The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [55]
I lifted up a solemn and wide-eyed expression. “That was a sound of mourning, that I had gone for so many years without hearing this message.”
The true believer looked suspicious. Fortunately, activity at the front of the room distracted her from further accusations.
A jolly-faced woman, brisk and tidy as a nurse despite the long white robe she wore and the large gold ring on her right hand (nurses tend to avoid rings) marched to the front of the now-full room to address the padlock on the double doors. She had problems, becoming more and more flustered until a man who might have been her brother, also dressed in a robe and wearing a ring, got up to help her. Between the two of them they wrestled the thing off and pushed back the doors.
My first surprise of the evening was the back-drop thus revealed: a painting by Damian Adler.
Not that it was immediately recognisable as such. In fact, it was not even instantly recognisable as a painting, merely an expanse of black broken by tiny white specks. From my seat at the back, I could see little more than velvet darkness and a sense of depth, but having spent the past two days with his work, I had no doubt that it was from the hand of The Addler.
The two acolytes had pulled a somewhat shaky-looking table before the open doors and were now draping it with a black cloth. The woman set up a pair of incense burners and held a match to the contents, which began to weep a thick smoke that made me glad for my seat at the back. The man drew a silver candelabrum from one of the cupboards, put it onto the cloth, and started working candles into it. The candles were black.
I perked up. Was I about to become a participant in a Black Mass?
I had spent enough time in theological studies to have come across various parodies of the Roman Catholic Mass, from Fools' Feast to orgy-on-the-altar. But surely nothing too extreme would take place here, in a public meeting hall that invited strangers off the street?
No: Neither the people nor their attitudes suggested that they were about to enact an orgy atop the flimsy table. Disappointing, perhaps, but then again, I had no wish to be arrested in a raid. Holmes' rivals in Scotland Yard would never let either of us live it down.
It took the flustered brother and sister a while to get the reluctant wicks lit, but when the light was growing at the end of each dark taper, they stood back and glanced at the audience. The entire congregation—some of us belatedly—rose to its feet, and those in the know gave a ragged chorus: “Light from darkness.”
Half the lights in the room were turned down, a relief in temperature if nothing else, and with that, a figure in a startlingly white, hooded robe swept down the central aisle, a book carried reverently before her. It was Millicent Dunworthy, the woman with the badly dyed black hair who had welcomed me. She, too, had a gold band on her right hand, although I was certain she had not worn it earlier. And when I looked down at the hand of the woman beside me, I saw that she wore one as well, a large, roughly made band of bright yellow gold.
As Miss Dunworthy took her place at the front, a tremor ran through the audience: Feet shifted, people looked at their neighbours with raised eyebrows, a small murmur could be heard.
She laid the book on the impromptu altar and raised her face; her first words explained the reaction. “The Master couldn't be here tonight, and asked me to lead the worship. He sends his love, and hopes to return next week.”
The congregation, reluctantly it seemed, settled into the chairs. With no further ado, she opened the book, revealing a brief glimpse of a simple design worked in gilt on the dark cover, and read in a voice of theatrical piety:
The Stars
The man was but a child when he began to hear the message of the stars, to grasp the precision of their meaning, to feel the tenuous link between their paths and those of human beings.
It is no secret that greatness and celestial motions