A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [115]
My soles scrunched immensely on the deep pile, and as the doors of Margery’s rooms approached, I was made aware of how very bad my nerves were: I was convinced that both Margery and her Marie stood waiting, to leap on me the moment I turned my back.
It seemed a very long time, but was less than half a minute, before I was beneath the light. Without turning my back to the opposite doors, I reached down for the knob to the chapel door and found it open. The eternal candle burnt over the altar, lighting my way to the connecting door into the dressing room. This one was locked.
It was not, however, a very good lock, and it gave way to my probes in a short time. That alone warned me what further scrutiny confirmed: The room contained nothing more valuable than the clothing in the wardrobes (admittedly expensive enough, mostly Worth and Poiret, with a few Chanels adding a modern note). The prices of these clothes would make the elves’ place look like a pawnshop.
A slow, intense circuit of the room revealed nothing, except that Margery’s taste in underclothing was remarkably exotic and that she snored. I let myself out through the chapel, locking the dressing room door behind me, and went back out into the light.
The study door was locked, and this lock was a good one. By the time it opened, I was blinking sweat from my eyes and muttering silent but emphatic imprecations against all the locksmiths I knew and Mr Yale in particular. It took me twelve minutes to conquer it, and for every one of those 720-odd seconds, I fully expected Marie’s door to fly open and send me sprinting for my life. The damned thing finally clicked, the wire pick rattled slightly against the brass, and the knob in my greasy palm squeaked minutely when I turned it. I slipped inside, closed the door, eased the knob to and flipped the simple latch I had remembered from this side, and waited, breathless, counting off three long minutes before I relaxed into an irritating shakiness. The gorgon slept.
When my eyes had adjusted to the light easing in from under the door and the low glow from the fire, I could see that nothing much had been moved since my last tutorial with Margery. I reached out to the back of the sofa, picked up the thick cashmere shawl kept there, and went back three steps to lay it along the bottom of the door. The shawl would block any light from inside the room, and I then stuffed the end of my handkerchief into the keyhole. It was now safe to turn on the electric lights.
The familiar room came into view. There were three good possibilities for hiding a safe, as I remembered, and I found it at the second one: a block of the decorative supporting cornice at the fireplace. It slid away, revealing a solid eight-inch-square slab of iron with a handle on one side and a combination dial in the centre—a combination dial, not a key.
I sat down on the arm of the sofa and stared at it bleakly. I was a fool not to have let Holmes do it. This safe was of the best quality; it would not fall for any of the clever tricks taught me by Holmes’ pet safecracker (not the one who had opened a restaurant on his release). Despite the popular image of a burglar with a stethoscope, safes are broken not by hearing, but by touch. Steady nerves, infinite patience, and slow, painstaking, concentrated labour results in what our Eton-and-Balliol cracksman had called “that moment of indescribable giddiness” when the tumbler falls into place. However, steady nerves and slow concentration were precisely the qualities I lacked most just at the moment. Five days before, I had been locked in a cave, half-starved and stupefied