The Language of Bees

  Dolls, books—a lot of books—and a basket of brightly coloured toys. A diminutive enamel-ware tray with a miniature tea-set for four, missing one cup but otherwise perfect, and perfectly exquisite. A neatly made bed, a diminutive wardrobe. But the walls were the reason the room pulled me in: Damian had painted them.

  Even under the fitful gaze of my torch, the walls were incredible. The room seemed to be atop a hill, with a blue sky broken by the occasional puffy cloud overhead, a changing landscape stretching out in all directions, and a green carpet underfoot to remind one of grass: One half expected a fresh breeze on one's face. To the north stood a city on a bay, its boats suggesting a location considerably farther east than London: Shanghai, perhaps? Then came a tropical beach, with coconut palms and birds too exotic even for Nature. Farmland came to the south, more French than English, with a small, Tuscan-looking hill town in the distance. That gave way to jungle, with monkeys and a sharp-eyed parrot watching over the child's cot. Everything there looked real enough to walk to.

  It must have taken him weeks.

  I would happily have stood there for an hour—would very happily have curled up to sleep in that tiny bed—had I not heard the third and final ring of the doorbell. Reluctantly, I pulled myself out of the room and padded down the hallway to the sound of loud constabulary curses from downstairs.

  I waited until he had yanked open the front door and was shouting at Holmes before I trotted down the stairs and through the kitchen. Holmes was apologising loudly, sounding for all the world like a sobering drunk. “The wife says I should bring you these, she baked them this afternoon, and tell you I'm sorry to disturb you. She's right, I don't know what I was thinking, I ought to know my own front door and this surely isn't it.”

  In the face of open apology accompanied by a tray of biscuits (brought for the purpose, freshly baked by Mycroft's invisible kitchen) the constable's righteous anger deflated. I passed out of the kitchen door and let the latch lock behind me, scaling the wall and dropping the block of rope-bound wood into the nearest ash can before the PC had dunked his first biscuit.

  Holmes was waiting at the agreed-to spot; the tension left his shoulders when I rounded the corner.

  “The constable was in the kitchen when I got there,” I explained. “I didn't think it a good idea to pick the lock with him drinking tea ten feet away.”

  “I should have expected that he would settle there,” he said.

  “In any case, I have the book, and a couple of others. And I found a white robe like the one Miss Dunworthy wore the other night, far too short for Damian. But—when you were there, did you see the child's room?”

  “Briefly.”

  “Extraordinary, isn't it?”

  “My… son.” He hesitated; this was the second time, in all these years, that I had heard him say that phrase. Now he repeated it, saying quietly, “My son loves his daughter.”

  Second Birth: Many go through life born but once,

  scarcely aware of good and evil. Those who are born

  anew—spiritual birth—take their first step outside

  of the Garden when they perceive the difference

  between good and evil

  Testimony, III:1

  HALFWAY THROUGH TUESDAY AFTERNOON, I LOOKED up from the final page of Testimony and noticed how very empty Mycroft's flat was. I had slept late and came out of the guest room to find both Holmes and Mycroft away, Mycroft to the office where he had worked for most of his life, and Holmes, as a terse note on the dining table informed me, “Gone to Cerne Abbas.” Mycroft's housekeeper, Mrs Cowper (whose odd hours I never could predict), made me breakfast and then left me to my work. Since one or the other of the men had taken with them the list of forty-seven names from Millicent Dunworthy's ledger, my work consisted of the book I had stolen the night before.

  My formal training, the field in which I had spent much of the past seven years, was in the analysis of theological texts. Thus I approached Testimony the way I would any unfamiliar manuscript: a quick skim followed by a closer read, making note of themes, idiosyncrasies, and references I wished to hunt down.

  Six hours and a whole lot of words later, I closed the cover and my attempt at scholarly detachment faltered. I looked at the symbol on the book's cover, and saw a tattoo on a dead woman's belly. I went to make myself a cup of tea, and thought I heard something move in the back of the apartment. When I looked into Mycroft's study to see, I then thought I heard the front door open and close. I checked that it was locked, and started to go through the entire flat. When I caught myself stooping to look under a bed, I loudly said a rude word and left, taking with me nothing but the key.

  I marched along Pall Mall and through Cleveland Row to Green Park, turning up the Queen's Walk and continuing down the other two sides. Then it dawned on me that I had just described a triangle, the shape that figured so prominently in everything to do with the Children of Lights. Impatiently, I crossed over to St James's, making myself slow down and pay attention to my surroundings: up the Mall, down Horse Guards Road, then back along the Birdcage Walk—where it struck me that not only was St James's Park laid out as a sort of triangle itself, it even had a circle—the Victoria memorial—at its peak.

  I abandoned the parks entirely, and made for the Embankment.

  Testimony was nonsensical, even silly in places—I had found myself chuckling aloud at the thought of Millicent Dunworthy declaiming some of its fairly blatant sexual imagery, all about energies bursting forth and enveloping. Much of the writing employed tired heresies and re-worked exotica, leavened by the occasional flash of imagination and insight, and I had found the author overly fond of ornate language and self-aggrandisement.

  So why had it left me feeling as if I had read someone's pornographic journal?

  As soon as I asked myself the question, my inner eye provided the answer: Yolanda Adler, dressed in new clothing, sacrificed at the foot of an ancient monument, probably with the weapon the author called the Tool.

  I walked, and walked. Eventually, I burnt off the worst of the crawling sensation along my spine, and made my way to a nearby reading library to track down some of the Norse and Hindu references. At half past five, I walked back to Pall Mall and let myself into Mycroft's flat. He came in as I was pouring myself a cup of tea.

  “Good afternoon, Mary.”

  “Hello, Mycroft. Do you know if Holmes planned to return to night?”

  “I believe he anticipated having to stay the night in Poole.”

  “He's going to talk to Fiona Cartwright's employment agency?”

  “Depending on what he found in Cerne Abbas. He borrowed my small camera, although I do not know what he expects to record with it.”

  “He doubts it was suicide?”

  “My brother accepts nothing he has not judged with his own eyes.”

  True: An unexplained cut on the hand of a gun-death was enough to make him question the official verdict. “Was it you who took the list of names from the table?”

  “I put a man on it. He should have a complete report tomorrow.”

  “What about Shanghai; anything from there?”

  “It is not yet a week since I wired,” he protested gently.

  “It's been a busy week,” I said, by way of apology, although I was thinking, How long does it take someone to hunt down a few records anyway? “Here, have a cup of tea, Mrs Cowper's made plenty.”

  “I was thinking to change for my afternoon perambulation.”

  “Shall I keep you company?”

  “I should be very glad to have you join me on my self-imposed penance to the gods of excess,” he pronounced, and went to trade his black City suit for something more appropriate to a stroll through the park.

  In light-weight and light-grey suiting, whose gathered waist-band emphasised its elephantine wrinkles, he took up a straw hat and held the door for me.

  Neither of us spoke much as we passed by the open windows along Pall Mall, but once we were among trees, he a
sked, “Have you learnt anything from the book you purloined?”

  “It's left a very nasty taste in my mouth.”

  “I see.”

  “Anyone who capitalises that many English nouns should be shot.”

  “The author's diction offends you?”

  “The author's arrogance and assumptions offend me. His dedication to the idea that all happenstance is fate offends me. His imprecision offends me. His images are both pretentious and disturbing. The sense of underlying threat and purpose are …” I heard myself speaking in the erudite shorthand the Holmes brothers used, and I cut it short. “He scares me silly.”

  “Tell me how,” Mycroft said, equally capable of brevity. I walked for a bit, ordering my thoughts, before I went on.

  “The book concerns the spiritual development of a man—one assumes the writer, although it is in the third person—from a boy born under signs and portents, through his dark night of the soul, to his guided enlightenment. It has four sections with eight topics each-eight is a number significant in many traditions, although it could mean nothing, here—and a concluding section that acts as a coda. What begins as standard nuttiness darkens in the middle. The fourth section—Part the Fourth, he terms it—concerns his ‘Great Work,’ which appears to be a mix of alchemy and, well, human sacrifice. Only two of his thirty-two topic headings are repeated: ‘Sacrifice,’ which is divided into its submissive and its transformative aspects, and ‘Tool.’ I'm not certain, but thinking about it, I wonder if the Tool could be a knife forged from meteor metal.”

  “A sacrificial knife,” he said.

  One who did not know Mycroft Holmes would have heard the phrase as a simple intellectual conclusion: I could hear not only the distaste, but the pain underlying that: He, too, had Yolanda Adler before his eyes.

  “He doesn't say it in so many words,” I told him. “And when he mentions primitives cutting out and eating the hearts of their enemies, it sounded as if he took that as metaphorical, not literal. Everything in Testimony is couched in these pseudo-mythic terms; the author is deliberately crafting a holy scripture.”

  “Megalomaniacs I have known,” he mused. “I believe you are familiar with Aleister Crowley?”

  “His name has come up a number of times in the past few days.”

  “So I would imagine, if that text of yours is representative of this circle's interests.”

  “Holmes thinks that Crowley's manifesto is in large part artifice, stemming from and feeding into an overweening egotism. If Crowley is God—or Satan, which for him amounts to the same thing—then how can his followers deny him his wishes, whether those be sex, or money, or just admiration of his poetry? If his desires are unreasonable, that's because he's a god; if he's a god, then his desires are reasonable.”

  “A convenient doctrine,” Mycroft agreed.

  “However, I should say that the author of Testimony may actually believe in his rigmarole. If Crowley is dangerous because shocking and scandalous behaviour is a way of convincing the gullible of his divinity, then this man would be dangerous because he actually believes he is divine.”

  “May I assume that your presence here indicates an uncertainty as to the author's identity?”

  “There are bits of evidence scattered throughout the thing, but I'm not sure how dependable even those are—he seems very willing to adopt a flexible chronology, even when it goes against good sense. For example, he claims a small meteorite fell into a pond outside the house as he was being born, and that his mother personally supervised its retrieval, but he then says the thing didn't cool for hours. Of course, most religious texts find symbolic truth more important than literal, just as kairos-time—when things are ripe—is more real than chronos-time, which is a mere record of events.”

  “Perhaps you might assemble a list of those items with evidentiary potential, so we could reflect on those?”

  “Er …”

  “You have done so? Very well, proceed.” He clasped his hands behind his back, the cane dangling behind him like an elephant's tail, and listened.

  “He draws from the Old and New Testaments, Gnosticism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, alchemy, and a variety of mythologies, with an especial interest in the Norse. I'd say he's read a number of works on mysticism, from Jung's psychological theories to William James's Gifford Lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience. The sorts of books I saw in Damian's house. The author claims, as I said, that he was born during a meteor shower, but there was also a comet in the sky—which could be actual fact, or a sacrifice of accuracy in favour of mythic significance. And come to think of it,” I mused, “that design they use, which I took for a spot-light, could be a stylised comet.

  “He has travelled—he mentions France and Italy, the Far East, and the Pacific. He honours and, I think, finds inspiration in the mixed heritage of Britain. In two or three places, he employs artistic metaphors. And, I, well…” I exhaled. “There are eight drawings by Damian in the book.”

  We navigated the crossing of Piccadilly and Park Lane and were well into Hyde Park before Mycroft spoke. What sounded like a tangent went in fact directly to the heart of what I had been telling him.

  “My brother permits few people inside his guard. Four people in his first sixty-three years, I should say: myself, Dr Watson, Irene Adler, and you. For those inside his affections, Sherlock's loyalty is absolute. In another man, one might call it blind. Any one of us four could commit cold-blooded murder, in Trafalgar Square, in broad daylight, and he would devote every iota of his energy and wit to proving the act justified.”

  “And now there are five.”

  “I have not seen my brother and my nephew together, but I should not be surprised to find Damian added to the fold.”

  We paced in silence for a time, until I responded with an apparent tangent of my own.

  “Has Holmes told you what happened in San Francisco this past spring?”

  “He mentioned that you had received unexpected and disconcerting information concerning your past.”

  “I doubt he couched it that mildly. I discovered that pretty much everything I thought I knew about my childhood was wrong. That after my family died, I shut my life behind a door and forgot it. Literally. ‘Disconcerting’ isn't the word—I felt as if the ground beneath me had turned to quick-sand. It has left me doubting my own judgment. Doubting whether or not to trust anyone else.”

  “Including Sherlock.”

  “Him I trust, if anyone. And yet, I can't help thinking that Damian's mother deftly outflanked him. Twice.”

  “Yes, although when Sherlock met her, he assumed her to be a villain, when in fact she was not. That is quite a different thing from falling for the schemes of a villain one believes innocent.”

  “You think he could not be deceived by Damian?”

  Another lengthy silence, then he sighed. “You think Damian wrote this book?”

  “Do you know his birthday?”

  “The ninth of September, 1894.”

  The Perseid meteors would have been finished; I should have to find if there were any comets that year. “What about his mother? Did she die on a full moon?”

  “She died in June 1912, but I do not know the precise day. This is in the book?”

  “To answer your question, I hope Damian had nothing to do with Testimony beyond the drawings. But if I can't trust my instincts, I have to use my head. And my head tells me that there are points I cannot ignore.”

  “Perhaps you had better list them.”

  “The moon, to begin with: It's in nearly all his paintings, two men near him died around the full moon, and now his wife. The house where he was born had a pond—I've seen a drawing. The author of Testimony had no father and was raised by women; as an adult he was badly injured, went into some sort of a coma, and came out with what he calls ‘the eternal stigmata of divinity.’ Damian was raised without a father, he was injured in the trenches, and the scars on his head might be considered Christ-like. The man in Testi
mony then went through a period of darkness before finding a ‘guide,’ who took his hand and showed him the way ahead. After Damian killed his fellow officer, he was sent to the mental hospital in Nantes; there he met André Breton, who introduced him to automatism. Damian's paintings and Testimony are both permeated with mythological elements, particularly the Norse god Woden. And, he has a self-portrait showing Holmes, Irene Adler, and himself with a sun, a moon, and a comet over their heads.

  “Damian explains his art by saying that he became sane by embracing madness, finding beauty in obscenity. The book is both mad and obscene.

  “Finally, there is the child's name. He and Yolanda named her Estelle, or star. Testimony makes much of stellar influence.”

  “Possibly. On the other hand, Estelle was also the name of my mother. Our mother.”

  I turned to stare at him. “Really? I never knew that. Would Damian have known?”

  “One should have to ask Sherlock.”

  And asking Sherlock would mean opening up this entire can of worms and setting it in front of him with a fork. Neither of us wished to do that without some kind of actual evidence.

  We had crossed the Serpentine, where the good cheer of the crowd at the tea house made a mockery of what we were saying.

  “What of evidence to the contrary?”

  He was not about to admit that my damning list of links between Damian and the book was in any way evidence, certainly not for any court of law. Nonetheless, damning it was.

  “First and foremost, it's nonsense. Intellectual trash. I can't think Damian's mind works that way.”

  “Unless,” Mycroft said, playing devil's advocate, “the nonsensical nature of the writing is a deliberate choice, aimed at catching the imagination of a certain audience.”

  “It's not just intellectual snobbery speaking when I say that it's deeply troubling, and frightening, to think that Holmes' son could produce such a thing.”

  “So say the families of any of the world's spectacular murderers.”

  “All right, what about this: Holmes has considered the possibility that Damian killed Yolanda, and rejected it.” Mycroft was silent, which constituted an agreement that this was a heavy weight on the side of innocence. “There is also the clothing Yolanda was wearing—an ugly frock, and shoes and silk stockings far too large for her. They were purchased by Millicent Dunworthy, under orders from someone, but there is no indication that she was making the purchase for Damian. In any case, he would have known the size of his wife's feet and the length of her legs.”