Free The Language of Bees by Laurie R. King Page A

coffee.
    Holmes’ unplanned and unexplained absence was by no means sinister, or even suggestive. We were hardly the free-love Bohemians of Damian’s circle, but neither did we live in one another’s pockets, and often went our separate ways. If Holmes had gone off with his son in search of a wayward woman and child, he was not required to take me with him, or even to ask my permission.
    He might, however, have written me a note. Even Damian’s wife had done as much.
    I drank my coffee on the terrace as the world awoke, and ate a breakfast of toast and fresh peaches. When Lulu came, chatting and curious, I retreated upstairs, put on some old, soft clothing that had once belonged to my father, and began the lengthy task of disassembling my travelling trunks.
    I emptied one trunk, reducing it to piles for repair, storage, and new possessions. As I was sorting through the odds and ends of the past year—embroidered Kashmiri shawl from India, carved ivory chopstick from California, tiny figurine from Japan—I came upon an object brought from California in a transfer of authority, as it were: the mezuzah my mother had put on our front door there, which a friend had removed at her death and kept safe for my return.
    I looked up at a tap at the half-open door.
    “Good morning, Lulu,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
    “Mr Adler, ma’am. Is he coming back? It’s just that his room looks empty, and if he’s not going to be needing it—”
    “No, I think he’s left us for the time being.”
    “That’s all right, then, I thought he’d finished, and with Mrs Hudson coming home on the week-end and all I wanted—”
    “That’s fine, Lulu.”
    “Are you nearly finished in here, because I could help if you—”
    Lulu was an implacable force of nature; as Mrs Hudson had once remarked, if a person waited for Lulu to finish a sentence, the spiders would make webs on her hat. I abandoned the field of battle, and retreated downstairs to start in on the mail.
    By noon I had written an answer to a letter from my old Oxford friend Veronica, admiring the photograph she had sent me of her infant son, and responded to a list of questions from my San Francisco lawyers concerning my property there. Another letter from an Oxford colleague was pinned to a paper he was due to present on the Filioque Clause, for which he wanted my comments. I dutifully waded into his detailed exegesis of this Fourth Century addendum to the Nicene Creed, but found the technical minutiae of the Latin trying and eventually bogged down in his attempted unravelling of the convoluted phraseology of Cyril of Alexandria. I let the manuscript fall shut, scribbled him a note suggesting that he have it looked over by someone whose expertise lay in the Greek rather than the Hebrew Testament, and stood up: I needed air, and exercise.
    But first, I hunted down a book I’d thought of on Holmes’ shelves, then followed thumps and rustles to their source in the upstairs hallway. Lulu looked up as my presence at the head of the stairs caught her eye.
    “I’m going for a walk,” I told her. “Don’t bother to set out any luncheon, I shouldn’t think either of them will be back. And when you’ve finished here, why don’t you take off the rest of the day?”
    “Are you certain, ma’am? Because I really don’t mind—”
    “I’ll see you tomorrow, Lulu.”
    “Thank you, ma’am, and I’ll make sure to lock up when I go, like you and Mr Holmes—”
    I laced on a pair of lightweight boots I had not worn for the best part of a year, took a detour through the kitchen to raid the pantry for cheese, bread, and drink, and left the house.
    I turned south and west, following the old paths and crossing the new roads towards where the Cuckmere valley opened to the sea. The tide was sufficiently out to make the small river loop lazily around the wash; three children were building a castle in the patch of sand that collected on the opposite bank. Even from this