‘P’raps.’ He grinned mischievously. ‘But they’ll all be sayin’ it this time next week, just you wait and see. Like sheep, they are. Baa baa baa,’ he mimicked.
‘Fivepence for a nail?’ I complained mildly. ‘I doubt you pay a penny a dozen for them.’
‘Great Aunt Edif, you’ve got a cheap ironmonger,’ he countered. ‘Give me ’is name and you can ’ave that one for free. Or – tell you what – I’ll just take the nail awt and we’ll call it quits.’
I gave him a sixpenny piece.
‘I ain’t got nuffink smaller,’ he warned.
I nearly suggested we looked for a cafe, but few places were happy to give change unless I bought something so it hardly seemed worth the trouble.
‘You can knock it off my next bill,’ I told him, and he threw out an arm.
‘Oh fanks, miss, you’re an ops-a-daisy.’ His hammer went flying out of his hand, skidding along until a flower girl put her foot on it.
‘Oh Lor’,’ she cackled. ‘Do anyfink for a giggle, ’e will.’ And she toed it back along the pavement towards him.
‘We could do wiv you in goal for Spurs, Peggy.’ The bootmaker clapped appreciatively and she hooted in merriment.
Most comedians would sell their mothers and throw in their souls for free to have an audience like her, I pondered, as I crossed the square. I would have given a great deal at that moment to be able to jump into the Serpentine to cool off, but instead I had to gently steam under my layers of cotton and be grateful that the Rational Dress movement had banished the corset from everyday wear.
‘Ice-cold lemonaayade,’ a shaven-headed boy called out. ‘Satcha treat in the ’eat. Lovely r’freshin’ ice-cold lemonaayaay-aayaayaayade.’
That sounded too good to miss, so I risked and wasted a penny. His product was warm, cloudy and fusty, served in a cracked cup dipped into the sediment at the bottom of a barrel. I handed it straight back.
‘I could get better from a horse trough.’
‘No, you could’n’.’ He flinched from my barb. ‘It’d be ’xactly the same.’
44
An Inspector Calls
I WAS CHECKING THROUGH my account of the strange case of the woman who lost a sandal in Bohemia when the doorbell rang. Molly thundered along the hallway and I heard an Oh it’s you, and I hoped it was somebody who she was entitled to address in that way. She had once spoken to the Prince of Wales’s equerry in an even more familiar fashion. I did not have to worry long, however, because she came bursting in with ’Spector Pound, flinging out her arm as if introducing a trapeze artist.
‘Thank you, Molly.’ I got up from the desk. ‘Good morning, Inspector. If you are looking for Mr Grice, he has been called as a professional witness in the trial of Beryl Cornette.’
The inspector looked uneasy, I thought. Did he have bad news?
‘Actually, it is you I have come to see,’ he said, and Molly winked.
‘Aye aye.’ She gave him a big nudge.
‘Go away,’ I said in my most Gricean tones.
‘But he’s only just got here.’
‘I was talking to you.’
‘Ohhhh.’ She tangled her fingers.
‘And do not eavesdrop,’ I warned, waiting for her to ask me what an eave was and if it would break when she dropped it, but she only gave another pained but briefer Oh, tied her fingers into granny knots and clumped back towards the lower stairs.
‘I have some good news,’ he told me.
‘You do not look like you have.’
His face was pinched and anxious. Was he going away again? I realized with a pang that it was none of my concern any more.
‘I am to be promoted,’ he announced, ‘in about two weeks’ time. Newburgh is retiring at last and I am to take his place.’
‘Chief Inspector?’ I resisted the urge to throw my arms round him. ‘But that is wonderful.’
‘I shan’t be sorry not to be posted back to Limehouse.’ He managed a fleeting grin.
‘Quigley must be eating himself,’ I crowed. ‘He thought the job would be his.’
‘He will have to accept it.’ Pound shrugged. ‘Or leave.’
‘The latter would be too much to hope for.’ I touched his hand. ‘Oh, George, that is marvellous news.’
He smiled again but still nervously. ‘I hoped you would be pleased.’ His clear blue eyes – the ones that Harriet said she go could boating in – were troubled.
‘Are you not?’ I asked in consternation, and George Pound cleared his throat.
‘I have been a fool, March.’ He called me by my Christian name for the first time since we had separated at that graveside. ‘A damned fool.’
‘What have you done?’ I asked, praying that he had not gone off and married some horrible woman.
‘Would you like to sit down?’
‘No.’
‘I let you go, March.’ He looked at his feet. ‘And when you tried to come back to me, I turned you away. I was a damned fool.’
At this point Mr G would have reminded the inspector that he had already established that point, but I only said, ‘What are you telling me?’
‘I was worried about the gulf in our affairs but mine are much improved now, though I will never be a wealthy man.’ He glanced into my eyes.
‘I do not care about that.’
‘I know.’ George Pound searched my face and his big hand went to my cheek. ‘When I thought I had lost you—’
I put a finger to his lips. ‘You never lost me.’ And for the first time I saw those eyes glisten.
‘I love you so much.’ He went down on one knee. ‘March—’
‘Don’t,’ I said, and he looked at me in bewilderment. ‘Do not say it unless you mean it – really mean it – and mean it forever.’
‘Will you marry me?’
‘Oh, you bloody fool.’ I fell down on my knees and cradled his big, wise, strong, gentle face. ‘Of course I will.’
And the tears ran down George Pound’s cheeks and I kissed each one away until I could not see them for my own.
‘Oh Lor’.’ Molly materialized with unnerving stealth. ‘Has she fallened over again? What a cry baby.’
*
Molly served us tea on the first floor. George did not feel comfortable with the idea of sitting in Sidney Grice’s armchair, and there was a sofa in the sitting room where we could sit together and look out on the street, but mainly at each other.
‘I shall get you well again,’ I promised, toying with the ring on my third finger.
‘I am quite well now,’ he reassured me. ‘My wound burst and it seemed that I would die, but the poison drained and now it has completely healed.’
I should have been there with you.
‘I shall make you very well,’ I told him. ‘You have lost weight. I shall feed you up with beef and kidney pies and puddings and foaming pints of stout.’
‘It will be me that is stout,’ he warned.
‘I hope so.’ I squeezed his hand. ‘And I shall cut and rub your tobacco and fill your meerschaum pipe, and take you back to Parbold and introduce you to my old friend Maudy Glass, and show you all my childhood haunts.’
George snuggled closer. ‘I shall ask Mr Grice this evening,’ he vowed.
‘Let me speak to him first.’ I kissed George. ‘You know what he is like.’
‘All too well,’ George agreed ruefully, and pinched his philtrum.
‘Strictly speaking, he cannot forbid it,’ I said, ‘for he is not my legal guardian, but I should like his blessing.’
‘And so should I,’ George agreed heartily. ‘I have a very high opinion of your godfather and I should not like to come between you.’
‘Your sister will not be happy,’ I predicted.
‘Lucinda will come round to the idea.’
‘I doubt it very much,’ I argued, with some feeling, for I did not care for Lucinda and she detested me, blaming me – and not without reason – for her brother’s being stabbed.
He separated his thumb and forefinger to run them under his moustaches. ‘She knows that I care for you, and I shall let her stay in our uncle’s house. We can find somewhere to rent.’
‘I cannot promise to be an obedient wife,’ I warned and George Pound put his arms round me.
‘I should not believe you if you did.’
‘And I still want to be a personal detective.’
‘And I shall do everything I can to support you in that,’ he said, and I knew that he would.
We sat a while, me nestling into his embrace.
‘Shall we have children?’ It occurred to me that I did not even know if he liked them.
‘Twenty.’ He hugged me. ‘Well, at least one, I hope.’
‘Two would be nice.’ I kissed his palm. ‘It can be lonely, being an only child.’
‘Siblings are not always a blessing,’ George told me ruefully. ‘But, if you want two, then two it is.’
An omnibus drew alongside with a Sikh in crimson robes and matching turban at the back of the top floor in splendid isolation, a warrior king aboard his chariot.
‘I know how desperately you miss your fiancé,’ George said carefully. ‘Your first fiancé, I mean. But I want you to make a promise to me, March. If anything happens to me—’
‘I will not let it.’
‘If it does,’ he insisted, ‘you will not keep a shrine to me.’ George put his hands to my face and turned it to look at him, and his gaze searched mine.
‘I promise,’ I said. ‘No shrine. And, whilst we are on that subject, you asked me once what I would do if Edward could return.’
I felt his fingers tighten. ‘It was not a fair question,’ he mumbled and glanced out of the window.
The Sikh stroked his beard and was gone.
‘You had every right to ask it,’ I insisted, ‘and I told you that I did not know. But I would like to answer it now. You are not a substitute, George Pound. You are not second best. If I had to chose between you, it would be you without hesitation.’
I had thought that I would feel guilty saying that aloud, for I had loved Edward with all my heart, but that heart had been broken and George Pound had mended it, and now it almost burst with love for the man with whom I would share my life.
45
The Broken Seal
SIDNEY GRICE WAS especially irascible when he returned. ‘How did the trial go?’ I asked, and he dropped his eye into a cupped palm.
‘How trials always go.’ He shook out a rolled eye patch. ‘According to the whims of twelve ignorant men.’ He tied the patch behind his head. ‘I spent forty-eight minutes explaining how Mr Cornette could not possibly have been in Barnet on the night in question, with the whole box of them nodding along, only for fifty per centum of the exotically named South Sea Songstress Sisters to oscillate her Bactrian eyelashes and snivel Oh, but I saw him there for the full dozen to change the remnants of their troglodytic neural ganglia.’
He tossed four letters, unopened, over his shoulder into the bin.
‘Oh dear.’ I held up my jug of water. ‘You would like a cold drink while you wait for your tea?’
‘I never like cold drinks.’ He threw two more letters into his wastepaper bin. ‘They are usually warm.’ And then he ripped open a pale rose-tinted envelope. ‘That is the second countess who has proposed marriage to me this month.’ He dropped that into his wire basket for filing and opened the flap of another to peruse it suspiciously. ‘How do so many algebraists manage to get murdered?’
‘I have often lain awake pondering that,’ I said. ‘Speaking of marriage.’
He tore a blue paper letter in four and then one of the quarters in four again. ‘I was talking of algebraistocide.’
‘Yes, but before that.’
‘That is one of our few areas of common ground.’ He reassembled the seven torn pieces on his desk. ‘Neither of us will ever enter into that ridiculous contract.’
‘Well, I might,’ I began tentatively, and he dipped his head.
‘Oh, March.’ He smiled fleetingly. ‘Even you are not that stupid. What man would be worth betraying me for, after all the time I have expended in patiently teaching you and all the confidences I have entrusted to you, in the understanding that you wished to follow – however ineptly – in my footsteps?’
‘Yes, but surely I could—’
‘Knowing that I could never work with another man’s. . .’ He paused to give his final word the magnitude of disgust it deserved. ‘Wife?
Sidney Grice broke the white wax seal of a huge ivory envelope, glared at the card he had extracted and made that odd quick bark that served him as a laugh. ‘A princess this time.’ He threw it into the basket. ‘Well, she shall have to settle for a lesser man.’
I tried to bring the subject back to what I wanted to tell him. ‘But I would still—’ I managed as the doorbell sounded, but I was not sure what I would still be to him when I was Mrs Pound. ‘There is something we must talk about,’ I added quickly, but my guardian was reinserting his eye and running his fingers back through his hair.
‘There are many things,’ he said, ‘beginning with why you have a nail protruding from the heel of your left boot, which is scratching my inadequately polished Hampshire oak floor.’
‘I broke the heel.’
‘Is this relevant to any of our cases?’
‘No.’
‘Then stop jibber-jabbering about it.’
Molly entered. ‘He told me to read it straight out so I wontn’t not forget it.’ She held the card at arm’s length and squinted. ‘His,’ she managed before bringing it up to her nose. ‘His Illustrated Highness Prince Ul-errrrmmm-rich. . .’ She turned back into the hall. ‘Is this an April Fool?’ she demanded. ‘A-L-B-what?’ She screwed her eyes tight. ‘That’s not how you spell Albert. Oh,’ she threw up her hands indignantly. ‘Sklu-something.’ She waved the card accusingly and called over her shoulder, ‘You made that last one up.’
‘Prince Ulrich Albrecht Sigismund Schlangezahn,’ I told her, and she leaned back disbelievingly. ‘This is like what they do in that street game when they get you to say things about sea sells she shells, and all laugh and say I got it wrong when I didntn’t not.’
I squeezed past the immovable bulk that was my guardian’s maid.
‘Good evening, Prince Ulrich,’ I said coolly. ‘Can I help you?’
The prince looked even more splendid than I had remembered, I was chagrined to note, for I would have preferred him to be a shuffling, weaselly man with a bulbous runny nose, but, standing a few inches before me, immaculately attired in a perfectly tailored charcoal coat and trousers and boots that gleamed like black quartz, was one of the most strikingly handsome men I had come across in years.
‘Miss Middleton.’ He snapped his heels together and put out his hand, but I did not take it.
New boots. I recalled Lucy’s account of the opium den.
The prince’s face was precisely and symmetrically carved with a long slightly hooked nose over his immaculately waxed, upturned military moustaches. And he had not followed many of his countrymen’s predilection for horridly luxuriant side-whiskers. His chin was square and clean-shaven, and unblemished apart from that scar.
‘Can I help you?’ I repeated firmly, and was about to ask him to leave when my guardian came out.
‘Your Highness.’ He held out his hand with more bonhomie than I had known him to exhibit for any living human being before. ‘Please excuse them. They are females.’
‘Zo I am observing,’ the prince said in a doomed attempt at gallantry.
He was still a poor second to George, I decided.
‘Come through.’ Sidney Grice ushered our visitor towards my chair.
‘But I cannot sit while the lady stands,’ Prince Ulrich protested.
‘Oh, I do,’ Mr G assured him, and proceeded to demonstrate. But the prince remained standing, his back as straight as his silver-topped walking stick, for it appeared he shared at least
one of Sidney Grice’s practices – that of carrying one indoors.
‘Tea,’ Mr G barked, and Molly made her way back down the hall.
‘I come for two reasons,’ the prince began. ‘First, to know that you haff quite recovered, Miss Middleton.’
‘From you threatening to assault me?’ I enquired, and his immaculately tended moustaches rose like eyebrows in surprise.
‘It cannot be you are still believing that after I explained?’ His eyes, deep-set under a prominent brow, flashed topaz as he directed them at me.
‘It can be,’ I assured him, and Prince Ulrich reddened a fraction in the jowls.
‘I am an officer in the Imperial German Army, cousin to Kaiser Wilhelm and a gentleman of the highest standing in my country. You are thinking I would outrage a vornan?’
‘When somebody pays a procurer and pokes me about like a pig in a cattle market, I cannot help but have my suspicions,’ I rejoined.
His brow fell and those eyes were almost jet, but still compelling in their gaze. ‘You cannot condemn me for acting my part veil.’ His lips had a sensual fullness to them that I might have found attractive, if I had allowed myself to do so.
‘You are about to find out that I can.’
‘But you and your friend were acting it alzo.’
Sidney Grice lay back in his chair, watching us both with mild amusement. ‘I think it might be better if you sat, Prince Ulrich. Miss Middleton is in danger of dislocating her cervical vertebrae from trying to look you in the eye at a nine-inch disadvantage.’
The prince shrugged. ‘As you vish.’
Our visitor helped himself to an upright chair from the central table and, with his higher vantage and greater height, I was hardly any better off when I settled into my armchair.
‘Perhaps you would like to tell Miss Middleton the second reason that you came,’ Mr G suggested.
‘Indeed,’ the prince acquiesced. ‘Though I am having doubts as to whether you will give your assent, Mr Grice.’
This sounded disconcertingly as if Schlangezahn were seeking permission to ask for my hand in marriage, and it flashed through my mind that my refusal might be an opportunity to announce that I was already spoken for. But I dismissed the idea even as it floated into my mind.
Dark Dawn Over Steep House Page 19
