Laurie King - The Language of Bees

But in the end, our preparations came to naught. The next morning early there came a message from M Cantelet to say he was coming down, and requested us to meet his train. Holmes grumbled at the delay, but we were there when the train pulled in.

I had thought the avocat effervescent the day before, but it was nothing to the bounce in his step and the rush of his words today.

His private investigator had broken the case. In conversation with M Faux's lady friend late the night before, it had transpired that the man had in fact been elsewhere on the night in question. Filot could not have seen Damian Adler commit murder, because he was twenty miles away, roaring drunk, and did not arrive back in Ste Chapelle until the following afternoon.

This, of course, did not prove that Damian had not killed the drugs seller, but it did reduce the prosecutor's foundations to sand. M Cantelet anticipated a successful argument, and I think was mildly disappointed when we arrived at the gaol and found Damian Adler already free. He stood outside of the gaol with the scowling gendarme and a stumpy, round-cheeked woman of about forty, who was wearing a dress and hat far too à la mode for a village like this.

Damian's eyes would not meet ours. They wove their way along the doorway, up the vine shrouding the front of the house, along the street outside, while his fingers picked restlessly at his clothing. In the bright light, the bald tracing of scars could be seen beneath his short-cropped hair, and it suddenly came to me that this was not merely a drug-addled derelict, nor some nightmare version of Holmes, but a soldier who had given his health and his spirit in the service of France. He was lost, as so many of his-my-generation were. It was our responsibility to help him find himself again.

The woman watched us approach, and as M Cantelet launched into speech with the gendarme , she touched Damian's arm and spoke briefly in his ear before stepping forward to intercept Holmes.

“Pardon me,” she said in accented English, raising her voice against that of the avocat . “You are, I think, Damian's father?”

“The name is Holmes,” my companion replied. “This is my… assistant, Mary Russell.”

“I am Hélène Longchamps,” she said. “An old friend of Damian's. I own a gallery in Paris. Come, you will buy me a coffee and we will talk. Damian, you sit here, we will have the boy bring you a croissant.”

Mme Longchamps, it transpired, had known Damian Adler since before the War. She had sold a score of his paintings, for increasing amounts of money, and what was more, she had cared for him: bullied him into painting, fed him when he was hungry, gave him a bed and a studio in her country house. And threw him out whenever he showed signs of drug use.

“You understand,” she told Holmes, “he changed after the War. Oh, we all changed, of course, but I am told that a head injury such as his often has profound effects on a person's mind. From what I could see, more than the injury, it was the drugs. They take hold of a man's mind as well as his body-certainly they did so with Damian. And now it takes only a moment's weakness, a brief coup de tête or a dose of un-happiness or ennui or simply a party with the wrong people, and it swallows him anew. And when that happens I become hard. I refuse him help. I say, ‘You must go to your friends, if that is how you wish to live,’ and I withhold any monies from his sales, and I wait. We have done this three times in the thirteen months since he came out of hospital and became a civilian. And three times he has returned to my door, laboriously cleaned himself of drugs, and begun to paint again.”

“Why do you do this?” I had to agree with the suspicion in Holmes' voice: A well-dressed, older woman with a talented and beautiful young addict was not a comfortable picture.

But she laughed. “I am not after a pretty bed-warmer, sir. I knew his mother, before she died, and I knew Damian from when he was five or six years. I am the closest he has to an elder sister.”

“I see. Well, madame, I thank you warmly for assisting the boy. I should like-”

She cut him off. “If you want to help the boy, you will leave him here.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“M 'Olmes, I imagine you will propose to take Damian back to l'Angleterre, n'est çe pas?”

“I should think it would not be altogether a bad idea to remove him from the source of his temptations,” Holmes said stiffly.

“But yes, it would be a bad idea, the worst of ideas. The boy must find his own way. I know him. You do not. You must believe me when I tell you that attempting to shape a future for him will guarantee failure. You will kill him.”

She leant forward over the tiny table, quivering with the intensity of her belief. The effect was that of a small tabby facing down a greyhound, and it might have been laughable but for those last four words.

Holmes studied her. Even the avocat across the way fell silent, turning to see what both the gendarme and Damian were watching so intently.

Mme Longchamps sat, as implacable as any mother.

Holmes looked over at his son, and then he nodded. Mme Longchamps closed her eyes for a moment, then looked at me and gave me an almost shy smile in which relief was foremost.

Holmes walked back across the road to where his son sat. “Mme Longchamps suggests that I return to England and let you get on with it. Is this what you wish?”

Damian did not actually answer, not in words, but the look he gave the woman-grateful, apologetic, and determined-was a speech in itself. Holmes reached into his breast pocket and sorted out a card.

“When you feel like getting into contact, that is where to reach me,” he said. “If I happen to be away, the address on the reverse is that of your uncle. He will always know where I am.”

Damian put the card into his coat pocket without looking at it; something about the gesture said that he might as easily have dropped it on the ground. Holmes put out his hand, and said, with an attempt at warmth, “I am… gratified to have made your acquaintance. The revelations of this past week have been among the most extraordinary in an already full life. I look forward to renewing our conversation.”

Damian stood and walked over to Mme Longchamps. Holmes' face was expressionless as his hand slowly fell, but Mme Longchamps would not have it. She put her hands on the boy's shoulders and forced him around.

“Say au revoir to your father,” she ordered.

He looked at Holmes with an expression of hopelessness and regret, a look such as a ship-wrecked man might wear when, seeing that help would not arrive, he chose to let go of his spar. I was only nineteen and was well supplied with problems of my own, but that look on his face twisted my heart. “Adieu,” Damian said.

“I am very sorry,” Holmes told him. “That your mother never told me of your existence.”

Damian lifted his head and for the first time, the grey eyes came to life, haughty and furious as a bird of prey. “You should have known.”

“Yes,” answered Holmes. “I should have known.”

He waited. For weeks. I went back to my studies, but whenever I came down from Oxford, I saw how closely Holmes watched the post, how any knock at the door brought his head sharply around.

In the end, it was Mme Longchamps who wrote, in early December, to say that she was desolated to tell him, but Damian had gone back to his ways, and that no-one had seen him for some weeks. She assured Holmes that Damian would find her waiting when he grew fatigued of the drugs, and that she would then urge him to write to his father.

It was the only letter Holmes had, from either of them. In March, when she had not replied to two letters, he began to make enquiries as to her whereabouts.