Chapter 17
“They’re closed,” said Caroline, not looking up from the napkins she was ironing.
“Are you certain? I’m worried I might have left them open when we were airing the second floor yesterday—”
“They’re closed, Mrs. Easton. I was upstairs not an hour ago. All the windows are closed.”
The older woman murmured a sound of assent.
Caroline could practically see her benefactress’s worried mind working beneath her crooked cap.
It had been like this since dawn that morning—the repeated questions, the double- and triple-checking of every detail, Mrs. Easton abandoning each task partway through to begin a completely different one.
It was now three o’clock; tonight’s guests would be arriving at any moment.
For Caroline, the evening couldn’t come quickly enough.
“And there are white mums on all the dressing tables, except for—”
“Except for room 205,” finished Caroline, “which has lilies, because Mr. Hadley is allergic to chrysanthemums.” She set the hot iron back on the stove and began to fold the napkins into little tricorn hats as Mrs. Easton had shown her.
“The roast is in the oven. The oysters are shucked. The bread rolls are proofing. The cake is frosted and in the icebox.”
The landlady nodded absentmindedly. “I just feel I’m forgetting something. Something important.”
Caroline resisted the temptation to roll her eyes. “Why don’t you go upstairs? Walk through the house. Make sure everything is ready. I’ll finish these up”—she nodded to the neat pile of white linen—“and then I’ll set the table.”
Mrs. Easton turned toward the dining room stairs. “But don’t lay out the place cards,” she called over her shoulder. “Because Mr. Hadley and—”
“And Mr. Ripley don’t get along,” Caroline finished. “And you want Mr. Jacobs sat as far as possible from Mr. O’Riley. You’ve said.”
Mrs. Easton blinked at her. “Right. Well. I can see I’ve been repeating myself.”
As the landlady disappeared up the stairs, Caroline regretted her tone. She felt raw-edged, and Mrs. Easton’s frantic energy gnawed at her nerves, but she must not draw undue attention to herself. Not now, not with so much at stake.
Last night she had barely slept at all, drifting off into a light doze only in the hour before dawn to fall back into the familiar dream. She had awoken to Rab’s knock with her heart pounding; the face of what—of who—was chasing her evaporated the moment she opened her eyes.
Rab had not behaved any differently toward her since the day she had left Charlie’s notebook open on her desk.
At least, not in any way she could point to.
But something had crystallized between them, and whenever their paths crossed, she had the unsettling sensation that each of them was playing a part.
Caroline walked through her plan as she finished folding the napkins, imagining each step in her head to quell the uneasiness coursing through her.
After supper service she would disappear, as bidden.
But she would not go to her room. Instead, she would linger on the dark servants’ staircase with her ear to the dining room door.
Caroline knew the boardinghouse well now, as well as she’d known Audley House.
She knew which floorboards creaked and where the shadows lay deepest. If she had to, she could slip through the corridors unseen, unheard.
If one of the Full Moon’s strange guests was the Ripper, she would discover their secret.
And tomorrow, in the clear, protective light of day, she would bring that information to Sergeant Corbet.
She had promised him she would be careful. That she would not put herself at unnecessary risk. But time was slipping away from her, and she was no closer to solving the mystery than when she had arrived on the boardinghouse’s steps.
It was time to take a chance.
—
The afternoon passed in a frenzy of last-minute tasks.
Mrs. Easton returned to the cellar kitchen all a-flurry, having remembered the forgotten detail: Mr. Swartz, the guest staying in room 200, was Jewish.
She and Caroline spent the final hours before the guests arrived preparing a second, even more elaborate appetizer than bacon-wrapped oysters.
But Caroline was grateful: The work hid her shaking hands and excused her one-word responses.
Five o’clock found both women changed and groomed, Mrs. Easton with her iron-gray hair coiled into its chic chignon and fixed with silver pins, Caroline in the same pink-and-maroon morning gown she had worn to the previous supper.
As Caroline bent to pull the roast from the oven, Mrs. Easton, arranging the hors d’oeuvres on their silver platters, said, “I’m sorry I’ve been such a right mess today.”
“No need to apologize. There’s been so much to do.”
“There’s always so much to do here. But I’ve been running round like a chicken with my head cut off. I know that.” Mrs. Easton gave the roast an appreciative sniff. “I haven’t been myself. I’ve been distracted. Snappish. And it’s you who’s borne the brunt of it.”
Caroline set the roast on the waiting trivets with a grunt.
“I couldn’t have done this”—Mrs. Easton gestured to the elaborate dinner waiting in its lidded silver tureens—“without you. And I just…I want to tell you that I’m that grateful it was you who knocked on my door asking for work, and not some other girl with more experience but poorer manners.”
The back of Caroline’s nose began to burn, and not just from the warmth of the landlady’s words.
An adult had never apologized to her before.
Her imminent betrayal crept up her throat.
But she swallowed it down and adopted Mrs. Easton’s own no-nonsense tone as she said, “Well, I’m beginning to regret it, looking at all these dishes.
Really, Mrs. Easton; do you have another vessel in your possession, or have we used every last one for this meal? ”
Mrs. Easton surveyed the gleaming row of silver, lined up like armored troops for battle, and laughed. “I suppose you’re right. I really do think I’ve learned my lesson this time, though. Next month it will be cold entrees and soup made a day ahead, and if they don’t like it, they can hire a cook.”
Caroline laughed, too, and pushed away the thought that next month, Mrs. Easton and everyone in this house might be sitting in a prison cell.
The tension in the dining room could be cut with a knife and served on toast.
Caroline felt it swell with every step as she followed Mrs. Easton up the kitchen stairs: a sort of buzzing in the air, as though the dining table had transformed into the hornet’s nest Sergeant Corbet had warned her she was dancing upon.
The trays of appetizers were demolished, the white tablecloth littered with empty oyster shells and grease stains. Someone had already spilled their wine. The chandelier shivered with a dozen male voices pitched to be heard over their companions’.
“Of course they kicked the tar out of them—with Hattersley and Pochin off the pitch, the Warwicks didn’t stand a chance. Frankly, I’m surprised they only won by sixteen runs…”
“It is imperative not to drink before three years. See how red, how thick? This is eighty-two’s vintage. Anything before three years is swill.”
“I swear! Sloths as tall as elephants. Throughout South America. No, they’re all dead now, of course, but he dug up the fossils, you see, and their heads were as big as carriages—”
“You wrangle ’em and you slice ’em off, just like that. Sure, they squawk a little, but I’m tellin’ ya, they’re sweeter’n gizzards and half as chewy—”
They couldn’t all be drunk. It was just six o’clock, and by Caroline’s count of empty bottles, only two carafes of canary had been emptied between the dozen of them. And yet their raised voices bounced off the walls, and the faces around the table were red and sheened with sweat.
Caroline and Mrs. Easton set their dishes on the sideboard and each took up a wine jug.
With a brusque nod that put Caroline in mind of a battalion captain heading back into the fray, Mrs. Easton marched toward John’s side of the table, holding the carafe against her chest like a bayonet.
Caroline set her shoulders in the opposite direction. Toward Commissioner Warren.
She had secretly hoped that she had been wrong.
That she would realize, when she saw him again, that she had mistaken their mustached guest for the man in the newspaper.
But there was no mistake. Here was the same severe hairline, the same shrewd, close-set eyes.
Even if the skin beneath them was sagged and dark, even if he looked as though he had not slept since the last time she had seen him.
“I read in the Evening Standard,” said Monsieur Rodart, seated to the commissioner’s right, “that another body was found in Osborn Street.”
Caroline stiffened. But the commissioner only shook his head.
“The hoaxes abound,” he sighed. “Every day a new false lead. I cannot tell you the number of letters we have received which proclaim the author to be the murderer, to have hidden a legless, armless body somewhere in the borough.” He made a sound of disgust. “And the way the public has responded. Like these murders are some kind of…of sport. There’s a glee to it, to the newspaper headlines. ”
“More wine?” Caroline asked woodenly, staring down at the straight, oiled line of his part.
The commissioner didn’t even glance at her as he nodded and slid his glass toward the edge of the table. “It tests my faith in the human race, Monsieur Rodart. And I served Her Majesty on two tours in South Africa.”
Monsieur Rodart glanced up as she poured, smiling sunnily. “Merci, mademoiselle. Everything smells heavenly. You and Madame Easton have been working all week for this meal, and like all things that come from your kitchen, I am certain it will be delicious.”