightedly around me at the surface of the water. Years before I knew him, Holmes had encountered a poisonous jelly-fish in these waters, strayed here after unusual weather. Ever since he'd told me the story, I had been in the habit of watching out for another one-as if the creature might reveal itself by a fin above the water. Perhaps I should ask Dr Watson to write one of his tales about the event, I thought: It might reduce the crowds on this particular beach, if not the whole of Sussex.

Today I saw no tell-tale fin or translucent bubble, and I dived deep into the frigid water.

I swam along the cliffs until my skin was rubbery with cold and my fingers puckered, dragging myself out onto a beach all but deserted of umbrellas and children. I amused myself for a time by tossing pebbles into an abandoned tin mug from ever-greater distances, then dressed and climbed the cliff to wobble my bicycle back to the silent house. There I drew a hot bath and stepped into the water with a glass of wine to hand-after all, alcohol aids muscular relaxation. I may have fallen asleep for a few minutes, because the water seemed to cool abruptly. I got out and put on a thick towelling robe, then hurried downstairs to fill the ravenous gap within.

I was pleased to find a portion of meat pie in the back of the icebox, stale but still smelling good, and ripe tomatoes from the garden outside the door, into which I chopped some onions and cheese. A bottle of cider from the pantry, a slice of stale bread and fresh butter, and I was content in my small and no doubt temporary island of tranquillity. I ate at the scrubbed wood table in the kitchen, and left my dishes in the sink until morning.

Not bored, not lonely: content.

Although I will admit that several times during the day, I had pushed back the suspicion that my labour was an attempt to exorcise the spirit of the empty hive, to turn its unnatural emptiness into a more normal thing. And that several times during the day, I had found myself wondering where Holmes was.

I decided to read outside until the light failed, and went to fetch Strachey's Victorians from the table beside my bed upstairs. As I went past the library, my eye caught on Damian's painting of the bee teapot, which Holmes had left leaning against the low shelves near the door (being, no doubt, unwilling to chance waking me by returning it to the laboratory-and, where was Holmes, anyway?). I picked it up to take it upstairs.

Such a peculiar image, I reflected when the painting was back on its wall in the laboratory: The scrupulous rendering of an impossibly bizarre creation. On the surface, it appeared an intellectual jest, yet there was no denying the disturbing currents down below. An English tea-pot with a nasty sting. Was this the only one of its sort that he had done? Or was this his general style?

Odd, that Holmes had been satisfied with just the one piece.

No, not odd: impossible.

Finding Holmes' collection of Damian's art was easy, once I thought to look for it-although in a Purloined Letter sort of way that took me the better part of an hour, since it was right under my nose. I went through both safes, the shelves in Holmes' study, his records in the laboratory. I was on my knees, about to take out the drawers in his bedroom chest, when I thought about where I had found the painting: He had left it against a shelf that contained art-related titles, from monographs such as “Lead Poisoning in the Age of Rembrandt” and “Death-Masks of the Pharaohs” to The Great Italian Forgers and Sotheby's Guide to the Renaissance.

Sure enough, on the far side of that bottom shelf, all but invisible behind Paintings of the Spanish Inquisition, stood a slim, over-sized book with a brown leather cover. On its front cover was the name Damian Adler. I laid it on the desk under the strong light, and opened it.

It was less a book than a bound album containing small original drawings and photographic reproductions of larger pieces, perhaps fifty pages covering a period of nine years. The first piece was a startlingly life-like pen-and-ink portrait of a woman, hair upswept, chin haughty, eyes sparkling with laughter. There was love, too, in those eyes-love for the artist-but it might explain why Holmes had never shown me this album.

The woman was Irene Adler.

The date in the corner was 1910. Damian had been sixteen years old. She died two years later.

There followed a series of small sketches of French streets: a market, the Seine as it went through Paris, an old man snoozing on a park bench. Three of the five were dated, all of them before Irene Adler's death.

Then came the shock: With one turn of the page the viewer stepped from an empty street with interesting shadows to a front-line trench under fire. The trench walls loomed high and threatening, as if the pit were about to swallow the figures within; the moon high in the heavens seemed to taunt. At the centre, a man cowered, wrapping his body around his rifle like a terrified child embracing a doll; the man beside him gripped the brim of his helmet with both hands, as if trying to pull it down over himself; to the right of the drawing stood a young man, head thrown back and arms outstretched in a stance that could have been sexual passion or the agony of crucifixion. The paper the scene had been drawn on was grimy with dried mud and held together by gummed tape.

There were seven war-time drawings in all. Although none were dated, their order was easy to determine, because the style grew increasingly precise as time passed. The last one, a close study of the upper half of a naked skull emerging from the mud, possessed the finely shaded detail of a photograph.