Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [64]
“Because of the stairs?”
“Actually, I don’t think she knew they were there. No-one did—that was the appeal. I think it was simply that the room was not appropriate in her eyes for a child. One can rather see her point, although at the time we all thought her terribly unreasonable.”
“As far as you know, this stairway is not common knowledge?”
“I shouldn’t think so. You saw the candles—those have sat there gathering dust for a long time. Our generation knew, but we also knew if we told, it would have been blocked up. Gabriel may not even have discovered the door’s existence.”
“Well, I should be quite careful about using the stairway when the Darling children are about the place, if you wish it to remain a secret. They are highly inquisitive, not terribly well supervised, and fond of hiding in odd places.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
With a final glance to see that the jib door was invisible, Iris crossed the room and put an eye to the more ordinary door leading into the corridor. Satisfied, she pulled it open, and in a moment we were at our own rooms, hers on the other side of Marsh’s dressing room, mine next from hers.
“I’ll ring and ask that tea be sent up for us both,” she told me. “We can be naughty and hide out in our rooms until dinner. Enjoy your bath,” she added, and like two truant schoolgirls, we evaded our social obligations until the clamour of the gong recalled us.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I girded myself for the dinner as grimly as any young knight girding for a tournament—and as painfully aware of my inferior equipage and relative inexperience.
To make matters worse, the only members of the party absent when I reached the drawing room were Marsh and Iris. I stood in the doorway, alone in my second-best dress, looking up at the furious murals of battle on the walls and feeling eleven sets of eyes come around to rest on me. My fervent impulse was to turn and sprint for the safety of the Greene Library; instead I stiffened my spine, put on a smile that Holmes would have admired, and went forward to greet my hosts and their guests.
Lady Phillida’s introductions were, for my purposes, woefully inadequate. Not that she was trying to exclude or patronise me—indeed, I believe it was the opposite, that her casual, first-name introductions were an attempt to make me feel welcome, as if I were already on the inside of her circle and she was merely reminding me of people I already knew. In fact, her method had the opposite effect, leaving me uncomfortable about addressing anyone by name, yet incapable of asking who they were and what they did. The structures of traditional formality have their uses.
By the time Iris and Marsh arrived, I had met Bobo, Peebles, Annabelle, Jessamyn, and the seven others, and knew nothing whatsoever about any of them beyond what I could glean by my own senses.
“Peebles,” for example, was a dissipated individual with artificially blackened hair and moustaches whose compulsive double-entendres and caressing lips against the back of my hand at introduction made clear his devotion to the sensuous life, even as the chemical odour his pores exuded told me that champagne was not the strongest stimulant in which he indulged. Aristocrat, I mentally added when one of the men addressed him as “Purbeck”; there was a Marquis of Purbeck, I remembered.
“Bobo” was clearly an actor, as theatrical here beneath the chandeliers as he would be under spotlights. There were also two watchful London businessmen (who winced slightly at being presented as “Johnny” and “Richard”) and a pair of German immigrants in expensive suits.
The three remaining guests were women, but not quite ladies. Their accents wandered up and down the social scale, and even before Marsh came in with Iris and fixed them with an icy glare, I had already decided that they were there to entertain the gentlemen. In one manner or another. (And, watching the actor circle around Peebles, I suspected that he had been brought for essentially the same purpose.)
When we went in to dinner,