The Housekeepers(34)

Third move.

Mrs. King took one last lemon sherbet for luck. It left powdered sugar all over her hand. She licked it off, eyes on Mrs. Bone. “All right,” she said. “I’ll finish up here. Back to the house you go.”

Mrs. Bone was already adjusting her diabolical hat, racing for the door. “Ta-ta,” she said, and the bell clanged on the way out.

Honor thy family, thought Mrs. King wryly, as she went to sign the contract.

14

Two weeks to go

Lord Ashley was coming for tea. Miss de Vries had invited him to dinner, and Lockwood had negotiated with the Ashleys’ agents for hours to make them take the bait. But the diktat came down from the mother: it was tea or nothing; they could take it or leave it.

“Lady Ashley is giving our matter her close attention,” said Mr. Lockwood. He’d come over first thing in the morning to set the plan.

Miss de Vries sniffed. She’d been up all night, on edge. “A doting mother. How charming.”

Lady Ashley. A name that would come to her if this went through. It had something, a certain swing to it. She rather liked it.

Mr. Lockwood itemized the Ashley portfolio. They kept a lofty black-bricked house on the smartest end of Brook Street. Fairhurst, their country seat in Surrey, had been in the family since the seventeenth century—lots of pale stone and gracious lines. Their place in Scotland was built in a violent shade of terra-cotta, decked with flags and ghastly turrets. It was a brutal, hideous house, and it made her heart start ticking with pleasure.

“Tell me their weak spots,” she said to Mr. Lockwood.

He spread his hands. “One sees it so often. Old money, locked up in land. They’re simply gasping for something liquid.”

Miss de Vries nodded. “Tea it is, then,” she said.

Lord Ashley drove himself to Park Lane in a Victoriette two-seater, one-handed, elbow resting on the crimson side panel. Papa would have hated that little motor carriage, Miss de Vries thought. He would have coveted it for himself. She stood by the window above the porch and watched his lordship arrive. The carriage rattled up to the pavement just after four. She went to the top of the stairs, placing herself behind one of the marble pillars to observe him arrowing into the house. Young—or at any rate not much older than she was—twenty-four at most. Not tall. In photographs, his face looked delicate, with pointed eyebrows that could have been drawn on with a brush. In the flesh he appeared denser, harder. He had a lantern jaw with a vicious heft to it.

His voice carried up the stairs. “God, the smell,” he said, flicking a silk scarf from his neck, holding it out for the footman. “It’s putrid.”

That sort of voice came from the back of the throat, lazy and clipped. Miss de Vries envied this. She had trained her own with enormous care, with exceptional discipline, in order to make it work for her. But the more she spoke, the more tired she became. What freedom it must be, to simply talk without caring, with no worry about where your words might land.

“And the drafts,” he said, frowning upward. “This place is ghastly.”

Miss de Vries grew still. She agreed with him entirely. But she resented him for saying it. By any measure her house was immense, beyond splendid, constructed at unimaginable expense.

“My lord?” Mr. Lockwood had gone downstairs to greet him.

“You must have rats in the house. Can’t you tell? It reeks. Something must’ve crawled into the walls and died.”

This remark irked her, too. Naturally they had mice. Even Brook Street had them, surely. They crammed their little bodies into the crevices beneath the floors, and there expired. The smell they left behind was almost familiar now—oozing, stinking, mingled with vinegar and rose water. She hardly noticed anymore. Perhaps she was missing things.

Lord Ashley came up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Miss de Vries had to back quickly into the saloon.

By the time they rolled open the double doors she had gathered herself. “Lord Ashley,” she said, modulating her voice down a notch, to freeze him to the spot, to set the tone. “Good afternoon.”

He marched straight in, already talking. “…and the windows are facing full west—it’s absolutely scorching in here. I don’t know how you can stand it…”

Her voice had no effect on him at all.

Lord Ashley sat with his back to the window. A boy, really, thought Miss de Vries, the longer she looked at him. Ugly or handsome, she couldn’t decide. He had a mean face, and his hair ended in a curl that seemed to be slicked to his forehead. He stretched his legs out wide, heels scudding the carpet.

Mr. Lockwood managed the conversation, and Miss de Vries had to give him credit: he knew what he was doing. The topics seemed disconnected. Lord Ashley’s stables, his judgment of the railways, the expense of motoring, the vulgarity of Americans. But Lockwood knitted them together neatly, making an occasional jotting in his notebook, smiling throughout.

“I agree,” said Miss de Vries at intervals. They’d agreed she would say nothing more. Modesty, moral rectitude, dignity—she radiated these virtues, unrelentingly, unendingly, maintaining perfect posture.

“But you can’t care for town in the summer,” Lord Ashley said to Lockwood, but his eyes were on Miss de Vries. “You can’t possibly intend to keep this house.”

There was a silence, a stretched-out moment. That was an opening gambit.