Laurie King - The Language of Bees

He found her in the Père Lachaise cemetery, a victim of the terrible influenza that followed on the Great War's heels.

M Cantelet's investigator was immediately dispatched to Ste Chapelle, but Damian was gone. Cantelet and others searched all of France, but the trail was cold: No gallery, no artist, no member of the Bohemian underworld had heard news of Damian Adler since January. Even Mycroft failed to locate his nephew.

Holmes' lovely, lost son vanished as abruptly as he had appeared.

Until one summer evening in August 1924, when he stood in the middle of our stone terrace and said hello to his father.

MY HAND WAS STILL BRACED ON Holmes' ARM, where I had steadied myself after walking into him, and I felt the shudder of effort run through him: Being controlled is nowhere near the same as being unfeeling.

But he could not control his voice, not entirely; when he spoke he was hoarse as a man roused from a long sleep. “God, boy. I thought you were dead.”

“Yes,” Damian said simply. “I'm sorry.”

Holmes started towards him, his hand coming out; instead of taking it, Damian stepped forward and embraced him. After the briefest hesitation, Holmes returned the greeting, with a fervour that would have astonished all but a very few of his intimates. Indeed, one might have thought Holmes had instigated the gesture, with Damian its more reluctant participant.

I moved towards the house, so as to leave them to their greetings, but the two men broke apart and Damian turned in my direction.

“And, Step-Mama,” he said, coming forward to plant a very French kiss on my cheek.

“Call me Mary,” I said firmly.

“I've come from London,” he said to his father, by way of explanation. “Uncle Mycroft caught me up on your news. When he told me you were en route from New York, I decided to come down last night and wait for you-he sent along a note to your helpful young housekeeper, so she wouldn't set the dogs on me.”

I'd heard precisely five words out of him at our first meeting, but I found now that his accent was as charming as the easy flow of his words-there was French at its base, overlaid with American English and something more clipped: Chinese? His clothing was a similar mélange, the canvas jacket homespun and local whereas the shirt had travelled a long, hard way from its beginnings. His shoes were, I thought, Italian, although not bespoke.

The dogs were a figure of speech-Mycroft knew we had no dogs. The housekeeper, however, was not, and I thought the reason Damian mentioned her was that he had noticed her standing in the door to the house: Lulu had her strengths, but silence and discretion were not among them, and it would not take a long acquaintance with her to realise that it was best to watch one's tongue when she was near.

“Pardon the interruption,” she said, “but I've fixed supper. Would you like to eat, or shall I put it into the ice-box?”

I spoke up, overriding Holmes' wave of dismissal. “Hello, Lulu, how are you? Dinner would be greatly appreciated, thank you. Shall we come now?”

“If you like,” she said gratefully. And as the table had been laid and the food already in its serving bowls, it would clearly have been a vexation had we said, No, thank you.

Mrs Hudson would have marked our homecoming with Windsor soup, a roast, potatoes, gravy, three vegetables, and a heavy pudding; she would have been red of face, and waves of heat would have pulsed from the kitchen doorway. Lulu, on the other hand, began with an interesting cold Spanish soup of finely chopped tomatoes and cucumber, then set down paper-thin slices of cold roast beef dressed with mustard and horseradish, a bowl of Cos leaves tossed with a light vinaigrette, and a platter of beetroot slices drizzled with pureed herbs-Lulu's aunt ran the nearby Monk's Tun inn, and the aunt's teaching was why I, for one, was willing to put up with Lulu's tendency to gab.

The two men ate what was before them, although I doubt either could have described it later. I, however, took second helpings of most, winning a beatific look as Lulu passed through with another platter.

In the presence of food and servants, conversation went from the summer's weather to Mycroft's health and then London 's art world. Of Mycroft, Damian knew little, apart from finding his uncle looking well, but it seemed that he had been in the city long enough to converse knowledgeably about the last.

As he sat at our table and held up his end of the small-talk, I began to sense that somewhere beneath his deliberate ease and charm lurked the edginess we had seen before. On reflection, this would hardly be surprising: Their first meeting had ended on a note of pure animosity, and if neither of them was about to bring it up, nor were they about to forget it.

I decided that what Damian was doing with his friendly shallow chatter was to illustrate that he had grown up, to show Holmes that the natural resentment of a boy whose father had failed him had been replaced by a man's mature willingness to forgive, and to start again. That it was being done deliberately did not necessarily mean it was insincere.

Thirty-five minutes of surface conversation was as much as Holmes could bear. When my fork had transferred the last morsel of salad to my tongue, he waited until he saw me swallow, then stood.

“We'll take our coffee on the terrace, Miss Whiteneck, then you may go home.”

“And thank you for that fine supper, Lulu,” I added.

“Er, quite.” Holmes caught up three glasses and a decanter on his way out of the door.

I followed with a pair of silver candelabras that I set on the stones between the chairs; the air was so still, their flames scarcely moved. The summer odours of lavender and jasmine combined with the musk of honey from the candles and after a minute, with the sharp tang of coffee. Lulu set the tray on the table, then retreated to the kitchen to do the washing-up. By unspoken agreement, while she remained within earshot, we sat and drank and listened to the rumour of waves against the distant cliffs.

I watched our visitor out of the corner of my eye, as, I am sure, did Holmes. The years had brought substance to the man, while the beard, and the candle-light, transformed his fragile beauty into something sharp, almost dangerous. More than mere weight, however, he had gained assurance: Bohemian or no, this was a man that eyes would follow, both women's and men's.

Lucifer, I'd thought him earlier, and I sat now with my coffee and mused over the idea. Originally, Lucifer was the name of Venus at dawn (Vesper being the planet at dusk). The prophet Isaiah had used the morning star's transient brilliance as a metaphor for a magnificent and oppressive Babylonian king who, once the true sun rose across the land, would fade to insignificance. Jewish and Christian thought elaborated on Isaiah's passage, building up an entire mythology around the person of Lucifer, fallen prince of angels, beloved of God, brought low by pride. Lucifer is, one might say, a failed Christ: Where Jesus of Nazareth bowed willingly to Pilate's condemnation, accepting crucifixion as the will of God, Lucifer refused to submit: Subjecting himself to his inferiors, he declared, would be to deny the greatness of the God who made, loved, and chose him.

The story of Lucifer was, I reflected, a window on fathers and sons that Sigmund Freud might spend some time investigating.

The kitchen clatter had ceased. We now heard the sound of the front door opening, and closing; in response, Damian stood up and shrugged his coat onto the back of the chair, dropping his cravat over it and turning up his sleeves as he sat again. His left forearm bore a dragon tattoo, sinuous and in full colour. He hadn't had that when we had seen him before, I thought. He also hadn't had the muscle that rippled beneath it.