The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [59]
“But Da’, some supper—”
“Nah, Mary, wouldn’t want to be spoiling all this lovely beer with food, would I? Off to dreamland now, Mary,” and he slammed heavily at the door. His fiddle skittered into life and, heart-pounding and hands fumbling, I made myself ready: trousers pulled on beneath my dark skirts, a length of brown silk rope around my waist, tiny binocu-lars, a pencil-sized torch. The gun. A smear of black from the dirty lamp-glass onto my face and hands. A final glance around before shut-ting down the lamps, and the rag doll caught my eye, slumped discon-solately on the shelf. On sudden impulse—for luck?—I pushed her into a pocket and slipped out silently into the shadows, away from the pub, to make my way down to the big square house that sat well off the road, the one with no neighbours.
I crept up the road with infinite care but met no one and was soon squatting down among some bushes across from the house, studying it through my binoculars. The rooms on the ground floor were lit behind thin but effective curtains, and other than the voices coming from, I thought, the corner room on the far side, there was no way of know-ing what the house concealed. Upstairs the front was dark.
After ten minutes the only sign of life had been a tall man crossing the room in front of the lamp, and coming back again a minute later. There were no indications of outside watchmen or dogs, and I contin-ued up the road, scuttled across at a crouch, and worked my way back to a ramshackle outhouse, which smelt of coal and paraffin. The house’s thin curtains allowed lamplight to escape so that the ground around the house was illuminated for night-adapted eyes; ten more minutes in that spot, and nothing moved, other than a fitful breeze.
I fell back from the outhouse and picked my painstaking way through an overgrown vegetable garden, over a fence in need of mend-ing, behind a second outhouse (this one smelling faintly of petrol) and its attached chicken coop, under the branches of a small orchard where the plums rotted underfoot, and up to a third shed whose diminutive size and location would have declared its function even if its aroma had not. It also gave me a full view of the back of the house and its yard.
There was a light on in a room upstairs. From the arrangement of windows I decided there were probably two rooms on this side, with perhaps a small windowless lumber-room between them, and it was the room on the right, away from the tree, that was lit. To my distinct pleasure the house’s general decrepitude came to a climax in the cur-tains of this room, which were either torn or simply not adequately closed, because a shaft of yellow lamplight fell across the sill. If I could get high enough I might see into that room, and I very much wanted to know what lay inside.
I looked around. Somewhere there was sure to be a hill, but in the darkness all I could tell was that it did not tower up immediately be-hind the house. I looked speculatively at the building beside me. It might give enough height, and the slates looked strong enough to hold my weight. I glanced around for something to step up on, to lessen the scrabbling noises, remembered a discarded bucket among the weeds in the orchard, and went to retrieve it. The bottom had a hole in it, but the sides were sound, and upturned with a board across it the makeshift step enabled me to reach the privy’s ridge. I gained the tiny roof and had just begun to congratulate myself on the minimum of noise I had made when the back door was flung open and a very large man with a terrifying bright lamp in his hand was revealed on the steps.
Holmes’ training held. The mad urge to leap off and dash into the covering darkness washed through me, leaving little more than a set of absolutely rigid muscles and a desire to mould myself into the cracks of the roof slates, but before the man was halfway across the yard my mind had notified me that although he was coming towards me, he had nothing in his other hand, and nothing on his mind other than a visit to the room