by M C Beaton
But Emily spoke to the open air. For Mr. Bessamy, with a great grinding of teeth, had removed himself to the solace of his study.
Sally smiled weakly at Miss Fleming, who had supplied her with a supper of tinned salmon sandwiches and strong tea after she had sent a wire to Emily. “So you see,” ended Sally, who had been regailing her new friend with the story of Aunt Mabel’s death, “I don’t think I have the job. And how much money should I ask?”
“If I were you,” said Miss Fleming firmly, “I would go to bed and have a good night’s sleep, and then, in the morning, I would simply turn up at Home Chats and start answering the letters. I would tell this Mr. Barton that in the heat of the moment he gave you the job. These Fleet Street men can never remember a thing from one moment to the next.”
“I’ll try,” said Sally doubtfully. “Can I have a bath?”
“If no one’s in the bathroom, yes,” said Miss Fleming. “You will need two pennies for the geyser, and you’ll find the bathroom at the end of the corridor. Now I’ll take you back to your room. You’re very lucky to get it, you know. It’s pretty awful, but it’s cheap and clean.”
She said good night outside Sally’s door, and Sally went into the dark little cell that was to be her home. Tomorrow she would take in her surroundings but just for the moment she was too tired. She undressed, and putting on her dressing gown and slippers, she picked up her sponge bag and made her way along the corridor to the bathroom.
The geyser, fed by two pennies put into the slot, went off with a terrifying bang. The gas roared horrendously, and then a thin stream of boiling water began to trickle out of the brass spout.
Sally sighed. It would take at least half an hour’s time to fill.
The bathroom was a long coffin of a place with a high ceiling on which flakes of paint and cobwebs moved in the hot air rising from the gas jets. The cork bath mat was crumbling at the edge, and there was no toilet. That was housed at the opposite end of the corridor. The bathroom was also full of signs: PLEASE LEAVE THE BATH AS YOU WOULD WISH TO FIND IT. EXTINGUISH GAS. USE YOUR OWN SOAP.
Sally waited patiently while the water mounted slowly in the large old tub. The house was full of noises and voices. A woman clattered down the stairs, laughing shrilly and talking nonstop to a silent partner. Somewhere a couple was arguing fiercely, the words mercifully indistinct. There was the sad, pathetic wail of a young baby. There was a mixture of odors of gas, disinfectant, dry rot, mildew, baked potatoes, welks, baked beans, and sour milk. Each room carried the stern warning NO COOKING IN THE ROOMS, but according to Miss Fleming, no one paid any attention. They all used a little gas ring that pulled out next to the gas fire and on it cooked their suppers.
At last the bath was ready, and by that time there were several impatient rattles at the door and cries of “Hurry up in there! Are you going to take all night?”
“I’ve only just run the bath!” called Sally, but this only produced more furious rattlings at the door, so instead of having a long, leisurely soak, she had a hurried scrub, and, after cleaning out the bath, she opened the door to be confronted with six pairs of furious eyes, three male sets and three female. Sally blushed at being seen attired only in her nightgown and woolly dressing gown by the opposite sex, but the men were too impatient and would not have noticed if she had emerged stark naked.
Once in the darkness of her room—NO GAS TO BE LIT AFTER 10 P.M.—Sally turned back the thin covers of the iron bed and then went to lean out of the window.
Below her in Bryant’s Court the ladies of the night were plying their trade. Sally raised her eyes instead and looked over the rooftops, where London lay spread out under an orange sky.
The very air seemed to pulsate with raucous life. She sent up a prayer for the soul of Aunt Mabel, and then gave herself up to dreams of the future. She was in London and everything was possible. Good-bye, Emily.
She would never go back.
Mr. Barton, Editor of Home Chats, paused at the top of the stairs. He saw a shadow moving behind the frosted glass of the Letter Editor’s door and went forward and pushed it open.
Sally, with her hair carefully piled on top of her small head, was going over the filing cabinets with a feather duster.
“What are you doing here?” demanded Mr. Barton crossly.
“Don’t you remember?” said Sally sweetly, although her heart was hammering against her ribs. “You gave me Aunt Mabel’s job.”
“I did?” Mr. Barton clutched his head. It had been a hectic evening, what with the old girl dying like that, and then putting the magazine to bed. He’d had a few more pints than were good for him, and so the evening before came back to him as a sort of gray fuzziness interspersed with bright flashes of total recall.
He could remember the head printer laughing over the Aunt Mabel column and pronouncing it very good.
He looked at Sally doubtfully. Had he offered her the job?
She certainly looked less of a schoolgirl with her hair up. In fact, she looked very attractive indeed. Enough to make the Reverend Frobisher Entwhistle turn in his grave. The Reverend Entwhistle had founded the magazine some fifty years ago. The small profit from the journal went into a trust for his various dissolute offspring. Mr. Barton had held the job for the past twenty years. He had tried to storm Fleet Street as a young man with dreams of becoming a foreign correspondent burning in his eyes. But somehow he had become the editor of Home Chats instead. He had made no changes.
Apart from Aunt Mabel, an office boy, and Mr. Barton, the rest of the contributors were free-lance, sending in articles on “How to Reprimand a Bad Servant,” “How to Raise Funds for Your Local Church,” “Parish Gossip,” and similar epistles.
He himself wrote the cookery column, plagiarizing Mrs. Beeton without the smallest shred of conscience. He lived for the evenings, which he spent at the bar of the Red Lion around the corner, when, after the fifth pint, he could pretend he was a real Fleet Street man and hint darkly at scoops in far countries with all the other failures who were doing exactly the same thing.
Suddenly the whole morning-after futility of his job hit him.
“Very well,” he said to Sally. “But only a trial, mind. We only publish six letters and answers. But you have to reply personally to everything that comes in.”
“Is there a lot of correspondence?” asked Sally anxiously, looking around the cluttered room.
“No,” sighed Mr. Barton. “Aunt Mabel was too much of a Bible-basher to be popular. If you run short, make ’em up.”
“Isn’t that dishonest?” asked Sally, round-eyed.
Mr. Barton stared at her in disgust. “If you want to work in Fleet Street,” he said caustically, “you’d better learn the ropes. I am not asking you to report on wars that don’t exist or social scandals that never happened, although there’s plenty of those in the popular press. If you don’t have letters, write them yourself. That’s not selling your soul.”
Sally nodded. He stared at her, and then he said, “And another thing—don’t, whatever you do, tell anyone you’re Aunt Mabel. You’re too young, see! We’ve got a drawing of this sweet little old lady with specs at the top of the column, and that’s what you’re supposed to look like.”
“What are my wages?” asked Sally faintly.
“Two pounds and fifteen shillings a week,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it,” said Sally breathlessly. It seemed like an awful lot of money to her, and she had hardly made a dent in her fortune of two hundred pounds.
Mr. Barton gave a weary flip of his hand and strode out.
Sally slowly walked around the desk and sat down, hugging herself in excitement. She had made it! Here she was in Fleet Street, and an editor—well, Letters Editor—but still.
Sally’s first flight into journalism didn’t exactly hit the streets. That was not the way of Home Chats. It rather filtered its way into domestic homes and vicarages, where it mostly lay ignored until the cook took it away to the
kitchen to copy the recipes, unaware that she had them already in her copy of Mrs. Beeton.
But first one person turned idly to the letter page and stared and showed it to another and another. Word of mouth is better than advertising any day, and soon copies of Home Chats were disappearing off the book stands and out of the kitchens as people exclaimed over Sally’s advice.
It was her reply to the pregnant housemaid that caused the most furor. First of all, letter editors were not supposed to publish such letters. They were supposed to send vague, woolly replies in plain envelopes. But not only had Sally published it, but she had gone to town on her reply.
She had urged the fallen housemaid not to waste her time with unnecessary guilt. The child must come first. The father, if he were not in a position to marry the girl, must be made to pay child support. The man was just as responsible as the girl for the unborn child. Sally had urged the woman to ask her mistress for advice, since “no lady with a true Christian spirit would even consider turning you out of doors.”
So those who were shocked at Sally’s forth-rightness felt hobbled when it came to writing a blistering reply, because nobody wanted to be accused of lacking in Christian spirit.
Then there was the girl who was being forced by her parents to marry the rich neighbor’s son. “Don’t do it,” said Aunt Mabel—Sally.
“Money cannot buy love, and there are times when one’s parents do not know what is best for one. Honor thy father and thy mother—but by all means follow the dictates of your conscience.”
Well, it was rather hard to argue with that one too.
By the time the next edition of Home Chats reached the public, the bewildered Mr. Barton found he had to increase the print, and Sally was in dire need of a secretary. Letters poured in by every post, and she worked long and hard to answer all of them. Then one night Mr. Barton had a brainstorm. He had never thought of that incredibly dull magazine ever blossoming into anything else. But why not? He, James Barton, could still be the reporter he had always longed to be. He knew he was good.
He walked out of the Red Lion, his pint of beer standing on the counter, untasted, and went back to the office and wrote a blistering article on the evils of prostitution. He had all the facts and figures at his fingertips, for he had written a free-lance article only the year before in a last-ditch attempt to prove himself. Now it would have a market.
In another month the big newspapers were beginning to sit up and take notice of this new child in their midst. Sally had an elderly secretary, a friend of Miss Fleming recruited from the lodging house, and two whole pages in the magazine. Mr. Barton had hired a reporter and spent the nights in consultation with his printer. The headlines became bolder and the stories stronger.
Following Sally’s example, Mr. Barton qualified his most lurid stories by pointing out that they were just what every God-fearing, thinking man and woman should know about.
God, the Bible, and titillation was a heady mixture. The public lapped it up. They could read all those scandalous letters and stories and know that it was their Christian duty to read such things.
Sales soared, and so did Sally’s salary. The dissolute relatives of the late Reverend Entwhistle became even more dissolute on the proceeds, and Mr. Barton could be seen drinking champagne occasionally in El Vino’s instead of sipping bitters in the Red Lion.
Sally and her secretary, Miss Frimp, and Miss Fleming left the lodging house and took an apartment in Bloomsbury.
Sally forgot about Emily and the children. Her whole life was centered in that one cluttered room behind the frosted glass door. She worked long and late. She enjoyed the heady feeling of exhaustion, the smell of success, the feeling of a day’s work well done, as she walked out into Fleet Street and looked down that famous canyon, breathing in the smell of hot paper, feeling the thud of the presses, and seeing the sooty dome of St. Paul’s floating against the night sky.
She hardly thought of romance or love or marriage.
In fact, she was getting a peculiar insight into the pitfalls of love, romance, and marriage as anguished letter after anguished letter reached her desk.
But strangely enough no one ever tried to find out the identity of the now-famous Aunt Mabel. The little old lady with the spectacles still beamed out wisely from the top of the page.
No matter how much he imbibed in the hostelries of Fleet Street, Mr. Barton always referred carefully to Aunt Mabel as “a nice old girl.”
And then one day the axe fell—in the form of a crested letter. Much impressed, Miss Frimp passed it over to Sally to open personally.
Sally read it through twice and then said faintly, “I must consult Mr. Barton.”
That gentleman was happily engrossed in his latest exposé—“A Day in a London Slum”—when Sally walked in and handed him the letter silently.
He whistled between his teeth as he read.
It was more like a royal command than a letter. The Duchess of Dartware had written, requesting Aunt Mabel’s presence at a house party in a week’s time. The duchess said her son was about to become affianced to a most unsuitable young girl, and she wished to have Aunt Mabel’s advice.
Mr. Barton stared at it and then stopped whistling and looked up. “Well, you can’t go, Miss Blane. Aunt Mabel must remain anonymous. Tell you what. I’ll write to her nibs and tell her that you never go anywhere, but that if she supplies you with a few more details, you’ll write the advice. That should fix her.”
Sally sighed with relief and went back to bury herself in her work. But somewhere there was a nagging feeling of disappointment. It would have been marvelous to have been able to visit a ducal home… just once.
Mr. Barton sent the letter to the duchess, and the duchess replied by wire.
Stop waffling stop send Aunt Mabel stop if you do not send Aunt Mabel I shall call at your office in person stop so don’t be a silly twit stop
Mary Duchess of Dartware
Sally and Mr. Barton stared at each other over the wire in consternation.
“We’re sunk.” said Mr. Barton, clutching his head.
“I have it,” said Sally. “We’ll let her call here. Miss Frimp can pretend to be me.”
But Miss Frimp nearly fainted at the very idea. Normally a timid soul, she dug her heels in on this one occasion and refused to budge, which left them exactly where they were.
Mr. Barton scowled while Sally paced up and down the room. She stopped suddenly and stared at a theatrical poster on the wall, and a mischievous smile lit up her face.
“I’ve got it!” she exclaimed.
“What?” cried Mr. Barton, who truly believed Sally to be omnipotent.
“I’ll hire a theatrical makeup artist,” said Sally. “A white wig, some spectacles with plain glass, and some rubber wrinkles, and—voilà! Aunt Mabel.”
“It’ll never work,” said Mr. Barton, but he looked longingly toward his unfinished article.
“Of course it will,” said Sally bracingly.
“Nothing to it! Two days with the old trout and I’ll be back.” She twitched the wire out of Mr. Barton’s unresisting fingers. “I’ll reply to this. Imagine! I’m going to be a duchess’s guest!”
Her hope and happiness buoyed her up all the way back to Bloomsbury, but there she met with a setback as her two older flatmates digested the news.
Miss Frimp, released from the social confines of the office where Sally was her boss, flatly stated that she thought the whole idea was “terribly dangerous.” Miss Fleming said gloomily that Sally was bound to be found out.
The three women were sitting drinking tea around the table of their sparsely furnished living room, which was devoid of the usual feminine knickknacks that one would expect three single ladies with good salaries to have.
But the fact was that all three worked long hours and never seemed to have the time to pay much attention to their home, short of paying a char to keep the place clean.
Sally had never regretted having chosen such odd flat
mates instead of girls of her own age. She enjoyed Miss Fleming’s tough, intelligent brain and inside-out knowledge of the workings of Fleet Street, and she enjoyed equally Miss Frimp’s old-maidish manners and frequent shy little jokes.
They argued the pros and cons far into night, and by bedtime, Sally was more than ever determined to go.
Miss Frimp, who looked so like that picture of Aunt Mabel in the magazine, said with her infectious feminine giggle, “What if you were to marry the duchess’s son yourself?”
“He’ll probably be some pimply adolescent who’s fallen for a chorus girl,” said Sally. “And don’t forget, I shall be covered in rubber wrinkles.”
“Hadn’t you better look him up in Debrett’s Peerage? volunteered Miss Fleming. “Might as well find out who he is.”
“Time enough for that,” said Sally, yawning.
“All the time in the world…”
CHAPTER THREE
There has always been a lack of respect for titles and dignitaries in Fleet Street. A story is a story, whether it concerns Little Johnny Bloggs, age three, in Clapham, stuck down a coalhole—“He was ever so brave,” said thirty-year-old brown-haired, blue-eyed Mrs. Mary Bloggs, laughingly, yesterday—or the latest goings-on of His Royal Highness, King Edward. Sally had acquired the Fleet Street outlook by a sort of osmosis, and therefore had not paused to really think about what being a guest of a duke and duchess would entail.
Admittedly the theatrical man had done a wonderful job, and even the anxious and critical Miss Frimp had failed to recognize Sally as the sweet little old lady who had emerged from under the hands of the expert.
