The Beekeeper's Apprentice: or, On the Segregation of the Queen (Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Book 1)

by Laurie R. King

One thing alone kept me from total bleak despair, and that was the awareness that this was a temporary state.

In fact, so carried away was he by the music that I believe he forgot I was there, forgot where he was, forgot to breathe, even, at certain passages.

this man who was a Victorian gentleman down to his boots; this man was now proposing to place not only his life and limb into my untested, inexperienced, and above all female hands, but my own life as well.

And then a miracle happened. Holmes reached out his long arms to me and, like a frightened child, I went inside them, and he held me, awkwardly at first, then more easily, until my trembling faded.

“I was merely going to say that I hope you realise that guilt is a poor foundation for a life, without other motivations beside it.”

I drove myself. I ate less, worked invariably into the early hours of morning, drank brandy now to help me sleep.

Watson wrote too, long tentative letters, mostly about Holmes’ health and mind. He came to see me once in Oxford. I took him for a long walk so I might not have to sit and face him,

He mistook the hint of excitement in my voice for nervousness, and reached over to pat my soft scholar’s hand with his big, calloused one.

I moved in a woolly cocoon of words and numbers and chemical symbols, and spent my every spare minute in the Bodleian.

I lay and felt the fingers of my unresponsive right hand, and thought about the walls of Jerusalem, and what my mathematics tutor had taken from me.