Free The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King

the apoplectic seizure my appearance had caused, we ate and we drank champagne, and Mrs. Hudson produced a birthday cake with candles, and they sang to me and gave me presents. From Mrs. Hudson came a pair of silver hair combs. Watson produced an intricate little portable writing set, complete with pad, pen, and inkwell, that folded into a tooled leather case. The small box Holmes put before me contained a simple, delicate brooch made of silver set with tiny pearls.

    “Holmes, it’s beautiful.”

    “It belonged to my grandmother. Can you open it?”

    I searched for a clasp, my vision and dexterity hindered somewhat by the amount of champagne I had drunk. Finally he stretched out his fingers and manipulated two of the pearls, and it popped open in my hand. Inside was a miniature portrait of a young woman, with light hair but a clear gaze I recognised immediately as that of Holmes.

    “Her brother, the French artist Vernet, painted it on her eigh-teenth birthday,” said Holmes. “Her hair was a colour very similar to yours, even when she was old.”

    The portrait wavered in front of my eyes and tears spilt down my cheeks.

    “Thank you. Thank you everybody,” I choked out and dissolved into maudlin sobs, and Mrs. Hudson had to put me to bed in the guest room.

    I woke once during the night, disorientated by the strange room and the remnants of alcohol in my bloodstream. I thought I had heard soft footsteps outside my door, but when I listened, there was only the quiet tick of the clock on the other side of the wall.

    returned to Oxford the following week-end, to a winter term that was much the same as the autumn weeks had been, only more so. My main passions were becoming theoretical mathe-matics and the complexities of Rabbinic Judaism, two topics that are dissimilar only on the surface. Again the dear old Bodleian opened its arms and pages to me, again I was dragged along in Ronnie Beacons-field’s wake (Twelfth Night this time, and also a campaign to improve the conditions for cart horses plying the streets of the city). Ratnakar Sanji was conceived in the term’s final weeks, to be born in May fol-lowing the spring holiday, and again I simply did without sleep, and occasionally meals. Again I emerged at the end of term, lethargic and spent.

    The lodgings house was looked after by a couple named Thomas, two old dears who retained their thick Oxfordshire country accents. Mr. Thomas helped me carry my things to the cab waiting on the street as I was leaving for home. He grunted at the weight of one case, laden with books, and I hurried to help him with it. He brushed off his hands, looked at the case critically, then at me.

    “Now, Miss, not to be forward, but I hope you’ll not be spending the whole of the holiday at your desk. You came here with roses in your cheeks, and there’s not a hint of them there now. Get yourself some fresh air, now, y’hear? Your brain’ll work better when you come back if you do.”

    I was surprised, as this was the longest speech I had ever heard him deliver, but assured him that I intended to spend many hours in the open air. At the train station I caught a glance of myself in a mirror and could see what he meant. I had not realised how drawn I was look-ing, and the purple smudges under my eyes troubled me.

    The next morning the alien sounds of silence and bird song woke me early. I pulled on my oldest work clothes and a pair of new boots, added heavy gloves and a woolly hat against the chill March morning, and went to find Patrick. Patrick Mason was a large, slow-moving, phlegmatic Sussex farmer of fifty-two with hands like something grown from the earth and a nose that changed direction three times. He had managed the farm since before my parents had married, had in fact run with my mother as a child (he three years older) through the fields he now tended, had, I think, been more than half in love with her all his life. Certainly he worshipped her as his Lady. When his