A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [72]
“Miss Russell, good afternoon,” said the young man as he settled himself beside me.
“Mr Bell,” I greeted him.
“I have a list of seven possible flats. If you’d like to look at them, perhaps you might tell me what you like or don’t like about each one. I’ve also set interviews with three maids and two married couples, beginning at seven o’clock at the firm’s offices. Does this meet with your approval?”
“Very much,” I said, and with a tap on the window, we eased sedately out into traffic.
The third flat on the list was ideal. It actually was in Bloomsbury, just off Great Ormond Street, a sleek and spanking-new building built on a piece of land cleared by a bomb from a Zeppelin in 1917. The flat was on the fourth storey, six large rooms and a kitchen. The owners were on an extended tour of the Americas, and they had furnished their possession in the latest brittle style, all angles and tubes, metal and mirrors and unnecessary drama, expanses of fawn carpeting and pale primrose walls and draperies. The bedroom contained a bed the size of a small luxury liner and a plethora of exotic fabrics draped across the walls, windows, and every surface. Perfect—horrible, but perfect.
“I’ll take it.”
“You will? That is to say, I’m glad you like it. There are also servants’ quarters available, in the basement.”
“I’ll take them, too. You said this relative of yours can cook?”
“Oh yes, mum. Miss.”
Glutinous puds and watery vegetables. Well, no doubt I should be taking my meals in restaurants a great deal.
“Fine. I’ll sign the lease papers now, if you can find the representative, and then perhaps you’d send someone to the Vicissitude for my things.”
“Certainly.”
The servant question was settled as easily, when Freddy Bell’s second cousin and her husband turned out to be a quiet, intelligent pair whose former employer had suddenly moved out to India, where servants are cheap, if maddening. Freddy and my new butler made several trips to the Vicissitude for my newly acquired finery and knickknacks while my maid-housekeeper investigated her new quarters downstairs.
While the two men were away on a trip, I prowled my new, if temporary, home, somewhat overwhelmed at the speed that is possible with the phrase “Cost is no object.”
One of the few and, I hasten to add, completely inadvertent advantages given me by being under my aunt’s care for the past six years was that I had come out of it quite unspoilt by money. My allowances were so small as to be miserly, and my pride kept me from appealing to the executors of the estate to remedy the situation of a wealthy young woman kept in penury. Although I knew that in theory I was probably one of the wealthiest women in Sussex, in practice I accepted that I had less pocket money than the butcher’s daughter.
The only time I had escaped these fetters was the day two years earlier when, with a purse fat with notes borrowed from Holmes, I had indulged in a perfectly glorious orgy of shopping. On a much larger scale, today’s profligacy had brought the same pleasure.
My rôle in the Temple investigation would be built upon the foundation I had already laid. My stunningly generous donation to the lending-library fund, my jumble-sale clothing replaced by couture would be followed by the entrance of the heiress come fully into her inheritance. By now, Margery would have seen the notice in The Times of the estate settled on one Mary Russell of Sussex. She would use me as her tutor, yes, but she would also woo me.
I had been standing for some time at the sheets of glass that formed the front of the flat, looking down through the bare branches of the young plane trees at the passersby, when the taxi drew up for its final time into the illuminated patch of wet paving stones below my window. Freddy got out and bent to take up an armful of parcels, and suddenly, shockingly, for a brief instant I was back on another street two years before, looking into a horsecab at the mangled, malicously shredded remains of the clothing I had so happily bought