“Or someone else’s.” Mrs. Bone shrugged. “They’re not my people.”
“Alice Parker is my sister.”
“Lucky you.”
“Winnie Smith is my oldest friend.”
“So chuck the other old tart, if you must.” Mrs. Bone crunched her own pear drops.
Mrs. King held her gaze. “I’m not chucking any of them, Mrs. Bone. We’re all equals in this. I’ve made that quite clear.”
“I’m offering fair terms, my girl. You give me an advance against future earnings, and I put up the rest of the credit you need to get this thing moving. I mean properly moving.”
“I thought you said the whole plan was a load of nonsense.”
Mrs. Bone smiled, beadily. “It may well be, my dear. But that’s on you, not on me.”
Mrs. King considered this. She could pay Mrs. Bone’s advance, of course. In cash, too, just as Mrs. Bone would expect. It equaled almost everything she had saved, in a whole lifetime at Park Lane. She didn’t have any more than that. No backstop, no surety beyond it, at all. But if this job failed, a loss of savings would be the least of her worries. Mrs. Bone never loaned capital without expectation of full repayment. The cost of a default was an unspeakable punishment, whatever the family connection.
Mrs. King didn’t believe in God. Logic followed that she didn’t believe in the Devil, either. But she felt the presence of something then: a power greater and darker than her own. Her shadow loomed monstrously on the wall. She felt the presence of Mr. de Vries, his roar of laughter, lost in the air.
“Deal,” she said. She’d decide how to make it work later.
Mrs. Bone grimaced. “Not in here. I want it signed and witnessed. Two-sevenths, in black and white.”
She rapped loudly on the counter. A door at the back of the shop opened. “Through there,” she said, scratching her nose. “My boys will take care of you.”
Mrs. King looked through the door to the yard beyond. Those men weren’t the same as the ones in the street. They were heavier: older, denser and entirely impassive. They looked as if they were made of granite. They were carrying knives.
The chap nearest the door was smoking a pipe. He stepped to one side, making way for her. She looked through the door and saw a small table. Pen and ink. A contract, crisply minted, ready to sign. The walls in the next room had no windows, no escape routes at all.
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.