“I’m Mr. Pike.”
They spoke at precisely the same time, which seemed to fluster them into silence. Their mouths then set in twin, stubborn lines.
Mr. Pike inhaled audibly and at length, seemingly mustering patience. He offered a smile. “Would you like me to take your wet wraps soyou can warm yourselves next to the fire while you wait for Mrs. Durand and Mrs. Hardy?”
The foyer was flanked by what appeared to be two rooms; he gestured to the one on his left.
Daphne and her rescuer surrendered their hats and dripping wraps to the footman—her cloak, his dark, many-caped greatcoat, his beaver hat, her bonnet—and the maid named Dot watched him bear them away. Her expression confusingly suggested Mr. Pike had just robbed her.
“Have you indeed rooms to let, miss?” her escort prompted.
She turned with a start to them. And then she went still and studied them with what appeared to be unabashed fascination.
“We’ve a suite available. It’s very nice and a bit...” She lowered her voice as if she were confiding a delicious secret. “...dear.”
Daphne’s stomach clutched. A suite. Singular, she’d said. Perhaps only one room.
“A suite includes more than one room?” her companion cleverly asked.
“Three, sir.” She glowed as she imparted this marvel. “A sitting room, and two rooms for sleeping.”
This was marginally better.
“And the doors properly close and lock?”
“All of our doors and windows properly close and lock,” Dot informed him proudly. “And all of our hinges are well oiled, and our flues are clean.” Dot seemed to have interpreted this question as a matter of housekeeping. “I’ll go and tell Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Durand that you’re here.”
She whirled and thundered up the stairs.
By the time Lorcan and Daphne arrived at their door, a bitter, relentless January wind had been soughing and moaning through previously unsuspected cracks and crevasses of The Grand Palace on the Thames for nigh on a fortnight. It seemed no room was exempt.
“It sounds like a Peruvian whistle,” Mrs. Pariseau had said one night in the sitting room, with startling specificity. She was one of their very first guests, a spirited widow who seemed possessed of a great store of arcane knowledge, so everyone assumed this was correct.
“Sounds a bit like my digestion,” Mr. Delacorte reflected in the smoking room. Anyone who had spent time with Mr. Delacorte there could attest that this was also correct.
“It sounds a bit like you when I make love to you,” Captain Hardy murmured into Delilah’s neck while they were in bed one morning, listening to a low moaning created by the wind, and she’d given him a playful little swat.
“It’s like the incessant chatter of a guilty conscience,” Lucien, Lord Bolt, marveled on a hush to his wife, Angelique, as they lay awake one night, listening to it.
“Well, when you think about some of the things this building has seen...” Angelique murmured.
In the scullery, the wind had once groaned so sorrowfully and so harrowingly Dot had taken such a fright that she now refused to enter it alone, or at night. The very notion of ghosts both terrified and thrilled her, but she also found itthrilling to be terrified. She liked to imagine she was a heroine in a Horrid novel.
All in all, the creaks, cracks, sighs, and whistles made Delilah and Angelique feel as if The Grand Palace on the Thames suddenly milled with unseen guests. Which was unsettling, as the ones they could see were challenge enough.
Delilah and Angelique had lately been forced to admit to themselves that they had made a series of rare miscalculations. Flush from their success of letting a room to a scandalous opera singer in exchange for a spectacularly profitable night of entertainment, they had taken a chance on a charming, blushing, coltish trio of young German musicians who agreed to play in the sitting room at night now and again in exchange for a reduced rate on their rooms. They were polite, they spoke little English, and they played like angels.
But they ate like oxen. With terrifying, unanticipated speed and gusto. Mr. Delacorte’s waistcoat button had popped twice as a result of efforts to keep up. Even Helga, who hailed from Germany and was inclined to be indulgent with anyone who appreciated her cooking, had been alarmed. She’d been compelled to frantically replan menus and shopping lists and budgets.
When they weren’t practicing Mozart exquisitely in the annex ballroom, Hans, Otto, and Friedreich laughed uproariously amongst themselves in the sitting room and flirted with the maids. All Delilah and Angelique had to do if they wanted to discover why Rose or Meggiehadn’t yet finished the dusting was to follow the sound of giggling.
And then there was Mr. Angus McDonald, a somber, flame-headed Scottish scholar they’d admitted because they found his brogue a thing of great beauty, a sound like rough water tumbling over rocks on the misty moors. Which meant, unfortunately, they often could scarcely understand him. During his interview, they had mistaken what proved to be a certain unyielding dourness for appealing gravity. And he said things like “He’s an awfy scunnersome laddie” and “Whit dae ye pit in clapshot?” which they suspected might be faintly insulting, but they could mostly only nod and smile, as not even Captain Hardy nor Mrs. Pariseau was fluent in Scots Gaelic. They felt rather terrible about it, but he was meant to stay only a fortnight, and he had been given the room over Delacorte. The encroaching storm likely meant Mr. McDonald was going nowhere soon, unless it was mad, driven there by Mr. Delacorte’s snoring.
And if Mr. McDonald and the German boys occupied opposite poles, in between were their husbands, who were at the moment moodily smoking in the gentlemen’s smoking room and talking in low voices of worrisome things they clearly didn’t want Delilah and Angelique to hear. Captain Hardy, a legendary former blockade commander, and Lucien, the bastard son of a duke who had made a fortune at sea, were now partners (along with Mr. Delacorte) in an import endeavor, the Triton Group. Their ship carryingsilks and spices from the Orient was nearly a fortnight overdue in port. This was the source of their muttering. Any number of things could have happened toThe Zephyr. Taken by pirates or sunk by a storm. A lightning strike might have turned the mizzenmast into a torch. Mutiny. Illness. Tsunamis. Sea monsters.
For more than a week Captain Hardy and Lucien had been away from home for long hours in meetings with investors and merchants and insurers, as well as helping to sandbag storage warehouses in preparation for the anticipated storm.
“It’s going to be a bad one,” they’d grimly predicted.
