## Metadata - Author: [[Laurie R. King]] - Full Title: The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Category: #books ## Highlights - Our disguise is assumed the instant we step outside of that door over there and not let down for a moment. If you cannot sustain it, you’d best say so now, because one slip could mean the child’s life. To say nothing of the political complications that will result if we allow a valued and somewhat reluctant Ally’s representative to lose his child while on our soil.” His voice was almost mild, but when he looked into my eyes, I nearly quailed before him. This was no game of putting on Ratnakar Sanji’s turban and a music-hall accent, where the greatest risk was being sent down; the penalty for failure in this rôle could be a child’s life. Could even be our own lives. It would have been easy, then, to excuse myself from the case, but—if not now, I asked myself, when? If I refused now, would I ever find the necessary combination of courage and opportunity again? I swallowed, and nodded. He turned and put the beaker on the table, where it would sit, undisturbed, to greet our weary eyes when we returned. ([Location 1722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=1722)) - I leant into the gale of his speech and contributed two low, forceful words of my own. “Sherlock Holmes,” I pronounced. ([Location 1808](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=1808)) - Both of those hit home, like charges at the base of a dam, and the pent-up waters came gushing out in an intense monotone. ([Location 2543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=2543)) - “Mycroft, my dear child, my brother Mycroft. He possesses the knowledge of Scotland Yard without the obsessional reticence of that good body, which tends to hoard information like a dragon its gold. ([Location 2876](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=2876)) - No, I refuse to accept gallant stupidity in place of rational necessity. ([Location 2917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=2917)) - We eventually reached the noxious yard and stood before its pristine white surface, which obscured decades of horse droppings, kitchen slops, and other unmentionables. In the summer, it rivalled my Stilton for olfactory potency. ([Location 2993](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=2993)) - “Mycroft moves in circles rather more exalted than those I have in mind. His is the realm of espionage and political backstabbing, with only a peripheral interest in the world of retired bombers and hungry street urchins. ([Location 3378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=3378)) - “Holmes, we must talk, but I cannot breathe in your presence. There is a fine, if austere, set of shower baths in the prisoners’ section. Take these clothes, but don’t let them touch the thing you have on.” ([Location 3886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=3886)) - “I know you well enough, Holmes, to suspect that we are about to embark on a long and arduous journey. If it is a choice between expiring slowly from your fumes or being blown to pieces, I choose the latter. Gladly.” Holmes glowered at me for some seconds, saw that I was on this issue inflexible, and with a curse worthy of the docks snatched the proffered clothes and hurled himself out the door, furiously demanding directions from the poor constable stationed outside. ([Location 3892](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=3892)) - The river was greasy and black in the early twilight, high and very cold looking, its calmer reaches one undulating mat of flotsam. The swollen body of a dog rocked gently against a pier. The area was deserted, though voices and machinery noises drifted from the next row of buildings. ([Location 3921](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=3921)) - We walked carefully down the planks to a gate of peeling corrugated iron, which slid open with an eerie silence and closed again after us. ([Location 3924](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=3924)) - “Holmes, I—” One warning finger was raised, and I bit back the words that would only have made matters worse: Holmes, four days ago you were concussed and bleeding. Holmes, you’ve had less than a dozen hours’ sleep in the last eighty. Holmes, you were exhausted and furious when you saw the note, and you would have called to mind the characteristic missing serif on the a and the off-centre, tipsy l and the high M, you’d have consciously remembered seeing them, if not today, then tomorrow, or the next day, Holmes. However, I said nothing, because he would hear only: Holmes, you’re slipping. ([Location 3963](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=3963)) - “You are quite certain, I take it?” “Yes.” I began to recite the characteristics I had noted, but he cut me off. “That is not necessary, Russell. I have great faith in your eyes.” ([Location 3972](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=3972)) - Surely I kept you abreast of my thoughts last night?” “Your mutterings in the park were completely unintelligible, and if you spoke to me in the laboratory before dawn, I did not hear it.” “Odd, I thought I was quite garrulous. ([Location 3982](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=3982)) - I have not demanded of you an expertise in the study of London, but as you know, I spent most of my life there before I retired. I breathed her air, I trod her ground, and I knew her like—as a husband knows his wife.” I did not react to the simile, despite the Hebraic overtones to the verb, “know.” ([Location 4022](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=4022)) - “Sorry. But what does the fact that she chose to walk through Baker Street before going to the park have to do with it?” “You tell me,” he demanded, in a thin echo from a spring day long, long ago. Obediently I set to reviewing the entire episode, running my mind over the facts like a tongue over teeth, searching for a gap in the smooth, hard surfaces. ([Location 4031](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=4031)) - the control in his voice and the small twitch in the right side of his mouth spoke volumes of the rage and apprehension this threat set off in him. ([Location 4073](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=4073)) - “I begin to feel like a piece of driftwood tumbling about between waves and sand, snatched up and tossed from one place to another. It is a most disconcerting feeling. Were I alone I might almost be tempted to let myself be tumbled, just to see where I washed up. That, however, is not an option. “What then are the options? Offensive—an all-out attack? On what? Beating a mist with a cricket bat. Defence? How does one defend against a mirror-image? She has read Watson’s tales, and my bee book, the monographs on soil and footprints—not available to the general public—and God knows what else. A woman! She has turned my own words against me, caused me considerable mental and physical distress, kept me off my balance for five whole days, chased and harried me across my home territory until I am forced to go to ground—to sea. Do you know—” he broke off and whirled around to shake an outraged pipe stem at me, “this … person has even penetrated into one of my bolt-holes! Yes, today, there were signs.… I still cannot believe that a woman can have done this, deducing my deductions, plotting my moves for me, and all the time giving the impression that to her it is a deadly but effortless and highly amusing game. Even Moriarty did not go so far, and he was a master without parallel. The mind, capable of such coups de maître. Maîtresse.” He stopped and straightened his shoulders with a jerk as if to settle his clothing back into place. “A most gratifying challenging opponent, this,” he said in a calmer voice, and lit his pipe, which had gone out. ([Location 4076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=4076)) - “Today while I was on my distressingly fruitless quest for information through the human sewers of fair London town, it occurred to me that the matter of your future has come to a head. This peculiar … present situation has forced it, but it should have come sooner or later. The question I am faced with is, what does one do with a student who has passed every examination laid before her? Eventually she must be removed from statu pupularis and allowed to assume the rights and responsibilities of maturity. In your case, every paper I’ve set you, every test, up to the viva voce question of the mud on our opponent’s footwear, has come up an alpha. “I have, then, a limited number of options. Considering the gravity of this particular case, I feel I should be justified in removing you from the firing line as I did Watson, until I can clear it up. No, do not interrupt. Much to my displeasure, I find I cannot bring myself to attempt that. For one thing, the logistics of keeping you under control are too daunting. “It has been on my mind since Wales that an apprentice kept from her journeyman’s papers will spoil. Faced with this, what for lack of a better term I shall call a case, I have two choices: I can maintain your ‘apprenticeship’ (as you yourself called it), or I can grant you your Mastery. Having never been one for half-measures, I see no point in delaying the inevitable. Therefore…” He stopped, took his pipe from his mouth, looked into the bowl, put it back into his mouth, reached for the pouch in his pocket, and I very nearly screamed at him with the tension of being torn between “Thank God, here it comes, at last!” and “Oh, God, here it comes, he’s sending me away.” He opened the tobacco pouch and dug from it a small, much-folded scrap of onionskin, dropped it in front of me, went to the ashtray clipped to the table, and began to scrape the dottle from his pipe while I unfolded the paper. On it, in five lines of minute, cramped, antique, and graphologically cryptic script, were written: Egypt—Alexandria—Sayeed Abu Bahadr Greece—Thessaloníki—Thomas Catalepo Italy—Ravenna—Fr. Domenico Palestine—Jaffa—Ali & Mahmoud Hazr Morocco—Rabat—Peter Thomas Each of the personal names was followed by a series of numbers that looked like a radio frequency. I looked up, but Holmes was at the window again, his unrevealing back to me. “I have said before this time that I regard it as stupidity rather than courage to overlook a danger that presses as close as this one has. Even my critics will not accuse me of stupidity, else I should not have reached my present age after a lifetime of the rough-and-tumble. I remember vividly, as if it were last week rather than two and a half decades ago, sitting in Watson’s chair and admitting to him that London was too hot for my safety. The current state of affairs is … remarkably similar. “The admission then caused me some shame. But that was half a lifetime ago, and since then I have learnt, slowly and painfully, that time… ([Location 4093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=4093)) - Holmes won most of the games, but not all. He was a good player, ruthless and imaginative, but an erratic one, for he tended to glory in bizarre gambits and impossible saves rather than the methodical building of defence and thoroughly supported offence. Chess for him was an exercise, boring at times and always a poor substitute for the real game—rather like scales compared to the public performance of a concerto. ([Location 4209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=4209)) - Holmes had drawn white, and he came out, whirling his knights across the board like a berserker with his chain mace, sixteen squares of shifting destruction and disruption that had me slapping together hasty defences at half a dozen spots across the board, summoning and abandoning bishops and rooks, spraying pawns ahead of the fray and leaving them in odd niches as the action stumbled away across the board. One after another he swatted aside my defences, until in desperation I separated my royalty, moving my queen away from the vulnerable king to draw my opponent’s fire. For a time I succeeded, but eventually he trapped her with a knight, and I lost her. ([Location 4216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=4216)) - TWO DAYS LATER the Crusader walls of Acre closed in on us, as unlike the sun-swept stones of Jerusalem, eighty miles away, as could be imagined. Jerusalem’s golden walls had sparkled and shone, and the city vibrated with an inaudible song of joy and pain, but Acre’s walls were heavy and thick, and its song was a multilingual dirge of ignorance and death. The long shadows seemed like spectres to be avoided, and I noticed Holmes glancing about him sharply. Ali and Mahmoud, in their customary place four strides ahead of us, seemed as unaware of the gloom as they were of anything outside themselves, but even they edged towards the middle of the streets as if the walls were unclean. I tried to push away the mood, but it crept back stubbornly. “I wonder if these stones would speak with such a bleak voice if I didn’t know what the place stood for,” I said to Holmes irritably. “To a mind attuned to observation and deduction, the product reveals the mind of its creator.” He squinted up at the great, ponderous blocks that loomed up to hide the sky, and rubbed his hands together slowly. “Take Mozart—frenzied gaiety and weeping put to music. The agony of the man is at times unbearable. Let us go.” ([Location 4453](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00GQ6043A&location=4453))