‘But it must be very painful.’ I cringed at the sight of his bloodshot eye and swollen, purple lids.
‘It certainly is,’ he told me with great satisfaction. ‘When it starts to weep, my takings go up exponentially.’
‘Clip Prabberly and his colleagues are PRAMs, the Professional Ruffians Association Members,’ Mr G informed me. ‘When they are not begging, they put their skills to more disreputable purposes, such as loitering outside houses to discourage purchasers and drive the price down, but they can turn their hands to other things. Three of them went to Eton College.’
‘A pretentious parvenu of a school.’ Clip swatted the name to the ceiling. ‘I’m an old Wykehamist myself.’
‘You look very convincing,’ I remarked.
‘And smell it.’ Sidney Grice fanned the air with a few sheets of paper.
‘It is an irrevocable condition of membership that we never bathe,’ our visitor said merrily. ‘One of our band, Chisel Smith, fell into a laundry tub once and was suspended from active duty until he had slept in kennels for a month.’
My guardian’s arm swung out, a misshaped scarlet ball flew over me and Clip caught a bag clinking heavily of coins.
He pulled the drawstring loose. ‘Gawd bless yer, guv.’ He put his patch back on and manoeuvred his eye cover back into place.
‘You have done well. Now get out.’ Mr G pulled the bell rope once and, after Molly had shown Clip Prabberly out, instructed her to bring candles and go out for some rosewater.
I took out my scent bottle and sprayed a few puffs of my precious Fougère.
‘Cor, what a stink.’ Molly wafted my perfume away.
She brought a box of cangles and set out on her errand.
‘Why could we not meet Mr Prabberly in a public place,’ I suggested, ‘preferably upwind of him.’
‘He took enough risk coming here.’ Sidney Grice dipped a taper. He did not trust Molly to roam the room with a naked flame.
And, when the candles were lit and I had wasted still more of my perfume, I tackled him. ‘Have you been paying people to spy on Cherry?’
‘I have not.’ He toyed with the idea. ‘Do you think I should?’
Sidney Grice scrambled the coals into flames with the long poker to try to burn off the odour but, as so often is the case, pleasing smells are ephemeral but vile stinks are the unwanted guests who will not take the hint and leave. They linger and settle into your favourite armchair and are all but impossible to shift.
‘Her servants?’ I persisted.
‘No.’ He replaced the poker and dusted his hands off on each other.
‘Her callers?’
‘Indeed not.’ He nipped out a candle and waited for the smoke to permeate before relighting it. ‘Or not in the sense that you mean it.’
I changed tack. ‘Who is Mr Sam Wells?’
‘In this matter, and how my spirit shrivels in torment as I disclose this –’ my guardian worked his way along the other candles on the mantelpiece – ‘I am as distressingly ignorant as you. However,’ he moved to the central table where four candles flickered, ‘I am prepared to consider the painful possibility that I have just paid for faulty information. By Prabberly’s own admission, his man could not hear very well.’
‘So, if he misheard,’ I toyed with the name in my mind before it came to me. ‘Sam Wells could be—’
‘I want to say it first,’ Mr G broke in. ‘Samuels.’
Molly returned, proudly bearing a bottle like a sporting trophy.
‘Oh, it’s ever so romantical,’ she gushed.
‘The candlelight?’ I asked.
‘No.’ She put some of her employer’s change in the bowl on his desk. ‘The smell what you’re trying to get ridded of – just like my gentleman friend Tarragint when he worked in the cats’ meat factory drains.’
The bowl was made from a varnished skull-vault, all that remained of the Paddington Prowler after Sidney Grice had cornered him in Ramsay’s Circulating Library.
‘Do you have a clean apron to put on tonight, Molly?’ I asked and she wrinkled her nose.
‘This is my clean apron, miss.’
‘But it has stains down it.’
‘Lord love you, miss.’ Molly laughed. ‘It aintn’t got no stains down it at all. It’s got stains up it and up-stains dontn’t not count for nothing.’
‘Put—’ her employer began but our maid was in full flow.
‘And it was my clean apron when I put it on this morning, and I aintn’t changed it so it must still be my clean apron. My other—’
‘Put a clean one on,’ he bellowed and Molly blanched.
‘With no up-stains, sir?’
‘No stains in any direction of any size, shape or colour and,’ his voice sank to a menacing hiss, ‘quit my study. Now.’
Molly left us with a bobbing backward curtsey.
Sidney Grice spoke. ‘I shall change for dinner.’
‘Oh.’ Molly held up her spread palms either side of her face as she had seen a girl do on the cover of The Cunning Cut-throats of Clapham Common – not the finest volume on my bookshelf. ‘What into? Not an umpire what sucks out people’s blood.’
‘Some people might say I am that already,’ her employer said drily. ‘Go and tell Cook we do not want our dinner incinerated tonight.’
‘In where, sir?’
‘Burned,’ I said.
‘I’ll try.’ Molly scratched her tooth. ‘But she dontn’t like her nap disturbed while she’s cooking.’
‘I think I shall get changed too,’ I told my godfather.
‘What on earth for?’ He went back behind his desk. ‘Nobody will be looking at you.’
I changed nonetheless. I would look at me even if nobody else would.
Edward loved to look at me. He would watch me until I felt silly, which did not take long, then angry, which did not take long either. One afternoon as he polished his sabre in our dining room, he told me I was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen without hooves and I struck him playfully on the head with the scabbard. He needed four stitches after that.
68
✥
The Pipe of Dreams
CHERRY MORTLOCK ARRIVED at seven promptly.
‘I have never liked people who are fashionably late,’ she apologized as I scuttled down the stairs to greet her. ‘Oh, March, you look pretty.’
She had on an ebony gown, trimmed to emphasize her tiny waist and quite daringly décolleté in a way that was bound to shock my godfather – especially as she was still in mourning – and was hardly disguised by her silk shawl.
‘No, Cherry,’ I disagreed. ‘I look plain in a poor light. You look lovely.’
‘She most certainly does not,’ Sidney Grice corrected me, coming out of his study. ‘She looks breathtakingly beautiful, according to my calculations.’
Cherry’s face reddened briefly. ‘Calculations?’
‘I have no concept of or interest in beauty,’ he informed her, ‘but I observe what stimulates other men and I have worked out a mathematical formula for it, based largely on the symmetry and proportions of twenty-eight facial and fourteen bodily measurements, and you achieve a score of four point two seven six six seven.’
‘That does not sound very high.’ Cherry smiled uneasily and tried to ignore Molly’s dropping of her cloak on the floor for the third time.
Mr G looked splendid in his cerise tails, starched collar and extravagantly generous white bow tie.
‘It is scored out of four point two seven six six eight,’ he told her and she laughed.
‘I have forgotten what the first number was.’
‘You are close to perfection,’ I assured her.
We went to the upstairs drawing room. Occasionally I sat in there to get away from my guardian, but I had not been in that chamber with him since he had shown me around his home, the moment I had arrived.
‘Before I forget,’ Cherry reached into her velvet purse, ‘I have brought a peace offering for
Spirit.’ She brought out a slightly flattened white mouse. ‘It is made of cotton stuffed with catnip.’ She fluffed up its ears. ‘The man I bought it from swore that cats cannot resist the smell.’
‘She is sleeping upstairs.’ I popped it into my bulky sack of a handbag. ‘But, if she makes an appearance, you can give it to her yourself.’
‘She is getting a bit old for toys,’ Sidney Grice opined ungraciously.
‘What a pretty room,’ Cherry said and, though I would not have gone that far, this was easily the most feminine room of the house, three chintz chaises longues in a semicircle round an Indian rug before a lit fire. The matching calico drapes were drawn across the front window.
‘I often come here at night to watch over my city.’ Mr G propelled Cherry backwards with a little more force than was necessary, on to one of the sofas, and settled on the one between us. ‘Often for three hours and nine minutes, but occasionally for only one-seventh of that.’
‘Twenty-seven minutes,’ I calculated, to a stop-showing-off look from my guardian.
‘You will consume a sherry shortly,’ he told her. ‘It is not quite dark enough to be a true amontillado, I believe, but I have been informed by what I would regard as a reliable source that it is from the Montilla region and perfectly acceptable to ladies of taste.’
Apart from when I was ill and he was acting on doctor’s advice, I had never been served alcohol by Sidney Grice, but he poured and passed two schooners as if it were a regular ritual.
‘You do not drink?’ Cherry asked.
‘The keenest of minds blunt the most easily,’ he informed her, ‘and what an even more unhappy world this would be were my genius not to be honed to perfection.’
‘Quite,’ she murmured.
‘Quite what?’ he asked, resting his left arm over the back of his chaise longue.
‘Cheerio.’ I raised my glass to fill the puzzled space.
‘Your good health,’ she toasted in return.
Mr G leaned towards me until he was almost lying sideways.
‘How do you think it is going thus far?’ he whispered, though Cherry would have had to be very deaf indeed not to have heard him.
‘Very well,’ she said kindly and Mr G shot upright.
‘How discomfited you will be when I explain that my interrogation was dispatched towards Miss Middleton.’
‘Cherry spoke for both of us,’ I assured him.
‘Had you authorized her to do so?’ He pulled his lower eyelid up just in time to foil an escape bid by his eye.
‘In writing,’ I joked and, before he could ask to see the exact terms of that letter, Cherry weighed in with, ‘Do you really have no interest in beauty, Mr Grice?’
‘I have a titanic curiosity about how it affects the behaviour of others.’ He rose to pour himself a tumbler of water from a crystal carafe.
‘Inspector Quigley once told me that an ugly woman could quote the Bible and not be believed, but that a pretty one could tell a jury almost anything she liked,’ I put in – irrelevantly it seemed.
‘So all those compliments you paid me…’ Cherry began hesitantly.
‘Were statements of fact.’ He glugged his water.
‘Oh.’ Cherry wilted.
‘Would you rather I had lied to you?’
‘I think Cherry would rather that you meant them,’ I suggested.
‘I mean everything I say,’ Sidney Grice said indignantly.
‘Felt them,’ I rephrased.
‘Oh, that.’ He sprinkled invisible herbs. ‘I have no time for feelings.’
He drained his glass, threw back his head and gargled noisily but did not, I was relieved to see, spit it out again.
Cherry emptied her schooner. ‘I do not wish to be rude,’ she began.
‘It has only occurred to me nine times in the course of this evening that you might be,’ he reassured her.
‘But why did you invite me here?’
I brought the decanter and refilled both our glasses.
My guardian eyed his glass sadly and I topped it up.
‘Before I answer that, might I ask – also with no intent to be rude – why you came?’
‘I suppose I was intrigued,’ she admitted.
‘The hope of stimulating that reaction was the third reason I did so.’ Mr G blew on his water as if to cool it. ‘My first reason was because I wished to apprise you of our startlingly slight progress on the conundrum with which you have presented us and the sixth was my wish that you observe my demonstration of a childish trick. We need not concern ourselves with the other reasons at present.’ If the table had been made of gossamer he could not have placed his glass upon it with greater delicacy.
The door burst open so violently that it crashed against the wall and Molly wobbled in, trying to bow and curtsey at the same time.
‘Cook said to tell you dinner is served, only it aintn’t yet ’cause I’ve just come up two frights of stairs to serve it for you, and she said to tell you it aintn’t in-sin-whatever-you-said-burned.’
She toppled sideways but recovered like a roly poly doll.
‘Well,’ Sidney Grice rose with that knack he had of appearing to exert no muscular activity whatsoever. ‘If you are not too intoxicated to walk, Miss Mortlock, perhaps you would care to join us.’
‘I shall try my utmost.’
‘I tried my outmost once but it was broken,’ Molly announced cryptically just before her employer pushed her to one side to let us through.
I had never seen the table set for three before and I had certainly never seen it so loaded with knives, forks and spoons.
‘What on earth is all this?’ Mr G grasped a fistful. ‘And do not tell me it is cutlery – I know it is cutlery, but why in the name of Grace Horsley Darling and her twenty-one-foot Northumberland coble rowing boat is twenty-eight per centum of my canteen weighting this table to the point of collapse?’
Molly shuffled her feet and looked to the ceiling for inspiration.
‘I got fluttered after you called me darling,’ she admitted bashfully. ‘If that was a proposal I must ask you to do it better, like you did to Miss Middleton when she was a lunantic.’
Cherry tried to mediate. ‘I think Mr Grice just wants to know why we have so many knives and forks and spoons.’
Molly looked at her as one might an especially simple simpleton. ‘Because Miss Middleton sedded to make sure there were three sets of cuttery.’
‘That was three sets of cutlery between us, Molly,’ I told her, ‘not each.’
Molly’s teeth sprang forwards as she brayed in hilarity. ‘Between and each – why, miss, there aintn’t not no difference.’
‘Get the first course,’ Mr G instructed, settling Cherry in my place at one end of the table and himself at his end, with me in the middle like a child between parents.
Molly stuck her head into the dumb waiter shaft and roared, ‘Cook, you know that turnip what went runny and you added more water to make a soup? They’re ready for it now.’
The ropes creaked and the lift rose and Molly brought out three bowls, one at a time.
‘Where is the tureen?’ her employer challenged and, to save breath, added, ‘The big blue bowl.’
‘Oh, we was hoping you wouldntn’t not notice that,’ Molly answered, ‘only Cook had an accident with it… or I should say in it.’
Mr G shot a finger to his eye.
‘That will be all for now, thank you, Molly.’ I shooed her away as he inflated his lungs.
Our maid’s description of the first course was unusually accurate – mashed turnip in a greasy puddle. Cherry tried hard not to show her feelings but her lips defeated her. She dipped a spoon in experimentally.
Sidney Grice stood with his hands clasped and such a pious expression that I thought he had remembered to say grace, but he was marching to the end of the table with a decanter of red wine to serve Cherry and, less generously, me.
‘Some muck called Château Lafite Rothschild that the
baron keeps sending me crates of. I throw most of it away.’
‘But it is probably one of the finest Bordeaux wines that money can buy,’ Cherry protested.
‘Quite so.’ Mr G limped back to his place. ‘But you cannot escape the fact that it is French.’
‘Why did you not get a German wine?’ I enquired, knowing how he admired all things from that country.
He tipped a steady stream of salt into his hand. ‘Because that would cost Miss Mortlock money.’
‘Me?’ Cherry raised her eyebrows.
‘I assume you are aware that, being a business dinner, this evening will be charged to expenses.’ He scattered the salt. ‘Well, that is enough idle chitter-chat to fulfil my duty as the host.’
‘I shall pay for dinner,’ I promised.
Cherry snorted. ‘If you do the job, I shall not quibble over the cost of a turnip.’
‘Three turnips.’ Mr G created clouds of pepper over his bowl.
Cherry sampled her wine. ‘This is most palatable.’
‘Yes.’ My guardian tucked in with relish. ‘I am fortunate to have a cook who knows how to extract the majority of flavour from most dishes. Food should taste of nothing but salt and pepper.’
‘May I ask if you really proposed to your ward?’ Cherry put off the moment of sampling hers.
‘Yes.’ He chewed another scoop of it.
Cherry sniffed her food.
‘He wanted to stop somebody else getting control of my inheritance,’ I explained.
‘The idea was repugnant to me,’ he added.
‘Almost as repugnant as this effluent posing as food,’ I said. ‘Do not feel obliged to try to eat it, Cherry.’
‘Indeed not,’ Sidney Grice agreed. ‘We can have it reheated tomorrow. Boadicea.’
‘The horse that fled the day before the Garstangs died?’ I clarified.
‘What of it?’ Cherry pushed her bowl away untasted. ‘Thousands of horses bolt in London every day.’
‘The most accurate estimate I have been able to arrive at is an average of forty,’ Mr G informed her. ‘By which I mean steeds that have run out of control for at least one-eighty-eighth of a mile.’
Twenty yards, I calculated, but only repeated Cherry’s enquiry. ‘What of it?’
The Secrets of Gaslight Lane Page 31
