The Language of Bees

by Laurie R. King

  Harrods is a meeting place for another kind of worship, that of excess in all its glory. Under the stoutest of circumstances, I can tolerate twenty minutes inside its decorative doors before my fingers begin to twitch and my eyes scan the endless halls for an exit. But then, I am not a person who considers browsing through shops a recreational activity.

  Even with a specific objective in mind—ladies' shoes—it did not prove simple. Did I wish walking shoes, riding boots, ballet flats, shoes for the hunt, shoes for tennis—ah, heeled dress shoes. Daytime, evening wear, or for Court?

  I eventually tracked down the department featuring the Cardiff designer: There sat the shoe, glossy and unsullied by grass or bloodstains, the small, pointless bow at the back a bit of frippery that should have looked pathetic but instead struck me as oddly brave. One of the VAD nurses I knew during the War had painted her lips with care each morning before stepping onto the ward, to cheer up the boys, she said. This shoe in my hand had the same attitude.

  “A lovely shoe, that,” said a voice at my shoulder.

  “Not, however, for me,” I said.

  “It is also available in a patent black.”

  I put the shoe down and turned to give the woman a smile. I could see from her encouraging expression that she had already glanced at my feet, and knew that the only way I could be wearing this shoe would be if I ordered a pair made to fit.

  Although, this being Harrods, she could probably arrange that as well.

  It would almost be worth it, to see Holmes' expression.

  “Actually,” I said, “I am trying to find a person who purchased just this shoe recently. Is there someone who would be able to help me?”

  She reached out to shift the display model, rectifying my deliberately careless placement of the shoe against its mate. The proprietary gesture confirmed what I suspected: This woman was this department.

  “I rather doubt that would be possible,” she answered.

  “Let me explain. My sister is two years older than I, and received all the family elegance and little of its common sense. This spring, while I was out of the country, she fell in with a man of dubious background. Very good looking, you understand, and enormously plausible, but not, shall we say, out for my sister's best interests. Lally—that's what we call her, her name's Yolanda—always wants to believe the best of a person, and I've always been around to keep her from doing anything too stupid, until now.

  “I must speak with her, but this man denies that she is with him. I even managed to track them to an hotel in Paris this past week, but they had just left. No doubt they caught wind of my search. The only trace of them was a shoe under the edge of the bed, just one shoe. This shoe.”

  The woman had gone from mistrust to the edge of enthrallment—still uncertain, but wanting to believe, wanting the romance of one of her shoes in the midst of a tale of misplaced love and sororal fealty. One thing might bring her onto my side.

  I stretched out a finger and touched the little bow. “However, I have to say, the shoe we found wasn't quite as pretty as this one. It looked as if Lally'd been made to walk through puddles in it.”

  “But she's only had the shoes for a week,” she exclaimed.

  I kept all trace of triumph from my face. “Yes, I thought they looked new. A week, you say?”

  “Almost to the hour. Monday last, they were. One of my first sales of the day. I notice those early sales,” she confided. “I find the weeks tend to continue as they begin.”

  “Did she come in herself, to buy them?”

  “I'm afraid not,” the woman answered, clearly much taken with the scenario of a foolish girl whose love led to near-imprisonment.

  “Was it him, then? Tall, thin?”

  But she was shaking her head before I started the second sentence—and with a jolt I realised that I felt relief at her denial, because my vague description could also be a specific description of Damian. “Those shoes were purchased by a woman.”

  “Yes? Not an Oriental woman, though?” I asked, holding my breath.

  “No, an older woman. And, frankly,” she added, lowering her voice lest a Harrods' authority might hear, “not the sort of person I'd have expected to be interested in those shoes.”

  Person, not lady. Interesting. “What did she look like? It might have been his secretary. Or his sister,” I hastened to add, to cover both classes.

  “Secretary, perhaps, although if so I trust the gentleman does not have much dealing with the public. She wore an unfortunate dress and would have benefited from face-powder,” the saleswoman declared in sorrow. “As for the dye in her hair, it was as subtle as boot-black.”

  Millicent Dunworthy.

  The second-storey flat of the stand-in leader of the Children of Lights services appeared to be empty—at least, there was no response to ringing the bell beside the name Dunworthy at the entrance. I put my laden shopping basket on the landing and squinted down at a piece of paper. A few minutes later, one of the residents came down the stairs and attempted to get out of the door.

  “Oh! Sorry,” I exclaimed, “I seem to be in the way. Here, let me just move that—no, it's fine, I was just rereading this in the light, silly of me not to think—” The door shut on my self-effacing apology, with me on the inside and the man going down the steps, shaking his head.

  There is nothing so disarming as a basket of vegetables and an attitude of feminine disorganisation.

  I put the sheet of paper—an advertisement from a hair-cutting salon—into my pocket and carried the basket (which held mostly lettuces, for their lightness) up the stairs. The hallway was empty; the stairway door squeaked as it drew itself shut. I listened, but heard nothing, so I walked down to the end where the light had gone on the other night, and knocked softly.

  When there was no answer, I put the basket on a table in the corridor and got to work with my pick-locks.

  Millicent Dunworthy's flat consisted of three rooms: The largest combined sitting room—worn upholstered chairs, a chipped deal desk, and a wireless set—with kitchen—little more than gas ring, cupboard, and a table scarcely large enough for two. A pair of doors broke the side wall: The one on the right led to a bedroom with a narrow single bed, a cheap white-painted dressing-table, and a wardrobe that was too large for the room, so that the door hit against it rather than opening all the way to the wall. The other door was to a small lavatory with a wash-basin. The bath-room must be a shared one down the hall.

  I moved through the rooms, confirming that the occupant was not there, and confirming also that the only escape, should I be discovered, would be a sheer drop to the pavement, twenty-five feet below. Then I got to work, starting in the bedroom.

  The wardrobe contained clothing as dull and worn as the chairs in the sitting area, showing a preference for flowered blouses and sack-like skirts, the one striking exception being the white robe she had worn in the meeting hall. The dressing-table held little of interest but a jewellery box that might have been a present for a child's thirteenth birthday. The scraps of adornment it held were commonplace and without monetary value, with one exception: the coarse gold band I had seen her wearing. My finger felt scratches on its inner surface; when I carried it near the window, I saw the same overlapping triangle and circle that had been embroidered on the robe and tattooed on Yolanda Adler's abdomen.

  Other than that, the ring contained no inscription. I put it back as I had found it, and closed the childish box.

  The wash-room contained nothing more sinister than mild medical nostrums—no drugs in the water-closet, no cipher-books among the bath-towels.

  The desk in the sitting room, somewhat prosaically, was where Millicent Dunworthy kept her secrets. The desk-diary was not informative—one week looked much the same as its predecessor, with two blocks of time marked out, week after week, for the past several months: Every Saturday night since late January bore the notation Children: In March every Wednesday added the word Circle, both at eight o'clock. Interspersed were two
appointments for “dentist,” “lunch, mother” every other Sunday, and a morning meeting of “Children” on Saturday, the 30th. The only item of interest I saw in the last eight months was a notation on 14 May. There the usual Wednesday meeting had the large, proud addition: Testimony and Ring: a Child of Lights.

  I wondered, as I flipped through the barren pages, why she bothered keeping a diary. Was she methodical, or was her life so empty that regular marks were themselves reassuring?

  I arranged the diary as I had found it on the precise corner of the desk, and opened the first and shallower of the desk's two side drawers.

  The drawer had been lined with black velvet—amateurishly done, the corners uneven, the tacks awkwardly spaced and poorly hammered. In the middle of the drawer was the book she had read from on Saturday night, with that same symbol on its cover. I reached for it, then hesitated, knowing that once I opened it, I should be lost to the desk's other contents. I closed that drawer for the moment and opened the lower one.

  It held files. The first one contained Dunworthy's personal income and expenses, recorded in a 1924 ledger in the same fussy hand that had penned the notice on the meeting-room door. Rent, bills from the newsagent, the grocer, the butcher, small contributions to a savings account in the expenses columns; income in another, regular amounts for the past three months; before that, the sums varied in size and date. The ledger went back to January and bore mute witness to a life of considerable tedium.

  The file behind it bore the notation: Children of Lights.

  I opened it on the desk-top. It, too, had a ledger, with weekly amounts for tea, biscuits, hall rental, newspaper adverts, and the like. Every so often there would be small amounts for “supplies,” the type unspecified. The earliest noted expense was for hall rental, paid on 1 February of this year. It was followed by a man's name with the notation Builder—for the fitted cabinets in the meeting-hall, no doubt.

  No payment had been recorded to Damian Adler for the painting.

  The back half of the ledger was a list of names, dates, and sums. About half the names repeated, some of them every week, with amounts ranging from £10 to £1,000. I raised my eyebrows, because by rough tally, the Children of Lights had brought in just under £12,000 in seven months. I copied the names of everyone who had donated more than £100; the list came to forty-seven names.

  Behind the ledger was an ordinary mailing envelope containing assorted bits of paper, including the receipt for a pair of shoes from Harrods on 11 August. It was pinned to a sales receipt for a frock from Selfridges, another sales receipt for a pair of stockings, also from Selfridges, and a straw hat from a shop just a few doors down from Selfridges on Oxford Street.

  Also in the envelope were a piece of note-paper with a list of sums, although no indication of what they might be for; a scrap of lined paper with several times written on it, again with no explanation; a chemist's receipt for “The Mixture”; and a piece of different note-paper on which was written:

  two first class return tickets, Victoria to Eastbourne 1 picnic basket Fortnum & Mason, to be called for

  I read the lines, and wondered darkly if a child of three required her own ticket.

  I copied the information concerning chemists, picnic baskets, and sums, and returned the envelope to the file and the file to the drawer. A glance at the other files showed nothing of interest, so I closed the drawer and returned to the top one, this time drawing out the book. It was a thing of beauty: hand bound, heavy paper that was a pleasure to touch, and again the symbol. I turned to the title page, half expecting it to be called The Book of Lights, but instead saw only the word Testimony in the precise centre of the page. Below the word was the symbol, this time with a number beside it, hand-written in brownish ink:

  There was no publishing information, which did not surprise me; what interested me more was the lack of an author's name. I turned to the beginning of the print, and ran my eyes over the text:

  First Birth

  The boy came into being on a night of celestial alignment, when a comet travelled the firmament and the sky threw forth a million shooting stars to herald his arrival.

  Birth is a nexus, a time in which the Elements come together to form a new thing. Earth and air, fire and water, mingle and transform, to create a living being with the potential to become a vessel, glowing and pulsating with True Spirit.

  The boy's mother lay on her birth-bed and saw the meteor shower, and knew it to be an omen. She felt no surprise when, at the very height of her birth pangs, one of the celestial celebrants plummeted to earth in the pond at the foot of the house—stripe of flame roaring through the air to hit the water with a crash and a billow of steam—and once she had given the new life suck, she rose from her bloody sheets to oversee the rescue of the precious scrap of metal. It was still hot, even after hours in the water.

  Three lines down the second page, sudden voices jolted through me, shockingly near. The stairway door squeaked shut as the voices approached. I flung the book into the drawer, risking a split second to arrange it back to the centre, then snatched up my notes, shoved the chair back into place, and leapt for the bedroom.

  “Well, I shall certainly have a word with Mr Wilberham about those pipes, the hammering is simply unbearable, and if you—oh look, Millicent, is this your shopping basket?”

  Millicent did not answer, not that I heard, but while the other voice was puzzling loudly over the unclaimed basket of lettuces, perched on the hallway table like some idiosyncratic flower arrangement, the basket's owner was ducking behind an unclosable bedroom door, her heart pounding. An instant later, the key hit the lock.

  The door to the flat opened to the other woman's ongoing debate over the ownership of these wilting vegetables. Millicent Dunworthy came inside, and I heard the other woman say, “I do hope you're feeling better, dear, these things can be such a shock, I—”

  The door closed; the voice trailed off. I strained to hear, but the only sounds were the clump, clump of heavy shoes retreating down the hallway. A distant door slammed. I frowned: Why was Millicent Dunworthy just standing there? Had she somehow perceived that her home had been invaded?

  To my relief, sound came at last: a small sigh or stifled cry, then by the soft slap of a newspaper hitting a table, followed by keys and some other object. Her feet clacked over the floorboards, crossed the carpet, then clacked again on linoleum. Water ran into a kettle. I wrapped my fingers around the knob that brushed my hip, lest the door drift open.

  She set the kettle onto its ring and flame popped into life. Her heels rapped again: Lino, carpet, boards, then she passed by me, a foot away on the other side of a flimsy door. I stood tensely, my nose against the wood, scarcely breathing.

  The wardrobe door rattled open, causing its yellowing side to shift against my left shoulder. Hangers scraped; the door clicked shut; she walked past me again, her footsteps turning immediately to the right. I heard the snap of a light-switch.

  I drew a slow breath, then let it spill. Counting to twenty, I opened my fingers on the knob to let the door drift open, then took a step around it into the bedroom. Sounds from the lavatory assured me that Millicent Dunworthy was occupied for the next half minute or so. I pressed myself to the narrow swath of wall separating the two doors, and craned my neck forward a fraction of an inch—then smiled in relief: Millicent was the sort of lady who automatically closed the lavatory door even when she was all alone. It was not completely shut, and if she happened to be staring directly at the gap, she would see motion, but short of stretching out beneath her bed and hoping I didn't sneeze before she left for work the next morning, this was my best chance for escape.

  I stepped briskly on my crepe-soled shoes to the door, then paused. The tinkling sounds had ceased, but over the rising burble from the tea-kettle was something else. Crying. Millicent Dunworthy was weeping softly. I scowled downward as I listened, and my gaze slowly came to focus on the folded newspaper she had laid on the table along with her keys and hand-
bag. Here was the explanation of her tears:

  ARTIST'S WIFE SLAIN AT LONG MAN

  “THE ADDLER” AND SMALL DAUGHTER MISSING

  The front door-knob rattled slightly under my hand; if the apartment behind me had been completely still, she would have heard the door coming open, but it was not, and she did not.

  I left the shopping basket where it was and hurried down the stairs, my usual light-hearted relief at a successful burglary diminished considerably by that headline: Newsmen baying at our heels were not going to simplify matters one bit.

  Outside, the growing heat and the enervating stink and humidity brought my spirits down another peg. My ransacking of Miss Dunworthy's flat had been, in truth, only partly successful. I wanted that book so badly I had even considered snatching it from the desk and stealing it outright. Had I no alternative, I might have risked it.

  But I had an alternative—although not during daylight hours.

  Which reminded me of Holmes. I walked to the corner and whistled up a cab to take me to the Café Royal.

  I arrived a quarter hour late, and found Holmes well on his way to a conquest of Bohemia.

  The Sacrifice of Submission: Be clear: Sacrifice is wholehearted, or it is nothing. It must cost dearly: Abraham offering his son; Woden hanging himself in a tree; the Son of Man accepting an agonising death. The greater the cost, the greater the energies freed for Transformation.

  Sacrifice is the fame that sets quiescent Power alight,

  and consumes the world in a crash and a billow of smoke,

  and then in a whisper.

  Testimony, II:8

  DOMINOES MIGHT NO LONGER BE A FIXTURE IN the Café Royal, but Holmes had summoned a set, and was playing against a man I recognised as one of the foremost bookmakers in London; Holmes was winning. I looked with care around the other tables, not wishing to run into Alice or her Ronnie, but fortunately they were absent.