The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [86]
The wash-room contained nothing more sinister than mild medical nostrums—no drugs in the water-closet, no cipher-books among the bath-towels.
The desk in the sitting room, somewhat prosaically, was where Millicent Dunworthy kept her secrets. The desk-diary was not informative—one week looked much the same as its predecessor, with two blocks of time marked out, week after week, for the past several months: Every Saturday night since late January bore the notation Children: In March every Wednesday added the word Circle, both at eight o'clock. Interspersed were two appointments for “dentist,” “lunch, mother” every other Sunday, and a morning meeting of “Children” on Saturday, the 30th. The only item of interest I saw in the last eight months was a notation on 14 May. There the usual Wednesday meeting had the large, proud addition: Testimony and Ring: a Child of Lights.
I wondered, as I flipped through the barren pages, why she bothered keeping a diary. Was she methodical, or was her life so empty that regular marks were themselves reassuring?
I arranged the diary as I had found it on the precise corner of the desk, and opened the first and shallower of the desk's two side drawers.
The drawer had been lined with black velvet—amateurishly done, the corners uneven, the tacks awkwardly spaced and poorly hammered. In the middle of the drawer was the book she had read from on Saturday night, with that same symbol on its cover. I reached for it, then hesitated, knowing that once I opened it, I should be lost to the desk's other contents. I closed that drawer for the moment and opened the lower one.
It held files. The first one contained Dunworthy's personal income and expenses, recorded in a 1924 ledger in the same fussy hand that had penned the notice on the meeting-room door. Rent, bills from the newsagent, the grocer, the butcher, small contributions to a savings account in the expenses columns; income in another, regular amounts for the past three months; before that, the sums varied in size and date. The ledger went back to January and bore mute witness to a life of considerable tedium.
The file behind it bore the notation: Children of Lights.
I opened it on the desk-top. It, too, had a ledger, with weekly amounts for tea, biscuits, hall rental, newspaper adverts, and the like. Every so often there would be small amounts for “supplies,” the type unspecified. The earliest noted expense was for hall rental, paid on 1 February of this year. It was followed by a man's name with the notation Builder—for the fitted cabinets in the meeting-hall, no doubt.
No payment had been recorded to Damian Adler for the painting.
The back half of the ledger was a list of names, dates, and sums. About half the names repeated, some of them every week, with amounts ranging from £10 to £1,000. I raised my eyebrows, because by rough tally, the Children of Lights had brought in just under £12,000 in seven months. I copied the names of everyone who had donated more than £100; the list came to forty-seven names.
Behind the ledger was an ordinary mailing envelope containing assorted bits of paper, including the receipt for a pair of shoes from Harrods on 11 August. It was pinned to a sales receipt for a frock from Selfridges, another sales receipt for a pair of stockings, also from Selfridges, and a straw hat from a shop just a few doors down from Selfridges on Oxford Street.
Also in the envelope were a piece of note-paper with a list of sums, although no indication of what they might be for; a scrap of lined paper with several times written on it, again with no explanation; a chemist's receipt for “The Mixture”; and a piece of different note-paper on which was written:
two first class return tickets, Victoria to Eastbourne 1 picnic basket Fortnum & Mason, to be called for
I read the lines, and wondered darkly if a child of three required her own ticket.
I copied the information concerning chemists, picnic baskets, and sums, and returned the envelope to