The Language of Bees (12 page)

“Chicago, for the most part.”

“Do you think these bed-clothes have been laundered in the last month?”

“I should doubt it.”

“Perhaps I’ll sleep on top of them.”

“The night is warm.”

“And use my clothes as a pillow.”

“Head lice can indeed be a nuisance.”

“You sure you don’t want a small night-cap, to help you sleep?”

“Damian, I—”

“Yes, yes, you’re right. Clear-headed.”

“Shall I get the lights?”

“No! Leave them. For a bit. If you don’t mind.”

“As you wish.”

“So. Did you go to New Jersey? When you were in America?”

“I passed through on my way from New York, that is all.”

“I went there once. With Mother. When I was nine.”

“Which would have been 1903?”

“That’s right. Why?”

“1903 was the year I left London for Sussex.”

“And took up beekeeping.”

“Yes.”

“Did you truly not know?”

“About you?”

“About me, about her, about…”

“Your mother was a remarkably clever woman. Too clever, I fear, for the men in her life. What she told me, I believed.”

“Wanted to believe.”

“I did not
wish
to be sent away. I… was very fond of your mother. She was an extraordinary woman.”

“She was lonely. A son can only do so much.”

“I fear she may have been too clever for her own good, as well.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Not so easy, no.”

“In any case, good night.”

“I shall turn off the—”

“Leave
it! One of them, if you don’t mind. The small one.”

“As you like. Good night, Damian.”

Wrestling with Angels (1):
The boy born of the Elements
went up to the high mountains, and there
he stood before the waiting Angels and said
,
“Take me, I am yours, do with me as you will.”
Testimony, I:5

I
WOKE WHEN THE TERRACE GREW LIGHT, GROANING with the aches brought by alcohol compounded by hard stones. Was it Hippocrates who declared that moonlight affected the moistures of the brain, and drove a person mad? Certainly, it did one’s body no good.

I staggered to the kitchen to make strong coffee. At seven o’clock I picked up the telephone and asked to be connected with the Monk’s Tun inn.

“Hello, is that Johanna? Oh, Rebecca, good morning, this is Mary Russell. Could you— What’s that? Oh, thank you, it’s good to be back. Could I ask you to take a message to Lulu? Tell her she needn’t come out today—in fact, not to come out until she hears from me. Oh no, everything is fine, I’d just prefer she not come out for a few days. That’s right, Mrs Hudson is due back Saturday, and I’m sure she’ll
want Lulu’s help then. Thanks. Oh, and give my greetings to your aunt.”

I spent the morning settling into the quiet, amiable house, and finished up the accumulated correspondence. Feeling virtuous, I dropped the letters on the table near the front door and went to don clothing similar to what I had worn the previous afternoon, digging out a small rucksack from the lumber room and tossing into it another impromptu picnic, a few tools, some paper, and a pencil.

If Holmes was off dealing with one mystery, there was no reason I couldn’t turn my mind to the one left behind.

The empty hive was on a lonely southerly slope in the lee of a stone wall, as remote as any spot on the Downs. On the other side of the wall was the ancient burial mound; in the distance was a branch of the South Downs Way, one of the prehistoric foot-highways that weave across England and Wales. Towards the sea, figures moved along a rise in the ground: striking, how human beings tend to cluster together rather than spread themselves over stretches of emptiness such as this.

As I quenched my thirst with the bottle of water I had brought, I studied the empty hive. It was typical of those Holmes used, with three stacked segments, the two larger making up the hive body, and a shallower segment on top called the super. All three segments contained sliding frames on which the bees made their comb; when these were full, other supers would be added on top, to satisfy the bees’ desire to build upwards. Somewhere between the segments there would be a queen excluder, to segregate the larger queen and her eggs from the comb to be harvested.

When the bottle was empty, I went down on my knees for a scrutiny of the hive’s empty doorway.

No sign of mice, a common problem with hives. No litter of dead bees in the forecourt of the hive, and Holmes would have mentioned the presence of the destructive wax moth. So far as I knew, the paint was the same used on all the hives, and the construction was of a kind with at least two others. I prised off the top, set aside the tinkling bells, and began to examine the frames. The fragrance was dizzying.
Even though I was not particularly enamoured with honey, the temptation to rip into a segment and pop a wad of ambrosia into my mouth was powerful.

However, I did not want to tempt a neighbouring hive into a raid, introducing bad habits where there were none, so I left the comb whole.

It took some time to slide up each frame, and some muscle to wrestle aside the sections. I shone my torch around what remained. No moths, no death, just full comb and emptiness, as if the entire hive, queen to drones, had heard the Piper’s flute and taken off into the blue. I put down my torch and reached for the bottom section’s first frame, to return it to its place.

“Did you find anything?” enquired a voice.

I dropped the weighty frame onto my foot, stifled an oath, and swung around to glare at whatever holiday tripper had come to me for his entertainment.

He was a small, round man, clean-shaven and neatly dressed in worn tweeds and a soft hat. His arms were resting atop the dry wall, his chin propped on his fists. Clearly he had been watching me for some time while I had stood, top over tea-kettle with my head in the box.

Before I could send him on his way—the public footpath might be nearby, but this was decidedly not on it—he straightened. “Mrs Holmes, I presume?”

“More or less. Who—”

“Glen Miranker; at your service.”

“Ah. The bee man.”

“As you say. My housekeeper told me that you and your husband had returned. I rather expected to see him out here before this.”

“He has been called away. But you’re right, he came out to look at the hive immediately we got back on Monday evening.”

“Did he have any thoughts?”

“Holmes generally does. But in this instance, he didn’t share them with me.”

“Am I right in believing that you are not familiar with the apiarist’s art?”

“Merely an untrained assistant,” I admitted. “However, I thought I might look at the hive and see if anything caught my eye. When we were here Monday, it was nearly dusk, and he only got as far down as the super.”

I reached for the frame again, but as if my words had been an invitation, the man stretched out on the wall and then rolled over it, picking himself up stiffly from the ground and grabbing my torch. I waited as he conducted a close examination of the nooks and crannies, then I resumed sliding the laden frames into place.

“You have rather a lot of swarm cells here,” he noted.

“As your letter to Holmes said, they swarmed,” I noted dryly.

“But I checked the hive less than three weeks ago.”

I glanced at his aged back, bent over the hive, and wondered how he had managed to unload the boxes by himself. Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps it had been more than three weeks ago.

When I shifted the boxes, he made no effort to help, confirming my suspicions that his back was not fully up to the task. Instead, he inspected, delivering all the while a lecture on the craft of beekeeping such as even Holmes had not inflicted on me. I heard about varieties of bee and methods of hive construction, chemical analysis of the wax and the nutritional composition of various sources of honey, several theories of communication—Holmes’ “subtle emanations”—and how the temper of the hive reflected the personality not only of their queen, but of their keeper.

“Which is what makes this particular hive so very intriguing,” the man said. By this time I had returned all three sections to their former setting, and he was prone with one cheek on the grass, examining the hive’s foundations. I obediently struggled to tip the heavy box off of the ground. “Your husband’s bees tend to be eight parts methodical, one part experimental, and one part equally divided between startling innovation and resounding failure.”

“Er, you mean that his techniques are either innovative or failures?”

His head came around the side of the hive. “No, I mean the bees themselves. Reflecting his personality, don’t you know?”

“I see.”

He paused to stare off into the distance; my muscles began to quiver. “I recall him describing how he had introduced a peculiar herb out of the Caucasus Mountains that he’d heard had an invigorating effect on the honey. The bees took to it with great enthusiasm, made an effort to spread that herb’s nectar evenly throughout the combs, became disconsolate when the flowers began to fade. Unfortunately, as it turned out, the taste of the honey itself was absolutely revolting. Rendered the year’s entire production unpalatable.” He shook his head and continued his minute examination.

“So, are you suggesting that this hive’s madness is a reflection of some aspect of their keeper?”

He sat up, startled, and I gratefully allowed the hive to thump to the ground. “No. No, no, no, I shouldn’t have said it has anything to do with him.”

I laughed at the vehemence of his protest. “I’m only joking, Mr Miranker. I should say it’s every bit as likely that the hive decided it didn’t like the subtle emanations coming from the burial mound across the wall.” That outrageous theory silenced him for a moment, and I gathered my things to leave.

But not before he contributed a final shot. “One is always rather concerned when a hive fails to thrive,” he mused. “In Yorkshire and Cornwall they believe that when bees die, the farmer will soon leave his farm.”

I shivered, and said sharply, “It’s just as likely the bees deserted because nobody bothered to ‘tell’ them Holmes was away and would return. In any case, if a season is so bad the bees die, I should think it a sign that the farmer’s crops were suffering as well. Good day to you, Mr Miranker,” I told him, and made my escape.

Ridiculous, to feel a sharp frisson of disquiet because of this old man and his folk stories.

I spent the rest of the day walking: up to my own farm, where I looked from a distance and decided I did not wish to spend any more
of the day in conversation, and then west towards the Cuckmere. I passed the Wilmington Giant—225 feet of enigmatic figure carved into the chalk hillside—and crossed the Cuckmere to Alfriston, to enjoy a restorative cup of tea and a scone nearly as good as Mrs Hudson’s. When I had retraced my steps over the bridge, I turned south on the narrow track through Litlington and West Dean. Birds sang, despite the lateness of the season, and the lush countryside soothed my parched skin and my thin-stretched spirit.

I came home sunburnt, footsore, and at peace. What is more, since I had the forethought to stop at The Tiger on my way through the village, I was well fed.

I bathed and put on a silk robe I had bought in Japan, and while the kettle boiled, I went to the library in search of a congenial book. What I wanted was a novel, but there were few of those and none I had not read.

The room looked just as it had when we walked out of the house in January, since Mrs Hudson would not dare to disturb the arrangement of objects—which Holmes claimed was precise and deliberate. The only change was the small mountain of neatly stacked newspapers, which doubtless contained every
Times
and
Telegraph
issued since we had left: A sheet of foolscap stuck out every so often, counting down the months in Mrs Hudson’s handwriting.

The sight reminded me that, with Lulu away, the newspapers would be accumulating in the box at the end of the drive. While my tea was steeping, I went out to retrieve the four papers—two afternoons, two mornings, all delivered by a boy from Eastbourne many hours after they hit the streets in London—and started to add them to the mountain, then changed my mind. Instead, I took them with the tea onto the terrace, to while away the day’s last light.