Chapter One First Birth (1): The boy came into being on a night of celestial alignment, when a comet travelled the firmament and the sky threw forth a million shooting stars to herald his arrival. Testimony, I:1 AS HOMECOMINGS GO, IT WAS NOT AUSPICIOUS. The train was late. Portsmouth sweltered under a fitful breeze. Sherlock Holmes paced up and down, smoking one cigarette after another, his already bleak mood growing darker by the minute. I sat, sinuses swollen with the dregs of a summer cold I'd picked up in New York, trying to ignore my partner's mood and my own headache. Patrick, my farm manager, had come to meet the ship with the post, the day's newspapers, and a beaming face; in no time at all the smile was gone, the letters and papers hastily thrust into my hands, and he had vanished to, he claimed, see what the delay was about. Welcome home. Just as it seemed Holmes was about to fling his coat to the side and set off for home on foot, whistles blew, doors clattered, and the train roused itself from torpor. We boarded, flinging our compartment's windows as far open as they would go. Patrick cast a wary glance at Holmes and claimed an acquaintance in the third- class carriage. We removed as many of our outer garments as propriety would allow, and I tore away the first pages of the newspaper to construct a fan, cooling myself with the announcements and the agony column. Holmes slumped into the seat and reached for his cigarette case yet again. I recognised the symptoms, although I was puzzled as to the cause. Granted, an uneventful week in New York followed by long days at sea-none of our fellow passengers having been thoughtful enough to bleed to death in the captain's cabin, drop down dead of a mysterious poison, or vanish over the rails-might cause a man like Holmes to chafe at inactivity, nonetheless, one might imagine that a sea voyage wouldn't be altogether a burden after seven hard- pressed months abroad.* And in any case, we were now headed for home, where his bees, his newspapers, and the home he had created twenty years before awaited him. One might expect a degree of satisfaction, even anticipation; instead, the man was all gloom and cigarettes. I had been married to him for long enough that I did not even consider addressing the conundrum then and there, but said merely, "Holmes, if you don't slow down on that tobacco, your lungs will turn to leather. And mine. Would you prefer the papers, or the post?" I held out the newspaper, which I had already skimmed while we were waiting, and took the first item on the other stack, a picture post- card from Dr Watson showing a village square in Portugal. To my surprise, Holmes reached past the proffered newspaper and snatched the pile of letters from my lap. Another oddity. In the normal course of events, Holmes was much attached to the daily news-several dailies, in fact, when he could get them. Over the previous months, he had found it so frustrating to be days, even weeks in arrears of current events (current English events, that is) that one day in northern India, when confronted with a threeweek- old Times, he had sworn in disgust and flung the thing onto the fire, declaring, "I scarcely leave England before the criminal classes swarm like cockroaches. I cannot bear to hear of their antics." Since then he had stuck to local papers and refused all offers of those from London-or, on the rare occasions he had succumbed to their siren call, he had perused the headlines with the tight- screwed features of a Excerpted from The Language of Bees: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes by Laurie R. King All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
