The Language of Bees (2 page)

Holmes turned a page.

A few minutes later, I tried again. “Here’s a letter to
The Times
concerning a Druid suicide at Stonehenge—or, no, there was a suicide somewhere else, and a small riot at Stonehenge. Interesting: I hadn’t realised the Druids had staged a return. I wonder what the Archbishop of Canterbury has to say on the matter?”

He might have been deaf.

I shot a glance at the letter that so engrossed him, but did not recognise either the cream stock or the pinched, antique writing.

I set down the newspaper long enough to read first Mrs Hudson’s letter, which I had to admit was more tantalising than informative, then Mycroft’s brief missive, but when I reached their end, Holmes
was still frowning at the lengthy epistle from his unknown correspondent. Kicking myself for failing to bring a sufficient number of books from New York, I resumed
The Times
where, for lack of unread Druidical Letters to the Editor, or Dispatches from Reykjavík, or even News from Northumberland, I was driven to a survey of the adverts: Debenhams’ sketches delivered the gloomy verdict that I would need my skirt lengths adjusted again; Thomas Cook offered me educational cruises to Egypt, Berlin, and an upcoming solar eclipse; the Morris Motors adverts reminded me that it was high time to think about a new motor-car; and the London Pavilion offered me a Technicolor cowboy adventure called
Wanderer in the Wasteland
.

“They are swarming,” Holmes said.

I looked up from the newsprint to stare first at him, then at the thick document in his hand.

“Who— Ah,” I said, struck by enlightenment, or at least, memory. “The bees.”

He cocked an eyebrow at me. “You asked what it meant, that the hive had gone mad. It is swarming. The one beside the burial mound in the far field,” he added.

“That letter is from your beekeeper friend,” I suggested.

By way of response, he handed me the letter.

The cramped writing and the motion of the train combined with the arcane terminology to render the pages somewhat less illuminating than the personal adverts in the paper. Over the years I had become tolerably familiar with the language of keeping bees, and had even from time to time lent an extra pair of arms to some procedure or other, but this writer’s interests, and expertise, were far beyond mine. And my nose was too stuffy to detect any odour of honey rising from the pages.

When I had reached its end, I asked, “How does swarming qualify as madness?”

“You read his letter,” he said.

“I read the words.”

“What did you not—”

“Holmes, just tell me.”

“The hive is casting swarms, repeatedly. Under normal circumstances, a hive’s swarming indicates prosperity, a sign that it can well afford to lose half its population, but in this case, the hive is hemorrhaging bees. He has cleared the nearby ground, checked for parasites and pests, added a super, even shifted the hive a short distance. The part where he talks about
‘tinnitusque cie et Matris quate cymbala, circum’?
He wanted to warn me that he’s hung a couple of bells nearby, that being what Virgil recommends to induce swarms back into a hive.”

“Desperate measures.”

“He does sound a touch embarrassed. And I cannot picture him standing over the hive ‘clashing Our Lady’s cymbals,’ which is Virgil’s next prescription.”

“You’ve had swarms before.” When bees swarm—following a restless queen to freedom—it depletes the population of workers. As Holmes had said, this was no problem early in the season, since they left behind their honey and the next generation of pupae. However, I could see that doing so time and again would be another matter.

“The last swarm went due north, and ended up attempting to take over an active hive in the vicar’s garden.”

That, I had to agree, was peculiar: Outright theft was pathological behaviour among bees.

“The combination is extraordinary. Perhaps the colony has some sort of parasite, driving them to madness?” he mused.

“What can you do?” I asked, although I still thought it odd that he should find the behaviour of his insects more engrossing than dead Druids or the evil acts of spoilt young men. Even the drugs problem should have caught his attention—that seemed to have increased since the previous summer, I reflected: How long before Holmes was pulled into that problem once again?

“I may have to kill them,” he declared, folding away the letter.

“Holmes, that seems a trifle extreme,” I protested, and only when he gave me a curious look did I recall that we were talking about bees, not Young Things or religious crackpots.

“You could be right,” he said, and went back to his reading.

I returned to
The Times
, my eye caught again by the farmer’s letter demanding that a guard be mounted on Stonehenge at next year’s solstice, so as to avoid either riots or the threat of a dramatic suicide. I shook my head and turned the page: When it came to communal behaviour, there were many kinds of madness.

*
The events of those months may be found in
The Game, Locked Rooms
, and
The Art of Detection
.

First Birth (2):
The boy’s mother knew the meteor to be
an omen when, at the very height of her birth pangs, one
of the celestial celebrants plummeted to earth in a stripe of
flame that hit the pond with a crash and a billow of steam
.
It was still hot, after hours in the water
Testimony, I:1

W
E HAD LEFT OUR HOME ON THE SUSSEX COASTLAND one freezing, snow-clotted morning back in January, to return on a high summer afternoon when the green-gold countryside was as full and fragrant as a ripe peach in the palm of one’s hand.

I was pleased that we had caught the Seaford train rather than the one to Eastbourne. This meant that, instead of motoring through an endless terrain of seaside villas and sunburnt holiday-makers, we quickly shook off the town to cross the meandering tidal reaches of the Cuckmere, then threw ourselves at the steep hill onto the Downs.

Sussex had always enchanted me, the mix of sea and pasture, open downland giving way to dark forest, the placid face of beach resorts cheek by jowl with the blood-drenched site of the Norman conquest.
Daily, one encountered history protruding into modern life like boulders from the soil: Any foundation dug here was apt to encounter a Bronze Age tool or a Neolithic skeleton; ancient monuments dotted the hillsides, requiring ploughs and road-builders to move around them; place-names and phrases in the local dialect bore Medieval, Norse, Roman, Saxon roots. In this land, in the hearts of its people, the past was the present: It did not take much imagination to envision a local shepherd in winter—bearded and cloaked beneath his wide hat, leaning on a crook—as Woden, the one-eyed Norse god who disguised himself as a wanderer.

The motor that had coughed and struggled its way up the hill now seemed to sigh as it entered the tree-lined downgrade towards East Dean. Holmes shifted and reached for his cigarette case, and the abrupt motion, coming when it did, suddenly brought the answer to Holmes’ mood as clearly as if he had spoken aloud: He felt Sussex closing in over his head.

Sussex was his chosen retreat from the press of London, the rural home in which he could write and conduct experiments and meditate on his bees yet still venture out for the occasional investigation; now, after seven busy months in free flight across the globe, it had become small, dull, tedious, and claustrophobic.

Sussex was now a trap.

I had forgot for the moment that Mrs Hudson would not be there to greet us, but when Patrick pulled into the freshly gravelled circle in front of the house and shut off the engine, the front door remained closed.

Holmes climbed down from the car before its noise had died. He tossed his coat across the sun-dial and dropped his hat on top, then set off in shirt-sleeves and city shoes, heading in the direction of the far field near the burial mound.

Patrick was well used to my husband’s eccentricities, and merely asked me if I wanted the trunks upstairs.

“Thank you,” I told him.

The front door opened then, to reveal Mrs Hudson’s helper Lulu, pink and bustling and spilling over with words.

“Ma’am, how good it is to see you, to be sure, Mrs Hudson will be so vexed that she couldn’t be here, and I hope you don’t mind, but yesterday night a gentleman—”

The sudden appearance of a person who was not the one I wished to see, and a sudden unwillingness to immerse myself in the busy turmoil of homecoming, had me adding my own coat and gloves to the impromptu hat-stand and following in Holmes’ wake, out onto the rolling expanse of the South Downs.

Once clear of the flint wall around the gardens, I could see him ahead of me, striding fast. I did not hurry. It mattered not in the least if I caught up with him before he turned back for home, which he would do soon—even a hive infected with madness was bound to shut down with dusk. I merely walked, breathing in the air of the place that, for nine years, had been my home.

My headache faded, and before long my sinuses relaxed enough that I could smell the sea, half a mile away, mingling with rich traces of hay recently cut. I heard the raucous complaint of a gull, then the lowing of a cow—no doubt Daisy, belonging to the next farmer but one, prized because she bore a healthy calf every year like clockwork and gave the creamiest milk that a bowl of porridge had ever known. The rattle of a motor-cycle followed the roadway between Eastbourne and Seaford; five minutes later, the evening train from London whistled as it drew near Eastbourne.

I caught sight of a head of white clover being worked over by a late bee, and I watched until the busy creature flew off—in the direction of the orchard behind me, not towards the madness of the far field. I bent down to pick the flower, and as I walked, I plucked its tendrils, sucking out each infinitesimal trace of nectar.

It was a perfect summer’s evening in the south of England, and I dawdled. I meandered. Had I not been wearing the formal skirts and stockings of travel, I might have flopped back onto the cropped grass and counted the wisps of cloud.

India was spectacular and Japan was exquisite and California was a part of my bones, but God, I loved this country.

I found Holmes squatting beside the hive, shirt-sleeves rolled to his elbows. At a distance I was concerned that he would come away with a thousand stings, but closer up, I could hear the absence of the deep, working hum of a summer hive. The white Langstroth box was silent, its landing-board empty, and when he lifted the top of the hive, no cloud of winged fury boiled up from within. The only sound was the light jingle of the bells his friend had hung there.

I hoisted myself onto the wall, taking care not to knock stones loose, and waited for him to finish. The nearby burial mound was small enough to have remained undisturbed for four millennia, escaping even the attentions of the ever-curious Victorians. It cast its late afternoon shadow along the ground to the base of the wall. Raising my gaze to the south, I could make out the line carved by six thousand years of feet treading the cliff-side chalk soil; beyond it, the Channel had gone grey with the lowering sun.

Suddenly, the odour of honey was heavy in the air as Holmes began to prise up the frames of the super. Each was laden with dark, neatly sealed hexagons of comb, representing hundreds of millions of trips flown to and from the hive from nectar-bearing flowers. Abandoned now, with not a bee in sight.

More than that, we could not see, although I knew that come morning, Holmes would be out here again, hunting for a clue to the hive’s catastrophe. Now, he allowed the frames to fall back into place, and replaced the top.

As I have said, I care not overmuch for
Apis mellifera
, but even I held a moment of silent mourning over the desolate rectangular box.