Page 32 of Ghost in the Garden
“I wouldn’t,” Constance assured her. She sipped her tea. “You’re very defensive of her.”
“I am,” Ida said almost grimly. “Five years ago, I was nothing. I lost my husband and my kids to fever. Had nowhere to live, no job. Had nothing to live for, but she took me in, let me stay for nothing if I just cooked for them. So I did, and then I did it so much that she paid me for it, and brought me here when they moved.”
“From the Acre?” Constance said casually. She thought all the more of Angela Lambert for her kindness, her compassion, but she had to pry and poke until she found out something that made sense of the ghost.
“Yes. I ain’t sorry to see the back of that place, though it’s only a step away. Like another world.”
“I heard of this position through someone who worked for Mr. Gregg,” Constance lied. “Did he ever come here?”
“Now and again,” Ida said with a shrug. “Never came to the old place, and who could blame him? But he were good for Caleb Lambert. Brought connections to the partnership.”
“What did Mr. Lambert bring?” Beside muscled ruffians and a knowledge, no doubt, of slums.
Ida tapped her temple. “Brains. Clever sod, is Caleb Lambert.”
“You like him?” Constance asked, mostly because it hadn’t sounded like a compliment at all.
“Not much. Don’t have to, do I? I cook for him and he pays me well. It’s the missus I like, and always will.”
“Does everyone in the house feel that way?”
A hint of confusion clouded Ida’s eyes, a realization, no doubt, that she’d said more than she should. She took out her flask and poured a splash into her tea.
“Don’t ask,” she said. “But I’d say so. Here come the girls. Duggin won’t be far behind.”
*
Solomon did notlinger for long in his old office. Everything appeared to be working just fine without him. He wasn’t sure whether to congratulate himself on that or not.
By the time he left, the mist from the river had risen to connect with outpourings from steam vessels and factory chimneys, clogging the air with thick, stinking fog. It slowed the hackney that carried him into Seven Dials.
In that warren of iniquity, the fog was a mixed blessing. It made his own person harder to see. But then, he could not see attacks coming, either. The footsteps behind him probably only sounded stealthy, and yet someone had followed him from Lambert’s office, possibly even before that…
He was concentrating too hard on the footsteps behind. The attack from the right of a narrow alley took him completely by surprise. A paralyzing blow struck his side, and then he was shoved hard up against a wall, the cold steel of a blade at his throat while he gasped for breath.
“You’re outside your own world,” someone growled into his face, his breath rancid with old beer, fatty meat, and tobacco. “Stay away from the Dials if you want to live.”
And then he was free. Without a mark on him. The luckiest victim in Seven Dials. He hadn’t even been robbed. Bizarre.
Solomon started after his attacker so quickly that he bumped into someone else entirely and was roundly sworn at.
“Sorry,” he muttered, and barged past. But the fog had grown so thick that it was impossible to tell which of the vague, hurrying figures in front of him had been his attacker. He followed one who looked roughly the right shape, and deliberately jostled him to see the reaction.
But it was a much younger man who glared back at him, slapping his hands defensively over his pockets. “Mind your step.”
Solomon gave up. He had been warned off Seven Dials, not the wider area of St. Giles.Interesting…
Thoughtfully and with some difficulty, he found his way to the backstreet where Juliet Silver did her business.
The same youth let him in. This time he waited in the hall, on a slightly dusty chair surrounded by curios of silver, gold, and fine porcelain, in between the junk and the tat. But although he was left alone, he knew he was still being watched. In Constance’s establishment, it was much more blatant. A blank-eyed footman in livery stood to attention within feet, or directly outside whichever salon he had been abandoned in.
Within a couple of minutes, the boy came back and took him not to the parlor he had seen before but an equally cluttered office where the plump, opulent person that, amazingly, was Constance’s mother reached out a hand to him without getting up from the desk.
“What an unexpected pleasure, Mr. Grey. Are you buying or selling, or have you come to ask me for more help?”
“None of these, probably.” He took her hand and bowed slightly, which made her eyes dance.
“Connie know you’re here?” she asked shrewdly.
