After our game Aunt Antonia met with Munro about the final details of the forthcoming All Hallows celebration the next evening, and Linnie retired for the night.
Not surprising, Munro refused to wear a costume, while Lily chatted on about the party.
“I never been to nothin’ like that before,” she exclaimed.
“You have never been to anything like that before,” I corrected her.
“That’s what I said,” she replied with a frown.
I ignored that as she chatted on, eventually wearing herself down with another enormous yawn.
It was very near midnight. However, I reminded myself that in her previous life at the brothel that was usually when her workday began.
After the second yawn, I accompanied her upstairs to my former bedchamber and reminded her to wash and brush her teeth. She hardly saw the reason for that.
“The ladies at the house never brushed their teeth and they had a lot of admirers.”
Admirers— the paying sort of course.
I impressed upon her that healthy teeth were far better than gums for eating the toffee chews my aunt kept that she seemed to favor.
After washing and brushing, she donned her nightgown then crawled into bed.
“Tell me more about the inquiry case,” she insisted.
Instead of going into further details about the murders, I told her what I had learned about glass plate photography versus film photography. It was not long before I heard light snoring.
I returned to the adjacent sitting room, took out my notebook and recorded the information I’d learned that day. Somewhat boring perhaps, but useful in that it confirmed that the photographs of Amelia Mainwaring and Catherine Thorpe had to have been taken with a glass plate camera.
It was past one o’clock of the morning when I finally set my pen aside. I wondered what new information Brodie might have obtained about the case.
I left the single light on at the writing desk and returned to the bedroom. Lily had curled herself into a tight ball at the edge of the bed and I could only wonder what had served as a bed for her before. Very likely some small niche at the top floor of the brothel.
Even now, asleep, with the full size of the bed, she made herself as small as possible, leaving more than enough room for two.
I removed my skirt and shirtwaist, then slipped in at the other side of the bed.
The break in the weather that afternoon had disappeared, as rain pelted the windows. I had not lit a fire in the fireplace in the sitting room and the bedroom had grown quite cold. Without waking, Lily moved closer.
I pulled the down comforter up over the both of us as she snuggled, childlike, against me.
* * *
I was wakened the following morning by Lily’s excited chatter about the party as she dressed.
“Her ladyship is going as some queen wot got her head chopped off. I seen the make-up. It’s bloody wonderful!”
Bloody wonderful. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed.
“She said I could go as a swordsman… I think that’s wot she said. Only I canna take the sword with me as it might be dangerous,” she chatted on.
She had dressed and shoved her feet into a pair of new boots.
My aunt had the skills and the connections of a field commander when she set her mind to something. In addition to new boots, there were a half-dozen dresses in the wardrobe of the sort appropriate for a young girl, along with a walking skirt and several shirtwaists.
“Miss Lenore said somethin’ about her costume. I think she said it was a fox or something like that…”
“A fox?” Most unusual, I thought, as her tastes usually ran toward the mundane— a damsel in distress, some ancient medieval maiden. As a matter of fact, I thought I remembered that she had gone as Maid Marian once with her then husband as Robin of the Hood— not very authentic considering how Andrew had ended in prison.
