Mr Holmes - Couverture souple

Chapter 1

Upon arriving from his travels abroad, he entered his stone-built farmhouse on a summer’s afternoon, leaving the luggage by the front door for his housekeeper to manage. He then retreated into the library, where he sat quietly, glad to be surrounded by his books and the familiarity of home. For almost two months, he had been away, traveling by military train across India, by Royal Navy ship to Australia, and then finally setting foot on the occupied shores of postwar Japan. Going and returning, the same interminable routes had been taken–usually in the company of rowdy enlisted men, few of whom acknowledged the elderly gentleman dining or sitting beside them (that slow-walking geriatric, searching his pockets for a match he’d never find, chewing relentlessly on an unlit Jamaican cigar). Only on the rare occasions when an informed officer might announce his identity would the ruddy faces gaze with amazement, assessing him in that moment: For while he used two canes, his body remained unbowed, and the passing of years hadn’t dimmed his keen gray eyes; his snow-white hair, thick and long, like his beard, was combed straight back in the English fashion.

“Is that true? Are you really him?”

“I am afraid I still hold that distinction.”

“You are Sherlock Holmes? No, I don’t believe it.”

“That is quite all right. I scarcely believe it myself.”

But at last the journey was completed, though he found it difficult to summon the specifics of his days abroad. Instead, the whole vacation–while filling him like a satisfying meal–felt unfathomable in hindsight, punctuated here and there by brief remembrances that soon became vague impressions and were invariably forgotten again. Even so, he had the immutable rooms of his farmhouse, the rituals of his orderly country life, the reliability of his apiary–these things required no vast, let alone meager, amount of recall; they had simply become ingrained during his decades of isolation. Then there were the bees he tended: The world continued to change, as did he, but they persisted nonetheless. And after his eyes closed and his breaths resonated, it would be a bee that welcomed him home–a worker manifesting in his thoughts, finding him elsewhere, settling on his throat and stinging him.

Of course, when stung by a bee on the throat, he knew it was best to drink salt and water to prevent serious consequences. Naturally, the stinger should be pulled from the skin beforehand, preferably seconds after the poison’s instantaneous release. In his forty-four years of beekeeping on the southern slope of the Sussex Downs–living between Seaford and Eastbourne, the closest village being the tiny Cuckmere Haven–he had received exactly 7,816 stings from worker bees (almost always on the hands or face, occasionally on the earlobes or the neck or the throat: the cause and subsequent effects of every single prick dutifully contemplated, and later recorded into one of the many notebook journals he kept in his attic study). These mildly painful experiences, over time, had led him to a variety of remedies, each depending on which parts of his body had been stung and the ultimate depth to which the stinger had gone: salt with cold water, soft soap mixed with salt, then half of a raw onion applied to the irritation; when in extreme discomfort, wet mud or clay sometimes did the trick, as long as it was reapplied hourly, until the swelling was no longer apparent; however, to cure the smart, and also prevent inflammation, dampened tobacco rubbed immediately into the skin seemed the most effective solution.

Yet now–while sitting inside the library and napping in his armchair beside the empty fireplace–he was panicked within his dreaming, unable to recall what needed to be done for this sudden sting upon his Adam’s apple. He witnessed himself there, in his dream, standing upright among a stretching field of marigolds and clasping his neck with slender, arthritic fingers. Already the swelling had begun, bulging beneath his hands like a pronounced vein. A paralysis of fear overtook him, and he became stock-still as the swelling grew outward and inward (his fingers parted by the ballooning protuberance, his throat closing in on itself).

And there, too, in that field of marigolds, he saw himself contrasting amid the red and golden yellow beneath him. Naked, with his pale flesh exposed above the flowers, he resembled a brittle skeleton covered by a thin veneer of rice paper. Gone were the vestments of his retirement–the woolens, the tweeds, the reliable clothing he had worn daily since before the Great War, throughout the second Great War, and into his ninety-third year. His flowing hair had been shorn to the scalp, and his beard was reduced to a stubble on his jutting chin and sunken cheeks. The canes that aided his ambling–the very canes placed across his lap inside the library–had vanished as well within his dreaming. But he remained standing, even as his constricting throat blocked passage and his breathing became impossible. Only his lips moved, stammering noiselessly for air. Everything else–his body, the blossoming flowers, the clouds up high–offered no perceptible movement, all of it made static save those quivering lips and a solitary worker bee roaming its busy black legs about a creased forehead.

Chapter 2

Holmes gasped, waking. His eyelids lifted, and he glanced around the library while clearing his throat. Then he inhaled deeply, noting the slant of waning sunlight coming from a west-facing window: the resulting glow and shadow cast across the polished slats of the floor, creeping like clock hands, just enough to touch the hem of the Persian rug underneath his feet, told him it was precisely 5:18 in the afternoon.

“Have you stirred?” asked Mrs. Munro, his young housekeeper, who stood nearby, her back to him.

“Quite so,” he replied, his stare fixing on her slight form–the long hair pushed into a tight bun, the curling dark brown wisps hanging over her slender neck, the straps of her tan apron tied at her rear. From a wicker basket placed on the library table, she took out bundles of correspondence (letters bearing foreign postmarks, small packages, large envelopes), and, as instructed to do once a week, she began sorting them into appropriate stacks based on size.

“You was doing it in your nap, sir. That choking sound–you was doing it, same as before you went. Should I bring water?”

“I don’t believe it is required at present,” he said, absently clutching both canes.

“Suit yourself, then.”

She continued sorting–the letters to the left, the packages in the middle, the larger envelopes on the right. During his absence, the normally sparse table had filled with precarious stacks of communication. He knew there would certainly be gifts, odd items sent from afar. There would be requests for magazine or radio interviews, and there would be pleas for help (a lost pet, a stolen wedding ring, a missing child, an array of other hopeless trifles best left unanswered). Then there were the yet-to-be-published manuscripts: misleading and lurid fictions based on his past exploits, lofty explorations in criminology, galleys of mystery anthologies–along with flattering letters asking for an endorsement, a positive comment for a future dust jacket, or, possibly, an introduction to a text. Rarely did he respond to any of it, and never did he indulge journalists, writers, or publicity seekers.

Still, he usually perused every letter sent, examined the contents of every package delivered. That one day a week–regardless of a season’s warmth or chill–he worked at the table while the fireplace blazed, tearing open envelopes, scanning the subject matter before crumpling the paper and throwing it into the flames. The gifts, however, were put aside, set carefully into the wicker basket for Mrs. Munro to give to those who organized charitable works in the town. But if a missive addressed a specific interest, if it avoided servile praise and smartly addressed a mutual fascination with what concerned him most–the undertakings of producing a queen from a worker bee’s egg, the health benefits of royal jelly, perhaps a new insight regarding the cultivation of ethnic culinary herbs like prickly ash (nature’s far-flung oddities, which, as he believed royal jelly did, could stem the needless atrophy that often beset an elderly body and mind)–then the letter stood a fair chance of being spared incineration; it might find its way into his coat pocket instead, remaining there until he found himself at his attic study desk, his fingers finally retrieving the letter for further consideration. Sometimes these lucky letters beckoned him elsewhere: an herb garden beside a ruined abbey near Worthing, where a strange hybrid of burdock and red dock thrived; a bee farm outside of Dublin, bestowed by chance with a slightly acidic, though not unpalatable, batch of honey as a result of moisture covering the combs one particularly warm season; most recently, Shimonoseki, a Japanese town that offered specialty cuisine made from prickly ash, which, along with a diet of miso paste and fermented soybeans, seemed to afford the locals sustained longevity (the need for documentation and firsthand knowledge of such rare, possibly life-extending nourishment being the chief pursuit of his solitary years).

“You’ll live with this mess for an age,” said Mrs. Munro, nodding at the mail stacks. After lowering the empty wicker basket to the floor, she turned to him, saying, “There’s more, too, you know, out in the front hall closet–them boxes was cluttering up everything.”

“Very well, Mrs. Munro,” he said sharply, hoping to thwart any elaboration on her part.

“Should I bring the others in? Or should I wait for this bunch to be finished?”

“You can wait.”

He glanced at the doorway, indicating with his eyes that he wished for her withdrawal. But she ignored his stare, pausing instead to smooth her apron before continuing: “There’s an awful lot–in that hall closet, you know–I can’t tell you how much.”

“So I have gathered. I think for the moment I will focus on what is here.”

“I’d say you’ve got your hands full, sir. If you’re needing help–”

“I can take care of it–thank you.”

Intently this time, he gazed at the doorway, inclining his head in its direction.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, tentatively stepping onto the Persian rug and into the sunlight.

A scowl halted her approach, softening a bit as he sighed. “Not in the slightest” was his answer.

“Will you be eating this evening?”

“It is inevitable, I suppose.” He briefly envisioned her laboring recklessly in the kitchen, spilling offal on the countertops, or dropping bread crumbs and perfectly good slices of Stilton to the floor. “Are you intent on concocting your unsavory toad-in-the-hole?”

“You told me you didn’t like that,” she said, sounding surprised.

“I don’t, Mrs. Munro, I truly don’t–at least not your interpretation of it. Your shepherd’s pie, on the other hand, is a rare thing.”

Her expression brightened, even as she knitted her brow in contemplation. “Well, let’s see, I got leftover beef from the Sunday roast. I could use that–except I know how you prefer the lamb.”

“Leftover beef is acceptable.”

“Shepherd’s pie it is, then,” she said, her voice taking on a sudden urgency. “And so you’ll know, I’ve got your bags unpacked. Didn’t know what to do with that funny knife you brought, so it’s by your pillow. Mind you don’t cut yourself.” He sighed with greater effect, shutting his eyes completely, removing her from his sight altogether: “It is called a kusun-gobu, my dear, and I appreciate your concern–wouldn’t want to be stilettoed in my own bed.”

“Who would?”

His right hand fumbled into a coat pocket, his fingers feeling for the remainder of a half-consumed Jamaican. But, to his dismay, he had somehow misplaced the cigar (perhaps lost as he disembarked from the train earlier, as he stooped to retrieve a cane that had slipped from his grasp–possibly the Jamaican had escaped his pocket then, falling to the platform, only to get flattened underfoot). “Maybe,” he mumbled, “or maybe–”

He searched another pocket, listening while Mrs. Munro’s shoes went from the rug and crossed the slats and moved onward through the doorway (seven steps, enough to take her from the library). His fingers curled around a cylindrical tube (nearly the same length and circumference of the halved Jamaican, although by its weight and firmness, he readily discerned it wasn’t the cigar). And when lifting his eyelids, he beheld a clear glass vial sitting upright on his open palm; and peering closer, the sunlight glinting off the metal cap, he studied the two dead honeybees sealed within–one mingling upon the other, their legs intertwined, as if both had succumbed during an intimate embrace.

“Mrs. Munro–”

“Yes?” she replied, about-facing in the corridor and coming back with haste. “What is it?”

“Where is Roger?” he asked, returning the vial to his pocket.

She entered the library, covering the seven steps that had marked her departure. “Beg your pardon?”

“Your boy–Roger–where is he? I haven’t seen him about yet.”

“But, sir, he carried your bags inside for you, don’t you remember? Then you told him to go wait for you at them hives. You said you wanted him there for an inspection.”

A confused look spread across his pale, bearded face, and that puzzlement that occupied the moments when he sensed the failing of his own memory also threw its shadow over him (what else was forgotten, what else filtered away like sand seeping between clenched fists, and what exactly was known for sure anymore?), yet he attempted to push his worries aside by inducing a reasonable explanation for what confounded him from time to time.

“Of course, that is right. It was a tiring trip, you see. I haven’t slept much. Has he waited long?”

“A good while–didn’t take his tea–can’t imagine he minds a bit, though. Since you went, he’s cared more for them bees than his own mother, I can tell you.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, sadly it is.”

“Well, then,” he said, situating the canes, “I suppose I won’t keep the boy waiting any longer.”

Easing from the armchair, the canes bringing him to his feet, he proceeded for the doorway, wordlessly counting each step–one, two, three–while ignoring Mrs. Munro uttering behind him, “Want meat your side, sir? You got it all right, do you?” Four, five, six. He wouldn’t conceive of her frowning as he trudged forward, or foresee her spotting his Jamaican seconds aft...