A Slight Trick of the Mind Page 17

  “A grave decision, my boy,” he said, nudging the watering can with a cane, watching as the startled wasps gave flight. “A terrible miscalculation—”

  He lowered the veil before proceeding, feeling little concern about the wasp who then roamed along the beekeeper's gauze like a sentinel. For he knew he was close to their nest, and, he knew, they could do nothing to defend themselves. He was, after all, better suited for their destruction than the boy had ever been, so he would finish what Roger had attempted but ultimately failed to do. Yet as he scanned the ground below, minding every step he took, he was filled with regret. In teaching the boy much, he had apparently not taught him a most vital fact: that pouring water into a wasps' nest only hastened the insects' wrath; it was—Holmes wished he had told him—like using petrol to quell a fire.

  “Poor boy,” he said, spying a hole in the ground formed curiously like a gaping, filthy mouth. “My poor boy,” he said, dipping a cane just past the lips of the hole, extracting it then, bringing the inserted end in front of the veil and studying the wasps that were now clinging to it (seven or eight of the creatures, agitated by the cane's violation, angrily probing the offender's circumference). He shook the cane, scattering the wasps. Then he gazed into the hole, its lips muddy from where the water had spilled, and saw the darkness inside taking shape, writhing upward as wasp after wasp began scrambling from the opening—a good many going straight into the air, some landing on the veil, others swarming around the hole. So this was how it happened, he thought. This, my boy, was how you were taken.

  Without panic, Holmes retreated, heading woefully to the beeyard. In time, he would phone Anderson, uttering exactly what the local coroner was in the process of recording, something Mrs. Munro would hear related at the afternoon's inquest: There were no stingers protruding from the boy's skin or clothing, indicating that Roger was the victim of wasps, not bees. Moreover, Holmes would make clear, the boy was trying to protect the hives. Roger had no doubt observed wasps in the apiary, had then found their nest, and, attempting to eradicate the creatures by drowning them, provoked the brood into a full-scale attack.

  There was more Holmes would share with Anderson, various minor details (the boy fleeing in the opposite direction of the beeyard while getting stung, perhaps intending to steer the wasps away from the hives). Before calling the constable, however, he would retrieve the dropped petrol canister and find the matches Mrs. Munro had discarded. Leaving one cane at the apiary, his fingers grasping the canister's handle, he'd journey again to the pasture, eventually pouring petrol into the hole as doused wasps struggled helplessly outward. A single match would complete his task, the flame cutting like a fuse across the ground, igniting the gaping mouth with a hiss, producing a slight eruption, which momentarily belched fire past the earthen lips (nothing escaping from within afterward save a single twisting ribbon of smoke that dissipated above the undisturbed grass), eliminating in an instant the queen and the fertile eggs and the throng of workers trapped inside their colony: a vast and intricate empire encased by the yellowish paper of the nest, gone in a flash, like young Roger.

  Good riddance, mused Holmes while weaving through the high grass. “Good riddance,” he said aloud, his head arched to the cloudless sky, his vision disoriented by the expanse of blue ether. And upon speaking those words, he was overcome by an immense melancholy for all enduring life, everything that had and did and would someday rove beneath such perfect, ever-present stillness. “Good riddance,” he repeated, and began weeping noiselessly behind the veil.

  18

  WHY HAD the tears come? Why—while resting in bed, then pacing the study, then going to the beeyard the next morning, and the morning after that—did Holmes find his head touched by his own hands and his fingertips wetted from brushing his whiskers, even as no crippling sob or mighty lament or paralysis transfigured him? Somewhere else—he imagined a small cemetery on the outskirts of London—stood Mrs. Munro and her relatives, everyone dressed in clothes as bleak as the gray clouds brooding over the sea and land. Was she crying, too? Or had Mrs. Munro shed all her tears during the lonely trip to London, sustaining herself in the city with the strength of family, the comfort of friends?

  It's unimportant, he told himself. She is elsewhere, and I am here—and I can do nothing for her.

  Still, he had made some effort toward helping her. Prior to her departure, he'd sent Anderson's daughter to the cottage twice, the girl carrying an envelope with more than enough money for travel and funeral expenses; both times, the girl returned, her features demure yet pleasant, informing him that the envelope had been refused.

  “She won't take it, sir—won't talk to me, either.”

  “It is all right, Em.”

  “Should I try again?”

  “Best not—I don't think it will accomplish much.”

  Now facing the apiary alone, his expression was abstracted and strict and frozen in dismay, as if he were also standing with the mourners at Roger's graveside. Even the hives—the white rows of boxes, the unadorned rectangular shapes rising from the grass—seemed like burial monuments to him. A small cemetery not dissimilar to the beeyard, he hoped was the case. A simple place—well tended and green, no weeds, no buildings or roadways visible nearby, no motorcars or human bustle disrupting the dead. A peaceful place aligned with nature, a good location for the boy to rest and for the mother to say good-bye.

  But why was he weeping so effortlessly, yet without emotion, the tears impelled by their own accord? Why couldn't he cry out loud, sobbing into his palms? And why—on the occasion of other deaths, when the pain was equal to what he felt now—had he shunned the funerals of loved ones and never once spilled a single tear, as if sorrow itself was something to be frowned upon?

  “No matter,” he muttered. “It's pointless.”

  He wouldn't strive for any answers (at least not on this day), nor would he ever believe that his tearfulness might be the concentrated sum-total result of everything he had seen, known, cared for, lost, and kept stifled throughout the decades—the fragments of his youth, the destruction of great cities and empires—those vast, geography-changing wars—then the slow atrophy of fond companions and one's own health, memory, personal history; all of life's implicit complexities, each profound and altering moment, condensed to a welling salty substance in his tired eyes. Instead, he sank downward without dwelling any more, lowering himself to the ground, sitting there like some stone figure that had inexplicably been set in the shorn grass.

  He'd sat there previously, on the very same spot—near the apiary, the location marked off by four rocks carried up from the beach eighteen years earlier (black-gray stones made smooth and flat by the tide, fitting perfectly into his palm), placed exactly apart—one in front of him, one behind, one to the left, one to the right—forming a discreet, unassuming patch, which had, in the past, contained and muted his despair. It was a slight trick of the mind, a game of sorts, though often beneficial: Within the rocks' domain, he could meditate, thinking warmly of those who were gone—and later, when stepping beyond the patch, whatever grief he'd brought into the space was kept there, if only for a short while. “Mens sana in corpore sano” was his incantation, spoken once inside the patch, repeated afterward when stepping from it. “Everything comes in circles, even the poet Juvenal.”

  First in 1929, and then again in 1946, he'd regularly used the spot to commune with the dead, subduing his woes in the unanimity of the beeyard. But 1929 was almost his undoing, producing a far more grievous period than the current upset, for elderly Mrs. Hudson—his housekeeper and cook since his London days, the only person who had accompanied him to the Sussex farmhouse upon his retirement—fell to the kitchen floor with a broken hip, cracking her jaw, losing teeth and consciousness (the hip, it was learned, had likely fractured just prior to the lethal fall, her bones having become too brittle to support her overweight body); in hospital, she eventually succumbed from pneumonia. (A mild enough ending, Dr. Watson wrote to Holmes, afte
r being notified of her passing. Pneumonia is, as you well know, a blessing to the feeble, a light touch for the aged.)

  But no sooner had Dr. Watson's letter been filed away—and Mrs. Hudson's belongings collected by her nephew, and an inexperienced housekeeper hired for the farmhouse chores—than that companion of many seasons, the good doctor himself, died unexpectedly of natural causes late one night (he'd enjoyed a nice supper with his visiting children and grandchildren, drunk three glasses of red wine, laughed at a joke his eldest grandson whispered in his ear, wished everyone good night before ten, and was dead before midnight). The heartbreaking news came in a telegram sent from Dr. Watson's third wife, delivered unceremoniously into Holmes's hands by the young housekeeper (the first of many women who would pass wretchedly through the farmhouse, quietly tolerating their irascible employer, usually quitting inside a year's time).

  In the days thereafter, Holmes wandered the beach for hours, from dawn till dusk, contemplating the sea and, for long periods, the many rocks beneath his feet. He hadn't seen or spoken directly to Dr. Watson since the summer of 1920, when the doctor and his wife spent a weekend with him. Yet it had been an awkward visit, more so for Holmes than for his guests; he wasn't particularly friendly toward the third wife (finding her rather dull and overbearing), and, aside from rehashing some of their earlier adventures together, he realized he shared little in common with Dr. Watson anymore; their evening conversations inevitably faded into uncomfortable silences, broken only by the wife's inane need to mention her children, or her love of French cuisine—as if silence was somehow her ultimate foe.

  All the same, Holmes regarded Dr. Watson as someone who had passed beyond his kin, so the man's sudden death, coupled with the recent loss of Mrs. Hudson, felt like a door slamming abruptly shut on everything that had previously shaped him. And while strolling along the beach, pausing to watch the waves curl in on themselves, he understood how adrift he'd become: Within that month, the purest connections to his former self had dwindled to almost no one, but he remained. Then on his fourth day of walking the shore, he began considering rocks—holding them to his face, discarding one in favor of another, finally settling on the four that pleased him the most. The tiniest of pebbles, he knew, held the secrets of the entire universe. Moreover, the rocks he soon carried up the cliff in his pockets had preceded his lifetime; they had—as he was conceived, as he was born and educated and made old—waited on the shore, unchanged. Those four common rocks, like the others he had tread upon, were infused with all the elements that then formed the great sweep of humanity, every possible creature and imaginable thing; without question, they possessed rudimentary traces of both Dr. Watson and Mrs. Hudson, and, obviously, much of himself as well.

  So Holmes gave the rocks a specific area, sitting among them with legs crossed, clearing his mind of what troubled him—the muddle caused by the permanent absence of two people he cared deeply about. Yet, he had determined, to feel someone's absence was, in a way, also to feel his or her presence. Breathing the beeyard's autumn air, exhaling his remorse (tranquillity of thought was his unspoken mantra—tranquillity of the psyche, just as he'd been taught by the Lamaists of Tibet), he sensed the beginnings of closure for himself and the dead, as if they were ebbing away gradually, attempting to depart from him in peace, finally allowing him to rise and go forward, his transient sorrow bridled between the venerable rocks. “Mens sana in corpore sano.”

  During the latter half of 1929, he occupied the spot on six different occasions, each subsequent meditation growing shorter in duration (three hours and eighteen minutes, one hour and two minutes, forty-seven minutes, twenty-three minutes, nine minutes, four minutes). By the new year, his need to sit among the rocks had abated, and whatever attention he then afforded the spot was for its tending (the removal of weeds, the trimming of grass, the rocks pressed firmly into the earth like the stones lining the garden pathway). Almost two hundred and one months would transpire before he lowered himself there again, doing so several hours after being informed of his brother Mycroft's passing—his breath streaming outward in puffs on a frigid November afternoon, dissipating beyond like some half-glimpsed, ethereal vision.

  But it was an inward vision that engaged him, already taking shape within his mind, welcoming him into the Strangers' Room of the Diogenes Club four months earlier—where Holmes had a final meeting with his only surviving sibling (the two enjoying cigars while sipping brandy). Mycroft looked well, too—clear-eyed, with a hint of color in his plump cheeks—although his health was failing and he was prone to exhibiting a loss of mental faculties; yet on that day, he was incredibly lucid, reliving stories of his wartime glories, seemingly delighted with his younger brother's company. And while Holmes had just recently begun sending jars of royal jelly to the Diogenes Club, he believed the substance was already bettering Mycroft's condition.

  “Even with your imagination, Sherlock,” Mycroft had said, his massive body verging on laughter, “I do not think you could picture me clambering ashore from a landing barge with my old friend Winston. ‘I'm Mr. Bullfinch,' Winston said—for that was the code name agreed upon—‘and I've come to see for myself how things are going in North Africa.'”

  However, Holmes suspected that the two great wars had, in fact, been a terrible strain on his brilliant sibling (Mycroft having continued in service well past the retirement age, rarely leaving his Diogenes Club armchair, yet indispensable to the government nonetheless). As the most mysterious of men, an individual poised at the very top of the British Secret Service, his elderly brother had often functioned for weeks without proper sleep—fueling his energy by eating voraciously—while single-handedly overseeing a multitude of intrigues, both domestically and abroad. It came as no surprise to him that—at the conclusion of the Second World War—Mycroft's health was declining rapidly; nor was Holmes astounded to observe an improvement in his brother's vigor, brought about, he was sure, by the sustained use of royal jelly.

  “It's good to see you, Mycroft,” said Holmes when standing to go. “You have become the antithesis of lethargy once more.”

  “A tramcar coming down a country lane?” said Mycroft, smiling.

  “Something like that, yes,” said Holmes, reaching for his brother's hand. “It has been too long between meetings, I fear. When shall we do it again?”

  “We won't, I'm sorry to say.”

  Holmes bent forward at his brother's chair, clutching Mycroft's heavy, soft hand. He would have laughed at that moment, except he saw those eyes contrasting his brother's smile. Irresolute and precarious with resignation, they suddenly fixed and held his stare, communicating as best they could: Like you, they seemed to say, I have dipped my toes into two centuries, and my race is about run.

  “Now, Mycroft,” said Holmes, lightly tapping a cane against his brother's shin, “I wager you are mistaken on that count.”

  But as had always been the case, Mycroft was never wrong. And soon the last thread to Holmes's past was severed by an unsigned letter sent from the Diogenes Club (the contents offering no condolences, stating simply that his brother had died quietly on Tuesday, November 19, and—in keeping with the final wishes—the body had been interred anonymously and unceremoniously). How very Mycroft, he thought, folding the letter, putting it among the other papers on his desk. How right you were, he considered later when sitting among the rocks—staying there into the chilly night, unaware of Roger spying on him from the garden pathway at dusk, or Mrs. Munro finding the boy, speaking with an admonishing tone: “You leave him be, son. He's in a queer mood today—Lord knows why.”

  Of course, Holmes said nothing of Mycroft's death to anyone, nor did he openly acknowledge that second delivery from the Diogenes Club: a small package following the letter by exactly a week, discovered on the front doorsteps and nearly crushed underfoot as he went outside for a morning walk. Beneath the brown wrapping, he found a worn edition of Winwood Reade's The Martyrdom of Man (the same copy his father, Siger, had given him while
he was a convalescent boy, languishing for months in the attic bedroom of his parents' Yorkshire country house), with a short note from Mycroft attached. What a depressing book it was, but one that had made a great impression on Holmes as a youngster. And in reading the note, in holding the volume once again, a memory he'd long since suppressed revealed itself—for he had loaned the book to his older brother in 1867, insisting Mycroft read it: “When finished, you must share your impressions—I wish to know what you think.” Many interesting ruminations, was Mycroft's brief assessment some seventy-eight years later, although a bit too meandering for my tastes. Took me ages to get through it.

  It wasn't the only time that the departed offered their words to him. There were the notes Mrs. Hudson had apparently written for herself, possible reminders jotted on scraps of torn paper and tucked away—in kitchen counters, in the broom closet, scattered throughout the housekeeper's cottage—only to be chanced upon by her initial replacement, who gave them to Holmes with always the same perplexed expression. For a while, he kept the notes, contemplating each one as if it might piece together what seemed a nonsensical puzzle. But in the end, he could gather no definitive meaning from Mrs. Hudson's messages, all of which consisted of two nouns: Hatbox Slippers; Barley Soapstone; Girandole Marzipan; Hound Cheapjack; Ordo Planchet; Carrot Housecoat; Fruitlet Prelibation; Tracheid Dish; Pepper Scone. The library fireplace, he concluded without sentiment, was where the notes belonged (Mrs. Hudson's cryptic scraps igniting on a winter's day, smoldering into nothing, along with various letters sent to him by complete strangers).

  A similar fate had previously befallen three of Dr. Watson's unpublished journals, and for good reason. From 1874 until 1929, the doctor had recorded the minutiae of his daily life, producing countless volumes, which lined his study bookshelves. But the three journals he bequeathed to Holmes—covering Thursday, May 16, 1901, through late October 1903—were more sensitive in nature. For the most part, however, the journals chronicled hundreds of minor cases, a few notable exploits, as well as a particularly humorous anecdote concerning stolen racehorses (“A Case of the Trots”); yet mixed with the trivial and the noteworthy were a handful of sordid, potentially damaging affairs: various indiscretions by relatives of the royal family, a foreign dignitary with a palate for small Negro boys, and a prostitution scandal that had threatened to expose fourteen parliamentary members.