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

across the Channel, although the air throbbed and glass rattled for days on end with the July bombardment of the Somme, although I know I must have spent great numbers of hours in the emergency medical station, what I recall most about that summer of 1917 is how beautiful the sky was. The summer seemed mostly sky, sky and the hillsides on which we spent hours talking, talking. I had bought a lovely little chess set of ivory, inlaid wood, and leather to carry in my pocket, and we played games without number under the hot sky. He no longer had to handicap himself severely in order to work for his victories. I still have that set, and when I open it I can smell the ghost of the hay that was being cut in a field below us, the day I beat him evenly for the first time.

    One warm, still evening just after dusk we walked back from an outing on the other side of Eastbourne. We were strolling towards the cottage from the Channel side, and as we neared the small fenced or-chard that housed his hives Holmes stopped dead and stood with his head tipped to one side. After a moment he gave a little grunt and strode rapidly across the turf to the orchard gate. I followed, and once among the trees I could hear the noise that his experienced ears had caught at the greater distance: a high, passionate sound, a tiny, endless cry of unmistakable rage coming from the hive in front of us. Holmes stood staring down at the otherwise peaceful white box, and clicked his tongue in exasperation.

    “What is it?” I asked. “What’s that noise they’re making?”

    “That is the sound of an angry queen. This hive has already swarmed twice, but it seems determined to swarm itself into exhaus-tion. The new queen had her nuptial flight last week, and she is now anxious to murder her rivals in their beds. Normally the workers would encourage her, but either they know she is going to lead another swarm, or they are somehow driving her to do so. In either case, they are keeping her from doing away with the unborn queens. They cover the royal cells with thick layers of wax, you see, so she cannot reach the princesses and they can’t chew their way out to answer her chal-lenge. The noise is the queens, born and imprisoned, raging at each other through the prison walls.”

    “What would happen if one of the unhatched queens escaped from her cell?”

    “The first queen has the advantage, and would almost certainly kill it.”

    “Even though she is going to abandon the hive anyway?”

    “The lust for murder is not a rational thing. In queens, it is an instinctual response.”

    I went up to Oxford a few weeks later. Both Holmes and Mrs. Hud-son went on the train with me, to deliver me to my new home. We walked by the Cherwell and down to the Isis to feed the ill-tempered swans, and back by way of Mercury’s fountain and the silent, brooding bell named Tom to the station. I embraced Mrs. Hudson and turned to Holmes.

    “Thank you,” was all I could come up with.

    “Learn something here,” he said. “Find some teachers and learn something” was all he could say, and we shook hands and walked off to our separate lives.

    he oxford university I came up to in 1917 was a shadow of her normal, self-assured self, its population a tenth of that in 1914 before the war, a number lower even than in the years following the Black Death. The blue-coated wounded, wan and trembling be-neath their tanned skins, outnumbered the black-robed academics, and several of the colleges, including my own, had been given over to housing them for the duration.

    I expected great things of this University, many of which it gave me in abundance. I did find teachers, as Holmes had ordered, even before the remnant of male dons trickled back from France, having left parts of themselves behind. I found men and women who were not intimidated by my proud, rough-cut mind, who challenged and fought me and were not above reducing me sharply to size when criticism was due, and a couple