Страница 70 из 77
Then in December, The Powers Above had decreed that a particular piece of ground must be won, a tiny hillock of no more importance than any other hillock won or lost over the past twenty-eight months. It was to be a surprise push. It was certainly a surprise to the citizens of a much-shelled village, trying to scrape a few potatoes from the liquid ground.
And a child. God only knew where her parents were-under a collapsed building, leaking into a field. But the child was there, a grubby thing in a too-short dress and a too-large hat who had climbed-or been placed-on a bit of surviving wall, where she kicked her heels and watched the parade of passing motors and horses; soldiers marching in one direction, soldiers staggering or being carried in the other.
No fear, no curiosity, just sitting and watching, hands in her lap, as if she’d been sitting and watching the whole of her young life.
One glance, and the passing soldiers and ambulance drivers could tell she was not right. A closer look, and Goodman had seen the almond curve to her eyes, the protruding tongue-tip that imparted a look of great concentration. She was what they call Mongoloid, what his mother-what The Other’s mother-had called one of God’s i
Then he was arrested, and it was discovered that Goodman had been born on a battlefield when The Other had died. He expected to be lined up and shot, but word came of a medal, and as a favour to the French, they sent him to Craiglockhart instead. There he met Rivers, and told him, just a little, about the girl on the wall.
Only after, when he’d crawled off to Cumbria and found the old woodsman’s hut and let the land remake him, had she gone away, for good.
Until an aeroplane came at him out of the sky and gave birth to a very different child with the same almond-shaped eyes.
And now below him lay the child’s nest, her hive, the loud, confusing, cold-hearted world into which she had been born. She might appear a being that could not feel the touch of earthly years-Wordsworth’s children, again-yet in no time at all the shades of the prison-house would close in on her and she would grow up. There was nothing he could do to stop it. She could not live in a Cumbrian estate among the owls and the hedgehogs. Her people lay below him. In his pocket was the drawing her father had done, the child become a woman: That was her world.
Her world, not his: He had no place here. But because of a child with a certain shape to her eyes, he must try to see the life in the machine, to see the sweetness in what they produced. He must do what he could to make it a place worthy of her.
He wished he’d had time to talk to Mary Russell’s man about bees. The books in his bolt-hole suggested an interest in the creatures, yet this was a man who’d spent his life with the darkest side of the human race. Would he look between his feet at a city landscape and see a hive, or a machine? Would he behold the labours of his fellow man and see the sweetness of intellectual honey, or yet more machines in which they would enmesh themselves? The man’s eagerness to support his brother’s preoccupation with Intelligence-what a misnomer!-suggested the latter. Nonetheless, he was Estelle’s grandfather, and therefore worthy of assistance.
Are you afraid of anything, Mr Robert?
Oh, dear child, I most certainly am. I am afraid of fear, so afraid. I am terrified of the bonds that tie a man down, the weight of other lives on his shoulders, the responsibility for stopping u
He was grateful to have made the acquaintance of Mary Russell: A perfect woman, nobly pla
Command me, dear lady, he thought. Warn me and comfort me and give me orders, for I am in need of a clear-cut task. I have long cast off my officer’s class. I need to know that someone else is in charge.
Still, the music to the funeral had gone well, and that was all his own doing. Perhaps he needed to venture his own contribution to the current problem.
What could he bring to this next act in the play?
He got to his feet and stretched out one arm in a gesture unseen by those on the street below. “Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens,” he shouted at them, then laughed aloud.
Having thus granted London his god-like permission to continue its scurrying life, he put on his hat and turned for the stairway.
He had, he recalled, promised a pint of milk. And his pockets were capacious, his coat large enough to conceal a beltful of sustenance-cheese and biscuits from the shop on the ground floor of this very building, apples from the man on the corner, a packet of coffee, a small loaf of bread. That Mycroft fellow looked as if he’d appreciate a slab of bacon.
Oh, he thought, and a newspaper. Mary’s husband seemed particularly taken by the things.
Chapter 65
Bensbridge’ I assume to be Westminster Bridge, and he wants a reply in the Evening Standard, but what the devil does he mean by ‘the object of your affection’?” I demanded. Goodman, newspaper delivered, had washed his hands of the matter and retired to the kitchen. He was humming to himself and exploring the cupboards.
“I do not know. Although addressing himself to Sherlock suggests that he believes me dead.”
Holmes and I rose at the same instant.
“There’s a public telephone down the street. Do you want to go, or shall I?” I asked.
“Take a taxicab to the offices of the Evening Standard,” Mycroft said. “There will be a telephone near there.”
“You’re not thinking of agreeing to his demands?” I protested.
Holmes’ face was a study in storm clouds. He made a circle of the room, then snatched up Mycroft’s gold pen and a piece of paper. “If we do not place a reply-by noon-we remove the option of choice. One of us needs to stay here, and… you are the less immediately visible.” He held out the page, on which he had written three words:
The beekeeper agrees.
I hesitated, but the revelations of the night before, which I had pushed from my mind under the urgent need for rationality, washed back with a vengeance. Suddenly, the thought of being locked up with my brother-in-law filled me with revulsion. Without further argument, I thrust the page into a pocket and made for the kitchen. As I climbed through the dumbwaiter hole, I heard Holmes say to Mycroft that he needed some things from downstairs.
I went fast down the shaft and through Mycroft’s flat to the guest room, noticing in passing that Goodman had cleaned up the débris from the panel. Holmes found me ripping garments from the wardrobe.
“Russell.”
“Theft,” I spat. “Embezzlement for the good of the nation! Oh, Holmes, how could you?”
“It was necessary.”
“The ends justifying the means? The tawdry excuse of every tyrant through history.”
“Mycroft is no tyrant, Russell.”
“Isn’t he? Stealing money from his government to set up his own little monarchy. What is he doing with all that money, that can’t be done openly? Bribes? Assassinations? I know there’s blackmail-blackmail, Holmes! Those letters of his that ‘would taint our name forever.’ You detest blackmailers, yet you permitted it!”