Chapter Six
SIX
Taking Isla was both a good idea and a bad one. Good because it smooths the way with Lady Adler. Bad because Lady Adler pivots from me to Isla, and I’m relegated to the assistant role, just as I would be with Gray.
I don’t blame Lady Adler. I faced the same issue when I started as a modern police detective, assigned to a much older—and male—partner.
He was great, but from the way others treated us, I felt as if I were still a constable, assigned to help an actual detective.
While that rankled, I recognized that I was significantly younger than him and also young for a detective, with a face and manner that always had people underestimating my age.
To Lady Adler, I’m very young, very female, and also very pretty, which I have learned definitely affects how people treat me. As a buxom blond, I’ve discovered that any stereotypes about that didn’t originate in the modern world.
I am also clearly not from Isla’s class, much less Lady Adler’s.
It doesn’t matter how I dress or act, the very fact that I am a working woman says I am, well, working class.
Isla might be a chemist, but she sells her work through male colleagues.
Not only would clients mistrust a woman handling potentially poisonous substances but her class and position mean her “job” is supposed to be managing her bachelor brother’s household.
Isla keeps trying to divert the conversation my way, but in the end, I decide keeping out of it is actually for the best. I don’t really have much to ask Lady Adler, and Isla can keep her occupied while I do my job.
I stay until Isla mentions the chronicles, and Lady Adler agrees to let us record the case, and then it’s time for me to move on.
Lady Adler has turned me over to the butler—Loomis—who will take me to speak to the staff, with instructions that I am to be allowed wherever I wish to go and that all employees are permitted to stop work to answer my questions.
In a household like this, I didn’t expect such freedom to conduct my investigation, and I appreciate it.
I tell Loomis I would like to see Nellie’s sleeping quarters. He takes me there without comment and remains outside the door. It’s only after I’m inside that I realize I don’t know which bed is hers—and the butler certainly wouldn’t either. Time to do some detective work and figure it out.
The attic room is a large loftlike space, with plenty of room for three housemaids and a parlormaid.
Even then, the communal arrangement reminds me how lucky I’d been to land in Gray’s house, where every staff member has private quarters.
Being in the attic, it is also very warm and stuffy.
We’re long before the age of air-conditioning or even electric fans.
My own room has a large window, which helps.
It also has a higher ceiling. This is very much an attic, sloping sides and no windows, and sixty seconds after I enter, sweat trickles down the nape of my neck.
There isn’t any gas lighting up here. Isla and Gray’s mother made sure it was installed in the staff quarters at the same time it was installed in the house, but most employers wouldn’t think of that.
Between the lack of gas lighting and lack of windows, I need to light a lamp.
Luckily, there’s one right beside the door and it has a good strong flame.
I lift the lamp and look about the room.
There are four beds. Again, I’m reminded of my luck in working for Gray and Isla.
There, I have what I’d consider a roomy twin bed.
These are more common single-occupancy staff beds and are narrower than a standard twin.
At least they’re more than a lumpy mattress on the floor. I’ve seen those, too.
Four beds, all made, two with the headboards along the west wall, two along the east, barely enough room to squeeze between the footboards. Each bed has a small table with a lamp. There’s one shared wardrobe and chest of drawers, and each bed has a box under it, presumably for personal items.
My initial impression had been “dormitory,” but now I realize it reminds me more of old-school orphanages.
Narrow beds. Communal storage except for one little box.
I can balk at the thought of living like this, but it would be perfectly acceptable for Victorian domestic staff, and many steps up from the sort of housing they could otherwise expect in the Old Town.
The bedding is clean and probably only handed down once or twice.
The rugs are threadbare and, like all the furnishings, likely recycled from the main house, but again, that’s the standard.
Recycling is a way of life here, where even with factories, “fast fashion” culture doesn’t exist. Everything is shifted down for reuse.
New furnishings would go into your best sitting room or your own bedroom.
Once wear sets in—or fashion changes—they’ll be moved to another room and then another and another, until they end up in the staff quarters.
Even once they’re too shabby for the servants, they’ll find new homes.
I walk down one side of the room as I examine all four beds. As a former maid myself, I can distinguish the three that were just made this morning from the one that’s been sitting that way for a few days.
I pull in my skirts to pass between the narrow space between beds. Then I examine the nightstand. It’s empty, save for a candle. While there’s a shelf, that, too, is empty.
I rearrange my skirts, lower myself to my hands and knees, and tug the box from beneath the bed. It’s empty, confirming this is Nellie’s bed. I run my fingers along the shadowy corners of the long box, but there’s nothing wedged or hidden in it.
I stay where I am as I think. With skirts and a corset, I’m not going to be popping up and down to search.
After a moment’s thought, I lower myself completely to the floor and push my lamp under the bed.
I could already see it was empty without the box, but now I confirm that.
Nothing under the bed. Nothing tucked up under the mattress.
I conduct a thorough floor-level search before I start getting to my feet. Then I pause halfway up and check between the mattress and the bed frame. Nothing there either. I’m rising again when my gaze catches on a hole in the mattress where a bit of stuffing pokes out.
I lower the light to that hole. It’s a slit, more like a deliberate cut than a tear, and it’s under two inches long.
On a hunch, I poke my thumb and forefinger in.
Yep, it’s exactly the right size for that.
With my forefinger only, I root around and feel something hard.
It takes some work, but I soon fish out a necklace.
I set it on the bed and keep digging. Nothing else.
The necklace is a gold chain with a red-stone pendant. I am the worst at identifying jewelry. I used to joke there was no point in boyfriends buying me actual gold or actual gemstones, because I’d be just as delighted with the fake stuff. I know what I like; I do not know what’s valuable.
Is this real gold? Is the red gemstone a ruby?
A garnet? I only know it’s very pretty and very dainty and intricate.
The sort of thing I personally like. But is it a gift from a young man?
A trinket Nellie herself bought for a few coins in the market?
Or an expensive family heirloom she brought from home?
I can easily ask Isla. For now, I consider the implications of this necklace.
Nellie left in the night. She took everything except this necklace.
Did she forget it? Realize too late that she’d left it behind and couldn’t ask for it back when she hadn’t properly quit?
Or does this necklace suggest that something more nefarious happened to the maid? Just because all her things are gone doesn’t mean she is the one who cleared them out.
The door opens, and I slip the necklace into my pocket as I turn, expecting to see the butler, wondering what is taking me so long. Instead, it’s a young woman about Catriona’s age, with bright blue eyes and curly brown hair falling from a bun.
“Oh.” She eyes me in the lamplight, gaze snapping up and down my figure. “Are you the new maid?” Her tone falls somewhere into uncertainty, as if I both do and don’t fit her expectations.
“No,” I say as I slide between the footboards to greet her. “I am Miss Mallory Mitchell. I have been brought on to investigate Nellie’s disappearance.”
Her brows knit, as if this sentence sounds like English, but was clearly not.
“Nellie is missing?” she says.
“As of a few days ago, yes?”
“She left a few days ago.” The young woman moves to the dresser and opens a drawer, as if I’ve already been dismissed.
“That is what the Adlers believed,” I say. “They now fear there might be more to it.”
The maid turns, frowning. “More to it? How?”
As much as I lament being in the body of a twenty-year-old, it has its advantages. Like here. The maid would never speak so boldly to Gray. Not even to Isla. But I am just another young woman, my dress and manner saying I am not even a young woman of importance.
“Did you see Nellie when you retired that night?” I ask.
“Of course. We go to bed at the same time, so we are not clanking about when others are trying to sleep. We all saw her. She put on her nightgown, climbed into bed, and turned out her lamps.”
“And that morning?” I prompt.
The maid shrugs. “Her bed was empty. The others thought she’d gotten up early.
She did that sometimes. But her bed was unmade, and Mrs. Loomis’s rule is that once we are up, the bed must be made.
Still, I thought Nellie forgot, so I did it myself.
When we realized she was not around, we discovered that she had left. ”
“Discovered? How?”
She looks at me as if I am very dense. “Her things were gone.”
“Was her leaving unexpected?”
The maid shrugs. “She seemed to like it here at first.”
“But then…”