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

distance I could see the pink of their exposed shoulders, and I thought—the back of my neck well remembered—how sore they would be tonight, crying at the touch of bed-clothes on their inflamed skin.
    Which image returned me to my thoughts before sleep the night before: the photograph, and the child. Her name was Estelle, Damian had told us, after the bright stars on the night she was born. An odd little girl, troubled by everyday things another child would not even notice—she would exhaust herself with tears over the sight of a feral cat in the rain, or a scratch on the leather of her mother’s new shoes. But clever, reading already, chattering happily in three languages. She and her father were closer than might normally be the case, both because she was in and out of his studio all day, and because of Yolanda’s periodic absences.
    He wanted us to understand, Yolanda was not an irresponsible mother. The child was well looked after, and Yolanda never went away without ensuring Estelle’s care. It was simply that she believed a child did best when the parents were satisfied with their lives, when their sense of excitement and exploration was allowed full expression. Self-sacrifice twisted a mother and damaged the child, Yolanda believed.
    Or so Damian said.
    Personally, I thought he seemed too willing to forgive his wife both her present whims and her past influences. Without meeting the woman, of course, I could not know, but the bare bones of the story could easily paint a far less romantic picture, beginning with the blunt fact that a young woman whose friends were prostitutes was not apt to be an innocent herself. And, running my mind back over Damian’s tale, it occurred to me that he had taken great care to saynothing of what she had been doing between leaving the missionary school at eleven and being kicked onto the streets at sixteen.
    Without a doubt, he had been besotted with her—even his gesture in the snapshot testified to that—but this was a man whose life’s goal was to embrace light and dark, rationality and madness, obscenity and beauty.
    One had to wonder if the affection was as powerfully mutual. One might as easily posit another scenario: Desperate young woman meets wide-eyed foreigner with considerable talent and an air of breeding; young woman flirts with the young foreigner and engages his sympathy along with his passion: Young woman encourages the man’s art, nudges him into financial solvency, and finds herself pregnant by him. Marriage follows, and a British passport, and soon she is in London, free to live as she pleases, far from the brutal streets of Shanghai.
    Without meeting her, I could not know. But I wished Holmes had stuck around long enough for us to talk it over. I wanted to ask how he felt about having his son marry a former prostitute.
    I left the path at the old lighthouse, to sit overlooking the Channel, and took from my pockets the cheese roll, the bottle of lemonade, and the slim blue book I had found in the library between a monograph on systems of zip fastening and an enormous tome on poisonous plants of the Brazilian rain-forest.
    I ran my fingertips across the gold letters on the front cover: Practical Handbook of Bee Culture , the title read, and underneath: With some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen .
    I had read Holmes’ book—which he, only half in jest, referred to as his magnum opus —years before, but I remembered little of it, and then mostly that, for a self-proclaimed handbook, there seemed little instruction, and nothing to explain why its author had retired from the life of a consulting detective at the age of forty-two in order to raise bees on the Sussex Downs. Now, nine years and a lifetime after I’d first encountered it, I opened it anew and commenced to read my husband’s reflections on the bee. He opened, I saw, with a piece of Shakespeare, as I remembered, Henry V:
The honey-bees ,
creatures that by a rule in nature teach
the