Buckingham Palace Gardens - Anne Perry [29]
She was quick in the women’s rooms. Mrs. Quase’s bedroom was very feminine. She had lots of perfumes and decorative combs, pretty handkerchiefs, silver-backed brushes, creams and ointments in crystal jars. Gracie imagined a woman very keen to preserve her beauty. She could not resist a quick look into the wardrobe, and estimated enough money spent on dresses to pay a score of maids for a year. From what she could see, her frocks were all immaculately cared for.
Mr. Quase’s room was different. There was no smell of perfume in it, rather more like leather and boot polish. The surfaces were very tidy and there was a case for papers. She touched it and found it locked.
Mr. Dunkeld’s room also had a case in it, larger than Quase’s, and it was locked as well. There were expensive cuff links and collar studs in a small bowl. They looked like gold. His shaving things were expensive also, and he had silver-backed brushes for hair and clothes, a silver-handled shoehorn, and an engraved silver whisky flask with a pigskin case on the dresser. He was obviously a man who liked to have expensive possessions and show off a little. The room still smelled vaguely of cigar smoke, for all Ada’s attempts to get rid of it. They would have to come back with more lavender and beeswax polish. What a waste of time!
She noticed also that he had seven books on the shelf, all to do with Africa. She would like to have looked at them, but she could not risk being caught.
Mrs. Dunkeld’s room had no trace of the smoke. It smelled of lily of the valley, cool and clean, not sweet like Mrs. Quase’s room.
She went down for more towels and came back up again.
Mrs. Sorokine’s room was remarkable for the scarlet robe splashed across the bed and the strings of pearls and crystals flung on the dressing table amid a profusion of hair ornaments and jars of cream and perfume. Fearing she might come back any moment, because the room looked so interrupted, Gracie dared not stay. She placed the towels and left.
Mr. Sorokine’s room was a surprise, largely because of the number of books, and none of them was about Africa, as far as Gracie could see. There was one on the bedside table with a marker in it. She picked it up and looked at the title: The Picture of Dorian Gray. She opened it at random and started to read. She was immediately so absorbed in the strength of the words, the evil and passion in them, that she did not hear the door open. The first she was aware of him was when he spoke.
“Can you read it?”
She was so startled the book slipped out of her hand and fell to the floor. “I’m sorry!” she said too loudly, feeling the heat scorch up her face.
He bent and picked it up, being careful to straighten the pages. “Can you?” he asked again.
She stared at him in horror. He was a tall man, handsome, with a broad brow. He had strong features, but not insensitive. Somehow, she would have expected his eyes to be brown, not the gray they were. She nodded. It was not a matter of not lying to him so much as not denying the gift Charlotte had given her.
He smiled. “What did it say?”
“It were about wanting to be beautiful always,” she answered, gulping. “An’ young.”
He looked satisfied, as if her answer pleased him. “I’ll leave it on the table,” he told her. “Then you can look at it again. You can put the towels on the dresser.”
She had left them in a heap on the bed. Her face still burning, she picked them up and put them where they should be. Then, with hands shaking, she fled into the corridor.
Without looking at anything at all, she replaced the towels in Mr. and Mrs. Marquand’s rooms, and gathered up all the old ones. She staggered down to the laundry with them, occasionally dropping one or two and having to go back and pick them up, awkwardly, dropping others as she did so.
Downstairs in the laundry finally she dumped the lot of them in one of the big wicker baskets and decided to take a look around. If anyone found her here, she could easily say she was looking for soap or bran or any of a dozen other