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Mycroft need only walk in the door of his Whitehall office to send any rats scurrying for their holes. With me at the building’s telephone board and Holmes at its exit, one or the other would lead us to their source.
Before the sun rose behind the curtains that Monday morning, our plans were laid.
Mycroft stood, moving like an old man. Holmes and I were little better. I looked at the mantelpiece clock: nearly six.
“You will leave soon?” I asked Mycroft.
Holmes was frowning at his brother’s stiffness and spoke first. “The afternoon will suffice.”
“Really?” I dreaded to hear what other activity he had in mind. “So what now?”
“A few hours of sleep might be for the best.”
“Sleep, Holmes?” I exclaimed. “Do we do that?”
“As best we might, given the age of Mrs Melas’ beds.”
When we began to stir, Goodman woke and stretched full-length on the striped divan, looking remarkably like Estelle. Then he jumped to his feet.
“Unless you need me to guard the door or repel boarders, I’ll be gone for a bit. Shall I hang the picture back over the hole downstairs, on the chance someone wanders in?”
Holmes started to object, but I was more accustomed to Goodman’s habit of popping in and out of view, and told my long-time partner, “He knows the back entrance, he knows to take care that no one sees him use the hidden doors, he’ll be careful.”
“And I’ll bring a pint of milk,” Goodman said.
“But not an entire arm-load of groceries,” I ordered. “Nothing you can’t slip unseen into your pockets. We don’t want you to look like a delivery boy.”
He put on his straw hat and marched with jaunty steps to the kitchen. I had a sudden pang of doubt-we could be trapped here-but stifled it, and went to find a bed. It wanted airing, but a slight mustiness would not keep me from sleep.
I felt I had scarcely closed my eyes when a presence woke me. I forced an eye open, and saw green; blinked, and the green became an eye; pulled back my head, and Goodman came into view, his face inches from mine.
I sat sharply upright, glanced over, and found Holmes, incredibly, still asleep-who would have thought Goodman could enter this place without waking either of the brothers? When I turned back to my human alarum clock, my vision was obscured by an object that, when I had pushed it away sufficient to focus, proved to be a folded newspaper.
His other hand came around the side of the page, one finger pointing at the print. “Is this for you?”
I took the paper, and read:
THE BEEKEEPER wished in trade for the object of his affection central Bensbridge, alone, 2:30 am, reply acceptance in evening standard.
Chapter 64
Robert Goodman sat on the rooftop, watching London rush to and fro between his dangling toes. The view was omniscient-in the theatre of the streets, his seat was in the gods. Which was only appropriate, considering the Person on whom he was meditating.
Are you frightened of anything?
Suffer the little children, to come unto me, because they will speak the truths only fools know. Oh, the Son of Man knew what he was talking about, that was for certain.
And the Son of Man did his own sitting on the heights, thinking on the morrow, wondering if he might not simply slip away and leave his friends to sort it out.
A simple child that lightly draws its breath / And feels its life in every limb; what should it know of death? Interesting, that the Bard of Avon had so few children in his writing while Wordsworth had so many. If Wordsworth had been a playwright forced to deal with actors, would he, too, have replaced children with sprites and fairies?
A simple child should know nothing of death, or fear, or hunger. But children did, all the time. Estelle Adler certainly did, poor mite-mother murdered, father hunted. But what was that to him?
An ambulance driver had responsibilities, but they were not those of an officer. A driver’s demands were immediate, clear-cut, and rode light upon the conscience: Men died, but if one had done one’s job, those deaths could be laid at the foot of someone else. Some officer.
Even then, even Before, his very soul-that Other whom he once was-had cringed from an officer’s relationship with the men in his command. Not through cowardice: He would risk life and limb to bring a man home, even one who was not going to reach the field hospital alive. But he would not lead them. He would not love them and comfort them and cajole them into the path of flying metal. He’d have put a lump of metal into his own brain first.
Are you frightened of anything, Mr Robert?
An omnibus paused between his toes, sucking up a row of tiny figures, evacuating others. The Son of Man could walk among those figures and go u
Take away this cup, for I am afraid. If the Son of Man couldn’t talk his way out of what was coming for him, how could any other son of man?
A tiny dot of brilliant blue caught his eye, and he bent forward to watch it: a woman’s hat, a spot of defiant joie de vivre sailing the drab sea before it was swallowed by a shop.
With the bright spot gone, he became aware of the pull of the street, far below. Mad world, mad kings, mad composition! There was earth beneath the tarmac and tile, real earth, and its call was, ultimately, not to be denied. Who was to say it would not be today?
Without a doubt, the time had passed for men like him. The city below him was a machine, its people mere moving parts generating goods and money. Cold rationality had spread across this fair land: Its nobility were those who stole for good purpose. Which he could understand-gods made their own rules-but these took no joy in life. The gods of this England were film stars and dispensers of tawdry advice, and they embraced brittle frivolity rather than the deep and supple exuberance of woodland creatures. In this England, Ariel would wear a straight-jacket, Hamlet would be fodder for the gossip columns. Hadn’t he seen Oberon and Titania this very morning, aged and worn as the feather in his borrowed hat: a man and a woman, older than their years, sitting on a park bench in their cast-off overcoats and sharing a scrap of ill-cooked food? The king and queen of the fairy world, eking out their days amongst the wind-blown biscuit wrappers.
Goodman pulled the feather from his hat band. This primary flight-feather of Strix aluco had greeted him one morning outside his front door, a gift from the tawny lady whose home was in the old oak, whose voice often called to him at night. His fingers smoothed the barbs to order, but there remained a gap. One barb was missing. When had that happened? He worked at it with his fingertips, as if his flight from the roof-top depended on the feather’s perfection, but even with the barbules linked, there remained a hole near the shaft.
Are you frightened of anything, Mr Robert?
The hole in the owl’s feather was the shape of an elongated tear-drop. Turned slightly, it reminded him of the shape of a child’s eye. A half-Chinese child’s eye.
He shuddered, and let go the feather, leaning forward, forward until a gust of wind caught it, whipping it around the corner and out of sight.
A child’s eye.
Late November, in the depths of an eternal war, a war with no begi