The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [53]
“Yolanda does go away from time to time,” I offered.
“Exactly!” the non-Bohemian wife and mother said.
“Well,” I said. “You know artists. They live differently from other people. I believe Damian rather enjoys being a … daddy.”
She took no note of my hesitation, which was less at the idea of Damian's pleasure in fatherhood than it was a matter of the unfamiliar vocabulary: Mummy, Daddy, and the language of the nursery did not come easy to my tongue. Her face softened with relief. “That's very true, he loves little Estelle to death. So you'd say he takes her to the park because he enjoys it, not because his wife, well, abandons them?”
I did my best to assure her that Damian enjoyed nothing better than to spend his every daylight hour with the child while his wife flitted around doing God knew what, then I thanked her again and left her to supervise the dollies' tea-party.
As I walked down the steps, I reflected that a woman who did not think to offer her name to a visitor might not be the best judge of a woman whose interests lay outside of the home.
I found no help from the three remaining houses, and considered: Branch out through the adjoining streets, or head for the Brompton Road meeting hall?
I decided that a further canvass of the more distant houses held little hope of striking gold, so I re-traced Jim's steps, out of Chelsea along the Fulham Road and along the crooked tail of Brompton. There I found a doorway next to a stationers. The shop was open, the door was not, although a hand-lettered sign tacked to its centre read:
Children of Lights meeting, 7:00 p.m. Saturdays
I let my gaze stray to the reflection in the stationers' glass. The young woman there did not resemble a potential child of light-lights, I corrected myself, although I had to wonder if the plural was an error. If I had anywhere near the right impression of Yolanda Adler, my dowdy skirt and sensible shoes would not serve to ingratiate myself into her circle. In any event, there was no doubt that I should have to do something about my appearance before entering the venue that would come after.
Some years before, I'd kept a flat in the city, but the married couple I'd hired to keep it up had since retired, and the bother of maintaining it outweighed its occasional usefulness. Now, on the rare occasions I was in Town without Holmes, I would either stay with his brother or in my women's club, the whimsically-named Vicissitude. Or, in a pinch, one of Holmes' bolt-holes.
It was the latter that held the wherewithal to transform me from drab chrysalis to full-blown butterfly; as it happened, there was one very close to hand.
I continued along the commercial streets until I came to the department store in which Holmes had built a concealed room. I let myself in by a hidden key and invisible latch. Of his various hidey-holes across the city, this was one of the more oppressive, as dim and airless as the wardrobe it resembled. But it was packed to the brim with costumes, and in minutes, I had an armful of likely garments to hold up before the looking-glass.
Or perhaps unlikely garments might better describe the raiment I wrapped myself in: a diaphanous skirt with a deliberately uneven hem-line, a gipsy-style blouse whose yoke was stiff with embroidery, a scarlet leather belt with a buckle fashioned from a chunk of turquoise, and a soft shawl that might have been attractive in a less garish shade of green. Everything on me apart from my spectacles and shoes was eye-catching, everything was bright, all the colours clashed.
I traced a line of kohl around my eyes and added a peacock-feather bandeau to my hair, then on