Laurie King - The Language of Bees

Other than that, the ring contained no inscription. I put it back as I had found it, and closed the childish box.

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 the file and the file to the drawer. A glance at the other files showed nothing of interest, so I closed the drawer and returned to the top one, this time drawing out the book. It was a thing of beauty: hand bound, heavy paper that was a pleasure to touch, and again the symbol. I turned to the title page, half expecting it to be called The Book of Lights, but instead saw only the word Testimony in the precise centre of the page. Below the word was the symbol, this time with a number beside it, hand-written in brownish ink:

There was no publishing information, which did not surprise me; what interested me more was the lack of an author's name. I turned to the beginning of the print, and ran my eyes over the text:

First Birth

The boy came into being on a night of celestial alignment, when a comet travelled the firmament and the sky threw forth a million shooting stars to herald his arrival.

Birth is a nexus, a time in which the Elements come together to form a new thing. Earth and air, fire and water, mingle and transform, to create a living being with the potential to become a vessel, glowing and pulsating with True Spirit.

The boy's mother lay on her birth-bed and saw the meteor shower, and knew it to be an omen. She felt no surprise when, at the very height of her birth pangs, one of the celestial celebrants plummeted to earth in the pond at the foot of the house-stripe of flame roaring through the air to hit the water with a crash and a billow of steam-and once she had given the new life suck, she rose from her bloody sheets to oversee the rescue of the precious scrap of metal. It was still hot, even after hours in the water.

Three lines down the second page, sudden voices jolted through me, shockingly near. The stairway door squeaked shut as the voices approached. I flung the book into the drawer, risking a split second to arrange it back to the centre, then snatched up my notes, shoved the chair back into place, and leapt for the bedroom.

“Well, I shall certainly have a word with Mr Wilberham about those pipes, the hammering is simply unbearable, and if you-oh look, Millicent, is this your shopping basket?”

Millicent did not answer, not that I heard, but while the other voice was puzzling loudly over the unclaimed basket of lettuces, perched on the hallway table like some idiosyncratic flower arrangement, the basket's owner was ducking behind an unclosable bedroom door, her heart pounding. An instant later, the key hit the lock.

The door to the flat opened to the other woman's ongoing debate over the ownership of these wilting vegetables. Millicent Dunworthy came inside, and I heard the other woman say, “I do hope you're feeling better, dear, these things can be such a shock, I-”

The door closed; the voice trailed off. I strained to hear, but the only sounds were the clump, clump of heavy shoes retreating down the hallway. A distant door slammed. I frowned: Why was Millicent Dunworthy just standing there? Had she somehow perceived that her home had been invaded?

To my relief, sound came at last: a small sigh or stifled cry, then by the soft slap of a newspaper hitting a table, followed by keys and some other object. Her feet clacked over the floorboards, crossed the carpet, then clacked again on linoleum. Water ran into a kettle. I wrapped my fingers around the knob that brushed my hip, lest the door drift open.

She set the kettle onto its ring and flame popped into life. Her heels rapped again: Lino, carpet, boards, then she passed by me, a foot away on the other side of a flimsy door. I stood tensely, my nose against the wood, scarcely breathing.

The wardrobe door rattled open, causing its yellowing side to shift against my left shoulder. Hangers scraped; the door clicked shut; she walked past me again, her footsteps turning immediately to the right. I heard the snap of a light-switch.