Laurie King - The Language of Bees

“I need to know about the Black Mass.”

“Not here,” she said immediately. “If you want to talk about that, we need to be in the sunshine.”

I found myself smiling at her. “How would you feel about punting?”

Her wizened face lit up. “So long as I am not in charge of the pole, I should love it.”

So in the end, I did spend the day messing about in a boat. Her granddaughter and I trundled Professor Ledger around to St Hilda's in a Bath chair, chatting all the while about northern India. Once there, it was no effort at all to transfer her slight weight onto one of the college's boats, which had been draped with cushions and rugs to rival Cleopatra's barge. The granddaughter added food and drink sufficient to an Arctic expedition, a large umbrella, and a parcel of smelling salts and aspirins. I stepped onto the stern, rolled up my sleeves, and pushed away upstream, the granddaughter's voice still calling instructions from the bank.

A punt is twenty-four feet of low, blunt-ended boat propelled by dropping the end of a young tree into the river bottom, leaning on it with precision, then snapping the dripping pole up, hand over hand, until all sixteen feet of it are clear of the water. Several hundred of these repetitions go into a day's entertainment. It is a skill that, once learnt, comes back naturally, although after a long hiatus, disused muscles protest.

We dawdled around the cricket grounds, past the Sunday throng sunning themselves at the Botanic Gardens, dodging amateur boats-men and the seal-like heads of boys swimming in the high, mud coloured water. The sun-dappled contrast to last night's rainy preoccupation with a series-murderer made me feel as if I were emerging from an opium dream into fresh air. From time to time, my elderly companion would engage the occupants of other boats-once when she sweetly but inexorably exchanged our six bottles of picnic lemonade for one bottle of champagne belonging to a group of Balliol students (they had several more) and later absently to stuff that now-empty bottle into the throat of an adjoining row-boat's blaring gramophone-but for the most part, she talked. The subject matter caused nearby boats to linger for a moment, uncertain that they had overheard correctly, then hastily paddle or shove away when they had confirmed that yes, that extraordinary old lady had in fact just said such a thing.

“The Black Mass is, essentially, magic,” she began. “One might, of course, make the same accusation of the Church's own ritual Mass, depending on how seriously one interprets the idea of Transubstantiation and the transformation of the communicants who partake of Christ's body.” A pimpled boy at the oars ten feet away dropped his jaw at this statement, staring at Professor Ledger until the shouts of his passengers drew his attention to the upcoming collision. She went blithely on.

“No doubt, a high percentage of communicants over the centuries have taken the symbol as actual, and indeed, the Church itself encourages the belief that the Host is literally transformed from wheat flour into the body of Christ, and that when we take of His flesh, we are ourselves transformed into His flesh. Cannibals the world around would instantly agree, that eating a person imbues one with his essence. Speaking of which, did my granddaughter pack along those little meat pies I asked her for? Ah yes, there they are. Would you like one?”

I permitted the punt pole to drift behind us in the water, steering but not propelling, while I accepted one of the professor's diminutive game pies. I took a bite.

“Grouse?” I asked.

“One of my grandsons takes a house in Scotland for the Twelfth every year,” she said.

“Very nice.” Also very small. I took the glass I had propped among the boards at my feet, washed the pie down with champagne, and resumed the pole.

Professor Ledger jammed a clean handkerchief into the neck of the bottle and tied a piece of string around it, then dropped it over the side to keep it cool but unsullied in the river water-a very practiced move, indeed. She then held up a morsel of the pie in her gnarled fingers, eyeing it with scientific detachment. “One must wonder, if one partakes of the essence of grouse, how does it manifest? Does one explode into violent flight, or begin to make odd noises, or start to reproduce spectacularly?” This time a courting couple on the bank overheard her; as we drifted past, they craned after us so far, I expected to hear two large splashes.

“In any event, if one insists on a magical element to religion, one cannot then be surprised when magic is taken seriously. The Black Mass developed originally from the Feast of Fools, when idiots ruled the day and strong drink and carnality flowed unchecked. Harmless parody helps relieve pressure, and by keeping it under the auspices of the Church, one might say that licentiousness was kept licensed.

“However, with a work of magic at its core, the Mass was vulnerable to the most crass of interpretations: that the Host itself was where the power lay. If it all comes down to the Host, then equally it all flows back from that same place, so that, by using that scrap of unleavened bread as the point of the wedge, the authority of the Mass, and of the Church, and of God himself, could be turned on its head.

“The Black Mass was originally intended to profane the Host so as to turn its power to profane uses. From that beginning, the Black Mass grew like lichen on a rock, until one finds, say, the mass performed by Étienne Guibourg in the Seventeenth Century, in which the mistress of Louis Quatorze was stretched out on the altar with the chalice between her bare breasts”-a bespectacled undergraduate walking the path along Christchurch meadow dropped his book of poetry, bent to pick it up while looking over his shoulder at us, and fell on his face-“while the priest chanted his Latin to the devil.

“Sexuality, of course, is the central element in many of these Black celebrations, doubtless because the Church has aligned itself so definitively against free sexual expression. You've read the Marquis de Sade?”

“Er,” I replied. I felt a bit like the bespectacled undergraduate.

“Well, then you'll remember how often his corrupt sexuality contains reference to elements of the Church-the Host, the Mass, monks, priests.”

“What about blood?” I asked, a bit desperately.

Professor Ledger's bright eyes came to rest on my face. “My dear, why don't you tell me what you're after? Is this academic? Or one of your little investigations?”

I took the boat to the side opposite the footpath and worked the pole into the muck below, trapping us against the tree-lined bank. Once secure, I stepped over to the centre and settled onto cushions, retrieving the champagne and topping up our glasses.

“It's a case,” I answered, and told her about it, my voice just loud enough for her aged ears. I did not tell her all: not Holmes' personal stake in it, nor the identity of the dead woman found ten miles from my home. I think she guessed that I was leaving out a large part of it, but she did not comment.

“So,” I concluded some quarter hour later, “when there were objects that resemble quill trimmings at the murder sites, stained by what appears to be dried blood, and bits of black candle-wax as well, we had to wonder.”

“Necromancy,” she pronounced, her old voice quivering with distaste. “From nekros and manteid: ‘dead divination.’ Blood spells and invocations. Sealing a covenant. The darkest of the dark arts. And to use fresh blood, in situ…” She shook her head. “You must stop this person, Mary.”

I forbore to make reference to her deprecating “little investigations” comment, but dug the rucksack I had brought from London out from under half a dozen rugs, and handed her the Adlers' copy of Testimony . “It might help, if you were to look at this and tell me what you see.”