For me, even with our recent difficulties, I knew that Brodie was a true friend, as I was to him.
As for Lily, she kept her true feelings with most people carefully hidden. She was slow to trust, something else I could identify with as well.
Mr. Symons, my great-aunt’s head butler for over forty years, greeted me as I arrived.
“Good day, Miss Mikaela. It is always good to see you.” He glanced past me as the coachman gathered the team to return to central London.
“Mr. Brodie is not with you?” he said with a slight frown.
Since my sister and I first arrived at Sussex Square, he had appointed himself not only guardian of the door, but guardian over two young orphan girls as well.
“He had business to attend to.”
“Very well, miss.”
“Is that Mikaela?” Aunt Antonia called out. “Do join me in the ballroom, dear.” Her voice echoed down the long hallway.
As I handed off my coat and umbrella, I looked at Mr. Symons, usually an accurate source for whatever was happening at Sussex Square.
“She has been with the wood carver most of the morning,” he explained in that stoic manner that I was familiar with.
“Wood carver?” Repairs of some sort or perhaps a new piece of furniture?
“I believe it is about the dragon’s head,” he replied with a faint roll of the eyes.
“I see. Thank you, Mr. Symons.” Of course, I didn’t see at all and could only imagine what I might find as I headed in the direction of the ballroom.
“Here you are,” my great-aunt exclaimed as she sailed across the enormous hall that had seen entertainments, feasts, and perhaps a sword fight or two over the generations since it was built several hundred years earlier.
It was one of a handful of original estates in London that had survived and dated back to that original ancestor, William the Conqueror.
“We are quite through here. Thank you, Mr. Sturgess, for your thoughts and suggestions. I should like to see a drawing by next week along with a schedule for the work. We are planning a wedding before Christmas. I don’t imagine that I will have need of it until after that.”
“Of course, madame.” Mr. Sturgess nodded as we passed. He did seem a bit pale.
“New furnishings?” I inquired, thinking of the reception after Linnie’s wedding that our aunt insisted be held at Sussex Square. Perhaps a new banquet table or two?
She smiled as she took me by the arm and we sat at one of the long tables that had been in her family for centuries, complete with a few battle scars.
“I believe we have enough to accommodate a few hundred guests,” she replied. “I requested Mr. Sturgess’s thoughts regarding a dragon’s head for the boat.”
She made a sweeping gesture to the Egyptian boat that had graced the ballroom since another reception she had given the year before.
“I do want everything to be as authentic as possible when I sail off.”
As in that Viking funeral she had spoken of since I was a child, complete with sails aflame as she sailed off to… wherever she intended to sail.
I was convinced that she would have her way in this, and thought it a perfect way to end one’sstayin this life, as my friend Templeton had explained it.
She communicated with the somewhat disagreeable spirit of Sir William Shakespeare. Particularly when one of his plays was not being represented as he thought it should.
Of course, that is if one believed in spirits in the afterworld. I left that particular door open and thought a Viking send-off was quite exciting. It did seem as if my great-aunt had taken that notion to a new level.
“A dragon’s head?” I asked with growing interest.
Aunt Antonia smiled. “It is all quite daunting for Mr. Sturgess. His work came highly recommended by Captain Turner, and he should know, with his experience on different vessels.”
Captain Tom Turner was a long-time acquaintance. He had a lengthy career, sailing between England and the Orient on all manner of ships. He had lost a leg during an encounter withpirates in the South China Sea, and retired to the canal boats he owned in Richmond.
