Bath Belles (2 page)

It was odd that, having gone at last to the house where Graham had been killed, I should now begin to push him to the back of my mind and feel something like joy and excitement return to my life. A little trip will often drive away the blue devils. I should not have waited so long to get out again into the world. When a young lady is staring at the windy side of twenty, she hasn’t time to dawdle. Was it possible my mind had begun to consider the unthinkable—that I might yet find someone to usurp Graham’s place in my heart?

**

The next morning, unwilling to waste a minute before getting into the social whirl, Mama asked the maid for ink and wrote her note to Yootha Mailer before taking breakfast. I used the time to write my sale notice for the newspapers and my letter home to Hotchkiss and Ettie, and I had them all sent off by a hotel page. This done, we called a hackney to deliver us once more to Elm Street.

Having been astonished by the small size of the house the day before, I was agreeably surprised to find it was larger than I remembered. The bright sun striking its facade removed the previous day’s gloom and made it appear prettier. The doorway was elegant, and the facade had leaded windows on either side of the door. It was three stories high—too tall for anything of symmetry or balance, but it was in decent repair. Nothing, alas, had changed within. The confusion was still there waiting for us, but it was easier to face in the morning than at the end of a long trip. We put off our pelisses, tucked tea towels into our waistbands, and got to work.

“I wonder where it happened,”
Esther remarked as we put the cushions back on the sofa and arranged the toss pillows on top of them. The sofa was a pale blue satin, striped with a deeper blue and yellow. The velvet toss pillows were gold, to match the draperies. Graham had selected all this elegance, consulting with me on colors and styles.

“Right here, I expect,”
I said. “His body was found on the sofa.”
My voice was hard and cold, to prevent it from trembling at the awful picture that darted into my head of poor Graham stretched out, perhaps on the very velvet pillow I held in my hands, and clutched to my breast.

Esther peered around at the sofa and carpet. Her voice was sepulchral. “I wonder if there’s any blood,”
she said.

“Not likely, Esther. A victim of strangulation doesn’t bleed, as far as I know.”

The police assumed Graham had been strangled by human hands, as no rope or cord was left behind. The motive was called robbery. His money purse was missing, but a small diamond tie pin was left intact. How much cash would a struggling young solicitor carry with him? Surely not enough that he would defend it with his life. Graham would have, though. He was like that. The injustice of it would have caused him to fight to the death. It was not mere chance that had led him to the study of the law.

“Who do you think killed him?”
Esther asked as she went on fitting some drawers into a small wall table.

“A person or persons unknown,”
I said grimly. I really didn’t want to know more or to think about it at all. Some criminal had killed a good, honorable man and gotten clean away. It was done, and no good could come from harking back to it. The police had investigated thoroughly, Yootha had said, and had learned nothing.

“Esther, come and help me in the kitchen,”
Mama said, but her worried voice revealed her reasoning. She didn’t want me reminded unnecessarily of the past. Esther would have a peal rung over her for discussing the murder. As though I could help thinking the same thoughts myself!

We got the living and dining rooms and a bedroom each put to rights by noon and were ready for lunch. We set off in the proper direction to reach New Bond Street, where we made our meal at a small restaurant. I was in charge of decisions for us all, and my next decision was that henceforth we would eat at the house. Meals out were not only unappetizing and expensive, but also inconvenient. We shopped for food, and then I remembered to go and have the gas turned on. We returned to Elm Street, already finding the little brick house familiar and welcoming after the hour spent amid the busy throng of London.

During the afternoon we arranged our creature comforts around us in the house, moving lamps and small tables and so on to suit us. We put away the food when it was delivered and were just lighting candles to ward off the early dark of November when the man from the gas company came to connect us. We enjoyed our first meal there by gaslight, and we felt very modern and citified, turning the knobs to make it as bright as daylight till the tyrant decided we were wasting expensive gas and turned them down to a less harsh glare.

Building a fire in the stove proved difficult. I had seen the servants light the grate often enough that I knew what should be done, but the thing was harder to accomplish in a closed stove. In the end we ate cold ham with bread and cheese in the saloon and heated our tea kettle on the hob while Esther made toast on a long fork. It was cozy, like a picnic, eating around the fire with an unusual quantity of traffic streaming past a few yards beyond. For the first dozen carriages we ran to look out the window, but in the end we became blasé
about the clatter and the bobbing lights. We drew the curtains and settled in to read the papers we had picked up while shopping. Our advertisement had not been inserted yet.

“I shall put my sign in the window,”
I decided, and drew one up to look as official and businesslike as my wobbly print could make it. That it be legible from the street was the important point. “House for Sale. Inquire within”
was all I wrote.

Meanwhile, Esther had discovered the entertainment page of the paper and was busy regaling us with all manner of divertissements open to Londoners and tourists. There were plays and concerts, operas and ballets, lectures, and public dances enough to satisfy the entire population of London. Esther soon decided that what suited a clutch of unescorted ladies from Bath was a comedy to be played for a week at the Haymarket Theatre. She received tentative agreement, pending arrival of our servants with our clothes and approval from Yoofa Mailer, who was to be our social arbiter.

I spent close to an hour checking the real estate columns to determine if the price we planned to ask for our house was fair. I couldn’t make head or tail of the prices demanded, but I assumed that the reason one eight-room house was going for seven thousand guineas and another for four must have to do with location. As there was nothing “with gas”
under five, I decided to ask six and judge by my first customer’s face if he thought me insane or a flat.

With no candles shrinking to alert us to the hours’
passing, we stayed up till midnight. The gaslight was remarkable, turning night to day. Mama and I repaired a rent made in the saloon draperies when they were torn from their tracks, while we all discussed the vandalization of the house.

“It seems like spite, plain and simple,”
Mama said. “I don’t believe a single thing was stolen. The silver candlesticks are still here, and a very fine silver tea service. You’ll want to take that home, Belle.”
She went on to name other easily removable objects that hadn’t been pilfered.

“Graham’s jewelry box has in it everything I remember seeing him wear, too,”
I agreed. “Except his diamond stickpin, and the lawyer said he will be sending over a package tomorrow with the items he was wearing when ...” I swallowed down a lump, and Mama spoke up to rescue me.

“That is an odd sort of thief,”
she opined.

“It was just hooligans. I’m grateful they didn’t do more mischief while they were about it—break dishes and mirrors and windows, I mean.”

“How do you think they got in?”
Esther asked idly. “You had to unlock the door, Belle, and there were no windows broken, were there?”

I jumped up in alarm to double-check. “I didn’t notice any!”

“There were none broken. They were all closed and locked. He must have had a key,”
Mama announced. She was a good housekeeper and noticed such things. I stopped in my tracks.

“He might have gotten in through the cellar,”
Esther suggested. Comforting thought!

There was nothing for it but to take a candle to the cellar and check. I was thankful we did, despite the frightening trip into the black bowels, for there, where it was not easily seen, was a window wide open to the elements, both criminal and climatic. The wrongdoer had obviously crept in there and gone up the stairs and into the pantry. There was no lock on the pantry door. We locked the basement window, propped a chair under the handle of the pantry door, and returned to the saloon, carrying two dusty bottles of wine from Graham’s well-stocked cellar.

“It’s odd Graham would have left that window unlocked when everything else was closed properly,”
Mama said.

“Especially as it exposed his wine cellar to the cold,”
I agreed. Graham was a bit of a fanatic about his wine.

“What I wonder is how the thief ever discovered it,”
Esther mused.

“Very true,”
Mama nodded. “The back yard has no easy access from the street. There is that pretty bit of iron fence enclosing the yard. Fairly high, and with a spiked top. It is certainly odd.”

“Officer Harrow is right,”
I said. “London is full of thieves.”
He was supposed to have dropped around earlier, but I doubted we’d ever see him.

“Yet after the whole two years, nothing much is missing, so far as we can see,”
Mania pointed out, frowning over the drapery, her needle poised for action. “It certainly is odd.”

So it was, and we were fortunate no other marauder had discovered the secret. We agreed we must keep all doors and windows locked when we were out of the house and left it at that.

When we finally went upstairs to bed I found it impossible to occupy the master bedroom, which had been chosen as mine. Graham had done it up in dusky blue and white, according to my wishes. The canopy and drapes were blue, the carpet and walls white with some blue and gold ornaments. His things were laid out there as if he might walk in the door any moment and smile at me. I could almost imagine him coming. I felt the old excitement, aggravated now by a shivering chill. So tall, so handsome—or so he seemed to me. He had the loveliest chestnut hair, just touched with a natural wave. My favorite of Graham’s features was his noble brow. It was high and clear, with the hair growing to a widow’s peak in front.

I picked up his silver-backed brush, touched the comb with one of his hairs still on it. The blue jacket he must have worn to work that day was still slung over the back of a chair. The servants should have tidied up before leaving. I knew from the lawyer that the two servants had been paid and sent off, his horses sold, and other such exigent matters attended to. But no one had packed his clothes and personal effects. It would be for me to do.

I’d have Hotchkiss make up a bundle of anything he didn’t want and give it to charity. Some few mementos I would keep—Graham’s watch, perhaps, or a bit of jewelry. I drew open the drawer of his desk and saw bound up in blue ribbons my letters to him, as his to me were in my desk at home. The oval miniature I had given him of a young Belle Haley was there on his desk where he could look at it while he wrote to me, as he mentioned once in a letter he did. It was an eerie sensation, almost like having a last chance to talk to Graham. I said what one must say in a final conversation. Good-bye, dear Graham. I love you. Then I quietly closed the door and met Mama, come to see if I was in tears.

“Go to bed, Mama. It’s very late,”
I said.

“Are you…
all right, Belle?”
she asked.”

“I’m fine. Graham wouldn’t want me to cry willow forever, but I shall sleep in the other room. I was just—saying good-bye to him.”

“It’s for the best, dear,”
she consoled, and patted my shoulder.

I kissed her cheek and went to the rose room at the end of the hall. This room facing the street was noisy, even past midnight. How could people live amid such bustle? Did folks never settle down in London? It was impossible not to think how things would have been had Graham lived. I would be lying with him in that lovely blue canopied bed. By now, a child might be sleeping in another room. But it was not to be, so I would sell the house, let some other lady fill up the nursery here, and get on with a different life for myself back home at Bath. Oh, but what a hollow, meaningless life it was without Graham!

At Bath we considered ourselves early risers, but we were not in the habit of entertaining callers at such an early hour as nine o’clock. That was the time our first caller arrived at Elm Street. A respectable-looking woman in a navy pelisse with sable trim stood on the doorstep. She had determined that the house was for sale and expressed an interest in seeing it. I didn’t want to let her get away, yet to take her on a tour, when Mama and Esther were still making toast over the coals in the saloon grate was obviously undesirable.

“If you could come back in an hour ...” I suggested.

She tossed her head and sniffed. “There are plenty of homes for sale. If you’re not interested ...”

I ground my teeth at her lofty manner and said, “Do come in.”
She entered, looking all around at the windows, uncleaned for upwards of two years, ran her finger over dusty window ledges, opened cupboards and found their doors poorly hung or requiring oil, or the shelves within badly spaced. With
tsks
of annoyance from the customer and disjointed explanations from myself, the tour continued to bedrooms with unmade beds, everything “so terribly small,”
halls “pitch black,”
stairways “dangerously steep.”
I came to appreciate my mother’s manner of description that morning.

And after it was all over the woman had the gall to say, “I am not really looking for a house at the moment.”

“Then why are you here?”
I demanded, eyes flashing.

“I am your next-door neighbor,”
she said, as though that gave her carte blanche to barge in at dawn, disturb our breakfast, and disparage everything. “Mrs. Seymour. My husband and I live in the large house on the corner. We have often mentioned removing to a smaller place now that the children have left home. This spot is so handy it seemed worth a look, though of course it is much too small and really in very bad repair.”