The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King Read Free Book Online Page A

for you have done what my skills could not, and brought back my truest friend from the grave.”

    I stood there struck dumb with confusion. Holmes, ill? He had looked thin and grey when we first met, but dying? A sardonic voice from the next room made us both start guiltily.

    “Oh come now, Watson, don’t frighten the child with your exag-gerated worries.” Holmes came to the doorway in his mouse-coloured robe. “ ‘From the grave’ indeed. Overworked, perhaps, but one foot in the grave, hardly. I admit that Russell has helped me relax, and God knows I eat more when she is here, but it is little more than that. I’ll not have you worrying the child that she’s in any way responsible for me, do you hear, Watson?”

    The face that turned towards me was so stricken with guilt that I felt the last of my wish to dislike him dissolve, and I began to laugh.

    “But, I only wished to thank her—”

    “Very well, you’ve thanked her. Now let us have our tea while Mrs. Hudson finds some breakfast for us. Death and resurrection,” he snorted. “Ridiculous!”

    I enjoyed that day, although at times it gave me the feeling of open-ing a book halfway through and trying to reconstruct what had gone before. Previously unknown characters meandered in and out of the conversation, place-names referred in shorthand to whole adventures, and, overall, the long years of a constructed relationship stood before me, an intricate edifice previously unseen. It was the sort of situation in which a third party, namely myself, could have easily felt awkward and outdistanced, but oddly enough I did not. I think it was because I was so very secure in my knowledge of the building Holmes and I had already begun. Even in the few weeks I had known him we had come far, and I no longer had any fear of Watson and what he represented. Watson, for his part, never feared or resented me. Before that day I would have scornfully said he was too dim-witted to see me as a threat. By the af-ternoon I knew that it was because his heart was too large to exclude anything concerning Holmes.

    The day went quickly, and I enjoyed being an addition to the trio of old friends, Holmes, Watson, and Mrs. Hudson. When Watson went off after supper to gather his things for the evening train to Lon-don, I sat down beside Holmes, feeling a vague need to apologise to somebody.

    “I suppose you know I was prepared to hate him,” I said finally.

    “Oh yes.”

    “I can see why you kept him near you. He’s so...good, somehow. Naïve, yes, and he doesn’t seem terribly bright, but when I think of all the ugliness and evil and pain he’s known...It’s polished him, hasn’t it? Purified him.”

    “Polished is a good image. Seeing myself reflected in Watson’s eyes was useful when contemplating a case that was giving me problems. He taught me a great deal about how humans function, what drives them. He keeps me humble, does Watson.” He caught my dubious look. “At any rate, as humble as I can be.”

    hus my life began again, in that summer of 1915. I was to spend the first years of the war under Holmes’ tutelage, al-though it was some time before I became aware that I was not just vis-iting a friend, that I was actually being taught by Holmes, that I was receiving, not casual lessons in a variety of odd and entertaining ar-eas, but careful instruction by a professional in his area of consider-able expertise. I did not think of myself as a detective; I was a student of theology, and I was to spend my life in exploration, not of the darker crannies of human misbehaviour, but of the heights of human specula-tion concerning the nature of the Divine. That the two were not unre-lated did not occur to me for years.

    My apprenticeship began, on my part, without any conscious recognition of that state. I thought it was the same with Holmes, that he began by humouring this odd neighbour for lack of anything more demanding at hand, and ended up with a fully trained