The Language of Bees

by Laurie R. King

  “I'm sorry. But the Adlers weren't here tonight.”

  “No. Something may have come up.”

  “You haven't talked to her, then?”

  “Not for the past week, no.” There was an air of puzzlement in her voice, indicating that she not only had no idea where Yolanda Adler was, she was surprised not to have seen her.

  “Such an interesting person, isn't she?” I gushed. “So exotic. Where was it she's from? Singapore?”

  “I thought it was Shanghai?”

  “You're right! I'm a bit of a fool when it comes to geography. But I just love her accent.”

  “It is charming, although it's so light, with your eyes shut you'd think she grew up in London.”

  “How long is it she's been coming here, anyway?” I asked it absently, my attention on the painting.

  “She was here at the beginning. January, meetings began. Although I have to say, she's never seemed as thoroughly committed to The Master's work as some of us. Over the past months, she seems to have lost interest.”

  “Does she have any particular pals, among the Children? I was just wondering if she, too, found you because of a friend.”

  “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. Trace Regent Street to where it crooks its arm to embrace Eros; draw a line between the Royal Academy and the theatres of Shaftesbury Avenue, between Soho and St James; describe the intersection of finance with sensuality, where art crosses pens with drama, and there you will find the Café Royal.

  It was nine-twenty on a Saturday night, and despite the scaffolding of its ongoing renovations, the Café Royal was turning over nicely. I waited until I saw a likely couple approaching its doors, then I fell in beside the woman to address her a remark about Dora Carrington. Our apparent conversation got me safely through the door—a single woman was still, even in these enlightened days, looked upon with suspicion by restaurant guard-dogs. I ostentatiously handed the porter a glittering tip to keep my black cloth bag (gold guineas were archaic, unspendable, and impressive as hell: Holmes kept a good supply of them in his bolt-holes for precisely that purpose) and swept inside.

  When I had been here with Holmes, some years before, one had a choice between the Restaurant proper, the Grill Room, or the Brasserie downstairs—known to its habitués as the Domino Room for the constant click of the tiles to be heard there. The renovations looked to be sweeping away much of the Café's scruffy charm, but as I went down the stairs, I ceased to worry that its clientele would desert it altogether. A wall of noise awaited me amongst the gilded caryatids and rococo mirrors: Strident voices, piercing feminine laughter, and the ceaseless clatter of cutlery against plates emerged from a miasma of tobacco smoke and alcohol fumes that bore localised tints of blue, gilt, or scarlet from the walls and the plush banquettes.

  The maître d' had that race's innate ability to make himself understood despite the handicaps, and I responded in type, by telling him that I was meeting a friend and holding up my wrist to check the time. He read the words on my lips, or perhaps merely the gesture, and although a few years before he might have hesitated, these were the Twenties. He stood aside while I looked about for my imaginary companion.

  A woman of my height, in male clothing but with scarlet lips and flowered waistcoat, was noticed even in that place. I surveyed the room, allowing the room to survey me, before shaking my head at the man and telling him, “My friend isn't here yet, why don't I sit at that table over there and wait for her?”

  Had the table not been small and awkwardly situated behind a particularly raucous group, he might have had another suggestion, but in that mysterious osmosis that functions in a well-run café, in the thirty seconds I had stood there, the man had learnt of the coin I gave the porter, and merely bowed me forward. Either that or, as occurred to me much later, he recognised me as a one-time companion of Sherlock Holmes, and decided to give me leave.

  I ordered a drink, drew out the ivory cigarette holder, frowned at the lack of a cigarette in my pockets, and leant over to borrow a smoke from one of the men at the raucous table. Less than three minutes after I
had walked in, I had a cigarette in my hand and a chair at the crowded table; the waiter swept over in his floor-length white apron to place my cocktail before me, and twenty perfect strangers clasped me to their Bohemian chests.

  I had chosen the difficult little table with care, for the noisy group was clearly assembled around a Great Man, their numbers swelled by sycophants edging up at the far end. I was halfway down the length of the table, close enough to catch his eye if not his ear, but it didn't take long to figure out who he was.

  Augustus John was that most unlikely of creatures, a prosperous Bohemian—one who had even been invited into the Royal Academy. Perhaps his nonconformist ways had even contributed to his success, for in an artist of the Twentieth Century, outrageousness and avant-garde were to be desired—and a man who extolled the superiority of his friends the gipsies, who kept a household of two peasant-dressed wives and their assorted barefoot children while still collecting mistresses and befriending royalty, and who went around London looking like a Canadian trapper in a velvet cloak was the very definition of nonconformist.

  He was also a fine painter, which helped matters considerably.

  I let the conversation bounce around me for a while as I sat and smoked and nodded my response to opinions on politics and a scandal encompassing a print-maker and a violinist (this was a Bohemian scandal, and therefore involved money and bourgeois attitudes rather than money and sexual promiscuity) and the relative merits of Greece versus the south of France as cheap, warm spots conveniently strewn with decorative rustics where one might spend the winter painting.

  When my glass was empty, I ordered drinks for half a dozen of my nearest table-mates. The noise level of the Café pounded like surf; the smoke grew so dense, the golden walls ceased to shine. The poet to my left fell asleep against my shoulder. I transferred his head to the table; the man across from us helped himself to the poet's half-empty glass. The two people beside him, who had been pretending their legs weren't brushing together under the table, could bear it no longer and left, five minutes apart and fooling no-one. A woman in a suit similar to the one I wore lingered at my shoulder for a time, trying to make conversation until it was clear I was not interested, when she went away in a huff. The Great Man at the head of the table spotted this little play, and caught my eyes after the lesbian had moved on. He winked; I shrugged; a few minutes later a scrap of folded paper began to circulate down the table. It had a sketch on the front of an angular young androgyne in spectacles that could only be me. I unfolded it, and read:

  I could do something intriguing with a model like you. Interested?

  Underneath, it gave an address. I looked up to see his eyes on me, and I'm afraid I blushed, just a little, before gamely raising my glass to him.

  “Sastimos!” I called down the table, which made his bushy eyebrows rise.

  “Sastimos! Droboi tumay, Romalay.” His return of my Romany greeting was perhaps a test, and I summoned a memory of Holmes' long-ago tutorials in the language.

  “Nais tukah,” I replied politely.

  “Anday savay vitsah?” he asked, which was a little more complicated, both the language and the question of what group of Roma I belonged to. But the noise and the crowd covered any errors I made, and before he could order me down the table to him I made a show of folding the paper and slipping it into my pocket, as if to say that we would continue the conversation at another time.

  (I had, in fact, no intention of doing so, but as it turned out, I did go to see John at another time, and he did end up doing a small portrait. That is one piece that Holmes values without question.)

  By ten-forty, the peak of the evening was reached, and the revellers began to move on to other late-night venues. A lavender-clad playwright stood up and announced that he thought he would go to a party he'd heard of in Brompton, and he departed with a woman on each arm. Two married couples across from me shook hands all around and then they, too, left, although it seemed to me that each went out of the door with the other's spouse. Eventually, Augustus John rose and made his way out, looking irritated at the half a dozen admirers who drifted after him. The sleeping poet snorted awake, dashed down the contents of the nearest glass, and staggered off in the direction of the entrance. When the waiter returned, I ordered another drink, although my glass was still half full, and asked the two people next to me if they'd like another. They would.

  “That was Augustus John, wasn't it?” I asked the woman, a thin, brown creature with untidy fringes and mismatched clothing.

  “You must be new in town, if you don't know him.” She had an appealing voice, low and just beginning to roughen with the cigarettes she smoked.

  “I've been away for a while, in America,” I told her, although John had been a fixture in the Café Royal for years.

  She asked me about America, I made up some stories about the art world there, about which I knew next to nothing, then asked about John again.

  “I wonder if he might know where a friend of mine is, another artist. I should have asked him before he left.”

  “Who are you looking for?”

  “Damian Adler.”

  “Sorry, don't know him.”

  “Yes, you do,” piped up the man at her side. “Painter chap, French or something, his wife knows Crowley.”

  “Oh, right—him. I haven't seen him for a while, though.”

  “Aleister Crowley, do you mean?” I asked the man—a writer, as I recalled. Yet another writer.

  “That's the chap.”

  The woman interrupted. “Except it wasn't Crowley, was it, Ronnie?”

  “It was, though,” he asserted.

  “No, they were talking about him, but I don't think she knew him.”

  “But why should I—oh, you're right, it was Betty who was talking about him, to her.”

  I wasn't sure I was following this fairly drunken conversation. “You mean Mrs Adler was talking to someone else about Aleister Crowley?”

  “Betty May. Crowley killed her husband.”

  “Betty May's husband?” This was sounding familiar, although not the name May.

  “Raoul Loveday. Took a first at Oxford, fell into Crowley's circle, died of drugs or something down in Crowley's monastery in Italy or Greece or someplace.”

  “Sicily,” I said automatically. I remembered this, from the newspapers a year or more ago. “So Yolanda Adler was talking to Betty Loveday, here?”

  “Being lectured by her, more like,” the woman said. “Poor Betty, she's terrified of Crowley, any time she comes across someone interested in him she feels she has to save them from him.”

  “And Yolanda was interested in Crowley?”

  “Yes. Or maybe not Crowley directly.” She blinked in owlish concentration.

  “Someone like Crowley?” I persisted.

  “Or was it that someone she knew was interested in Crowley, and she was looking into how much trouble he was? Sorry, I really don't remember, it was a while ago. I'm Alice Wright, by the way. And this is Ronnie Sutcliffe.” I shook her hand—bashed, scraped, and calloused—and his, considerably softer.

  “Mary Russell,” I said, introducing myself to her for the second time that night. “You're a sculptress, aren't you?”

  She beamed. “You've heard of me?”

  I hadn't the heart to admit that her hands had told me her avocation. “Oh, yes. But forgive me, Ronnie, I can't place where—”

  “Ronnie's a writer. He's going to change the face of literature in this century, taking it well past Lawrence.”

  “D. H.,” Ronnie clarified, looking smug.

  I nodded solemnly, and gave way to an unkind impulse. “Are you published yet?”

  “The publishing world is run by Philistines and capitalists,” he growled. “But I had several poems published while I was still up at Cambridge.”

  “I look forward to seeing your work,” I assured him.

  Alice remembered what we had been talking about. “Why are you looking for her, anyway?”


  “For Yolanda? I'm more trying to find her husband, Damian. He's an old friend, known him for years, and as I said, I'm recently back in town. I was hoping to see him.”

  The arch smile Alice gave indicated that she had read all the wrong meaning into my desire to see Damian Adler, but I caught back the impulse to set her straight: If it made her think me a denizen of the artistic underworld, so much the better. I shrugged, as if to admit that she was right.

  The Café was being tidied for the night, the chairs arranged around the marble tabletops, glasses polished and set back on the shelves. The remaining seven members of our party were one of three tables still occupied, and we would soon be politely expected to depart.

  Fortunately, before I could come up with a reason to attach myself to them, my two new friends claimed me instead.

  “Would you like to go on for a drink?” Alice asked.

  “The Fitzroy?” Ronnie suggested.

  “I'm running a little low on funds,” I told them, “but I'd be happy to—”

  “Why not pop on home?” Alice interrupted, before they could find themselves paying for the rest of the evening. “Someone left a couple of bottles there, and Bunny won't have finished them off.”

  Having encountered such a wide variety of human relations that evening, I should have been willing to bet that Bunny was not, in fact, a large rabbit. However, since there might be more information to be had from the two, I agreed readily.

  Outside on the street, we all three blinked under the impact of fresh air. After a moment, a man came out of the Café and pressed an object into my hand—the bag containing the skirt and blouse that I had put on in Sussex many long hours before. I thanked him, but he vanished before I could find a coin for him, and I joined my two companions as they turned up Regent Street, braced together against the sway of the pavement. My own feet meandered uncertainly, but once my ears stopped ringing and the stinging sensation in my eyes cleared, I discovered that it was a very pleasant evening.

  Alice talked at me over her shoulder, in tones that reached those in the buildings around us as well. She was a modern sculptress, she said, providing a woman's perspective to the most male bastion of all the arts. Her main problem, apart from the disinclination of the art world to treat women seriously, was finding a studio large enough to contain her vision. When we reached their home and studio, half a mile away in Soho, I saw what she meant.