“THE GREAT MARVEL OF KING’S SERIES IS THAT SHE’S MANAGED TO PRESERVE THE INTEGRITY OF HOLMES’S CHARACTER AND YET SOMEHOW CONJURE UP A WOMAN ASTUTE, EDGY AND COMPELLING ENOUGH TO BE THE PARTNER OF HIS MIND AS WELL AS HIS HEART.”

—The Washington Post Book World

MORE PRAISE FOR LAURIE R. KING’S BESTSELLING MYSTERIES

THE GOD OF THE HIVE

“The God of the Hive is mesmerizing—another wonderful novel etched by the hand of a master storyteller. No reader who opens this one will be disappointed.”

—Michael Connelly

“The Mary Russell series is the most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today, and this is the best installment yet.”

—Lee Child

“Gloriously complex … utterly absorbing reading … puzzling and uplifting.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“Her storytelling is robust, confident, and lightly sprinkled with grace notes reflecting the author’s background in theology.”

—The Seattle Times

“The excitement and suspense build.… Throw in the Baker Street Irregulars, several well-concealed London bolt-holes, some Holmesian cunning, and a rousing finale, and you have all the ingredients of another winning entry in the Laurie King canon.”

—Mystery Scene

“Laurie R. King’s God of the Hive is not for those looking for just one more Sherlock Holmes story. This is a rich, complex portrait of the Holmes–Russell extended family, nuanced well beyond the simplicities of Sir Arthur’s tales. As usual, King delivers far more than a ‘mystery’: Indelible characters and telling observations of England after the Great War make this real Literature but without pretension.”

—Leslie S. Klinger

“All it takes is the very first page of the newest installment in Laurie R. King’s brilliant series for and you’re gone … disappearing into an artfully crafted, creative and craft world.”

—M. J. Rose

“The God of the Hive will astonish and delight even the most seasoned of Holmes’ devotees.”

—Katherine Neville

“From thrilling plot to lyrical prose, Laurie R. King’s The God of the Hive is a spectacular finale to the unforgettable The Language of Bees. With nearly a continent separating them in this tale, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes take on a foe so powerful he has nearly eliminated not only their family but them. Without a doubt, King is the master of Sherlockian authors.”

—Gayle Lynds

THE LANGUAGE OF BEES

“Absorbing … in Mary Russell’s wry, brilliant, and occasionally utterly deluded voice … Readers will want the rest right now … this is one of the best of a uniformly superlative series.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“There’s a thriving cottage industry in new Sherlock Holmes stories, but imaginative and subtle Laurie R. King is way ahead of the pack.… The result, as always, is absorbing.”

—The Seattle Times

MORE PRAISE FOR LAURIE R. KING’S

AWARD-WINNING MYSTERY SERIES

FEATURING MARY RUSSELL AND

SHERLOCK HOLMES

“A one-woman case for the defense of unauthorized literary sequels … intelligent, witty, complex and atmospheric … By making a woman possible who matches Holmes in brainpower, as well as in depressive ten dencies of mind and spare elegance of manner, King has made marriage possible for the most famous and, surely, one of the most aloof detectives of all time.… A spellbinding mystery … superb.”

—The Washington Post, for Justice Hall

“A wonderful blend of sheer wit and canny ratiocination, this is mystery at its most ingenious.”

—The Guardian, for The Art of Detection

“Mesmerizing … King does a wonderful job of probing the human psyche.… All of her novels are superb.”

—Daily American, for Locked Rooms

“Suspenseful … Laurie R. King takes on England and literature’s most famous detective with masterful aplomb. I loved it.”

—Elizabeth George, for A Letter of Mary

“Inspired … King puts us into each scene so quickly and completely that her narrative flow never falters.”

—Chicago Tribune, for O Jerusalem

“Imaginative … dazzling. Lush, colorful and utterly compelling, this is a superbly wrought novel of suspense that evokes its period with enviable panache. Four stars out of four stars.”

—Detroit Free Press, for The Game

“A fascinating and often moving account of a friendship so unusual and so compelling that one almost accepts it as being historically real.”

—The Denver Post, for The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

“[One of] the best American authors of traditional mystery fiction.”

—The New York Sun, for Locked Rooms

“King writes real novels. There’s nothing elementary about her attention to period details and the behavior of her well-developed characters.”

—Orlando Sentinel, for The Moor

“Even readers who resist on principle the notion of resurrecting a previous author’s creation should be won over by this delightful and creative pastiche.”

—The Wall Street Journal, for A Letter of Mary

Other Novels by

LAURIE R. KING

Mary Russell Novels

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

A Monstrous Regiment of Women

A Letter of Mary

The Moor

O Jerusalem

Justice Hall

The Game

Locked Rooms

The Language of Bees

The God of the Hive

And coming soon …

PIRATE KING

Kate Martinelli Novels

A Grave Talent

To Play the Fool

With Child

Night Work

The Art of Detection

And

A Darker Place

Folly

Keeping Watch

Califa’s Daughters (as Leigh Richards)

Touchstone

Beekeeping for Beginners is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

2011 Bantam Electronic Edition

Copyright © 2011 by Laurie R. King

Excerpt from Pirate King copyright © 2011 by Laurie R. King

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Pirate King. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

eISBN: 978-0-345-52993-0

Cover design: Marietta Anastassatos

Cover images: frog-traveller/Shutterstock (honeycomb); Peter Waters/Shutterstock (bee); Oxana Zuboff/Shutterstock (landscape)

www.bantamdell.com

v3.1_r1

To the new bee

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Excerpt from Pirate King

1

Any reasonable man may reach a point in his life where self-destruction becomes a door worthy of consideration. A point at which it seems that the least a walking anachronism can do for the world is to remove himself from cluttering the landscape.

It was a cool, sunny day in April, 1915. I had set out at dawn from the silent villa to which I had retreated out of the London fogs some years before, carrying with me both the impedimenta of my avocation, and the means to end my life.

Do not imagine that I was unaware of the multiple ironies: My beekeeping task required a clear, warm day, while the other was more suited to a bleak and inhospitable sky; my acts were concerned with the populous community of a hive, while my thoughts were at their most solitary; my rucksack carried both restoration, and death.

My mind was not entirely made up. However, a lifetime dedicated to the science of thought has taught me that focusing the mind’s eye on one matter encourages greater clarity of vision along the periphery of the mental gaze. I should proceed with my surface task, while permitting the deeper machinery of my mind to turn.

In any event, off I walked onto the Downs that morning with a trio of bottles. Two contained paint, red and blue: With these I might track a wild—or rather, feral—colony for one of my empty Langstroth hives, to restore the apiary to full strength. (In a curious parallel, the designer of those hives had himself felt the grim attraction of a voluntary end.) The third vial held a small amount of nearly clear liquid: It would transform me into a mere problem of disposal and a pang of sorrow for those few individuals who held me in affection.

That it might also bring a sense of rejoicing to those who wished the world ill was one of the main reasons I had not made use of the bottle before that day.

I was in my fifty-fifth year on this earth. For nearly forty of those years, my life had been my work. Even during the dozen years of my ostensible retirement to Sussex, I had remained active—indeed, eight months previous, a lengthy case had led to the destruction of a major spy-ring, my contribution to the nation’s security. Then during the autumn, while the guns of France drew into place and plans were made for what the deluded imagined would be a brief war, I managed to keep myself in a position of usefulness.

But in January, one of my little victories, and its accompanying minor injury, had come to the attention of the powers-that-be. Rather than gratitude, their response had been one of alarm, that a person of my eminence might have been snuffed out by a stray bullet—or worse, taken captive and used as a hostage. One might have thought I was the young Prince of Wales.

My head had been patted, my protests ignored, I had been sent home to Sussex. To my bees, my studies, and the services of my long-time housekeeper, Mrs Hudson. To a soul-grinding boredom and a pervading sense of uselessness.

All my life I have battled grey tedium. The challenges of mental work and physical exertion, the escape of music and the occasional dose of drugs have aided me, but always I could reassure myself that the ennui was temporary, that it would not be long before some criminal laid his scent before me, and I would be off.

Now my so-called friends had conspired against me, coddling me for my own good.

Fifty-four is not old.

I found tedium mentally trying, but physically agonising. As winter turned to spring, it became apparent that the world had finished with me; the only thing required of me was a decision to agree.

So: that absurdly sunshiny April day, with the throb of distant guns an ominous basso beneath the rhythm of waves against chalk cliffs, and a small, clear bottle in the old rucksack at my feet as my hands used the fine camel-hair brush to daub paint on individual honeybees, and my colour-assisted eyes tracked their subsequent flight, and my mind circled ever closer to a decision.

To be interrupted by slow footsteps, approaching across open ground.

After twelve years in Sussex, I was well accustomed to busybodies. Everyone in the county knew who I was, and although they took care to protect me from the intrusion of outsiders, they felt no compunction to offer the same protection from their own attentions. Stepping into the village shop for Mrs Hudson would bring a knowing wink and a heavy-handed jest about investigating the choices of soap powder. If I paused to examine an unfamiliar variety of shoe-print on the ground, a short time later I would look back to find a knot of villagers gazing down to see what had drawn my attention. One time, a casual remark to a passing farmer about the sky—that a storm would arrive by midnight—led to a near-panic throughout the Downland community, until the farmer’s wife had the sense to ring Mrs Hudson and ask if I’d actually intended to warn him that the Kaiser’s troops were lying offshore, waiting for dark.

Only the pub had proved safe ground: When an Englishman orders a pint, his privacy is sacrosanct.

Every so often, perhaps once a year, I would become aware of what is known as a “fan.” These were generally village lads with too much time on their hands and too many penny-dreadful novels on their shelves. Trial and error had shown that a terse lecture on personal rights coupled with a threat to speak to their fathers would send them on their way.

Now, it seemed, I had another one.

I turned to watch the owner of the slow footsteps approach. The lad was wearing an old and too-large suit, a jersey in place of shirt and waistcoat (it had been cold that morning when I—and, it appeared, he—had set out) and a badly knit scarf, with a cloth cap pulled down to his ears and shoes that, despite being new, pinched his toes. His nose was buried in a book, as if to demonstrate his noble oblivion to any world-famous detectives who might be hunkered on the ground.

But he had misjudged either his path or his speed, because he was aimed right at me. I waited, but when he neither shifted course nor launched into a performance of astonishment, I cleared my throat.

The astonishment that resulted was, I had to admit, no act. The child was furious—embarrassment has that effect on the young, I have noticed—both at my throat-clearing and at the involuntary epithet it had startled out of him.

He snatched up his dropped Virgil—the Georgics, as one might expect—and demanded, “What on earth are you doing? Lying in wait for someone?”

It being, I presumed, the eternal task of a detective, to be lying in wait at all times and in all places.

“I should think that I can hardly be accused of ‘lying’ anywhere, as I am seated openly, on an uncluttered hillside, minding my own business. When, that is, I am not required to fend off those who propose to crush me underfoot.” And I turned back to my task of bee-watching, unaware that my mild (if condescending) remark had triggered off an inexplicable response of fury in the young person.

He planted those ill-fitting shoes into the turf and snarled, “You have not answered my question, sir.”

I sighed to myself. Be gone, child, I thought; I’m trying to commit a nice dignified suicide. “What am I doing here, do you mean?”

“Exactly.”

“I am watching bees. Now, go away.”

To my relief, I heard him move off—then ten feet away he dropped to his heels to perform the gaggle-of-villagers-solemnly-examining-the-ground routine. Demonstrating that he, too, could be a detective.

I tipped back my head, closed my eyes, clenched my jaws, and stifled the urge to leap to my feet and physically drive away this boorish child with my rucksack. Patience, Holmes; you’ve out-waited better men than this displaced London adolescent in ill-fitting garments.

And so it proved: Within three or four minutes, the subtle clues and demands of surveillance proved too much for my “fan,” and he got to his feet and walked away.

The footsteps retreated. In a moment, I heard the patter of startled sheep moving across the spring turf. The rumours of the sea a mile away and the cannon 200 miles farther off crept back into consciousness, counterpoint to the soothing hum of working bees. I looked down at the rucksack. Should I wait, until dark perhaps, lest some busybody rescue me? Or would it be better—

But the sound of returning footsteps intruded. My hand tightened on the canvas straps: I could just imagine the newspaper article:

Last known act of Sherlock Holmes

In a vicious attack on a visiting lad, whom he beat

about the head and shoulders with a rucksack, the

retired detective—

“I’d say the blue spots are a better bet,” came a voice, “if you’re trying for another hive. The ones you’ve only marked with red are probably from Mr Warner’s orchard. The blue spots are further away, but they’re almost sure to be wild ones.”

As this speech unfolded from the child’s lips, I turned to look at him. More than that, I rose, that I might see more closely the expression on this unlikely intruder’s face. Hairless cheeks confirmed his youth; blue eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles displayed alarm, but no triumph; the voice was more complex than I had noticed at first, a mixture of London and America (both coasts). The child even looked vaguely intelligent—though that last was probably an effect of the spectacles. One could only wonder who had wound him up and set him upon me.

“What did you say?”

“I beg your pardon, are you hard of hearing? I said, if you want a new hive of bees, you should follow the blue spots, because the reds are sure to be Tom Warner’s.”

“I am not hard of hearing, although I am short of credulity. How do you know what I am after?”

“Is it not obvious?” I came perilously close to catching up the rucksack and pummelling him, at this mockery of my speech patterns—rather, of the speech patterns that Watson and Doyle between them inflicted upon me: In truth, I rarely descend to open rudeness. However, the lad was still speaking: “I see paint on your pocket-handkerchief, and traces on your fingers where you wiped it away. The only reason for marking bees that I can think of is to follow them to their hive.” He went on, his words delineating an actual thought process: that I marked bees to follow them; I wished to follow them either to harvest the honey or to claim their queen; since it was not harvest time but it had been a cold winter in which wildlife suffered, I must be in need of another colony. Simple, clean, and utterly unexpected logic.

Far too sophisticated for an adolescent boy. Someone had put him up to it.

Very well: I cranked the gun of open rudeness into position and let fly. “My God,” I drawled. “It can think.”

A jolt of startlingly adult fury brought the child’s smooth chin up, made the blue eyes blaze behind the scratched glass. “My God, ‘it’ can recognise another human being when ‘it’ is hit over the head with one. And to think that I was raised to believe that old people had decent manners.”

It was clever. I was almost tempted to respond—on another day, I might have lingered to trace this mild puzzle to its source. But if an enemy had sent the lad, it was an enemy who would soon be beyond my personal concern; if a newspaperman (assuming there was a difference between the two categories), then he would soon have a new and unexpected story for his front page.

I bent to retrieve my rucksack, hearing the bottles trill their delicate siren song as I raised them up. The third bottle would have to come into play somewhere else. Which was rather a pity: This would have been a pleasant site for a last view of the world.

“Young man,” I began tiredly—

But I was to get no further. Had the child pulled out a revolver and fired it at me, he could have silenced me no more effectively.

“Young man?” he raged. “Young man! It’s a damned good thing you did retire, if that’s all that remains of the great detective’s mind!” And with that he snatched off his oversized cap. A pair of long blonde plaits slithered down the woollen garments, turning him into a her.

Thus, my first meeting with Mary Russell.

2

“I tell you, Watson, I haven’t laughed like that in months. Years, even.”

The doctor’s hand, wrapped around the glass, remained suspended in the air for quite a long time before it slowly lowered to the arm of his chair. “A girl?”

Sherlock Holmes gave a wry shake to his head. “I will freely admit, it surprised me no end. I’m getting old and blind and feeble, Watson.”

“Well, you sound remarkably cheerful at the prospect.”

“I do, don’t I? Ah, old friend, you of all people know how I chafe for lack of a puzzle in life. And here’s one, ready made.”

“She walked up, dressed in her father’s old suit, trod on you, insulted you, and made you feel an idiot. And you laugh?”

“Remarkable, isn’t it?”

The doctor carefully moved his glass to the table, and leaned forward. “Er, Holmes. I know you … That is, we’ve never discussed … That is to say …”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Watson, don’t be absurd. I may be old and foolish, but I’m not an old fool. The child has brains, Watson. Do you know how rare that is?”

“So I’ve been made to understand,” the doctor replied, a touch grimly.

Holmes went blithely on. “She’s an orphan, under the care—if one can describe it as such—of an aunt, although the house and land belong to Russell, not to the aunt.”

“Sussex is far from the centre of things, for a young girl.”

“Not altogether a bad thing, considering the vulnerability of London.”

“You’re not suggesting that the Kaiser will send troops up the Thames?”

“He doesn’t have to, with zeppelins at his command.”

“Holmes, a schoolboy with a sling could bring down a zeppelin! Southend was caught unprepared; it won’t happen again. It’s no reason to keep a bright young girl from London.”

“May I remind you that I warned the government about U-boats years ago? And the Lusitania won’t be the last civilian vessel they go after.”

The name was sobering. Dr Watson reflected sadly, “I sailed on her once, you know?”

“Yes.” Both men pondered the awful fate of the ship, and twelve hundred of its passengers, the previous week. Holmes stirred.

“Still, it isn’t London that interests the child. She has her eye on university.”

“Girls do that, these days,” Watson reflected. It kept the older lecturers occupied, until the boys came back from war.

“Oxford. Which only gives me two or three years to work with her.”

“What do you mean, ‘work with her’?”

“Before she gets sucked into the grind of pointless examinations and useless tutorials. For some peculiar reason, she’s set on theology. Can you imagine?”

“No. But Holmes, what do you mean—”

“By working with her. Yes, I heard you. You’d be amazed at how quickly she picks things up. Her mother’s doing, I’d imagine—the mother was a rabbi’s daughter, and she applied the same rigorous pedagogy to the child. Discipline and creativity are seldom found in the same mind, Watson.”

“Am I to understand that you are teaching this child, Holmes?”

“Of course, Watson. What did you imagine I’d do with her?”

The doctor shot the remainder of his drink down his throat, and got up to refill his glass. The tray of drinks was under the window, and he paused for a moment to look out across the Downs, going green with the spring. Lovely place, this. Though he still wished Holmes hadn’t moved so far away.

When he returned with the decanter, Watson was surprised to find his companion’s glass barely touched. After a moment’s thought, he bent to add a splash, regardless—shooting a casual glance at the state of his old friend’s eyes as he did so.

Holmes was not deceived. “No, Watson,” he said, “any elevation of spirits you may perceive does not have a chemical source. Not today.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Watson remarked. Glad, but puzzled.

The doctor tossed a small log onto the low-burning fire, then settled back in his chair. “So, you are teaching this stray girl. I can’t imagine what subjects a budding theologian would find your tutorials helpful for.”

“I told you, I’m getting my instruction in before she falls under the sway of the dons. Chemistry first, naturally.”

“Oh, naturally.”

“It’s useful both in analysis and when it comes to reactions. There’s nothing quite so handy as a nice controlled explosive device.”

“How the devil would explosives be of use to a theologian, Holmes?”

“Watson, what on earth is wrong with you? I’m not interested in training a theologian. I intend to make a detective out of her.”

The doctor’s jerk came near to upending the glass. “A detective? Holmes, are you telling me that after all these years, you’ve taken an apprentice? A girl apprentice?”

“Extraordinary, isn’t it?”

But Dr Watson was beyond answering.

3

At dusk, Holmes went to check on his hives, leaving his glass nearly untouched. Dr Watson stepped into the kitchen, grateful that tonight Mrs Hudson had no assistant.

“Lovely bit of honey cake that was, Mrs Hudson.”

“I’ve made one for you to take with you, Doctor. It’s getting to the time of year that we’ll have so much honey, I could bathe in the stuff.”

The image made him blink. “Er, Holmes tells me he’s taken an apprentice. A girl.”

“Can you believe it? A sweet thing, gawky and bright as a penny, though she could do something about the way she dresses. I think she wears her father’s old suits.”

The War was not a year old, but shortages had begun to result in eccentric forms of dress. However, a girl in men’s clothing was, he agreed, odder than most.

“Is she … I mean to say, do you think her intentions …”

“Dr Watson, what a question! I don’t know that she has any intentions, other than helping Mr Holmes. In the month he’s known her, he’s cheered considerably. You’ve no doubt seen that for yourself.”

“He’s put on a few pounds, and he is hardly drinking. Or using other, er …”

“Quite.”

“So, the child is no problem? He says she’s an orphan. A wealthy one.”

“A motorcar accident, as I understand it. In California. There may have been a brother, too—she doesn’t care to talk about it.”

“She’s American?”

“Her father was. Her mother was a Londoner. It’s the mother’s sister that Mary is living with now. Unfortunately.”

“Why? What’s wrong with the woman?”

“I’ll not repeat village gossip, Dr Watson. Leave it to say that Mary’s aunt hasn’t made a lot of friends for herself here. Now, I hope you’ll be stopping with us a few days?”

“Alas, I sail for America tomorrow,” he began, but Mrs Hudson nearly dropped the pan she was carrying.

“Sail! Oh, no, Doctor, you can’t sail! They’re saying the zeppelins will come along the coast next—and even if you get away safely, there’s the U-boats!”

“Oh, dear, dear Mrs Hudson, I shouldn’t have told you. Please don’t worry, the docks are being guarded now, our ’planes are up, any Hun zeppelin will be shot down the moment it sticks its head over the Channel. And I’ve been assured that the Navy is assembling a convoy for the crossing, with war-ships to guard us.”

“But those U-boats, they’re going after passenger ships now! And a person doesn’t even know they’re there until they shoot their torpedoes!”

“That’s precisely why I have to go now. The sinking of the Lusitania has shocked America to her core. I had already been asked to go over to help raise support for the War effort, but this will make my job that much easier. And if I sail now, I’ll appear such a brave fellow.”

“Dr Watson, don’t make jokes about it!”

“I’m sorry, Mrs Hudson, I promised the Prime Minister. I even had a letter from the King.”

At that, the housekeeper admitted defeat. She shook her head, and turned mournfully back to her stove. She had no faith in her final card, but played it anyway. “He’ll miss you.”

“I can’t say that I’ve been much of a friend this winter. I’ve only managed to get down here a handful of times, and my visits never seem to distract him much.”

“He enjoys seeing you,” Mrs Hudson protested loyally, her voice lacking utter conviction.

“He’d enjoy me more if I brought him a nice murder to solve,” Watson replied. “Still, he seems to have found a hobby, just in time for my absence. Perhaps I shall have an opportunity to meet this mysterious young lady before I go.”

But Dr Watson left the house the following afternoon without having laid eyes upon her. In the end, the detective’s apprentice did not appear until several mornings later.

Bearing a split lip and amateurish repairs to her spectacles.

4

It was the third week of May, and the sun was out after a too-long stretch of cold and rain. Holmes was in the garden when Russell arrived, his beekeeper’s hat tucked under his arm, smoke dribbling from a small spouted vessel on the ground nearby. When he heard her footsteps, he knocked his pipe against the nearby tree-trunk and dropped it into his pocket, then turned to hold out the netted hat, betraying only the briefest hesitation at the sight of her fading bruises. She took the object, examining it with curiosity.

“Put it on,” he said. “Tuck it under your collar, tuck your trouser legs into your stockings, and get a pair of gloves from the shed.”

“What about you?” she protested.

“The bees know me, but you haven’t been properly introduced. One or two stings are nothing to worry about, but too many can stop a heart. Even a young one.”

She dressed as he’d told her, and stood back as he picked up the smoker.

“The Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth, an American, was the first truly scientific beekeeper. He combined the theory of ‘bee space’—three-eighths of an inch; any other gap, the bees will fill—with the accessibility of moveable frames. His first axiom was, ‘Bees gorged with honey are not inclined to sting.’ Such as these.”

He paused, expectantly; she inched slightly nearer.

“I, however, take as my own First Rule of Beekeeping the dictum: Remain calm. Smoke makes bees drowsy, plentiful food makes them content, but even if they are hungry and even if one doesn’t have a smoker, they will not turn aggressive if one’s movements are slow and deliberate. If you appear calm, they won’t see you as the source of blame for their roof being ripped off, their lives threatened. If you’re calm, you’re invisible.”

During the speech, he had finished with the smoker and lifted off the top of the hive. Russell was torn by conflicting impulses: to step forward, or to move well away.

“May I talk?” she asked.

“Yes, if your voice remains even.”

“Does the smoke harm them?”

“Just makes them slow and stupid.”

“They’re insects—they must be fairly stupid to begin with.”

“Individually perhaps, but taken as a communal mind, they are quite efficient.”

“Why are you opening up the hive?”

“I am re-queening it. The most vigorous hive is one with a young queen. This one has been laying for thirteen months now. It’s time for her to go.”

The top layers of the hive were on the ground. He now began gently to prise up the frames, setting them aside, one at a time. And as he’d predicted, although the bees seemed puzzled as raw sunlight poured into their dark, warm, snug quarters, they did not appear outraged, or even much taken aback. The beekeeper’s naked fingers moved among the blanket of insects; not one of the creatures protested.

“How long do queens live?”

“As long as two, even three years.”

“So wouldn’t this one be in her prime?”

“Yes.”

“But, you’re going to take a queen who’s happily doing her job, and just … kill her?”

“Rule Two of beekeeping: One must be cruel, only to be kind.”

“Hamlet. Act three. You must be their scourge and minister?”

“Precisely. Ah, here she is.”

As Russell had seen in the glass-sided observation hive built into the corner of Holmes’ sitting room, the queen stood out, by her size and by her attendants’ attitude. It was an exercise in observation: Wherever Regina Apis moved, the others formed a circle around her, drawing the eye in.

Drawing, too, the beekeeper’s hand. Cruel steel forceps closed on her, snatching her from her tens of thousands of children; in an instant, the hive was bereft.

But before they could react, Holmes slid a hand into his pocket and drew out a tiny wire cage. He held it up to his apprentice. “If I were simply to drop this foreigner inside, the others would attack her. However, their memories are short. There is a small, edible plug keeping the new queen in her cage. In the day or two it takes them to chew through it, they will grow accustomed to her presence. When they do free her, it will be to welcome her, not to rip her apart.”

“The queen is dead, long live the queen.”

“Precisely.” He hooked the queen cage inside, then slid the missing frames into place, pushing their tops snugly together.

“Do you have to do this to every hive?”

“Most often the workers perform regicide on their own, either directly or by raising new queens to challenge the old one. On the other hand, it is sometimes necessary to replace the queen for other reasons. That hive there?” He gestured with his chin. “A month ago, I could not permit you this close. Their new queen is considerably less aggressive.”

“Bees have personalities?” Russell asked in surprise.

“They do, and the colonies reflect their queen.”

With the last frame in place but still uncovered, he squatted next to the box, watching his charges. Then he looked up. “Would you like to feel them?”

“What, put my hand in there?”

By way of demonstration, he inserted his fingers—gently, calmly—into the mass of bees flowing over and around the wooden strips. In seconds, his hand was engulfed by furry bodies. Russell swallowed, then squatted down beside him, pulling off a glove.

“Wait.” He raised his arm, permitting the bees to pour back down into the hive. He gently shook off the stragglers, then reached for her hand with both of his, rubbing her fingers and palms briskly between his long, dry, callused hands until his scent was hers. When he was satisfied, he extended his left hand, palm down, and had her lay her hand atop it. Then he slowly lowered the paired hands to the hive.

In a moment, the tiny prickle of insect feet explored the side of the apprentice’s hand, moving up and across its back. She barely noticed when Holmes eased his arm away, leaving her hand engulfed in a warm, pulsating, fragrant glove of bees.

He studied the expression on her bruised face. “Rule Three of beekeeping,” he remarked in a quiet voice. “Never cease to feel wonder.”

5

One of the things Mary Russell liked about the man Holmes was his disinclination to fuss.

He was a most demanding friend, no question about that. Even their informal tutorials tended to veer into the realm of examinations—although she was never certain if he was testing her knowledge, or something more complex. Yesterday, for example, when he had her thrust a hand into the beehive: Was that simply a lesson in beekeeping? Or a test of her courage? Her dexterity? Her willingness to obey?

The entire bee episode had been enlightening, and disturbing. Holmes had revealed an unexpected pocket of softness—Never cease to feel wonder—atop the ruthlessness of regicide. She supposed being cruel to be kind was inevitable in the realm of animal husbandry, like culling the rooster-chicks or slaughtering the meat lambs: She lived on a farm, but she would never make a farmer. Still, the image of the steel forceps snapping down on that glossy full body lingered in her mind. And although she told herself she was being melodramatic, the act brought to mind those of his old cases where he’d demonstrated a god-like willingness to act as judge and jury, and even (by failing to interfere) executioner.

She looked down at the current issue of the Strand she had brought out here to read, containing the somewhat disappointing final episode of the story Dr Watson had called The Valley of Fear. It left a person with more questions than answers—but asking Holmes about them would be pointless, as he invariably claimed that the chronicler had rewritten them to his own purposes. Someday, she would meet the good Doctor, and ask him directly.

Somehow, she suspected that Dr Watson would be something of a fusser, filling the air with protests and queries. Unlike Holmes, who, once he’d presented his test or question, and once it had been answered to his satisfaction, let it be.

Of course, Sherlock Holmes had no need to fill the air with questions. The man could construct a complex theory out of minuscule scraps of data—as Dr Watson had put it in an early story, “by momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man’s inmost thoughts.” She’d known this since their first afternoon together, when he read her entire uncomfortable situation out of one brief phrase and a twist of the mouth: large inheritance; greedy aunt. His subsequent delicate (for Holmes) enquiry—that he tended towards a dim view of human nature, but had she written a will?—had required her to reassure him that, yes, she had a will, and no, her aunt would not benefit enormously from her niece’s death.

That settled, they had gone on to other matters.

Then, five weeks later—last Tuesday—she learned that she had not, in fact, spoken the complete truth. Her lie had been inadvertent, but because she thought it was the truth, it had satisfied him. He might never have had reason to readdress the question of wills and problematical relations.

Until she greeted him with an injured face.

To her gratitude, he took in the facial bruising with one quick twitch of an eyebrow—no exclamations or questions, just that raking glance and a return to the hive of bees.

But she was not surprised when later that afternoon, in a minor diversion to the flow of conversation, he’d brought the topic back around to dangerous relatives.

She knew him well enough already to anticipate the question, and to give him what he wanted without argument.

“When I asked you last month—” he began.

“The papers went down on the Lusitania.” She adjusted the small Bunsen flame and held the beaker over it. “You were about to ask about the will, is that right?”

“By way of confirmation.”

“Well, I signed all kinds of papers in February, including a will, and I thought that was that. But some of my father’s properties were in France and America, and it turns out that with the War, paperwork takes longer than the solicitor anticipated. He wrote me last week to say that some of the key documents were on the Lusitania. Which means that my will isn’t quite as complete as I’d thought. However, I have an appointment in two weeks—June first—to sign another set.”

“Good,” he said, and that was the end of that.

Mrs Hudson, on the other hand, did make a fuss over the split lip, but then, that was Mrs Hudson.

Now the sun was going down. With a sigh, Russell rolled the magazine into her pocket and trudged across the darkening Downs towards home. At least her cousin would not be there. Her aunt’s only son did not visit often. He was at university, up in Edinburgh, and found the long trek to the south coast beyond tedious. He was a bully and a bore, and it was no surprise at all that after eight months of war, he had not enlisted.

She would, in an instant, if women were allowed to fight. Back in February, she had tried to enlist in the VAD, having her eye on an ambulance at the Front, but she was turned down as being too young. In the weeks that followed, she’d been compiling a false identity in order to apply again—but then she met Sherlock Holmes. And it didn’t take long to realise that if she were to disappear into VAD training, he would find her, and she would be dragged back to Sussex in ignominy. Still, working with him, it no longer seemed so vitally important to get to France.

Her cousin displayed no such urge to serve anything or anyone outside his own interests.

It had been a mistake, to voice the thought aloud when he showed up unexpectedly Saturday morning. She had managed to retain her self-respect (if not her sense of inviolability) by neither backing down nor giving him the usual subservience; however, it was just as well that her aunt had intervened. She’d been eyeing the fireplace poker, and it probably wouldn’t be easy for a girl of fifteen to explain away a battered cousin or claim self-defence, not with the victim’s mother there to call it murder.

But her aunt had intervened—by “accidentally” treading on the spectacles where they lay on the hearth-rug—and her cousin had returned to Scotland, leaving behind him an atmosphere of even greater tension than before.

Impossible to explain any of this to Holmes or Mrs Hudson. Instead, Russell wired together her glasses, dressed in long sleeves for a few days, and comforted herself with the knowledge that in two weeks, neither relative would be able to lay hands on the inheritance.

6

“Mrs Hudson? Mrs Hudson! Where has the woman—”

“I’m just here, Mr Holmes, no need to bellow.”

“Ah, there you are. Have you had word from Russell? She said she’d be here this morning. This is Saturday, is it not? The experiment is only half finished.”

“She probably decided she couldn’t face the stench.”

“What was that? Don’t mutter, Mrs Hudson.”

“I said,” the housekeeper called from the bottom of the stairs, “no, I haven’t heard from her.”

“Very well, if she arrives, she will find me in the laboratory.”

Half an hour later, the telephone sounded. Mrs Hudson answered, and after a brief conversation, walked up the stairs to rap on the door. A stifled oath and a tinkle of broken glass joined the sulphurous miasma that trickled into the hallway. She made haste to speak at the closed door.

“That was Mary’s aunt ringing, to say the child’s under the weather and won’t be coming today.”

The housekeeper made it as far as the half-landing when the door came open. Yellow smoke billowed outward. “Don’t tell me she’s fallen yet again? We must buy the girl some proper footwear.”

“I gather she’s ill.”

“Ill? Russell?”

“Perhaps it was the idea of breathing the air in your laboratory.”

“Pardon? Mrs Hudson, you mustn’t mutter like that.”

This time, the housekeeper did not reply: She had spoken quite loudly enough for him to hear.

As she anticipated, her silence brought him out to the top of the stairs. But instead of a demand that she repeat her statement, or a query as to the symptoms of his apprentice, he frowned, and asked one of his favourite sort of questions, enigmatic and to all appearances trivial.

“Tell me, Mrs Hudson, would you consider naiveté a flaw in intelligence, or merely in experience?”

“Mr Holmes! Naiveté is in no sense a flaw. Innocence is a charming and fragile virtue. We should all be much better off if we could preserve it through life’s tribulations.”

His grey eyes looked at her without seeing her: a familiar sensation. “Hmm. Fragile. Yes.”

“Why do you ask? Are you calling me naïve? Or is this about Mary?”

But her employer merely retreated into the reeking laboratory.

Mrs Hudson shook her head and went to prop open the front door, in hopes the additional ventilation might save the upstairs wallpaper.

When Mary returned the next day, neither of the people in the house thought she looked at all well.

Mrs Hudson’s response was to cook for her.

Holmes’ interest took a more circuitous route.

7

The May night was quiet. Sherlock Holmes sat nursing his pipe, long legs stretched out on the ground, surrounded by his hives. Two hundred and nine-nine days since War was declared. Fifty-four days since Mary Russell had come across him on the hillside, watching bees and considering suicide.

It would be difficult to say whether War or Russell was having the greater impact on his life.

The air was warm and still—the poor wretches huddled in the trenches seemed to be having a Sunday night’s respite from the guns. The hives gave out a pleasing hum as the night watch laboured to cool their charges within. The new queen Russell had helped him install had made a successful maiden flight and looked to prove herself fruitful; he’d check the frames in a day or two, to see how soon he might think about a harvest.

The colony never showed the slightest mistrust of their replacement queen, delivered by his own Almighty Hand. A beekeeper’s success often rested on the imperceptibility of his meddling.

Perhaps that should be Rule Four of beekeeping.

People wondered why the Great Detective kept bees. The question should have been, why didn’t everyone keep bees? Endlessly entertaining, intellectually satisfying, beekeeping was philosophy made manifest, theories about behaviour (human and bee) given concrete shape. The study of bees—the triumvirate of queen, drone, and worker—was a study of mankind. It provided a continuation of his life’s work of keeping the country running smoothly, free of crime and disruption.

Both tasks required an attention to detail, a willingness to get one’s hands dirty—and an acceptance that sometimes one got hurt.

He put away his pipe. As he climbed to his feet, brushing off his trousers, the odd thought occurred to him that Maurice Maeterlinck, that greatest of literary beekeepers, had also met a youthful muse in his later years.

One might assume, however, that Maeterlinck did not then set off across his French countryside at midnight carrying a burglar’s bag, and dressed in black clothing.

8

I knew where my apprentice lived, of course. By then I knew a great deal about young Miss Russell, and not merely the workings of her singular, if untutored, mind. I knew of her family, the events surrounding their death, the situation in which they left her, including the financial. I knew who was living in her house and in the others on her estate. I knew her house would contain one canary and two human beings—they had no dog, the servants slept elsewhere, and the cats lived in the barn. I knew that both Russell and her aunt slept up on the first floor.

What I did not know, however, made for key gaps in my plans. I did not know if my one-sided view of the aunt was a true picture. I did not know what other elements might contribute to Russell’s situation. I did not know—not with absolute certainty—how Russell would react were she to learn that I had been here.

Nonetheless, when confronted by ignorance, I generally decide that if I cannot have knowledge, wisdom shall have to suffice.

And I was wise enough to know that Russell must not know of my meddling. I was also wise enough to suspect that for a healthy (and, more to the point, wealthy) young girl, ill-fitting shoes or no, to have a fall, a brawl, and an illness within the space of six weeks took some looking into.

I paused inside the kitchen, senses open.

The air smelt of dull cooking, and even by the moonlight spilling in the windows, I could see the shortcomings of the cleaning staff. Money had been spent here, and recently—the gas-burning cooker was an enamel showpiece that provided the only gleaming surface in the room. I did not for a moment imagine that the aunt’s pocket-book had paid for it.

Three doors opened off the kitchen: the one behind me, with a mud-room and two time-bowed stone steps to the yard beyond; one directly ahead, on swinging hinges; and a narrow one to the right.

I stepped to the right, into the pantry, eased the door shut, and turned on my handtorch.

The door was sufficiently snug that a kitchen towel along the bottom would block most of the light. I pushed one into place, then thumbed the electrical light switch to ON.

By and large, criminals are pulled by conflicting impulses: the wish to keep the tools of their crime close at hand, and the need to push them far enough away that they might readily be denied. A woman poisoning her rich niece would be torn between carrying the poison in her pocket at all times, and hiding it at the farthest reaches of the estate.

However, any relative of Russell’s was unlikely to be stupid. She would consider a hiding place with care, seeking a place where others did not venture. And although it was true that Russell was no cook, and thus nearly any location within the kitchen would be safe from her, a rational knowledge of this would not win out over an emotional need for concealment.

To say nothing of the servants, who were apt to burrow anywhere.

Except … inside an object that evoked the worst parts of any housemaid’s employment.

At the back of a collection of cleaning supplies stood a tin of stove blacking. It gave me a moment’s hope—one might have expected the blacking to be discarded once an enamelled cook-stove was installed—but prising open the top revealed nothing but a near-empty tin of blacking, an overlooked survivor of the former inhabitants.

I went on with my search. A methodical hour later, I admitted that I had been wrong about where the aunt had stored her poison. Either that, or I had been wrong about poison in the first place.

Perhaps girls of fifteen habitually injured themselves, and took ill? Russell appeared to be growing in fits and starts—hence her new but ill-fitting shoes—and no doubt a changing physique brought its own problems. Still, I had not noticed any particular clumsiness in her, and she had always seemed robust of health.

Or perhaps being thin myself, and hearty, I attributed that combination to the child?

I admit, apart from my Irregulars—the street boys I’d hired as eyes on the streets of London—I’d never had much to do with young people.

Over the next hour, I discovered the aunt’s stash of bank notes and a handful of valuable jewellery beneath a floor-board, a packet of Veronal sleeping powder in a downstairs medicine cabinet, and indications that a letter had recently been burnt in the sitting-room fireplace—which would have been of little interest, except it had then been battered into powder with the fireplace poker.

I learnt that Russell’s mother had an eclectic and sophisticated taste in reading material, although I suspected that some of the books had belonged to the father.

I found that the comfortable chair before the fire had been claimed by the aunt, and that Russell spent little time in the sitting room, or indeed in the entire downstairs. The aunt’s choice of reading matter was firmly in the realm of ladies’ fiction; her needlework was clumsy and suggested a problem distinguishing green from red; the new recording disks beside the expensive gramophone reflected music-hall taste.

The paintings on the walls were a similar mix of old and beautiful interspersed with new and jarring.

Also, the aunt snored.

After an hour in the ground floor, I had found nothing suggesting attempted murder. The stairs I eyed with suspicion: They were old enough that creaks would come with the slightest pressure, and I am not a small man.

The house had two full stories and a partial attic, which suggested that this was the flight of stairs Russell had fallen down, eleven days after we’d met. “Three steps from the bottom,” she’d told me ruefully as I’d strapped her wrist, that we might finish Friday’s experiment. At the time, I’d thought little of it—after all, a fall of three steps was hardly a life-threatening event, not for a young girl.

However, two accidents and a sudden illness were thought-provoking. That all three had struck on week-ends was beyond coincidence.

I lowered my knees with care onto the bottom step (resulting in, as I’d anticipated, a faint creak from the wood) and took out my high-powered lens and the torch. I found a faint line at the base of one of the third-step balusters. Which signified little in itself—except that there was a similar line in the haze of unwiped polish on the brass stair-rail near the wall. A faint line, and an infinitesimal wisp of silken floss, that a less experienced eye would have dismissed as a hair.

Even if Russell thought to look at the time, it might have appeared that a length of the aunt’s embroidery floss had accidentally become wrapped across the stairs.

Had she thought to look. But I suspected that the child, humiliated by a display of adolescent clumsiness before her trim, generally disapproving, and self-contained aunt—plus, if my growing hypothesis was correct, the woman’s bully of a son—had not thought to investigate. Or if she had, it was after she returned home, when the thread had been cleared away.

I was tempted to risk the stairs, to gain a closer look at this so-called guardian of my new—my only—my utterly unanticipated—young apprentice. But that would risk coming face to face with the young woman herself. And that, I feared, might be a form of humiliation she would find impossible to forgive.

I paused in the sitting room to study the framed photographs, then left the house for good.

The rest of the night I spent before the fire with a pipe and a tin of shag tobacco.

9

It was raining the next morning when the London train left Eastbourne.

I arrived at the station early, not having dared enquire which train Russell intended to take—clients unaware they were clients always made for a tricky investigation, but with one as clever as Miss Mary Russell, the situation promised to be truly challenging. Her spectacles might be cracked, and their frames bent, but her vision remained startlingly acute.

Fortunately, I have friends in many odd corners of the world, including Eastbourne. I had been in place a little over three hours when a motor pulled up and out she climbed. She gave a small wave to the man at the wheel—her farm manager, Patrick—and went straight inside, carrying a small valise. I peeled myself off the wall of the tiny storage closet of the office across the street and hobbled on half-asleep feet down the stairs and onto the street.

With her tight budget, and this trip being a mere two and a half hours (assuming the schedule was not interrupted by troop movement), I did not think she would indulge in a seventeen shilling First Class return. Nine shillings and fourpence would be quite enough of a drain on her purse.

Thus, I bought a ticket for First. I had taken care with my disguise that morning, and my last act before stepping onto the street had been the insertion of the scleral lenses over my eyes, to change their colour from clear grey to muddy brown. The lenses had the unfortunate side-effect of making one’s tear ducts water ferociously, and would have me in agony by the time we reached Victoria. Still, as a finishing touch, they were far more effective than spectacles. And since our lessons had yet to cover surveillance techniques, chances were good that Russell had never heard of such things.

I pulled the raccoon-skin collar of the alpaca overcoat around my chin, settled my fedora at a rakish angle, and swanned my way towards First Class. Even if Russell had been looking directly out her window at me, I did not believe she had the experience to see through that particular costume and the way I moved inside of it.

It was actually rather amusing: Sherlock Holmes forced to muster all his skills to outwit a child of fifteen years.

The train left on time, then alternated its normal speed with odd pauses in empty countryside, coming to London less than an hour late. I took care to lose a glove amongst my draperies, allowing the other passengers to leave the carriage. Once Russell’s head had gone past the windows, I put on the glove, tugged up the wretched collar, and stepped down to the platform.

She did not look back once.

Nor, in this city of soldiers, did she take any note of the young man in uniform who leant against the outer wall. He had one arm in a sling; the other held a cigarette.

I stopped beside him, watching intently as my apprentice crossed the busy forecourt towards the street. By now my eyes were burning like fury, but I could see well enough to be certain that no one dropped in behind her, no one broke into a trot to join her omnibus queue.

She should be safe until the afternoon.

“Billy wrote me that you’d been wounded,” I said to the young man. “Do you require that sling?”

“Er, Mr Holmes?” The young soldier took his eyes off her figure, just for a moment, not at all certain of this person who addressed him.

“Must you wear that sling?” I asked again, more urgently. Injured soldiers might be commonplace in London, but she would notice if the same injury was following her about.

“No, it’s not a home-to-Blighty, I’m just filling in at the agency until I can pass my medical boards. I can do without it.” His gaze had returned to the assigned object of his surveillance.

“Good. You see her?”

“Tall girl with yellow hair and a brown hat?”

“That’s right. I’ll catch you up in an hour.”

The soldier did not ask how, simply heeled out his cigarette and trotted to a parked motor-cycle. As he kicked it into life, a young woman stepped out of the crowd and slid on behind him. The two Irregulars eased into traffic in the wake of the bus.

I knew where Russell’s optometrist’s was; the ’bus she’d boarded confirmed that her first goal would be to have her spectacles repaired. And since one of her favourite booksellers was just two streets from the shop, she was liable to linger in the vicinity before making her way to her mother’s club, which she used when she had to be in Town overnight. That gave me sufficient time for a more deliberate change of persona than just stuffing the loathsome overcoat (the fur had been poorly cured, and stank) and the blinding lenses into the nearest dust-bin.

One of the bolt-holes I had retained across London’s great sprawl was concealed as a room in the Grosvenor Hotel, mere steps away. There I flung off the wretched alpaca-and-raccoon, then hurried to ease free the slivers of tinted glass. While a kettle came to the boil over the little room’s gas ring, I held a damp flannel to my swollen eyes, mentally composing a letter to Herr Müller with detailed suggestions as to improvements in the corneal lens. When the tears had abated, I brewed coffee and picked out some alternative garments, gluing onto myself the appropriate tufts of hair.

Had I been even ten years younger, a military uniform would have rendered me instantly invisible. But thus far, the armed forces were not interested in men past their fifth decade.

So I became a woman.

I rinsed the cup and hung the extreme overcoat in the wardrobe, then picked up my handbag and went in search of my apprentice.

10

I’d had some say in the training of these two Irregulars, and was pleased to find them sufficiently competent to evade the eye of an untutored adolescent. In fact, they were better than competent, they were good: having left Victoria together on a motor-bike, they were now apart and on foot. The soldier had no sling, no cigarette, different badges on his uniform, and was so straight-spined, one could not imagine him lounging against the wall of a train station. The girl was nowhere in sight.

I paused to buy a newspaper from the vendor near the café by whose door the lad was standing, and murmured his name.

A slight widening of the eyes betrayed the young man’s reaction to the dowdy school-teacher in the sagging skirt, sensible shoes, and worn gloves. That, and the brief delay before he responded reassured me that my costume might suffice.

“Mr—that is, sorry. She left the optometrist’s and is in the bookshop.”

“Your friend is with her?”

“She took over twelve minutes ago.”

“Good. Step inside to change your coat, then come back.”

Russell’s appointment with the solicitor was for tomorrow, June the first. I had to assume that her aunt knew not only the time and place of that appointment, but also where Russell would stay in Town, and even more or less where she would go today. I could not afford to let the child range free and unguarded.

The War had stolen away my usual source of Irregulars, including the man who employed these two—Billy Mudd, who had learnt his skills from me long ago. Still, reasonably skilled agents were available, and if more of them were women than men, at this point the streets (and the jobs) of London held a higher percentage of women as well. For my purposes today, women were just fine.

Prolonged surveillance is a task nearly as wearisome to describe as it is to conduct, so I shall not go into close detail. Suffice it to say we did not lose her, and my companions were replaced every two or three hours. As for my appearance, it is extraordinary how much a ladies’ handbag may contain in the way of concealment. I felt quite bereft when I transformed at last into a man.

I even managed a quick meal, my first of the day, while the agency’s two women—one young, one old—kept their eyes on the inexpensive little bistro where Russell was eking out her meagre allowance.

I joined the older one as she followed my apprentice down the ill-lit street. The wartime ban on street lamps and outdoor lights made it necessary to follow rather more closely than I might have wished, but Russell merely made for the ladies’ club. I heard her voice greeting the door-man; the door closed behind her.

“Give me five minutes,” I told the agent. “Then you can go home.”

The empty building across from The Vicissitude (what a name for a club!) was a block of flats in the process of renovation. My pick-locks made fast work of the padlock, and I arranged the chains to appear fastened, should the beat constable give them a glance. Débris-littered stairs led to windows that were not entirely boarded over. I even found a sort of chair in one of the rubbish heaps, its three surviving legs ensuring that, tired as I was, I would not doze off too deeply. I positioned it before the window, and was rewarded with a second piece of luck: The curtains in a room across from me went bright, betraying a gap between them. In that gap my apprentice appeared. She looked down at the motorcars and pedestrians for a moment, then tugged the curtains more completely together. The glow behind them remained on.

Six minutes later, I heard the door below me scrape open and shut; a minute after, the door behind me did the same.

“Do you want me to watch the back of the club?” my companion asked.

“She’s given no indication that she’s aware of us, and that alleyway has no windows overlooking the back door. I think we’ll be safe enough.”

“There are rooftops. Or I could take up a position amongst the club’s dust-bins. Either way, with the blackout, she won’t see me.”

Good woman: not only a willing volunteer, but she’d done her home-work. Still, I could see no reason to inflict a miserable night on her: Russell had neither the clothes nor the money—nor even, I would have thought, the inclination—to be planning an evening out. If I knew the child at all, she was over there wallowing in her new books.

“That won’t be necessary. Just have someone join me here before dawn. A flask of coffee would be appreciated.”

“Have a good evening,” she said, and left me alone with my thoughts, my pipe, and the curtains across the street.

I sat down to my balancing act shortly after nine o’clock. The glow across the way did not vary for two hours. At ten minutes past eleven, faint shadows moved behind the curtains; a tall, slim silhouette passed left to right, then back again. A few minutes later, the room went dark.

I stood, taking care that my three-legged chair did not crash over, and waited at the window for a time. No one emerged from the club door, and I suppressed the inevitable glimmer of doubt—that she had felt her tail, that I should have put someone at the back—to return to the chair.

I stopped. Some odd sound had penetrated the night. I walked to the adjoining window, where more of the glass was missing, and listened to the bells and bellows of a fire engine. It was not near, and it was moving farther away. However, the noise was repeated as another engine hurried across London. Then another.

Some series of catastrophes were afoot. And although I knew it was hubris to assume that distant city fires might be in any way my responsibility, nonetheless, I felt an interest greater than mere curiosity. I studied the dark façade of The Vicissitude, knowing that the sound was unlikely to disturb the sleeper within, yet hating to abandon my watch even briefly.

But I did. I pulled out my torch and trotted up the decrepit stairs to the rooftop, battering the flimsy door open with my shoulder in the interest of speed. Outside, I pocketed my torch, the rooftop being sufficiently lit by the near-round moon and the probing beams of London’s dozen or so acetylene searchlights. The fire brigade engines had been to the north, but a flicker to my right drew the eye: fires, several of them, over the East End—alarmingly near the docks and Tower Bridge. After a moment, I lifted my gaze. The night sky held nothing but the beams and the moon—but there! An almost imperceptible motion where there should be none, high up and three, perhaps four, miles distant: a zeppelin? None of the searchlights lit upon it, but a faint flash from below lent it a momentary trace of substance; seconds later the sound of a small explosion reached my ears.

Then the oval ghost was gone, turning for home, delivered of its load of incendiary destruction.

Grimly, I returned downstairs. Indeed, it was no business of mine. And as I’d opined to Watson, it would not be the last such attack.

The room opposite remained dark. If Russell had slipped away in my absence, I did not know how I would look my young associates in the face, come morning. I settled to my chair and my pipe, and spent the next hours teetering gently to and fro, to and fro.

Just before three o’clock in the morning, the downstairs door betrayed a slow open, then a slow close. I moved silently behind the inner door, one arm raised to prevent its wood from crashing into me, but from the corridor outside came a familiar voice.

“Mr Holmes, I thought you might like a couple hours’ sleep.”

It was the younger of the two women from the evening before, bearing an ancient and bulging Gladstone bag.

“Do you know what the zeppelin hit?” I demanded.

“Is that what it was? They’ve been warning us about the zeppelin menace for months now, I think we’d all but decided they were a myth. All I heard was, there’s been a series of fires and explosions in Shoreditch and Whitechapel.”

“No myth. I saw it.” My eyes went to the bag. She dropped it to the floor and drew out the paraphernalia of an angel of mercy: sandwiches, two flasks, some apples, and an old but thick travelling rug. She held out one flask and the rug.

“Tea?”

“What is your name?” I asked.

“Marilyn White.”

“Miss White, I thank you.”

There was sufficient light in the room for me to see the look of apprehension on her features give way to one of pleasure. I unwrapped a sandwich and poured some tea into the flask’s beaker while she settled on my inadequate perch before the half-boarded window. I then pointed out the window behind which my apprentice (I hoped) slept, told Miss White to wake me before dawn, and wrapped myself in the rug on the floor.

No need to mention that I had abandoned my post for nearly twenty minutes.

I slept. But when the wake-up call came, it was rather more urgent than a proffered flask of coffee.

11

“Mr Holmes—her light’s come on!”

I was on my feet and free of the rug in an instant. The glimpse of sky between the boards was not much brighter than it had been: not yet six.

“A lad came to the club’s door a few minutes ago, knocked on it and handed over a note. When her window went light, I thought I should tell you.”

“Good work.” I began to fling on garments. “When we get down to the street, you go right, I’ll go left—I spotted one of the Post Office’s telephone boxes there, I’ll ring for reinforcements.”

“Do you want me to ask in the club, after she leaves? They may have seen what the note said.”

“If your colleagues reach us, then yes, but I’d rather have more than one person on her than know what summoned her.”

When Russell came out, she turned in my direction. She went past the telephone kiosk, on the opposite side of the street. I finished my call and fell in behind her.

Rule One of surveillance is the same as that for beekeeping: Remain calm. Attitude is all, when it comes to disguise. If one does not emanate tension—rather, if one only emanates the diffuse tension of any ordinary city-dweller—even a suspicious eye will not snag upon one’s figure. I kept pace with my apprentice, a street’s width apart, my slumping shoulders not only serving to reduce my distinctive height, but telegraphing the message that here was but a tired night worker on his way to a hot meal and bed.

I had two distinct advantages. First, I was at home here: Apart from the odd newcomer, such as the telephone kiosk, I knew London in the way my tongue knew my teeth, automatically, easily, and without hesitation. And second, my quarry was not only an infrequent visitor to the city, she was all but untutored in the ways of surveillance.

I was grateful for my neglect of her skills, because it meant that she made the mistakes of an amateur. When she glanced back, it was to her own side of the street first, permitting me a split second to slow or speed my gait. She made for a major road, where the ‘buses plied—and where other pedestrians offered concealment, even at that hour. She took a direct route, which not only enabled my telephonically summoned Irregulars to locate me, but allowed me to jog-trot through an ill-marked alley, over a low wall and around a newsagent’s shed to rejoin the hunt in a different position. She waited for a bus, rather than summon a taxi and force me—us—into risking a giveaway leap to do the same.

That last might have had to do with finances rather than inexperience.

When her ’bus pulled to the kerb, I was down the street in a taxicab, strengthened by two Irregulars. A third hurried to join the queue behind Russell. None of them was Miss White—she had remained with me until the laden taxicab found us, then went back to question the Vicissitude staff.

Our cab-driver was—a sight to which my eyes had not grown accustomed—a woman. This was no phlegmatic member of London’s usual cab-driving fraternity. Indeed, she was finding it hard to maintain a simulacrum of insouciance; she had the taxicab’s clutch poised to leap.

“Do not start until I tell you,” I reminded our modern Boadicea. “And when you do, drive at a normal speed.”

I was pleased that my apprentice had not chosen to travel via the Underground, although I was not certain why. Her route also seemed to be taking us towards the source of the previous night’s devastation—which might explain it, that she had been warned of a possible disruption to the trains. In any event, the smell came first, the reek of burning homes, followed soon after by the sight of filthy, exhausted rescue crews and fire brigade equipment, returning from a terrible night’s work. And, unusually enough, the farther east we went, the thicker the pedestrian traffic grew.

“Gawkers,” our driver commented in disapproval.

The young man at my side responded with a question as to the disaster, to which she readily gave answer, although before the end of the first sentence, I could see that she did not actually know what had happened here, but was merely repeating rumours.

She was right about the sight-seers, though. A few of those shoving along the pavements betrayed the eagerness of desperate family members; most were merely eager.

In no time, traffic was at a stand-still. Three black rooftops lay between us and Russell’s ’bus; heads began to crane to ascertain what lay ahead.

When Russell came down from the ’bus, our driver was alone in her taxicab, marooned and bereft of the day’s excitement.

My three Irregulars and I worked as a team, taking turns walking close behind her, then falling back to change hat, spectacles, or outer garment before moving up again. She had a goal, that much was clear. At first, I thought it might be the Liverpool Street station, but she kept to the north of it.

The rooftops of Spitalfields Market came into view—an entire city block, where brick buildings along three of the streets created a squared horse-shoe, its centre a glass-roofed market hall packed with stalls of many degrees of size and permanence. Despite the proximity of the night’s fires—the source could not have been more than a few streets to the east—the market was open for business. The usual Spitalfields odours of citrus and cabbage and onion were all but imperceptible beneath the reek of smoke, just as its usual populace of market porters, costermongers, deliverymen, and shopkeepers struggled to move around the influx of police constables, newsmen, and curious onlookers. Six members of a fire brigade were quenching their thirst outside a public house; an ambulance inched along Lamb Street. As far as the eye could see, the market pulsated like an exposed brood comb. The pavements were solid, the lanes worse, the market hall itself all but impenetrable.

I was, to put it mildly, apprehensive. I pushed forward, so close that Russell could not have failed to recognise me, had she turned. Anyone at all could come up to the child, then be away in an instant, leaving her bleeding into the paving stones.

In addition to the open west side, the market hall had five entrances—one each through the three-storey buildings on the north and south, and three on the long eastern face. At the northern, Lamb Street entrance, Russell paused to speak to a constable whose ash-streaked face made it clear where he had spent the night. He ducked his head to hear against the din, then straightened to point forward, directly across the market hall. What on earth had brought her here? What did she imagine she was going to find, two streets from a bombing site?

I made up my mind: No matter the repercussions, I could not risk her further freedom. I should have to elbow my way forward and take her under my wing. I braced my shoulders, permitted my spine to straighten to my full height—and saw over the heads the familiar visage of Miss White, searching the crowd from atop a box on the southernmost Brushfield Street side. The passageway leading to that entrance was partially blocked by a piece of what appeared to be fire brigade equipment, and a hand-written sign, illegible at this distance, had been put up where the passage opened onto the hall itself. My sight of the Irregular was blocked for a moment by a porter threading his way through the crowd with a load of baskets on his head, then she was back.

Russell had worked her way halfway across the hall, and was now closer to Miss White than she was to me. I rose up on a display of potatoes (ignoring the protests of the vegetables’ owner) and waved my arm widely. The young agent saw my gesture, and lifted a hand by way of response. I jabbed my forefinger at Russell, then swept my arm forcibly to the side, stating a clear order to remove Russell from this place, immediately, by whatever means necessary.

Miss White craned for a moment until she spotted the brown hat coming towards her, and gave me a quick nod before hopping down from her perch.

It was then that I saw the shadowy figure.

12

A person stood among the shadows atop the framework of a closed stall, half-hidden by one of the iron stanchions, under a dark portion of the glass roof that had been covered by tarpaulins, a stone’s throw from the Brushfield entrance. The stall beneath him was one of the more rag-tag structures, appearing little more than drapes and wood scraps, although clearly it was substantial enough to hold his weight.

I did not need to see the figure’s face to know it would match the framed photographs on the aunt’s desk; nor did I need to examine more closely what he held between both of his hands to know that it mustn’t land upon the head of a passer-by, particularly one who was of value to me. He was forty feet away and ten feet from the ground; Miss White was twenty feet on the other side and had not seen him; Russell was working her way around the less-crowded edges of the hall, closing inexorably on the waiting trap.

I jumped from my perch and leapt beneath the beefy arm of a drayman hauling at his horse’s bridle, then scrambled around three sight-seeing shop-girls and a messengerboy pushing his bicycle, knocked into a vendor of roasted pea-nuts, and aimed myself at my goal: a market porter with a stack of nine fully laden wicker baskets balanced atop his cloth cap.

I hit the poor fellow with the sort of rugby tackle I hadn’t attempted in forty years. Baskets exploded in all directions, raining the market with fresh spring peas ripe for shelling. Women shrieked, men shouted, horses shied, constables whistled, the local wags that afternoon jested that peas had broken out in Spitalfields—and more to the point, Mary Russell jumped back in surprise, stopping with her back against a wall.

I tucked my head down and scuttled like an orang-utan through and around the turmoil, dodging legs and skirts, hooves and wheels.

I knew precisely where I was going: the markets of London had not changed appreciably in my life-time, and Spitalfields had the same shape (and, for all I could see, the same personnel) it had when Robert Horner built it three decades before. I rounded the stall of a seller of lettuces and passed through a tidy booth mixing blooms and strawberries before leaping over a pyramid of new potatoes, throwing myself at the rough ladder that had been wired to this particular stanchion since 1901.

His back was to me. At his side was a boxful of some dark round objects the size of doubled fists: cocoa-nuts. He was holding one between his hands, poised at the edge of the makeshift booth. The rugby tackle would not do—I did not wish to send us both tumbling in front of Russell’s boots—but the hall was so noisy, the sound of my approaching feet was swallowed up. His first hint that I was there was my hand in his collar, yanking him backwards.

The cocoa-nut flew, cracking harmlessly on the ground but attracting the attention of Miss White. She stared up at me, then glanced at the crowd before looking back with an urgent question writ large on her face.

I shook my head and made a gesture of pushing her away, a signal that she was to stand down from the need to evacuate Russell, then returned my attention to the young man at my feet. He was cursing and beginning to rise, so I gave his supporting wrist a gentle kick and he collapsed again. This time, I seized his wrist and put it into a hold in the Oriental martial art I had long practiced, which froze him into place, if not into silence.

I peered over the edge of the stall, and saw Russell walk up, read the shop signs in the passageway, and stop beneath one. She pulled back the sleeve of her coat to glance at her watch. I dropped my head to speak into my captive’s ear.

“If you wish a chance to avoid a charge of attempted murder, you will lie absolutely still until your cousin leaves the market.” He struggled, so I moved his wrist to a position of both pain and incipient damage. I changed my threat. “If you wish your cousin not to know that you were trying to kill her, you will lie still.”

He lay still.

“Why here?” I said into his ear, too low to be heard past the top of the stall. “Why did you arrange for her to come here?”

There was no response, but then, I had not expected one. I used often to conduct with Watson what appeared to be discussions but were, in fact, monologues to assist the thought process. I had been known to do the same with villains.

“You knew where she was staying. You must know where her solicitor’s office is, and the time of their appointment. You could have come after her in either of those places, and yet you go to the effort of bringing her across town. With your Jewish heritage, you may have relations in this parish, but I cannot believe you feel at home in this market, not a person of your background. Which means some quality other than sheer familiarity brought you here.”

He tested my grip, until I moved his arm half an inch; he subsided.

“I am not the police,” I told him. “I have no interest in prosecuting you.”

“I was up here minding my own business, and you attacked me,” he blustered—but keeping his voice low enough that he might as well have made an admission.

“True. Why bring her here? Has it to do with last night’s aerial attack?”

His twitch was a yes. I removed my hat and raised my head far enough to see Russell. Her new lenses flashed as she studied the shop-fronts, the passers-by, the fire brigade equipment half-blocking the end of the passage. When she looked back into the market hall, I suppressed the urge to duck: I was in a dark place and would appear as nothing but a round shape, and in any event, her vision would be dazzled after looking at the light. She checked her wrist-watch again. If her appointment with the solicitor was the first of his day—which would be the most convenient choice for a girl needing to make her way back to Sussex by dark—she would need to leave soon.

If the cocoa-nut had come down on that brown hat, two pounds propelled by both gravity and muscle, what would have happened? Even a glancing blow would have stunned her; a direct hit might well have fractured her skull. One way or the other, she would have collapsed, beside this empty stall that was mostly tarpaulin, in the only sparsely inhabited corner of a crowded marketplace. In Spitalfields. Think, Holmes! Spital Field; one-time Roman cemetery; site of St Mary’s Hospital Without Bishopsgate; a centre of the silk industry, and later for Jewish refugees, tailors, and weavers. A parish with one of the darkest histories in London: 300 feet from where Russell stood, checking her wrist-watch, Mary Kelly had died, fifth victim of the Ripper. Twenty-seven years later, a site containing smoking devastation.

Smoke. Incendiary bombs. Market.

And tarpaulins.

“Your original plan was an attack on the streets between her club and the solicitor’s office. Since I am forced to assume that you have some iota of the family intelligence about you, I shall take it as given that you arranged an alibi to cover the time. But last night you heard news of the aerial bombing—perhaps you even have relations here in Spitalfields, from the days when the Jewish community took their refuge here—and it occurred to you that here was an ideal alternative: far enough from the solicitor’s office that the death and the change of her will would be separated by half the city, yet in a neighbourhood about which you had some knowledge. If you could entice her out to the East End, conceal her body, then arrange for her to be found amongst the rubble, she would appear to be one of the victims. And even if she were discovered today in the market, to all appearances she would be the victim of a freak accident, a falling cocoa-nut.

“Am I correct?”

The silence he gave me was answer enough.

I fished a length of twine from my pocket—I always carry twine, it is the most useful substance in the world—and bound his wrists. Then I turned him onto his back.

He was older than I’d anticipated, perhaps twenty-three or -four, and with the softness that suggests obesity by fifty. The struggle and tension brought no symptoms of weak heart or lungs to the fore. His eyes were angry, but behind the anger was fear.

I considered the tools available to me. He was half my age, and a coward—a dangerous coward, but not an uncontrollable one.

“You know who I am.”

“You’re the man who attacked me.”

“The name is Sherlock Holmes.”

His eyes went wide. “I thought …”

“You thought the rumours were a rural Sussex myth. No.”

Before he could consider the wider meaning in being confronted by a legend, I put to him the key question in the future safety of my apprentice.

“How much did your mother have to do with this?”

I could see him begin to speculate: better to lay the blame elsewhere, or to protest her innocence?

“What did your cousin ingest on Friday night that made her ill?”

“Oh, that? That was just a joke. To teach her a lesson—she sneaks down and steals food from the pantry. I mixed something in with the leftover soup.”

“It is Miss Russell’s food, Miss Russell’s pantry, and you would poison her for making use of it?”

“Not poison! Well, not really.”

“And the sprained wrist, and the fall on the stairs, and the split lip?”

“Those, it was only—the child is so irritating, so … condescending! To both of us, even Mother, who has given over her life to Mary.”

“Do not speak her name.”

The command, which slipped out of me without thought, silenced him. Half my age, and a coward, I reminded myself: very well.

“Your mother had nothing to do with the outright attacks on Miss Russell?”

Slowly, his head went back and forth. Still, I should have to have this same conversation with the aunt, and soon.

“I shall for the moment believe you. And since I do not wish the young lady to be aware that you tried to murder her—” Or, indeed, to know how I had come to stand guard over her. “—I will not turn you over to the police. Inside of two hours, her new will shall go into effect, and her inheritance will be beyond your reach. You may be tempted to take a petty revenge upon her, but let us be clear: If anything happens to her, anything at all, I will find you and I will punish you. Do you understand?”

He swallowed, and the sweat on his forehead declared his belief.

“You will not go to Sussex again. Instead, before today is out, you will go to a recruiter’s office and you will enlist in the Army. You will go into uniform, and you will serve your country, and you will be grateful that I do not leave your body here, atop a deserted stall in the Spitalfields Market.” And because he was the sort of blustering young man who requires an illustration to make a threat real, I drew out my folding knife, opened it, and let him look at it for a time.

Then I folded it away.

“Now, you will lie quietly until she leaves,” I told him. I moved away, to a place where I could watch my apprentice, and closed my mind to the loathsome creature at my feet.

Rule One: Remain calm. I had done so, and solved the problem while preserving the naiveté—that charming and fragile virtue—of my young client. I hadn’t even needed to kill a man to do it.

Rule Two: One must occasionally be cruel to be kind. To force this young man into uniform might, possibly, give him some backbone, turning him from the path of greed and cowardice. If nothing else, it would provide another rifle-bearer for the King.

Rule Four: Success often rests on the imperceptibility of one’s meddling. If that was so, I might judge myself successful, indeed, for the head beneath the brown hat consulted the watch yet again, gave a small shake, and turned towards the street outside.

But not without first giving a quick glance in the direction of Miss White, whose out-of-place clothing and too-casual loitering had raised the suspicions of an untutored, inexperienced girl ten years her junior.

I watched my apprentice move towards Brushfield Street, the very slight tilt to her head telegraphing a roused awareness, making it clear—to me, at least—that no one else would follow her unawares this day. I felt my face relax into a smile of distinct pleasure—nay, call it by name: pure joy.

For of all the rules of beekeeping, Rule Three is prime: Never, ever, cease to feel wonder.

Read on for an excerpt from Laurie R. King’s

Pirate King

CHAPTER ONE

RUTH:   I did not catch the word aright, through being hard of hearing … I took and bound this promising boy apprentice to a pirate.

“HONESTLY, HOLMES? PIRATES?”

“That is what I said.”

“You want me to go and work for pirates.”

O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea, our thoughts as aboundless, and our souls as free …

“My dear Russell, someone your age should not be having trouble with her hearing.” Sherlock Holmes solicitous was Sherlock Holmes sarcastic.

“My dear Holmes, someone your age should not be overlooking incipient dementia. Why do you wish me to go and work for pirates?”

“Think of it as an adventure, Russell.”

“May I point out that this past year has been nothing but adventure? Ten back-to-back cases between us in the past fifteen months, stretched over, what, eight countries? Ten, if one acknowledges the independence of Scotland and Wales. What I need is a few weeks with nothing more demanding than my books.”

“You should, of course, feel welcome to remain here.”

The words seemed to contain a weight beyond their surface meaning. A dark and inauspicious weight. A Mariner’s albatross sort of a weight. I replied with caution. “This being my home, I generally do feel welcome.”

“Ah. Did I not mention that Mycroft is coming to stay?”

“Mycroft? Why on earth would Mycroft come here? In all the years I’ve lived in Sussex, he’s visited only once.”

“Twice, although the other occasion was before your arrival. However, he’s about to have the builders in, and he needs a quiet retreat.”

“He can afford an hotel room.”

“This is my brother, Russell,” he chided.

Yes, exactly: my husband’s brother, Mycroft Holmes. Whom I had thwarted—blatantly, with malice aforethought, and with what promised to be heavy consequences—scant weeks earlier. Whose history, I now knew, held events that soured my attitude towards him. Who wielded enormous if invisible power within the British government. And who was capable of making life uncomfortable for me until he had tamped me back down into my position of sister-in-law.

“How long?” I asked.

“He thought two weeks.”

Fourteen days: 336 hours: 20,160 minutes, of first-hand opportunity to revenge himself on me verbally, psychologically, or (surely not?) physically. Mycroft was a master of the subtlest of poisons—I speak metaphorically, of course—and fourteen days would be plenty to work his vengeance and drive me to the edge of madness.

And only the previous afternoon, I had learnt that my alternate lodgings in Oxford had been flooded by a broken pipe. Information that now crept forward in my mind, bringing a note of dour suspicion.

No, Holmes was right: best to be away if I could.

Which circled the discussion around to its beginnings.

“Why should I wish to go work with pirates?” I repeated.

“You would, of course, be undercover.”

“Naturally. With a cutlass between my teeth.”

“I should think you would be more likely to wear a night-dress.”

“A night-dress.” Oh, this was getting better and better.

“As I remember, there are few parts for females among the pirates. Although they may decide to place you among the support staff.”

“Pirates have support staff?” I set my tea-cup back into its saucer, that I might lean forward and examine my husband’s face. I could see no overt indications of lunacy. No more than usual.

He ignored me, turning over a page of the letter he had been reading, keeping it on his knee beneath the level of the table. I could not see the writing—which was, I thought, no accident.

“I should imagine they have a considerable number of personnel behind the scenes,” he replied.

“Are we talking about pirates-on-the-high-seas, or piracy-as-violation-of-copyright-law?”

“Definitely the cutlass rather than the pen. Although Gilbert might argue for the literary element.”

“Gilbert?” Two seconds later, the awful light of revelation flashed through my brain; at the same instant, Holmes tossed the letter onto the table so I could see its heading.

Headings, plural, for the missive contained two separate letters folded together. The first was from Scotland Yard. The second was emblazoned with the words, D’Oyly Carte Opera.

I reared back, far more alarmed by the stationery than by the thought of climbing storm-tossed rigging in the company of cut-throats.

“Gilbert and Sullivan?” I exclaimed. “Pirates as in Penzance? Light opera and heavy humour? No. Absolutely not. Whatever Lestrade has in mind, I refuse.”

“One gathers,” Holmes reflected, reaching for another slice of toast, “that the title originally did hold a double entendre, Gilbert’s dig at the habit of American companies to flout the niceties of British copyright law.”

He was not about to divert me by historical titbits or an insult against my American heritage: This was one threat against which my homeland would have to mount its own defence.

“You’ve dragged your sleeve in the butter.” I got to my feet, picking up my half-emptied plate to underscore my refusal.

“It would not be a singing part,” he said.

I walked out of the room.

He raised his voice. “I would do it myself, but I need to be here for Mycroft, to help him tidy up after the Goodman case.”

Answer gave I none.

“It shouldn’t take you more than two weeks, three at the most. You’d probably find the solution before arriving in Lisbon.”

“Why—” I cut the question short; it did not matter in the least why the D’Oyly Carte company wished me to go to Lisbon. I poked my head back into the room. “Holmes: no. I have an entire academic year to catch up on. I have no interest whatsoever in the entertainment of hoi polloi. The entire thing sounds like a headache. I am not going to Lisbon, or even London. I’m not going anywhere. No.”

CHAPTER TWO

KING:   I don’t think much of our profession, but, contrasted with respectability, it is comparatively honest.

MY STEAMER LURCHED into Lisbon on a horrible sleet-blown November morning. My face was scoured by the ocean air, I having spent most of the voyage on deck in an attempt (largely vain) to keep my stomach from turning inside-out. My hair and clothing were stiff with salt, my nose raw from the handkerchief, I had lost nearly half a stone and more than half my mind, and my mood was as bloody as my eyeballs.

If a pirate had hove into view—or my husband, for that matter—I would merrily have keelhauled either with a rope of linen from the captain’s table.

My only source of satisfaction, grim as it was, lay in the knowledge that several of the actors on board were every bit as miserable as I.

The eternal, quease-inducing sway lessened as we left the open sea to churn our way up the Rio Tejo towards the vast harbour—one of Europe’s largest, according to someone’s guide-book—that in the days of sail had made Portugal a great empire. The occasional isolated castle or fishing village along the shore slowly drew closer together. Our view panned across a lighthouse, then picked up an odd piece of architecture planted just offshore to our left, a diminutive fort in an unnecessarily exuberant Gothic style (was that the style someone’s guide-book—Annie’s?—had called “Manueline”?) Someone in the crowd of shivering fellow passengers loudly identified it as the Tower of Belém; my mind’s eye automatically supplied the phrase on an internal sub-title:

I shook my head in irritation. I had watched more moving pictures over the past few days than in the past few years: My way of seeing the world had changed dramatically.

Beyond the Manueline excrescence rose Lisboa itself—Alis Ubo to the Phoenicians, Ulissipont to the Romans. Our first indication of the city was the spill of masts and belching smoke-stacks that pressed towards the docks. As we drew nearer, a jumble of pale walls and red tile roofs rose up from the harbour (it looked like a lake) on a series of hills (the guide-book had claimed seven, on a par with Rome) punctuated by church spires (a startling number of those) watched over by a decaying castle.

Pirates, I sniffed as I eyed the castle gun-ports. Any sensible member of the piratical fraternity would have steered well clear of this place.

I pulled my thick coat around me, made a fruitless attempt to clean my spectacles, and went below to assemble my charges.

My job—my official job—was to shepherd, protect, nurse, and browbeat into order some three dozen inmates of a mobile lunatic asylum. I was the one responsible for their well-being. It was I who ensured the inmates were housed and fed, entertained and soothed, kept off one another’s throats and out of one another’s beds. I was the one the inmates ran to, sent on errands, and shouted at, whether the complaint was inadequately hot coffee or insufficiently robust lightbulb. On the first night out from England, I had been roused from a fitful sleep by a demand that I—I, personally—remove a moth from a cabin.

A fraternity of actual pirates could not have been more trouble. Even a travelling D’Oyly Carte company would have been less of a madhouse.

But I was working neither with buccaneers nor with travelling players: The letter with the heading of the firm responsible for the Gilbert and Sullivan performances had merely been by way of introduction. Instead, I found myself the general coordinator and jack-of-all-trades for a film crew.

In the early years after the War, Fflytte Films had appeared to be the rising star of the British cinema industry: From Quarterdeck in 1919 through 1922’s Krakatoa, Fflytte Films (“Fflyttes of Fancy!”) seemed positioned to challenge the American domination of the young industry, producing a series of stupendously successful multi-reel extravaganzas with exotic settings and dashing stories. Then came Hannibal, which ran so far over budget in the preliminary stages, the project was cancelled before the second can of film was fed into the cameras. Hannibal was followed by the wildly popular Rum Runner, but after that came The Writer, which took eight months to make and ran in precisely four cinema houses for less than a week. The Writer’s failure might have been predicted—a three-reel drama about a British novelist in Paris?—except that Randolph St John Warminster-Fflytte (“Fflyttes of Fantasy!”) was a director famous for pulling hugely successful rabbits out of apparently shabby hats (Small Arms concerned the accidental death of a child; Rum Runner was about smuggling alcohol into the United States; both had returned their costs a hundredfold) and a movie about a thinly disguised James Joyce might have been as successful as the other ugly ducklings, particularly when one threw in the titillating appeal of the Ulysses obscenity ban.

However, since the film had skirted around the actual depiction of the obscene acts in question, it went rather flat. So now, with three costly duds on his hands and the threatened loss of his aristocratic backers, Fflytte was returning to the scene of his three previous solid successes (“Fflyttes of Fanfare!”): the sea-borne action adventure.

This one was to be loosely based on the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Loosely as in wobbling wildly and on the verge of a complete uncoupling. Not an inch of film had gone through the cameras; the Major-General was drunk around the clock; the cameraman’s assistant had a palsy of the hands that was explained to me, sotto voce, as the result of a recent nervous breakdown; the actress playing Mabel had taken the bit into her teeth with this, her first starring rôle, and was out to prove herself a flapper edition of Sarah Bernhardt (if not in talent, then in imperious attitudes and a knack of fabricating alternate versions of her personal history); and the twelve other young ladies playing the Major-General’s daughters—yes, thirteen daughters altogether—formed a non-stop cyclone of lace, giggles, and yellow curls that spun up and down the decks and occasionally below them—far below, to judge by the grease-stains on one pink dress thrust under my nose by an accusing maternal person. Even the eldest of the “sisters,” a busybody of the first order, had blinked her big blue eyes at me in practiced innocence from more than one out-of-bounds state-room.

We had not left the Channel before I felt the first impulse to murder.

“Producer’s assistant,” then, was my official job. My unofficial one—the one Holmes had manoeuvred me into—was given me by Chief Inspector Lestrade in his office overlooking Westminster Bridge. He had stood as I was ushered in, but remained behind his desk—as if that might protect him. A single thin folder lay on its pristine surface.

“Miss Russell. Do sit down. May I take your bag?”

“No, thank you.” I dropped the bag I had thrown together in Sussex—basic necessities such as tooth-brush, clean socks, reading material, and loaded revolver—onto the floor, and sat.

“Mr Holmes is not with you?”

“As you see.” Was that a sigh I heard? He sat down.

“You two haven’t any news of Robert Goodman or Peter James West, have you?”

“Is that why you asked me here, Chief Inspector? To follow up on the last case?”

“No, no. I just thought I’d ask, since both men have vanished into thin air, and whenever something like that takes place, it’s extraordinary how often Sherlock Holmes happens to have been in the vicinity.”

“No, we have not heard news of either man.” The literal, if not actual, truth.

“Why do I get the feeling that you know more than you’re telling?”

“I know a great number of things, Chief Inspector, few of which are your concern. Now, you wrote asking for assistance.”

“From your husband.”

“Why?” Lestrade had always complained, loud and clear, that there was no place for amateurs in the investigation of crimes.

“Because the only police officers I had with the necessary skills have become unavailable.”

“Those skills being …?”

“The ability to make educated small-talk, and mastery of a type-writing machine. It is remarkable how few gentlemen are capable of producing type-written documents with their own ten fingers. Your husband, as I recall, is one who can.”

“And yet the city’s employment rosters are positively crawling with educated women type-writers.”

“I had one of those. A fine and talented young PC. Who is now home with a baby.”

“Oh. Well, now you have me.”

“Yes.” Definitely a sigh, this time. “Oh, it might as well be you.”

My eyes narrowed. “Chief Inspector, one might almost think you have no interest in this matter. Is it important enough to concern Holmes and me, or is it not?”

“Yes. I mean to say, I don’t know. That is—” He ran a hand over his face. “I dislike having outside pressures turned on the Yard.”

“Ah. Politics.”

“In a manner of speaking. It has to do with the British moving picture industry.”

“Do we have a moving picture industry?” I asked in surprise.

“Exactly. While the Americans turn out vast sagas that sell tickets by the bushel, this country makes small pictures about bunnies and Scottish hillsides that are shown as the audience is taking its seats for the feature. I’m told it’s because of the War—all our boys went to the Front, but the American cameras just kept rolling. And now, when we’re just beginning to catch up, we no sooner come up with a possible rival to the likes of Griffith and DeMille when a rumour—a faint rumour, mind—comes to the ears of Certain Individuals that their man may be bent.”

I put the clues together. “Some members of the House of Lords are worried about the money they put up to back a picture, and mentioned it to the Chancellor of the Exchequer over sherry, and Winston sent someone to talk to you?”

“Worse than that—the Palace itself have invested in the company, if you can believe that. And the trouble is, I can’t say for certain that there’s nothing to it. The studio has been linked to … problems.”

“I should imagine that picture studios generate all sorts of problems.”

“Not generally of the criminal variety. There are some odd coincidences that follow this one around. Three years ago, they made a movie about guns, and—”

“An entire moving picture about guns?”

“More or less. This was shortly after the Firearms Act, and the picture was about a returned soldier who used his military revolver in a Bolshevik act, accidentally killing a child.”

“The Bolshevist terror being why the Firearms Act was introduced in the first place.” The 1920 Firearms Act meant that every three years, Holmes and I were forced to go before our local sheriff for weapons permits, demonstrating that we were neither drunks, lunatics, or children.

“That and the sheer number of revolvers knocking around after the War waiting to go off. Which more or less concealed the fact that someone sold quite a few of said firearms in this country, unpermitted, shortly after the picture came out.”

“What does that—”

“Wait. The following year, Fflytte did a story about a young woman whose life was taken over by drugs—Coke Express, it was called. The month following its release in the cinema houses, we had an unusual number of drugs parties along the south coast.”

“Yes, but—”

“And last year, one of their pirate movies was about rum-running into America. It came out in November.”

“I was busy in November. What happened?”

“McCoy’s arrest. ‘The Real McCoy’? The man’s made a small fortune smuggling hard liquor into the United States.”

“Hmm. Is this perhaps the same studio that was making a film about Hannibal?”

“Fflytte Films, that’s them.”

“Odd, I don’t recall hearing about a sudden influx of elephants racing down the streets of—”

“I knew this was a mistake. Never mind, Miss Russell, I’ll—”

“No no, Chief Inspector, sit down, I apologise. Surely there must have been something more concrete to interest you in the case, even in a peripheral manner?”

He paused, then subsided into his chair. “Yes. Although even that I can’t be at all certain about. We were beginning to ask some questions—in a hush-hush fashion, so as not to set the gossip magazines on fire—when the studio’s secretary went missing. Lonnie Johns is her name.”

“When was that?”

“Well, there’s the thing—it was only four or five days ago. And there’s nothing to say that the Johns girl didn’t just quit her job and go on holiday. The girl she shares a room with said it wouldn’t surprise her, that Lonnie’s job would shred the nerves of a saint.”

“But Miss Johns didn’t say anything to her, about going away?”

“The room-mate didn’t see her go—she’d just got back herself from a week in Bognor Regis.”

“Any signs of foul play at the flat?”

“Neither disturbance nor a note, although some of her things did seem to be missing, tooth-brush and the like.”

“If the girl had run off to the Riviera with a movie star, she’d probably have told everyone she knew,” I reflected.

“Normally, we’d barely even be opening an enquiry into a disappearance of a girl missing a few days, but time is against us. The entire crew is about to set sail out of London, and if we don’t get someone planted in their midst, we’ll lose the chance. And when my likely officers were unavailable, I thought, just maybe Mr Holmes would have a few days free to act as a sort of place-holder, until I could get one of my own in line for it. But never mind, it was only a—”

“And in addition, if it does blow up in the face of a gaggle of blue-bloods and splatter them all with scandal, it would be nice if Scotland Yard were nowhere in sight.”

“Miss Russell, I deeply resent the im—”

“Chief Inspector, I have nothing in particular on at the moment. I’ll be happy to devote myself to the Mysterious Affair of the Coincidental Film Crew.”

He looked shocked. “You mean you’ll do it?”

“I just said I would.”

“I thought you’d laugh in my face.” He gave me a suspicious scowl. “You aren’t a ‘fan’ of the cinema world, are you?”

“By no means.”

“And yet you seem almost eager to take this on.”

Motion pictures, or Mycroft? I reached out to snatch the folder from his hand. “My dear Chief Inspector, you have no idea.”

For even more Mary Russell, and even more Sherlock Holmes,

look for A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon

Edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger

Featuring stories from today’s top authors, including:

Alan Bradley

Tony Broadbent

Jan Burke

Lionel Chetwynd

Lee Child

Colin Cotterill

Neil Gaiman

Laura Lippman

Gayle Lynds & John Sheldon

Phillip & Jerry Margolin

Margaret Maron

Thomas Perry

S. J. Rozan

Dana Stabenow

Charles Todd

Jacqueline Winspear

Coming soon from Bantam Books