Dark Dawn Over Steep House

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  ‘For what?’ My guardian pressed his fingertips so hard together that the tips blanched.

  ‘I am seeking your dispensation to invite your vord to dinner.’ Our visitor grasped the arms of his chair as if preparing to leave.

  ‘Oh, she’s just had that.’ Molly trudged in with a tray. ‘And even little Miss Greedychops dontn’t not need two dinners.’

  As it happened I sometimes did, sneaking off for proper food after pushing Cook’s swill around the plate.

  ‘I have admonished you before about your unsolicited interruptions,’ Molly’s employer rumbled and she grinned, though less toothily than she used to.

  ‘He do use long words to say thanks,’ she told our visitor, and drew back her elbow as if to give him a chummy nudge but, luckily for her employment prospects, instead chose to puggle in her ear.

  ‘I shall not stand in your way.’ Sidney Grice shooed Molly away. ‘But I doubt that she will accept.’

  I smiled sweetly at the Prussian and tried to flutter my eyelashes but, unlike Mr G, I was never much good at that.

  ‘You haff something in your eye?’

  ‘Aqueous humour.’

  ‘Miss Middleton.’ Prince Ulrich cleared his throat, doubtless regretting his decision now.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I know vee haff had an unfortunate start and I should not like to read in one of your excellent accounts vot a monster I voz.’

  ‘Indeed you would not.’ I tossed my head, again an unimpressive manoeuvre with my hair so tightly pinned and tied back.

  ‘So I am hoping you vill accept my invitation to dine viv me at my hotel.’

  ‘Very well,’ I replied, in what I hoped was a haughty manner.

  ‘What time,’ my guardian blinked slowly like a lizard on a warm rock, ‘will you expect us?’

  ‘The two of you?’ Prince Ulrich’s face was impassive but his voice betrayed his surprise.

  ‘You do not want my maid to come too?’

  ‘Nein nein.’

  ‘Friday is convenient for me.’ I poured three teas.

  ‘At seven?’

  ‘Oh, very well.’ Mr G adopted the tone of a browbeaten husband whilst I set to pondering what I should wear.

  The prince declined my silent offer of milk. ‘In Berlin we drink our tea with lemon.’

  ‘An improvement on the glandular excretions with which Miss Middleton pollutes her beverages.’ Mr G stretched his mouth without exposing any teeth.

  ‘I hope you will not be going to Limehouse again, Miss Middleton.’ Prince Ulrich stirred a dab of sugar into his drink.

  Sidney Grice clamped his teeth together.

  ‘I shall go where I choose.’ I realized that I had put four sugars in my tea, though I normally have only one.

  ‘It is a dangerous place for a man.’ The prince tilted his head, the scar flashing towards me like white lightning on his skin. ‘Much more zo for a lady.’

  ‘Are you afraid I will arrest you again?’ I sipped my syrup.

  ‘I would not put it past her.’ Sidney Grice paddled his own tea vigorously in a to-and-fro motion from north to south that I had not seen him use before.

  ‘I was thinking more of the safety.’ Schlangezahn’s fingerplates were nicely cut, I noticed as he lifted his saucer.

  ‘And you are wise to do so.’ My godfather changed course, rowing leisurely from east to west. ‘Miss Middleton can be a highly dangerous woman. Before you rush off. . .’ he said, though our visitor had given no indication that he intended to do so. Sidney Grice put a hand to his waistcoat. ‘I wanted to ask you about this, Your Highness.’

  The prince raised his eyebrows in polite interest as my guardian brought a carved box out of his pocket.

  ‘I do not take snuff, Herr Grice,’ Prince Ulrich said.

  ‘Neither does Herr Grice,’ I told him, mainly because I wanted a chance to refer to my godfather in that way.

  Mr G flipped up the lid to reveal the button nestling in white cotton.

  ‘May I see?’ The prince held out his hand and Sidney Grice tipped the button into it, watching him closely.

  ‘It bears my family crest,’ Prince Ulrich confirmed. ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘Miss Middleton finds things.’ Mr G frosted around the edges. ‘Most of the time one might more accurately say she stumbles over things. I seek and discover them.’

  The German chuckled. ‘You are not telling me.’

  ‘Is it yours?’ I asked.

  ‘It looks like one of my vaistcoat buttons,’ the prince commented.

  ‘Have you noticed any missing?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘I am not thinking zo.’

  ‘Surely a gentleman who takes such care with his appearance as you clearly do would notice immediately,’ I reasoned, and he slapped his head theatrically.

  ‘Maybe I did find one gone last veek, maybe not,’ he said vaguely. ‘But I did not pay so much attention.’

  Sidney Grice leaned back.

  ‘Your valet would know,’ I pointed out. ‘He must check everything.’

  Prince Ulrich grinned. ‘You are good at this.’

  ‘It is my profession,’ I responded and Mr G pursed his lips.

  ‘I shall get him to check,’ Prince Ulrich decided. ‘And, if he has slipped up, I shall sack us both for incompetence – him for not noticing and myself for employing him.’

  He waited for a laugh and I managed the seed of a smile.

  ‘Perhaps you could explain to Miss Middleton why you did not notice.’ Sidney Grice pointed his right thumb down like a Roman emperor condemning a gladiator.

  ‘It was the day some stupid street child spilled a bucket of stinking vaste over me. I voz late for a meeting and I had to return to my hotel to change.’ He watched that thumb hover horizontally. ‘I might even haff pulled it off myself in my rushing.’

  The thumb shot up and the Prussian raised the corner of his lips uncertainly.

  ‘Would you like more unsophisticated leaves soaked in water?’ I offered, and Schlangezahn snorted at my reference to his words in Marylebone.

  ‘Of course he would not.’ Sidney Grice clamped a hand over the pot. ‘He is leaving.’

  Our visitor shifted in bemusement. ‘Then I shall expect you both,’ he emphasized the last word a fraction tetchily, ‘on Friday at seven.’

  ‘Assuming that I have not been murdered in the meantime.’ Mr G swirled the dregs of his tea, peering in like a fortune-teller.

  ‘Are you expecting to be?’ The prince was all at once a concerned parent. ‘I can arrange some protection.’

  ‘There is no need,’ I assured him. ‘It is just that one must always expect the unexpected in our business.’

  ‘If one could expect the unexpected it would become the expected.’ Sidney Grice demolished my claim.

  The prince drained his tea and rose. Mr G stretched over the back of his chair and gave the bell rope one pull. I never liked the skull joggling on the end of it.

  Our visitor bowed and Sidney Grice wiggled his fingers but did not rise.

  Prince Ulrich straightened his coat. ‘I am happy to see you are none the vorse for your experience, Miss Middleton.’

  ‘So am I.’ I went with him into the hall.

  I let him kiss my hand. It was not that I was convinced by his account of what had occurred that night in Limehouse, but I rather liked being kissed by men with moustaches now.

  46

  Scented Wrens and Recrudescent Swans

  THE OUTER OFFICE of Spry and Fitt constituted one small dark room, lit by a smoky gas mantle over the head of a clerk perched on a high stool, his back arched over a lower desk on a wide dais. He was so busily scratching away in a large red-backed ledger that he hardly seemed to notice our entry.

  ‘C. S. Derwent Assurance, first floor, but closed today. Any correspondence in the tray. Good day,’ he said, without looking up or pausing from his work.

  His head was hairless and the skin wrinkled like newspaper th
at has been dropped in a puddle.

  ‘As recrudescent swans,’ Sidney Grice shot back at him.

  ‘What?’ Hair sprouted from the clerk’s face like badly sown grass seed.

  ‘Or . . .’ Mr G reflected for perhaps half a second. ‘Acarus scented wrens.’

  The clerk pulled out the nib of his pen, his hand stained India Black by his employment. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘They are anagrams of C. S. Derwent Assurance,’ my guardian told him.

  ‘How did you do that?’ I marvelled, as the clerk pushed a fresh nib into the semilunar slot in his pen and slid the brass ring back over it.

  ‘It is quite simple,’ he told me. ‘One merely rearranges the letters until they are in the sequence of different words.’

  ‘But you did it in your head.’

  ‘Where else should I do it?’

  The clerk dipped his nib.

  ‘Well, most people would need paper and pencil and a good dictionary.’

  ‘It is more convenient to do it in my head.’ Mr G ran a finger under the ledger and sniffed the dusty smudge. ‘For I always have my head with me and there is no such publication as a good dictionary, though the Oxford comes close.’

  The clerk was writing busily when Sidney Grice kicked up his right leg with a litheness that would have done credit to a cancan dancer and plunked his foot on the desk.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the clerk cried out, and Mr G turned his glass eye towards him.

  ‘Gaining what we should have obtained the moment we achieved ingress to this shabby sham of a premises,’ Sidney Grice told him. ‘Namely, your exclusive attention.’

  ‘Is Mr Spry here?’ I asked.

  My guardian removed his foot with less agility, hopping backwards to retain his balance.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And who might you be?’ He asked so nastily that I did not feel like telling him.

  ‘I might be anyone,’ I responded. ‘But I am not likely to be you. If I were, I should have learned better manners.’

  Mr G began to stroll round him, climbing the one step on to his dais, cane swinging as if on a pleasant country walk.

  ‘Why are you behind me?’ The clerk half-swivelled on his stool.

  ‘First, because I am not on any other side of you and, second, my motivation is that I am not tall enough to read your ledger from down there,’ my guardian said. ‘And it is unkind of you to remind me of that – not that I look to you for benefaction.’

  There was a trap occupied by a mouldering mouse on the unswept hearth.

  ‘How dare you?’

  ‘It is not an especially brave act.’ Mr G whacked his cane across the book to stop the clerk slamming it shut and the clerk jumped sideways. ‘I once entered a subterranean labyrinth populated by nineteen ret-ic-ul-at-ed py-thons.’ He separated the syllables until they were almost distinct words. ‘That required a great deal more courage, though the aforementioned acrimonious and ill-mannered serpents were better company than you.’ He clipped on his pince-nez and leaned over, lifting the clerk’s arm out of the way by the sleeve. ‘And that is why I strangled Silas Spry’ he narrated.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ the clerk moaned. ‘I knew I wouldn’t get away with it.’

  47

  The Quiet of Graves

  I CLAMBERED ON TO the low stage as well and peered over the clerk’s head, now buried in his hands, elbows on his heavily used blotting pad.

  ‘He was a tryant and a Scruge,’ I read. ‘I think you mean tyrant,’ I pointed out. ‘And that last word should be spelled with a double O in the middle instead of the U.’

  ‘It is only a rough draft,’ he moaned.

  ‘And there are two S’s in confession.’

  Sidney Grice lifted his cane away, letting it hover as if about to bestow a knighthood. ‘S-L-O-R-T-E-R-E-D,’ he spelled out in horror. ‘You are no better suited to being a scribe than you are a murderer.’

  ‘Murderer?’ The clerk shot up and caught my chin with the back of his head, clacking my teeth together.

  ‘Blim—’ I checked the stream of expletives that sprang to my bitten tongue and satisfied myself with slapping his ear, admittedly much harder than I had intended.

  ‘Blimmid ’eck that stung.’ The clerk clearly did not share my scruples. ‘I haven’t murdered no one, though Lord knows I’ve been tempted.’

  ‘You are writing a story,’ I realized and leafed back to the first page. ‘There was a message engraved in the locket,’ I read aloud. ‘That is not a very exciting beginning.’

  ‘I know.’ The clerk rubbed his head as if it could possibly be hurting as much as my jaw. ‘But I have to fill my time somehow.’

  ‘Business is slow?’ I surmised.

  ‘Quiet as a grave,’ he confirmed. ‘You won’t tell Mr Spry, will you? It’s not much of a job but I’ll never get another with my spelling, and I can’t add up.’

  ‘Some graves are far from quiet,’ Sidney Grice mused. ‘Exempli gratia, the non-resting place of Miss Thythily Thythe of Hythe whilst being dug up by Canis Lupis Dingos.’

  ‘Do you have nothing to do?’ I asked, wondering if it would be decent to check that my upper incisors had not been loosened.

  ‘Not very much.’

  ‘And yet . . .’ Sidney Grice put his mouth two inches from the clerk’s unstruck ear and raised his voice to one level below a shout. ‘You do not respond favourably to the telegramic requests I have sent using a variety of aliases for an appointment.’

  The clerk winced. ‘Mr Spry has given me strict instructions not to accept any more clients.’

  ‘How many,’ Mr G demanded, ‘and I will accept an exact number – clients do you have?’

  The clerk scratched his pate with his pen, drawing quite a good likeness of an oxbow lake.

  ‘Assuming none of them have died.’ He counted off on his fingers as his lips shaped their names. ‘Eight, but I cannot recall when any of them last came in.’

  ‘And what about Mr Spry?’ I enquired, as the lake sprang a leak.

  ‘Hardly ever,’ the clerk said, ‘except to pay me and check that I am here.’

  ‘Does he have far to travel?’ I mopped his head with a torn sheet of blotting paper.

  ‘He used to.’ The clerk sighed contentedly at my attentions, but did not enquire why I was giving them. ‘Until he moved to Berkeley Square about four years ago.’

  Mr G pulled open the drawer of a cabinet and rifled through the few files ranged in it, all of them propped upright by a plaster bust of General Gordon in a glossy red fez. ‘At last a use for you.’ He leafed through them. ‘Where, to within one nineteenth of a seven thousand, nine hundred and twentieth of a furlong, are Mr Silas Pother Spry’s records apropos of Miss Lucinda Seraphora Bocking?’

  The clerk twisted on his stool. ‘They are never kept here,’ he said.

  ‘Where then?’ Sidney Grice patted the clerk’s coat, as if expecting to find the records there.

  ‘Well, I can only presume—’

  ‘Never start a sentence with well when nothing is,’ Mr G advised. ‘Never-never only do anything when you are not required to do it at all, and never-never-never presume anything when I require a fact. The truth is like the fatuously dubbed Cleopatra’s Needle in that respect. It towers and you can do a great many things with an Egyptian obelisk but you cannot presume it.’

  He took a letter out of an envelope.

  The clerk rubbed his eyes like a child waking up. ‘I don’t know, sir. In fact, I don’t even know your name.’

  ‘Then we are on an equal footing in that regard,’ my guardian stated. ‘For I do not know yours either. Come,’ he signalled to me. ‘It is never wise to waste more than nineteen minutes with a man whose younger sister will not speak to him.’

  ‘How on earth could you know that?’ The clerk gaped and sat back on his stool.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said and he absent-mindedly snapped his pen.

  ‘
So you did not think much of my story?’ he asked, distracted by my guardian patting him again.

  ‘Instead of making up something about a doctor, you should write about what you know,’ I suggested, and he made a noise like a disappointed puppy.

  ‘I only know about being a clerk and not a very good one at that,’ he snuffled. ‘Who would be interested in the diary of a nobody?’

  *

  I was halfway down before I realized that Sidney Grice was not following me and, when I craned my neck, I saw that he was heading in the opposite direction.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

  ‘Up.’ He sprang away two treads at a time.

  ‘Up where?’

  ‘Up here.’

  I sighed and followed, my skirts dragging annoyingly in the dust.

  The door on the next landing was closed and, in confirmation of this, a black-lettered sign slid into a board on the wall declared CLOSED beneath the words C. S. DERWENT ASSURANCE CO. LTD.

  ‘Well, that alters the anagram somewhat,’ he said accusingly.

  ‘Colt went to dances.’ I struggled but was quite pleased with my effort, until he pointed out, ‘You still have seven unused letters.’

  ‘Squidge,’ I blustered.

  ‘I shall make enquiries about the lineage.’ Mr G brushed his fingertips along and down the words like a blind man reading Braille. ‘And marital status of the elusive Spry.’

  Underneath the board, affixed by a pair of steel hooks and eyes, another sign read:

  IN CASE OF CLOSURE

  PLEASE DEPOSIT MAIL

  AT GROUND-FLOOR OFFICE

  Sidney Grice put his ear to the door and rapped with his knuckles.

  ‘Ahah.’ He pulled away with a sharp breath as if he had burned his ear and unscrewed the handle of his cane.

  ‘Which stick is this?’

  My guardian tossed his fine head of black hair. ‘The Grice Patent-Denied Housebreaking Cane.’ And he tipped what looked like an oversized corkscrew out into his hand.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘A bradawl.’ He clipped it into the handle to give himself a grip and put the point to the woodwork, twisting it in deftly.