The Language of Bees (13 page)

Little appeared to have changed in the past eight months. Politics were fermenting, the coal unions gathering themselves for another attempt at a living wage. I was mildly disappointed to find no further letters concerning suicidal or riotous Druids, but perhaps my interests were too specialised.

However—the light was almost gone by the time I reached the small
box at the bottom of the page and I nearly overlooked it—two men had been charged with conspiring to commit mayhem at Stonehenge on the solstice. That reminded me, I’d meant to hunt down the original articles about the riot, and the suicide in—had it been Dorset?

I found the paper that I had read on the train in the kitchen, waiting to receive the next batch of potato-peelings or coffee grounds. Fortunately, the Letters page was still intact:

Dear Sirs,

I write in urgent concern over the sequence of events, the near-riot between two opposing ideologies at Stonehenge following the desecration by suicide of one of our nation’s most spectacular monuments, down in Dorset. When one reflects upon the popularity of peculiar religious rituals among today’s young people, one can only expect that such shameful events will continue, growing ever more extreme, unless nipped in the bud. Need we wait until the Druids return human sacrifice to Stonehenge at midsummer’s night, before we mount even casual guard upon the nation’s prehistoric treasure sites?

A Wiltshire Farmer

Dorset. The only prehistoric site I knew there was the Cerne Abbas Giant, a rude version of my neighbouring Giant that I had passed that afternoon.

My curiosity roused, I went back to the library to heave the stack around until I unearthed the middle of June. I turned up the lights and started with the day after the solstice, 22 June.

The outraged farmer’s “near-riot,” it seemed, had been a loud argument culminating in a shoving match between six middle-aged people in sandals and hand-spun garments and a group (number not given) of earnest young people. The details were not exactly clear, but it would appear that the older traditionalists objected when the younger people proposed to stand in the light that fell through the standing stones, that they might absorb the sun’s solstitial energies.
Their elders had been strongly protesting, ever since the two groups had gathered with their blankets (and, one suspected, warming drinks) the night before, that the light needed free access to its recipient stone. So two of the young men elected to force their interpretation of the ritual on their elders, and thus became the men being charged with mayhem.

Every bit as ridiculous as I had anticipated. And if the farmer had exaggerated the pushing contest into a riot, what of the “suicide” in Dorset?

He gave no date, but I thought a Druid would probably choose to commit self-sacrifice on the summer solstice—although granted, my only evidence of his religious inclinations was from the farmer. I paged through the papers of 23 June, then 24, and came across no mention of Dorset or Druids. I reached for the 25th, then put it down and went back to the days before the solstice—perhaps the body had lain there for some time?

20 June, 19 June: nothing. This seemed peculiar. I knew
The Times
treasured its quirky letter-writers, but surely they wouldn’t have published one that made up its references out of whole cloth?

But there it was, on the afternoon of 18 June, under the headline,
Suicide at Giant:

Two visitors to the giant figure carved into the chalk at Cerne Abbas, Dorset, this morning were startled to discover a blood-soaked body at the figure’s feet. The woman, who appeared to be in her forties, had blue eyes, steel spectacles, bobbed grey hair, and no wedding ring. Police said that she had died from a single wound from an Army revolver, found at the body, and that her clothing suggested she was a visitor to the area.

The brief article ended with a request that anyone who might know this person get into touch with their local police, but the description could have been one in ten women in England. A sad death, but hardly one worth sitting up over.

I folded the paper and switched off the desk lamp, curiosity satisfied: The solstice had nothing to do with any death, nor did Stonehenge. I made to rise, then stopped with my hands on the chair’s arms. Had they identified this poor woman?

Sometimes, curiosity can be an irritating companion.

I turned the light back on and took up the one day during that entire week in June that I had not read. Of course, that was where it waited:

The woman found at the Cerne Abbas Giant at dawn on 18 June has been identified as Miss Fiona Cartwright (42) of Poole. Miss Cartwright was last seen on 16 June when she told friends she was meeting a man who had need of a type-writer for his advertising business. Friends said Miss Cartwright had been despondent of late.

A solitary woman, out of employment, had to be one of the most melancholy persons imaginable.

I rather wished I’d stopped before the mystery had been solved. Why had I got so involved with a silly piece of news like this, anyway? Not boredom. How could this blessed solitude be thought a tedium? I dumped the armful of newspapers any which way on the stack: Holmes could sort them out himself.

Unless he had decided to follow the bees off into the blue.

For lack of other fiction, I reached for Holmes’ copy of
Eminent Victorians
, and took myself to bed.

Wrestling with Angels (2):
In that moment of
submission, the heavens opened upon the boy and the
Light spilled in, filling him to overflowing
.
And when the boy came down from the high mountain
,
he found he had been marked by the Lights, and that he
bore on his body forevermore the stigmata of divinity
.
Testimony, I:5

D
AMIAN, I SHOULD THINK YOU’D HAD ENOUGH pacing about during the day. Couldn’t you sit down for a few minutes?”

“Did you have to lodge us in a
less
comfortable place than the one we were in last night?”

“This is absolutely safe.”

“That depends on what you are guarding against. Suffocation clearly isn’t a concern with you.”

“You dislike being enclosed?”

“I dislike risking asphyxiation.”

“Your tension suggests claustrophobia. Which, now I consider it, would also explain the degree of agitation you showed at the gaol in Ste
Chapelle. I thought at the time it was taking unduly long for the drugs to pass from your system; you might have told me before we came here.”

“I’m not claustrophobic!”

“If you say so.”

“I’m fine. Here, I’m sitting down. Now can we talk about something else?”

“I will admit, I had expected to have some results for our labours by now.”

“It’s hopeless, isn’t it?”

“Certainly today’s lack of results calls for a reconsideration of method for tomorrow.”

“Maybe she got it in her mind to go to Paris. Or Rome. She once asked me about Rome.”

“Recently?”

“A year, year and a half ago.”

“It would help if you could estimate how much money she might have taken with her.”

“I told you, I don’t keep track of money, Yolanda does. It’s how … it’s one way I prove that I trust her. All I know is, she didn’t take anything from the bank, but she may have hoarded any amount of cash. She likes cash.”

“Or she could have had another bank account entirely.”

“Yes, so? Look, I
do
trust her. I gave her my word when I married her, that she could live her life as she wished. She’s my wife, and the mother of my child; if it makes her feel better to have her own bank account—her own life—it’s her affair.”

“Most generous of you.”

“Damn it, I knew it would be a mistake to bring you into this.”

“Damian—Damian! Sit down. Please.”

“I want some air. I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Wait, I need to let you out.”

“Better now?”

“Look, I’m sorry, I get… when I get upset it’s best for everyone if I
just take a walk. And it doesn’t help that I’m not painting. Painting bleeds off a lot of steam.”

“Or drinking.”

“I’m not drunk.”

“Do you ‘get upset’ often?”

“No more than any other man. Why do you ask?”

“How did you come to have contusions on your hands and a scratch across your face?”

“My hands are always bashed about, but a scratch—you mean this?”

“It was less than a day old when I saw you in Sussex Monday night.”

“What are you saying? Are you accusing—”

“I am merely asking—”

“—me of doing something—”

“—how you came—”

“—to my wife? To—”

“—to bear signs—”

“—my
child?”

“—of violence.”

“How could you believe that I would harm either of them?”

“I did not say that I so believe. Damian, think: I do not know you. Circumstances have made us virtual strangers. Were you a stranger in fact, come to me saying that his wife and child had vanished yet he didn’t want to go to the police, that is the first question that I should have to ask.”

“Did I kill my wife, you mean?”

“Did you?”

“You think I would have come to you—you, of all men—for help, if I had done that myself? For God’s sake, man, I’m a painter, not an actor!”

“You are the child of two performers, a man and a woman practiced in easy deception and assumed faces. I put it to you again: Did you harm your wife?”

“No! No, no, no, for God’s sake you have to believe me. I would not
harm Yolanda, I would not touch a hair on Estelle’s precious head, not if I was drunk or insane with drugs I would not. I would sooner—I’d sooner cut off the hand I paint with than use it to hurt either of them.”

“Very well.”

“You believe me?”

“I do not think I’m yet decrepit enough that I cannot hear truth in a man’s vow.”

“Thank God for that.”

“So how did you come by the scratch on your face?”

“Your orchard wants grazing.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The trees around your house. They would benefit from having a cow turned loose in there from time to time, to prune the lower branches. That was what Mother used to do in France, so they didn’t poke one’s ruddy eye out when one decided to take a stroll through the garden in the moonlight.”

“I see. I apologise for my neglect, I have been away—what? Why are you laughing?”

“Oh, it’s—it just hit me, how your audience would react if they could hear us talking about pruning apples.”

“
My
audience? How do you think your admirers would react were I to photograph The Addler, master of Surrealism, sitting in an overstuffed chair wearing a Victorian smoking-gown and puffing on one of his father’s ancient clay pipes?”

“I should think they would find it the very definition of Surreal.”

“Ah, Damian. Your laugh …”

“What about my laugh?”

“It reminds me of your mother.”

“Do you wish the lights left on again?”

“Yes please.”

“May I turn off the one overhead?”

“Here, let me. You don’t mind?”

“They are electric, we won’t suffocate.”

“I shouldn’t bet on that.”

“If you can make it through the night, we shall go elsewhere tomorrow. A place with a window.”

“I’ll live.”

“Damian?”

“Hmm?”

“I suggest that we part our ways tomorrow, temporarily.”

“Why?”

“The places I need to go, it may be good if you do not have to see them. To have them linked in your mind with your wife …

“Damian? Are you asleep?”

“Why should I link these places with Yolanda? Simply because I was living in a bordello when I met her?”

“Damian, there is no such thing as a willing child prostitute.”

“Huh. You guessed. About Yolanda.”