The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [142]
“Still.” I realised that I was sitting in Brothers' chair and stood up hastily, while Holmes opened the other two copies. One had a 7, although its brown colour was nearly obscured by the blotting sand stuck to it; the next, with an 8, looked like the others I had seen.
“The Adlers' copy,” I said abruptly. “That smear on its title page is actually the numeral one.”
Holmes left the three books open under the desk lamp and went back to the shelf. “The binder told you he made eight?”
I forced my mind to his question. “Brothers seems to like the number eight—eight books, eight sections in each of the four chapters of the book. It would suggest that he has given away three others.” Millicent Dunworthy possessed number two, but I thought I could identify the other Inner Circle members who had received three, four, and five: the nurse, her brother, and the sharp-nosed woman.
“It would also suggest that he took his Book of Truth with him,” Holmes said. “Here's his blotting sand.” He pulled the top off of a surprisingly large decorative tin, and picked up a pencil to stir its contents.
“What a lot,” I said—there must have been a pound of the stuff, easily. I had seen blotting sand used at a solicitor's office, but it was generally a small sifting, easily dusted away. I reached out and took a pinch from the tin, rubbing it through my fingers. Blotting sand. And all those blank pages that wanted filling.
“Holmes—the sand. You found too much. Far more than he would need for just one numeral. And the repeated quill-sharpenings. The Book of Truth is his journal. He's setting down an account of the killings, then and there.”
Holmes looked at the sand, and murmured, “‘It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.’”
The power of the stuff in our veins: Professor Ledger had told me, and I had not taken it far enough. I had failed to imagine how full-blown the man's madness might be.
At least, I thought, grasping for some relief—at least this was not Damian Adler's madness. Although, even now I had to admit there was nothing to guarantee that Damian was not one of Brothers' acolytes. Nothing, that is, but the impossibility of his participation in the murder of Yolanda Adler, beloved wife, mother of his child.
“However,” Holmes said, bent over the books with his strong glass, “I should have said this number seven has used some material other than blotting sand.”
I took a look, and agreed: The material used to blot this number was fine enough that much of it had stuck. What that meant, if anything, there was no telling.
We replaced the copies of Testimony on the shelf, and while Holmes turned his attention to the walls, I settled to the desk (carrying over a stool, rather than sit again in Brothers' chair). The surface was covered in notes, books, pamphlets, and well-marked guidebooks to Scandinavia, Germany, and Great Britain. I found a desk-diary, which told us that Brothers had been away for the first three weeks of May, and a pamphlet extolling the charms of Bergen, Norway.
His current project, Text of Lights, took up most of the desk, in the form of notes made by a tight hand in a pen that leaked, typescript pages with cross-hatchings and notes, and the occasional torn-out page of a book or magazine with a paragraph circled. This would be Testimony for the masses, with simpler language, lots of Biblical references, astrological details, and concrete examples of the miraculous side-effects of becoming a Child of Lights.
I fished three crumpled sheets from the waste-paper basket, ironing them out with the side of my hand, but found they were only notes he had transferred to the typescript, and in one case, a fresh note spoilt by a gout of ink. I studied the smear, then searched through the debris for the pen that I had spotted, finding it under a discussion of astrological birth-charts. It was an ornate instrument with a twenty-four-karat gold nib, but ink clotted the lower edge of its