In the face of so much intransigence, retreat seemed the only option, and Gwendolen retired to a café and ordered sardines on toast and ate them while studying her precious Bartholomew’s. She would soon be quite au fait with the streets of London, she thought with some satisfaction.
* * *
—
In Henrietta Street there was no response to Gwendolen’s polite knock, so she banged harder. The doorknocker was in the shape of a leering, devilish face, not very welcoming, Gwendolen thought. Perhaps that was the idea. From the outside, the building had an air of abandonment, but a flutter of grimy lace at an upper-floor window hinted at someone on the premises.
She knocked again loudly, but the door sullenly refused to open. There was something untoward about the place. Gwendolen was not usually given to fancy, but something about the house in Henrietta Street gave her a chill. Perhaps that inhospitable door required a policeman’s more official knock before it would open. She sighed; retreat was once more the order of the day. Being a detective was frustrating. No wonder Frobisher sighed so much.
A newsagent’s kiosk on the Strand was festooned with postcards, including a conjoined strip, advertising itself as “The Sights of London.” Gwendolen paused. Those were the same cards that Florence had sent her parents, weren’t they? She felt strangely impelled to buy a set. The postcards hanging in the kiosk were for display. When they were sold to her, they were folded up and enclosed in a greaseproof envelope. She paid and slipped them in her bag. She must spend a day sightseeing—they might come in useful. And she must send one to the Misses Tate, Rogerson and Shaw. She could only imagine the excitement when they received it.
The Crystal Cup
You might be forgiven for thinking that the Amethyst—by far and away the most famous and lucrative of her clubs—would be the one that would be closest to Nellie’s heart, but this was not in fact the case, it was the Crystal Cup for which she had a particular affection. It was here that she was often to be found sequestered in the late afternoons, relishing the quiet before the evening’s revels began.
The club’s （mostly） exalted clientele was composed of many members of the Lords, as well as several who had taken the silk or indeed sat on the High Court bench, which might explain why it had never been raided. Its location was convenient for neither the Inns of Court nor Westminster, which, Nellie said, explained its discreet attraction for members of the Establishment, as no one expected to find them straying this far from their native habitat.
It was the most refined of all the clubs. Nellie had spent eight thousand pounds on the Ritzy blue and gold décor of the Crystal Cup—satin-quilted walls, pleated and gathered artificial silk on the ceiling and a maple herringbone parquet floor, pretty glass chandeliers, tables with pink-shaded electric lamps—it was like a little gilded chocolate box. Gunter’s in Berkeley Square did the catering. It was the only one of Nellie’s clubs where caviar was served. She charged seven shillings and sixpence a portion and barely made a profit by her standards. The head waiter was Russian and rumoured to be a minor Romanov, but Nellie had never asked because she didn’t want to be disappointed by denial.
The liquor licence was always up to date and the curfew for alcohol, although broken on a regular basis, was never investigated. The dance hostesses were of a superior calibre, nicely brought-up girls only a few shades short of debutantes. They cost two guineas a dance, twice the price of the Amethyst girls.
The restaurant of the Crystal Cup was on the ground floor, and Nellie liked to sit there and watch the last rays of the day seep through the harlequin lozenges of glass in the windows while breathing in the soothing scent of stale alcohol and cigarettes. Sometimes she took a small glass of Mariani coca wine, reckoning that if it was good enough for a pope it was good enough for her, even though she had shunned religion after an unfortunate incident in her girlhood, long before her convent education had finished.
Narcotics in themselves did not put the fear of God in Nellie. In fact, when Niven had set off for the Front in 1916, she had slipped into his kit bag a “Welcome Present for Friends” bought from Harrods that contained cocaine, morphine, syringes and needles. He had thrown it overboard on the Channel crossing, doubting that drugs would aid his survival.
Usually, however, it was a pot of tea that sat in front of Nellie on the table at the Crystal Cup. If she was still there when the dance hostesses started coming in, they would beg her to read their fortunes and she would fan her cards out on the table in front of her, offering them like promises to the girls. Or threats. Depending on how you looked at it. In Nellie’s world, everything depended on how you looked at it.