The Language of Bees (52 page)

Lofte’s “Society” was, it transpired, the Aeronautical Society of
Great Britain. And Mr Lofte himself, I found as we strolled up Old Bond Street with watchful eyes, had been Captain Lofte of the RAF, beginning in the early days of the War when, if memory served me, the average life span of an active fighter pilot had been three weeks. Even after several years in the Far East, he still knew half the world’s airmen, and those he didn’t, had at least heard of him. It explained how he had been able to thumb rides across two continents at the drop of a hat.

The Aeronautical Society wore the face of science over the heart of madcap undergraduates. We walked past a dignified sign and through a polished front door into a minor riot that would not have been tolerated at that bastion of Bohemian excess, the Café Royal. Five boisterous young men were racing—literally—down a long staircase while a sixth flung his legs over the banister and leapt to the floor below, staggering into a scramble as he hit the carpet ahead of the pack that rounded the newel and circled towards whatever rooms lay behind. Voices raised from the depths of the building indicated disputed results and an accusation of cheating; the dignified Swiss man at my side looked only marginally discomfited.

“We shall wait for them in here,” he suggested, leading me to a sitting room too tidy to be used for anything but the occasional entertainment of guests and ladies. He pressed into my hand an unasked-for glass of sherry, and slipped out. I set the glass on the table, and looked around me.

The quiet room was decorated primarily with photographs: Blériot after crossing the Channel in 1909; the Wrights’ first flyer, wings drooping alarmingly but its wheels clear of the ground; an aerial dogfight over English fields; Alcock and Brown standing next to the biplane they crossed the Atlantic in. I lingered over this last—surely immeasurably harder than a jaunt to Scotland, and that was five whole years ago. I puzzled over the next photograph, of a curious looking aeroplane with an enormous set of propellers misplaced to its roof. It resembled some unlikely insect.

“That’s an autogiro,” said an American voice from behind me.

I had not known there was anyone else in the room, but the man
had been sitting in a high-backed chair in a dim corner. I smiled vaguely in his direction, and returned to the photo. “It looks like the result of two aeroplanes flying into each other,” I commented. Then, realising that a jest about mid-air collisions might not be in the best of taste here, I amended it to, “—or a piece of very Modernist sculpture. Does it actually function?”

“They go up,” he said laconically. “Something I could help you with?”

“No, I’m here with Mr—Captain—Lofte. I think he’s gone to find someone.”

“Probably me.” The man peeled himself out of the chair and started in my direction. Watching the unevenness of his progress, I thought at first that he had been injured, then decided he was intoxicated. When he stood before me, I saw it was both.

He’d been burned. Shiny scar tissue spread up his neck to his jaw-line, the skin on his left hand was taut enough to affect mobility, and the stiffness of his gait suggested further damage. He held his drink in his right hand, and watched my reaction to his appearance.

It must be hard, to have to wait for every new acquaintance to absorb the implications of scars. Particularly when the new acquaintance was a not entirely unattractive young woman.

“I’m Mary Russell,” I said, and hesitated about whether or not to put out my hand.

He decided for me, moving his glass over to his left hand, concentrating for a moment until the fingers grasped it, then putting his right hand out for me to shake. “Pleased to meet you. The name’s Cash Javitz.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Detroit?”

He transferred the glass back to the more secure grasp. “’Bout fifty miles away. How’d you guess?”

“Accents are one of my husband’s … hobbies, you might say. I pick things up from him.”

“I been here so long, some Yanks think I’m a Brit.”

“Me, too. Mother was English, I’m from California, my father from Boston.”

“So, what’s Lofty want?”

“I need to get to Scotland in a hurry. Mr Lofte seemed to think this was the place to start looking.”

He lifted the glass to his face and drank, watching me over it. “Where in Scotland?”

“Well, actually, the Orkneys. Those are the islands—”

“I know where Orkney is. Don’t I, you snake?”

I was taken aback until Lofte’s voice answered; I hadn’t heard him come in.

“Don’t be rude to the lady, Cash. A simple no will suffice.”

“How much?” Javitz said instead.

“Do you have a ’plane?”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Not to offend, Mr Javitz, but my husband suggested I find a pilot who had taken the pledge. Considering the distance, I’d say that was a good idea.”

“He’ll be sober,” Lofte assured me.

“Mostly,” Javitz muttered under his breath.

Lofte frowned at the American, than said, “Cash knows the terrain like no other. When the RAF wouldn’t let him fly any more, he joined the Navy, and spent so much time around Scapa Bay they’ve made him an honorary Orcadian. The islands are tricky, the winds can be difficult. I’d trust my mother to Cash.”

“This mother of yours: Is she still alive?”

“My sister, then.”

“I’ve seen a picture of his sister,” the American commented. “She’d be safe from me, no question.”

I eyed him. This was adding up to one of those situations whose details Holmes did not need to know.

“To answer your question, Cash,” Lofte said, “we will have a ’plane by evening. I’ll ring here as soon as we know what kind and where it is. We can discuss then your fees.”

“By which time you’ll be sober,” I added firmly.

Javitz laughed and swigged down the last of his drink. “If I’m not, what will you do? Fly her yourself?”

“I’ll fly her,” Lofte said.

“To Orkney?”

The question was close to being a jeer, but Lofte held the American’s gaze. “Innocent lives are at stake, Cash. A man and a child. Miss Russell has to reach the Orkneys no later than Friday.”

“Right. Okay. ’Phone me, when you know. But if it’s some piece of rubbish held together by chewing gum and baling wire, you can take it yourself. I’m going to go find me some lunch.”

He stalked out, putting his empty glass on a polished table as he went by. I watched him leave.

“Can he fly, with that hand?” I asked my companion.

“He flies with his will, not his flesh. He will get you there.”

With a final glance at the doorway the American had gone through, I thought it a pity that we could not take Lofte with us. A man that experienced at conjuring transportation from thin air might be useful if we ran out of fuel halfway over the Cairngorms.

Place (1):
As celestial bodies work their influence, so do
historical bodies shape one another Britain is the sum of
its peoples: the ancients; the Romans; the Angles and
Saxons; the North Peoples; the Norman French
.
All built their roads, raised their children, and left their
names, their Gods, and their Powers
.
Testimony, IV:6

I
REACHED HENDON AIR FIELD JUST BEFORE DAWN on Wednesday. The aeroplanes that greeted my eyes were reassuringly solid, gleaming new, proud, broad-chested harbingers of the muscular future of flight.

Unfortunately, they were not the aeroplane we had been given.

Mycroft’s car drove me farther into the field, where I saw Lofte and Javitz hanging from the wing of a machine that even in the half-light appeared worn. The two men wielded spanners, and a third man stood on the ground with an electric torch. They had been at the field for hours, judging by the state of their clothing and the greasy handprints that covered the fuselage from propeller to rudder.

Mycroft’s assistant, a fifty-year-old Cockney by the name of Carver, would have driven off once I was out of the car, but I stopped him.

“These men need coffee and something to eat. You have twenty minutes.”

“Twenty—do you know what time it is?”

“I do. Consider this one of Mr Holmes’… requests.”

Carver threw up his hands and drove away with a squeal of tyres. I went over to the men, who had their back ends pointed at me and were arguing.

“Is there a problem?” I asked loudly.

“No,” Lofte said.

At the same instant, Javitz answered, “Not if you are wanting to fall out of the sky.”

“There is no problem,” Lofte repeated. “My friend is merely scrupulous about his machinery.”

“‘Scrupulous’ is a good thing to be,” I said encouragingly.

The machine was reassuringly large, with nearly forty feet of wing, towering over me at a height of ten feet. Lofte came to stand next to me and told me rather more about it than I needed to know: made by the Bristol company four years before, cruising speed of eighty-five miles per hour, a 230 horsepower Siddeley Puma engine, 405 square feet of wing surface. I nodded my head at the right places, and wondered who owned the thing, and why he might be letting us remove it.

“The best thing about it, from your point of view,” he said, “is that it has a range of five hundred miles.”

“You mean we can fly to Orkney with only one stop?” I asked in astonishment.

“Well,” he said, “theoretically, perhaps. In practice it’s not the best idea to push matters. He’ll put down in York first, just to look things over.”

There was something ominous about the way he suggested that. “What sorts of things?”

“It’s an unfamiliar machine, he’ll be … conservative.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“Nothing important. Well, just, the last time she was up, she came down a little hard. He’s now making certain that—”

“This machine crashed?”

“Not so much crashed as … well, I suppose yes, it crashed.”

Javitz finally spoke up; I rather wished he hadn’t. “It’s a piece of crap machine that’s been driven into the ground, literally. If I had three days to pull it apart I’d be happier. But I’ll get you there, in one piece, if it’s the last thing I do.”

“That’s not exactly encouraging, Mr—”

“Joke,” he said, baring his teeth at me in a grin. “She’ll be fine.”

It was surely not too late to catch the train to Edinburgh. And I might have, if Javitz hadn’t chosen that moment to throw his spanner into the nearest tool-bag with a grunt signifying satisfaction, if not actual happiness. He scrubbed his hands on a grease-coloured rag, and picked up my bag to stow it inside the side compartment. Carver came back with the food and drink, and Javitz helped himself to a fried-eggs-on-toast sandwich and a cup of coffee. Carver also handed him a piece of paper.

“Bloke waved me down and asked me to give you this,” he said.

Javitz took the page in the hand that held the cup; whatever he read made the look on his face go grim again.

“What is that?” I asked.

He stuffed it into a pocket, and said, “Weather conditions. We’ll have some wind, nothing to worry about.”

“I think—”

He turned on his heel and fixed me with an evil gaze. “I don’t fly dual controls. You want to drive the thing? Go right ahead, it’s your machine. If you want me to take you north, you’re gonna have to let me do the worrying.”

Twice in a year I had climbed into an aeroplane under the control of someone in whom I had less than complete confidence. I must learn how to drive one myself, and soon.

I nodded, and let Lofte show me how to climb up the ladder. He followed me to demonstrate the special hinged cover that transformed the passenger seat into an enclosed box. I eyed the glass
on all sides, wondering how hard a landing would be required to turn the windows into flying daggers.

I had brought my heaviest fur-lined coat, which I now wrapped around me. Javitz shook Lofte’s hand and leapt into the pilot’s open compartment in front while Lofte walked forward and waited for the signal to work the prop. Javitz fiddled with the controls in front of him, pulled on his goggles, then stuck up his thumb; Lofte vanished, the propeller kicked a few times before the engine caught, sputtered, then thundered into life. The fragile construction around me jerked and drifted forward. Lofte reappeared off the port side and waved at me with an air of confidence neither of us altogether believed. The sound of the big engine built, the seat pressed itself into my back, and with no ceremony at all we leapt once, twice, and the ground dropped away.