Chapter Nine

The first week of his Easter break was flying by and, before William knew it, it was Good Friday and all the family were heading off to Hertfordshire and a weekend of family fun at Uncle Mycroft's house. Except, that is, for Redbeard, who – due to Uncle Mycroft's strict rules about no animals being allowed inside his house – would be spending the weekend with his favourite octogenarian, Mrs Hudson, in Baker Street where he would, no doubt, be given far too many treats and be allowed on the furniture. Daddy had taken him there the previous day.

With regard to Mummy's pregnancy sickness, Uncle Mycroft had made a contingency plan for them all to be transported by helicopter, if necessary, but William was dubious about that idea. Though the journey time might be shorter in a helicopter, the motion of flying was far more likely to make Mummy nauseous than travelling in a well-sprung limousine expertly driven by Uncle Mycroft's new chauffeur, Mr Travis. But he kept his thoughts to himself. Some adults, he had learned from experience, took exception to being corrected by a child - not that he thought Uncle Mycroft was that sort of adult. On the contrary, his uncle had always encouraged him to speak his mind. But he knew Uncle Mycroft's intentions were honourable and he didn't want to hurt his feelings. Good intentions, bad idea.

However, everyone was relieved that, on the day, Mummy was feeling well enough to make the one-hour journey from East Smithfield by car. So, at ten o'clock sharp, their 'lift' drew up outside the house and Daddy got stuck in, passing all their luggage out of the front door for Mr Travis to load into the voluminous boot before they all climbed inside the walnut and leather interior of the limo.

Mummy, it was decided, would be better off in the front passenger seat so she could see the road ahead and, therefore, be less likely to experience motion sickness. William, Freddie and Violet sat on the back seat, in their individual child seats, and Daddy took the drop-down seat behind the driver, his back to the direction of travel, all the better to entertain the children en route. As the car pulled away, they all waved goodbye to Marie, who was looking forward to spending a long weekend with Gavin, visiting his parents in Cornwall. Their flight to Newquay left Heathrow at 13.45 so she needed to get moving if she was to finish packing and be ready for the cab she had booked for an hour's time.

ooOoo

The journey to Colbert House passed without incident, with the children kept occupied all the way by an epic game of Yellow Car. Violet was declared the winner, by dint of the fact that she yelled 'Lellow Tar' at every vaguely yellowish vehicle they passed, from light beige to bright orange, and including a delivery van, an HGV and a bin lorry.

As the limo drew up outside the imposing façade of 'the big house', William braced himself – fingers in ears - for what he knew was about to happen. True to form, the oak front door burst open and Charlie and Katy charged out, squealing with unconstrained excitement, to be instantly joined in their vocal onslaught by Freddie and Violet, who were still strapped into their child seats so had little choice but to show their delight at seeing their cousins by squealing and frantically waving their arms and legs.

William had taken the precaution of unclipping his own harness half way up the drive and, now the car was stationary, he opened the passenger door on his side of the car and jumped out, leaving Daddy to deal with the other two. He held open the front passenger door so that Mummy could climb out. She gave him a sympathetic – and grateful – smile then walked round the front of the vehicle to be greeted by Mycroft and Arthur, who had followed their children from the house at a more leisurely pace

'Alright, that's quite enough, you horrible lot,' bellowed Arthur – in his best Sergeant-Major voice – at the four youngest Holmeses, who were engaged in a totally over-the-top group hug, 'or the Easter Egg Hunt is cancelled.'

This had an immediate effect. The high-pitched squeals of delight changed to lower-pitched groans of despair, which were far easier on the ear.

'Works every time,' Arthur quipped, with a wink in William's direction.

While Arthur helped Sherlock and Travis to bring in the bags, Mycroft gave Molly his arm and escorted her into the house, herding the smaller children ahead of him, while William followed on at a safe distance. They made their way through the hall way to the Summer Drawing Room, where Mycroft's housekeeper, Mrs Willis, had laid the sideboard for Morning Coffee – with an elegant china coffee set which included a jug of cream, a bowl of brown sugar lumps, a plate of assorted biscuits and a jug of milk. There was a selection of plastic beakers for the younger children, who really could not be trusted with fine porcelain just yet. All that was missing was the coffee itself which was almost certainly in the process of being prepared by Cook, Mrs Orgreave, in the kitchen.

'Please, Molly dear, do make yourself at home,' Mycroft insisted.

Molly gratefully accepted, sinking down onto the surprisingly comfortable Regency sofa and patting the spot beside her, inviting William to take it.

By the time Sherlock and Arthur joined the party, the children each had a beaker of milk in one hand and a biscuit in the other and Mycroft was helping himself to a demitasse of the finest Arabica coffee. Molly, though, was conspicuous by her absence.

'Oh,' Sherlock frowned, eyeing the coffee jug in his brother's hand, accusingly.

'I'm so sorry,' said Mycroft, with an apologetic grimace.

'Don't be,' Sherlock replied 'We thought she was over the 'smell' thing but apparently not. I'll go and see how she is.'

He disappeared off to Molly's aid, in the cloakroom, just off the hallway.

'So, William,' Mycroft began, 'how are you? And how are those bees of yours? Doing better than last year, I hope?'

William wasn't surprised that his uncle remembered the great bee debacle from the year before. Indeed, it had been on his own mind quite a bit, too, and he'd been trying to come up with some contingency plans, just in case it happened again.

When Mr Hedges returned, seven days after removing the old queen and half the colony from the hive, William watched with great anticipation as the old man opened up the hive.

'Now, what we're looking for are sealed queen cells,' Mr H reminded him. Sealed queen cells meant that the colony – in the absence of the old queen – had been nurturing and rearing prospective new queens. 'What we have to do is decide which of these queen cells we're going to leave to hatch out and take over the colony. The others - if there are any others – we'll destroy because we only want one queen per hive. What might happen if we leave more than one viable queen cell?' the old man asked, always testing William's knowledge and understanding.

'If we leave more than one queen cell,' William began, 'which ever one hatches first might trigger the workers to destroy the others.'

'Yes, that's true,' Mr H acknowledged, 'and that wouldn't be an entirely bad thing, though a bit tough on the unsuccessful queens. But what else might happen?'

'If the new queen emerges and finds that there are other queen cells in the hive, she might swarm immediately and take half of what's left of the colony – so a mini-swarm – which will leave the hive with only a quarter of its original colony.'

'Quite right, young fella, well done,' Mr Hedges replied, nodding his approval. 'And such a small colony, due to having an inadequate labour force, might not be able to forage enough food, defend the hive and rear new workers so, sadly, the colony may die.'

So, it was important to leave just one queen cell.

'But don't make the error of choosing the first queen cell you see because, even at this late stage of development, the queen cells might still fail.'

Inside each sealed cell, the new queens would all be pupating and transforming from larvae to bees so things could still go wrong.

'Many a slip 'twixt cup and lip' – another of Mr Hedges' favourite sayings.

Having marked the position of each of the queen cells with drawing pins, the week before, William and his mentor began to make their way through the hive, inspecting every potential queen in turn. And that's when they learned that Mr H's other favourite saying was no less true now than the day it was coined.

One by one, as they extricated each frame and zeroed in on the spot where the queen cell was expected to be, they discovered that either the workers had destroyed the cell, for whatever reason, or that the egg inside the cell had failed to thrive and the cell was, unfortunately, empty. Right up to the very last comb marked with a drawing pin, William continued to hope that the next cell would prove viable. But, sadly, this was not to be. Disappointment engulfed him like a great wave.

'Oh, dear,' sighed Mr Hedges. 'I'm very sorry, young William, but every now and then – not too often, I'm pleased to say – this does happen. For some reason, only known to the bees themselves, the workers destroy and dismantle queen cells and re-use the wax for another purpose. It might be that different factions within the colony, each caring for an individual queen cell, attack the ones belonging to other factions to destroy the competition. This can happen, with a queenless hive. They can be very lawless places. A bit like us humans, in that respect, I'm sad to say.'

'But what can we do?' asked William, trying very hard to stop his bottom lip from trembling and the big fat tears welling in his eyes from over-flowing and rolling down his cheeks. Since he was wearing his hood, he couldn't even cuff the offending tears away so he sniffed, very hard, to try and divert them to the back of his throat – rather unsuccessfully, as it happened.

'Oh, don't you worry, young fella,' Mr Hedges reassured him, respectfully not embarrassing William still further by overtly drawing attention to his distress. 'There's two things can happen here. Firstly, the workers might choose a worker cell and try to rear an emergency queen from it.'

'How do they do that?' asked William, managing to keep his voice steady by deploying a strategic little cough, to clear his throat, and swallowing hard.

'Simple, really. They start feeding her Royal Jelly…actually, to say they start to feed her Royal Jelly is not really accurate because all bee larvae are initially fed on Royal Jelly for the first two or three days of their lives. But, after that, the workers and the drones are given different food and only the queens continue to receive Royal Jelly until they pupate.'

William was intrigued. He clearly hadn't got to that chapter in his beekeeping book yet.

'So, the workers will start feeding their chosen larva with Royal Jelly and they will build up the queen cell so it looks like a peanut shell – the big difference being that this queen cell will hang down from the face of the comb, rather than from the bottom. But,' Mr Hedges added, somewhat kerbing William's growing excitement, 'emergency queen cells rarely produce good quality queens and, more often than not, the colony fails anyway.'

William's forehead creased again with disappointment but he wasn't to be defeated.

'So, if that's 'firstly',' he began, 'what's 'secondly'?'

'What, lad?' Mr Hedges asked, slightly confused.

'What is the second of the two options?' William enquired, being more specific.

'Ah, well, the other option is that we just bring the old queen back, in her new brood box, and reunite her with her colony. In other words, we put the two halves of the colony back together again.'

'Really?!' William exclaimed, feeling a surge of happy hormones flooding his cerebral cortex.

'Yes,' Mr H confirmed, with a wide grin. 'Really!'

'William? William?'

The voice broke into his thoughts and William looked up to see Daddy gazing down at him, with a small smile twitching at the corner of his mouth in recognition of his own propensity to zone out when nothing in the here and now was sufficiently stimulating to hold his attention.

'We're going out for a walk before lunch. Do you want to come?' Daddy asked.

'Oh, yes, please!' William replied, grinning broadly. Jumping up off the sofa, he followed Sherlock from the now empty room.

ooOoo

As the party set out across the parkland, it broke up, quite naturally, into pairs. Katy took sole charge of Violet and made it her mission to see that her little cousin's every want and need was catered for, whether that was examining a particularly pretty wild flower or chasing after the many cock pheasants that were currently strutting their stuff on the rolling grassland, competing with one another for the attentions of the hen birds.

Freddie and Charlie were engaged in an elaborate role-play adventure, which required that they gallop around in ever widening circles, challenging one another to do battle with invisible swords.

Mycroft and William strode out, up ahead, deep in conversation, topic unknown, which left Arthur and Sherlock to bring up the rear and make sure no one got left behind.

'We've got the builders in,' said Arthur, by way of an opening gambit.

'Really?' Sherlock exclaimed. 'Not adding another wing, I hope. One can hardly stick a spade in the ground around here without hitting archaeology. The last time, I seem to remember, it was the remains of a Saxon burial ground. It took months to excavate. Drove my parents to distraction, all those bearded hippy types wandering around the place in their cut-off shorts and Pink Floyd t-shirts.' He chuckled at the memory.

'No, nothing like that,' Arthur replied. 'We're redesigning the Nursery…well, to be more precise, we're doing away with the Nursery altogether. Charlie and Katy have been sharing that space up until now but we feel they each need a space of their own – especially poor Charlie. He needs somewhere he can get away from Katy.'

Sherlock nodded his approval. It hadn't escaped his notice that Katy was definitely the more dominant of the two children and could be quite overbearing at times.

'It's not as though he can catch a break at school, even. The village school has only one Reception class and the other years are vertically grouped, right up to Year Six. Give them their due, they do try to keep them apart as much as possible but their options are limited.'

Sherlock remembered the village school. He'd gone there himself until he was nine and got sent away to board at Prep School. Not that he minded boarding. Quite the opposite, in fact.

'Anyway, they've rather outgrown the décor, too, and the soft pay area and ball pool. So, we're taking it right back to brick and dividing the space into two separate bedrooms, each with its own ensuite. There'll still be a communal area in the middle – the Demilitarised Zone, as Mycroft calls it. But that will be more for the nannies than the children. Somewhere for them to chill out when the kids are doing their own thing.'

'Sounds like a good plan,' Sherlock declared. Then his brow crinkled and he pursed his lips. 'We're going to have to move Violet out of the Nursery at some point to make room for the latest addition.'

Oh, dear,' Arthur huffed, 'that might be awkward.'

'Yes, we're not looking forward to it. We don't want her to feel pushed out and, quite frankly, she's volatile enough at the moment. It would be foolish in deed to do anything that might make things worse - assuming that's even possible.'

'Well, at least you don't have to do anything just yet.'

'No. The baby isn't due for quite a while and he or she will sleep in our room for the first couple of months. And, hopefully, Violet might have calmed down by then.'

Both men agreed that this was to be hoped for.

'Not thinking of having anymore yourselves, then?' Sherlock asked, tentatively.

Arthur shrugged.

'We have thought about it. Mycroft was concerned I might want to pass on my wonderful Brocklehurst genes to the next generation but I assured him that wasn't high on my list of priorities. Anyway, my sister Rosie has already taken care of that side of things. And, you never know, Josie might decide to have children one day, if she ever meets the right person.'

Sherlock remained silent on that subject. Interpersonal relationships were definitely not his area.

'And Mycroft's not getting any younger,' Arthur went on.

'None of us are getting any younger,' said Sherlock, ruefully.

'No, but he's a bit further down the track, if you get my drift. I'd like him to be able to enjoy his retirement, when the time comes, without having to put up with teenage angst and wot-not. And, quite frankly, I feel as though Katy and Charlie are my kids – our kids. If we were to go down the surrogate route again, it would be my kids and your kids, not our kids. No, two is enough. The Nursery is definitely redundant.'

'Poppah, I think we should go back now,' Katy's voice piped up.

'Is that right?' Arthur replied, using his Lancashire vernacular. 'And why's that, then?'

'I think it's going to rain,' Katy replied, pointing to a small, grey, innocuous-looking cloud that had drifted into view behind the trees on the far horizon, 'and Violet doesn't like the rain. And, anyway, Violet is tired and can't walk any further.'

Sherlock glanced at Violet. She didn't look tired. In fact, she was trotting along the path at a fair clip, trying to catch up with Freddie and Charlie, who were at that moment preparing for a duel – standing back to back, with their fingers folded in the shape of guns – about to begin pacing in opposite directions.

'Are you sure it's Violet who's tired?' Arthur asked, going down on one knee to bring himself to Katy's level.

The little girl pursed her lips while she considered the question.

'Well, she seems to be tired of me,' she said, at last, her lips quivering and turning down at the corners as tears started in her eyes.

Sherlock walked on, in pursuit of Violet, and left Arthur to deal with Katy's distress at being rejected by her protégé. It was probably a salutary lesson for bossy-boots Katy that not every child was as easily manipulated as her brother. And, privately, Sherlock was rather proud that Violet knew her own mind and could stand her ground.

ooOoo