‘You will not go into any other rooms?’ Lucy called after us.
‘Not unless I decide to,’ he reassured her.
Sidney Grice had an ability which I have never come across in other men, that of running silently – neither a footfall nor a rustle of his clothes to be heard. The stairs were dog-legged and he had raced to the half-landing before I was even on the first step.
Lucy’s voice chased after him. ‘But I do not want you to.’
‘And your wish is my command,’ my guardian yelled, and then more softly, ‘though I feel no compulsion to obey it.’ He disappeared round the corner only for his head to poke back round it and to whisper, ‘Mount the staircase one step at a time and wait on each stair for twenty seconds before proceeding in an orderly fashion to the next.’ He shot to the top. ‘Sing loudly,’ he hissed over the bannister rail, ‘but cease to do so when you place your huge foot upon the summit.’
And, before I could protest at yet another insult, Mr G was gone.
With nobody to see, I hitched up my skirts an obscene six inches or so and followed at the leisurely pace instructed. On the first step I cleared my throat and let rip.
‘I’m only a cockney sparrer
I live in a chimney pot
My nest is sooty and narrer
But it keeps us nice and ‘ot.
My mate said he was nevva leavin.’
But now Vs gorn orfwith the flock Leavin’
this poor sparrer grievin.’
A hen wivawt no—’
It was only at this point that I remembered what the next word was and concluded, rather unconvincingly, with, ‘mate’. The second verse was decidedly risqué, I recalled, and was relieved when Lucy called out, ‘Are you all right, March?’
‘Yes, thank you. It is just that I am nervous of staircases today and have to sing to keep my courage up.’
‘That must be embarrassing.’
‘It is for Mr Grice.’ I reached the top. ‘Especially when we have visitors.’
There was a pretty rose-coloured runner pinned to the white-painted wood by gleaming brass rods and complementing the beautiful, and very expensive, William Morris daisy wallpaper, and I wished my guardian would give me a free rein with his more austere decorations.
The patterns were continued on the landing, lit by a stained-glass skylight at the top of the stairwell and the sun coming from an open door on the right. Sidney Grice was kneeling in a cornflower bedroom to the side of a white-painted chest, placed, as Lucy had described, at the foot of the bed.
‘Just in time.’ He stretched out his cane and lifted the hinged lid as if expecting something dangerous to leap out. ‘Safe,’ he breathed and shuffled on his knees towards it.
The trunk was filled with neatly folded undergarments and he lifted each one aside to lay it carefully on the bed. There was a long ivory chemise on the lowest layer and he took it out to hold up to the light. ‘How delicate the needlework is,’ he marvelled, though I had never known him to show an interest in such things. He refolded the garment exactly along its creases again. ‘Hold out your hands.’ He draped it over my arms. ‘What can you smell?’
My senses, as my guardian never tired of telling me, were nothing like as highly attuned as his and so I knew that he was testing me rather than seeking my opinion. Feeling more than a little uneasy at this intrusion into Freddy’s personal possessions, I lowered my face to within an inch of her undergarment. ‘Laundry soap and sandalwood.’ The strong resinous aroma of the latter was unmistakeable, the chest having been lined with it as a defence against bedbugs.
‘Excellent.’ He clapped his hands twice like a sultan summoning one of his harem slaves. ‘Comment upon the quality of hygiene of the interior of the chest.’
I kneeled beside him, not wishing to be castigated for missing a speck of dust in a corner or the eye of a flea lodged in a seam. ‘It looks clean enough,’ I pronounced uncertainly.
‘Enough for what.’
‘Clean.’
‘So your use of the adjective enough was superfluous?’
‘Yes.’
‘I see.’ Mr G looked disappointed at that admission as he laid the chemise back and repacked the box, making minuscule adjustments to the line of a crease or frill. He closed the lid with a sigh. ‘So what have we learned from this exercise?’
‘That Freddy keeps her linen fresh and clean,’ I hazarded and my godfather clicked his tongue.
‘Sometimes you say some very silly things,’ he reproached me. ‘That was not one of those times.’
It was always difficult to tell if he was trying to be nice. ‘Shall we go down?’
Sidney Grice tugged at his scarred ear. ‘I fervently hope so for I have no wish to languish here for the residue of my corporeal existence.’ He got to his feet. ‘Come.’
Muriel was on the landing, presumably having been sent to check on us.
Mr G strode to the maid and tipped her chin up with the side of his forefinger, his head bending to hers. ‘You have a blemish,’ he breathed, as if he were making love to her. ‘Which men, myself included, might describe as a freckle.’ Oblivious to her blushes he ran his middle finger down the side of her nose. ‘And it has increased in diameter by one hundred and twentieth of an imperial inch since fate threw us together.’ He turned her head from side to side. ‘There are only four things which freckles should do and nine which they should not, and first amongst the latter category is to grow.’ He released her with a sigh. ‘Tell your mistress to send you at her own expense to Mr Greene, the dermatologist at University College Hospital, on Tuesday ante meridian.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Muriel looked at him in the same way I imagine young girls must have swooned at Lord Byron.
‘Go away now,’ Sidney Grice told her sharply and she hurried past us to another room.
50
The Potency of Envy
WE MADE OUR way down, Sidney Grice placing both feet on every step before continuing to the next one.
‘Did you find it?’ Lucy looked up, her face lined with worry.
‘Find what?’ He touched the side of his nose as if checking that the freckle had not leaped on to him.
‘The room.’
‘I should be a poor detective – which I am not – if I had not,’ my guardian said severely. ‘I also managed – without recourse to Miss Middleton’s assistance – to locate the chest you so sparsely described to us.’
Lucy plucked at her cheek. ‘And did you find anything in that?’
Mr G brought a flat calico pouch from his satchel.
‘Other than what you had already told me . . .’ He placed the pouch and his cane on the table. ‘Nothing.’
Lucy pulled her right sleeve down from the quarter-inch it had risen. ‘Then you have wasted your time,’ she sympathized.
Sidney Grice twiddled his long slender fingers. ‘On the contrary, there are times when finding nothing can tell one a great deal.’
He slipped the diary into the cloth bag.
‘What are you doing?’ Lucy asked. But she had clearly got the measure of the man for she added hastily, ‘Well, I can see what you are doing. Why are you taking Freddy’s diary?’
‘It is . . .’ I am almost certain that Mr G winked at Lucy Bocking as he put the bulging bag into his satchel. ‘Evidence.’
‘I did not say that you could take it.’ Her eyes darted side to side.
My guardian strapped his satchel shut. ‘A truthful and pertinent assertion.’ He retrieved his cane. ‘I should like to see the vessel in which it was contained.’
‘It was not in anything,’ Lucy said distractedly. ‘What if Freddy should look for it?’
‘You need have no fear on that score,’ he vowed. ‘She will not find it.’
‘But what would I say?’ Lucy looked around for an escape route.
‘I imagine that you would lie and deny all knowledge of it.’ Sidney Grice ambled to the door. ‘Goodbye, Miss Bocking. I anticipate us renewing our acquainta
nce in the very near future.’
‘When is Freddy due back?’ I asked and Lucy looked at the clock. ‘In about an hour.’
‘Are you really afraid of her?’ I asked. ‘I can stay, or help you to book into a hotel.’
‘No.’ Lucy waved a hand wearily. ‘I do not think she will try anything whilst you are both protecting me.’
‘I most certainly am not,’ Sidney Grice retorted as if she had made an improper suggestion and, bidding her a fond farewell, ambled from the room.
‘I hope he knows what he is doing,’ Lucy said as I kissed her goodbye.
‘Of course he does,’ I said firmly, but thought, I hope so too.
*
My guardian was already boarding a hansom when I caught up with him.
‘Do you think Lucy is right to be afraid?’ I began breathlessly and Sidney Grice gave my question some thought.
‘Miss Bocking may have grounds to be very frightened indeed,’ he decided at last. ‘Though not, one might hope for her sake, petrified. Being petrified does not benefit one in the slightest.’
‘I know you are always telling me not to judge people by my feelings about them . . .’ I tailed my own sentence off.
‘Good,’ he said so abruptly that I knew there was no point in adding but, But I truly believed that Freddy Wilde loved Lucy Bocking and that Lucy had been telling the truth when she said they were like sisters.
‘Never underestimate the potency of envy to corrupt the human spirit,’ my godfather philosophized.
‘But surely Freddy—’ I stopped, aware that I was again doing what he was always telling me not to do.
‘I have made a study of the way people position their bodies.’ Sidney Grice orated now in the same manner as I had once heard the Earl of Kimberly make a speech in parliament. ‘It is a minor branch of the forensic sciences which I call Grice’s posturology. And it seems to me that there is a certain tension between Misses Bocking and Wilde.’
‘But do you really think it could be envy?’
‘Where there are women, there is always envy.’ He brought out his coffin-shaped snuffbox and flipped open the skeleton-engraved lid.
‘But surely Freddy is grateful to Lucy for taking her in.’
He took a pinch, although the box was empty, and deposited it into the hollow of his thumb web. ‘Are you grateful to me?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Gratitude,’ he closed his right nostril and inhaled sharply through the left, ‘is the second shortest-lived and the most easily poisoned emotion known to man. There are few things which people hate more than being constantly in another’s debt.’
‘Besides which,’ I contributed, ‘Lucy is rich and will be pretty again whereas Freddy’s looks and fortune have been lost forever.’
‘At last.’ He sucked through his right nostril. ‘You are starting to think like a woman.’
He put a finger under his nose to suppress a sneeze.
‘Is that a good thing?’
Mr G snapped the lid shut. ‘Disgusting habit.’ He blew his nose and I was not sure if he meant thinking like a woman or the taking of non-existent snuff.
51
The Maniac Cathedral
I HAD BEEN PAST St Pancras when I first arrived in London. Molly had come to meet me but I was so taken with all the bustle of traffic and the crowds that I hardly noticed many of the buildings.
Attached to the station stood the Midland Grand Hotel, George Gilbert Scott’s gigantic Gothic construction. It was described by some as a maniac cathedral and one could easily see why. A hundred arched windows punctuated the massive red-brick frontage or jutted like pulpits from the facade, the honey-coloured pillars already greying in the grime of the city. Wherever I looked a different carving caught my eye, but my vision was drawn ever upwards. On the right-hand side a monolithic clock tower stood, topped by a soaring pinnacle, echoing the spires that rose from its corners and from the lower tower to the other side of the entrance.
Saluted by a lavishly uniformed doorman, we passed through the huge portico and I was about to complain that the man who invented revolving doors had never tried negotiating one in billowing skirts when I emerged into the lobby, my guardian pushing impatiently behind me, to find my breath taken away.
The grand staircase ascended magnificently in richly carpeted white stone with intricate iron balusters and a dark wooden rail. Dizzyingly high above was the bottle-green ceiling, glittering with countless painted stars. Polished green and pink limestone adorned the vermilion painted walls stencilled with thousands of golden fleurs-de-lis. Everywhere I looked were carved sunflowers, fruit, peacock tails and myriads of other designs.
‘For goodness’ sake, March.’ Sidney Grice nudged me. ‘You are gawking like an American.’ There were few worse insults in his exhaustive – and often exhausting – vocabulary.
I tore my eyes away and forced myself to concentrate on our business, as he ignored the long oak reception desk and marched straight to the concierge, who had been commandeered by a tall, podgy, befurred woman accompanied by a pageboy struggling to control three yapping Pekingese dogs snapping at his legs.
‘Inform Prince Ulrich Schlangezahn that Mr Sidney Grice has arrived,’ my guardian commanded, and the concierge, a well-built middle-aged man with a military bearing, glanced up.
‘Certainly sir. I am just . . .’
‘I have not travelled all the way from the exotic occidental wilds of Gower Street to chitterchat about what you are just doing,’ Sidney Grice scolded, as though our journey had been one to rival Burton and Speke’s search for the source of the Nile, ‘but to instruct you in your duty to me.’
The concierge was flustered. ‘As soon as I have dealt with this lady, sir.’
‘Now,’ Mr G insisted. ‘I am here on unofficial business.’
The way he said unofficial made it sound very important indeed and the concierge jumped to his feet immediately.
‘Certainly, sir. Prince Ulrich, you say.’
‘I do not, but I did.’ Mr G leaned on the desk like a drinker at a bar.
‘Do you know who I am?’ The lady’s fur became erect like an angry cat.
‘I know who you are not,’ Sidney Grice replied nicely. ‘For your fake pearls, counterfeit perfume, canine pelt coat and inaccurate diction invite me to venture that you are unentitled to the aristocratic monograms on the luggage being transported this way.’
‘How dare—’
‘And I suggest that you quit this establishment.’ Sidney Grice pinched at something on his Ulster as if she had given him a flea. ‘Before I divulge some of my observations to the manager of this garish hostelry.’
We are none of us who we pretend to be, I recalled Jones/ Chang asserting.
In an instant the lady threw her hand into the air. ‘Take everything away,’ she commanded the porters grandly. ‘I shall not stay in an establishment that admits such riffraff as this parvanu.’
My guardian blinked slowly. ‘Though it is unmerited, I believe the word you are dredging from your truncated vocabulary is parvenu.’ He articulated the last word precisely and the alleged-lady expanded.
‘You frebbing crup.’ Her jaw chewed in an elliptical motion like that of a grazing goat. Her head went back and she threw it forward.
Mr G stepped smartly aside.
‘Mein Gottf a voice murmured. ‘You keep delightful company.’
And I turned to see Prince Ulrich Albrecht Sigismund Schlangezahn, resplendent in his uniform of Prussian blue, adorned with black looped cords and braids, a magnificent golden epaulette on his right shoulder and a pool of spittle at his feet.
52
The Black Prince
PRINCE ULRICH BOWED in a quick formal manner.
‘Herr Grice.’ He snapped his heels together, his extraordinarily burnished knee-high boots so tightly fitting around his jodhpurs that they might have been painted on to his legs. ‘And Miss Middleton.’
I wondered, in a brief moment of frivo
lity, if I was supposed to curtsy, but he took my hand in his and pressed it to his beautifully trimmed and waxed imperial moustaches, and I decided that I would train George to adopt that habit as soon as possible.
‘You look enchanting.’
His voice was so deep and resonant that I resisted the urge to tell him that he did too, or to advise him to consult an oculist. Sometimes I like to be lied to, and this was one of those times. In his civilian clothes the prince had cut an impressive figure. In uniform he was spectacular.
‘How do you do?’ was all I could manage and I hoped to heaven that I was not simpering.
‘A client?’ the prince asked.
His eyes flashed the many colours of our surroundings as he surveyed us both.
‘We have had worse,’ I assured him.
‘You must be very proud of your guardian.’ The prince released my hand. ‘Herr Grice is a hero of the German Confederation. He is probably too modest to tell you that he saved the life of our Crown Prince Wilhelm at great risk to his own.’
Modesty was not one of my guardian’s most outstanding virtues but I replied demurely, ‘I believe that is how he lost his eye.’
‘And gained a Grand Cross.’ Prince Ulrich jutted his jaw.
‘Not much use for seeing with,’ I observed and the prince smiled uncertainly.
‘I am always apologizing for Miss Middleton,’ Mr G explained. ‘She has a sense of humour.’
‘But that is delightful,’ the prince assured him.
‘You like a woman with spirit,’ I reminded him and Prince Ulrich inclined his head.
‘Tonight, Miss Middleton, with your permission, we make a fresh start.’
‘We shall see,’ I said non-committally.
The prince offered me his arm and led me across the multicoloured Minton tiles and round a Moorish screen. He was slightly stiff in his right leg, I thought. We passed into an antechamber – a small room by this hotel’s standards – mahogany-lined, with long rose drapes matching the carpet and the starred ceiling.
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