The Pigeon Pie Mystery (11 page)

“It is an honour to serve Her Highness,” replied Pooki, sitting up straight. “Her father was the Maharaja of Prindur. When my mother found out who I was working for she cried for three days with pride.”

Alice raised an eyebrow. “It’s a wonder she didn’t cry for three days with shame, considering what happened.”

Pooki’s jaw set. “I do not gossip about His Highness,” she said, pouring them some tea.

“Even so, it can’t have been easy for you, suddenly finding
yourself scrubbing the floors,” she said. “Why didn’t you just get a new position?”

Pooki raised her chin. “My place is with Her Highness. Her sorrows are my sorrows, and her joys are my joys.”

Alice stared at her. “You’re one of those servants, are you? There aren’t many of you left. Her Ladyship is kind, but I wouldn’t go that far.” She folded her arms and sat back. “I’d love to be a lady’s-maid. Think of all those beautiful leftover dresses you get. You’d have to choose your mistress carefully, though. Some don’t give their old dresses to their lady’s-maid, as they don’t like seeing them in clothes they’ve recently worn.”

Pooki dropped some sugar into her tea. “Her Highness gives me hers, but I do not wear them. I look exceedingly ridiculous in them. They are very fancy, and I have big feet. I sell them and send the money to my mother.”

Picking up her cake with her fingers, Alice said, “Sometimes I think I should go and work in the colonies.”

“Do not fall into the fatal habit of thinking that if you were somewhere different life would be so much better. There are moths everywhere,” said Pooki, her mouth full.

“All masters and mistresses aren’t the same,” Alice pointed out. “Someone will tell you sooner or later, but I used to be the Bagshots’ parlour maid. Four years ago the General accused me of stealing. Unfortunately Mrs. Bagshot was ill at the time and didn’t stand up for me. She was the best mistress I’d ever had, and had hinted that I would become her next lady’s-maid. But he dismissed me without any notice and didn’t give me a character either. That’s why I ended up working as a trotter for Her Ladyship. I’m grateful she took me on, no one else would, but she pays me the wages of a German maid. Nasty piece of work, the General is. Don’t go anywhere near him.”

Pooki poured her some more tea. “So you have gone from being a parlour maid to a maid-of-all-work? That is almost as bad as me.”

Alice crossed her arms. “I have to drink in the King’s Arms with the under servants, not that many of them talk to me. It’s a right dump. I should be in the Mitre with the butlers and housekeepers.”

Pooki sat back, holding her cup and saucer. “We are both doing work that is unfit for our station. But we should be grateful that we have a position and that we can help others. In the meantime we should finish this cake before Her Highness sees it. It will prevent her from becoming stout. A good maid should always put her mistress before herself.”

Alice took another mouthful and then looked at the floor. “What are you going to do about all those beetles?” she asked. “They make my skin crawl.”

Pooki sipped her tea. “I have a plan, and it is one of my better ones.”

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, MINK STOOD
peering up at the bookshelves in the library, searching for her etiquette manuals. While she was naturally well versed in the protocol of calling, the afternoon ritual of social visits, a new set of rules came into play now that she had moved. She took down several volumes and brought them to her father’s desk, where she leafed through the commandments. According to one text, when a stranger arrived in a neighbourhood it was the duty of the older inhabitants to leave their cards. If they were desirable acquaintances it was usual for the visit to be returned personally, or by leaving a card, within a week. In large towns, it was common to wait until more was known about the stranger, it said.

However, another guide stated that the opposite was the case in the countryside, and that the newcomer should make the first move. Mink had no idea whether the Middlesex palace abided by town or country rules. The dilemma was further compounded by the fact that as a princess, albeit a foreign one, she outranked them
all. But given her treatment by some of her friends and acquaintances in London, she wasn’t sure how she would be received. Most of them had stopped calling the moment the scandal appeared in the papers. While fresher gossip had long since replaced the sordid tale, her re-entry into society had been thwarted by the fact that nothing turned upper-class stomachs more than the whiff of financial embarrassment.

She opened another manual but took in none of the words as she remembered the terrible moment, almost a year ago, when her world changed forever. She had just finished writing her letters, and was looking for signs of spring in the garden, when Bantam approached with such a look of concern she assumed that something was missing from the plate chest. With a glance towards the gardener, he asked whether he might speak to her alone. He then steered her towards the bench that circled the apple tree, and made sure that she was sitting before he broke the news: the Maharaja was dead.

But the butler, who prided himself on being able to conceal the slightest emotion, honed from years of eavesdropping at dinner, found himself weeping so profusely that he was unable to continue. Mink offered him her handkerchief and waited, adrift in her imagination until he stopped. Apologising profusely, he led her across the lawn and into the drawing room, his red nose the only visible dent to his dignity. He fetched Mrs. Greensleeves, the housekeeper, who stood in front of the Princess with her hands clasped, searching for the appropriate words. But there was no disguising what had happened: the Maharaja had died in an East End opium den, she explained. Underneath him, in an equal state of undress, was the girl who came in the mornings to clean the boots and the knives.

It wasn’t so much the seedy location that set tongues wagging, though it added a certain spice. Rather it was the lowly position of the girl, who spoke far too coarsely to ever get a live-in position,
to say nothing of her colourful testimony at the inquest. The hearing attracted so many spectators that a fistfight broke out over accusations of queue jumping. When the doctor who carried out the post-mortem examination revealed that the Indian’s death had not been caused by drugs, as many had presumed, but by a massive heart attack brought on by exertion, the coroner immediately called Maud Posset to the stand. Pushing his spectacles up his florid nose, he peered at the servant and enquired how she happened to find herself underneath a dead maharaja.

Wearing her sister’s Sunday bonnet, and with an accent that could curdle milk, the teenager explained that Mrs. Greensleeves had employed her on a temporary basis, as the third footman had suddenly taken ill. One morning she was walking down the drive when she encountered the Maharaja looking for one of his porcupines that had escaped. She listened to its description and joined him in the search, curious to see such a beast. It wasn’t long before she announced that she had found it, and crawled into a bush. But the Maharaja informed her that the creature she was pointing to was a hedgehog, and removed a leaf from her hair. He suggested that they try the hothouse, where they found the escapee, its snout down a gardener’s boot, drawn by its salty sweat. He then offered to show her his pineapples, a result of the head gardener’s mania for forcing. They wandered around, gazing at the fruit she had never tasted, his thinning coiffure sleeked with miracle hair tonic, and her dull brown curls clumsily pinned. Eventually the heat and the sweet aroma made her feel giddy, and he found her a bench and patted her hand. Before long, he was patting elsewhere, and declared her ripe enough to pick. Mesmerised by the man who smelt of frankincense, she felt his manicured fingers travel up her stocking and under her drawers, seeking the softness of her thigh. Her cheeks inflamed by the tenderness of his touch, she turned her lips to his, and all decorum was lost. The porcupine raised its quills in fright at the Maharaja’s gasp of ecstasy,
and three overripe pineapples fell to the ground with his final exalted thrust.

Every subsequent morning, once she had cleaned the boots and the knives, Maud Posset slipped into the hothouse to meet her master. She left with so much bruised fruit that Mrs. Wilson started complaining that there was not enough for the table. Suspecting a thief, the head gardener announced he was going to make regular patrols of his crops. The Maharaja caught the girl on the way to meet him and asked her to wait instead at the end of the road that evening. They travelled by hansom to Limehouse, in the East End, where shops with Chinese names sold ginger resembling swollen hands, and bottles of medicine made of animals that customers had never seen. Eventually it stopped outside an opium den, where washing hung between the upstairs windows like filthy bunting. Passing the counter, with its brass scales and selection of tobacco, they headed for the back parlour, screened off with a stained blanket. The reclining regulars didn’t stir at the entrance of the portly Indian in the Savile Row suit, and the teenager whose third-hand bodice failed to reach the top of her skirt. Gradually a Chinaman looked over while stirring a stew in a saucepan used to cook opium. The Maharaja pressed some coins into his tarnished hand, and the couple climbed the stairs to the upper floor, where they made their love nest in a room empty apart from a chest belonging to a sailor who had never returned. The Maharaja spread on the floor the piece of silk he found inside, and placed on the windowsill the shells the missing man had collected for his wife. The pair took their pleasure to the boisterous sound of the docks, the scent of the drug curling up through the floorboards. As weeks turned to months, they eventually expressed their love in words, and both surprised themselves by meaning them. It was then that the Maharaja apologised for the grubby surroundings and offered to take Maud Posset to a hotel. But the girl refused, preferring the room with its graffiti written in
languages she didn’t understand, longing for sweethearts on faraway shores.

When the coroner asked her about the day in question, the teenager explained that the Maharaja was halfway through his usual exertions, when he came to an abrupt halt and collapsed on top of her. She prodded him in the buttocks, but he failed to respond, and when she attempted to move she realised she was pinned to the floor. The wails of a hungry baby next door drowned out her pleas for help, and it wasn’t until her knuckles were raw from knocking on the floorboards that help eventually arrived. When the Chinaman finally rolled off the Maharaja, there were no more tears left in her to cry.

“What were you thinking while you were trapped underneath him for all that time?” asked the coroner, his curiosity having got the better of him.

The jury leant forward, and a member of the public produced an ear trumpet so as not to miss a word from the girl in the mismatched boots.

“That ’e shouldn’t ’ave heaten so much shirt-sleeve pudding,” she replied.

The coroner did his utmost to stem the howls of laughter that followed, but he was forced to announce an adjournment while order was restored. Once the gentlemen of the jury returned from their deliberations, the foreman cleared his throat and returned a verdict of natural causes. But that was by no means the end of it. The George pub next to the opium den renamed itself The Boots & the Knives; dealers in exotic animals had to draw up a waiting list, as there was a sudden run on porcupines; and the Savoy’s pastry chef created a pineapple meringue pie called Fat Maharaja. But more damaging of all was the tale’s inevitable eruption into the music halls, where songs were performed in perfect renditions of the offending accent. The most popular were hummed on the top of omnibuses, along picture galleries, and eventually in the queues
at the Bank of England. And, a year later, the chorus could still be heard from revellers swaying out of pubs at closing time: