The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [58]
“I've never noticed her being especially close to any of the others. Apart from The Master, of course. In fact, I rather had the impression that she knew him before.”
She reached for the doors then, to close Damian's painting away, so she didn't see my mouth hanging open.
“What, in Shanghai?” My question was a shade too sharp. She glanced at me over her shoulder, and I hastened to clarify. “I didn't know that the Children were an international organisation. Isn't that great!”
“As far as I know, this is the only centre. I merely meant that Mrs Adler knew him before we opened up.”
“Ah, I see. When was that, do you know?”
“Meetings began in January, we moved into this space the following month. Now, was there anything else?”
“Just, do you know if ‘The Master’ will be here next week?”
“One never knows,” she replied blandly, and bid me good night.
That blandness suggested that she knew more than she was saying, if not about Yolanda Adler, then about The Master. Perhaps I should know a little more about the competent, unattractive, and vulnerable Millicent Dunworthy as well.
I was waiting across the street when she left the meeting hall, the last one out and locking up behind her, a bit awkward around a white-wrapped parcel the size of the book and robe. She got the door locked, settled the bundle safely into her left arm, and marched away down the street, where the thick, petrol-scented air soon cleared the incense-induced headache from my skull.
Fortunately, the woman lived in walking distance of the hall-boarding a bus without her taking notice of me would have been tricky—and within a quarter hour she was vanishing behind the front door of a run-down apartment house. I waited until a light went on at the west side of the second storey, then I left.
It was now far too late to continue knocking up the Adlers' neighbours, even if I had been dressed for the deed, but nine-thirty would be just about perfect for the occupants of another district of Town.
However, I was having second thoughts about the garments I had chosen. They had been just right for the Children of Lights, but for an assault on the stronghold of London's avant-garde? Something less frivolous was required, more dramatic.
Fortunately, the bolt-hole was on my way.
Before tonight I had discovered that, by a judicious use of safety pins and sticky tape, I could transform a pair of Holmes' trousers into something that did not look like a child playing dress-up from her father's wardrobe. Tonight's victim of my tape assault was a beautifully cut evening suit that I'd thought he kept at Mycroft's, although this might have been an exact duplicate of that garment. In either case, I made short work of converting it to my frame, and put it on over a white shirt fresh from the laundry, adding a sumptuous embroidered waistcoat I found in the back of a cupboard. My blonde hair, cut above my ears back in February, still only came down to the lobes, so I slicked it with some pomade and painted my eyes a little, dropping a silk scarf around my neck.
I looked, surprisingly enough, like what I was: a woman in (mostly) man's clothing. I opened the safe and helped myself to various forms of cash, then drew an ivory cigarette holder from the bristle of pens and make-up pencils in a cup and slid it into my breast pocket. After another look at my reflection, I painted my lips a brilliant red, then nodded in satisfaction.
The clothing I had started the day in, back in Sussex, I folded into a black cloth bag, adding one or two things from the wardrobe, just in case. I let myself out, and put out a hand for a cab to take me to the capital of Bohemia.
Reward (3): The man was left knowing the path but
without the Tools to explore it, sensing his divinity but
lacking the means of bringing it to the fore.
Testimony, II:2
EVEN A PERSON WHO SPENDS HER LIFE ENGAGED in criminal investigations, preoccupied with academics, or out of the country entirely could not fail to locate the capital of Bohemia.