Page 95 of Evil at the Essex House
The call distracted Hiram for just long enough that the cane failed to make contact with Sid’s head. Hiram stumbled forward, his equilibrium upset by the change, and then it was Sid’s turn to swing the bat. It connected with Hiram’s calf, and the latter stumbled back, swearing. Sid jumped back up to his feet, and then the screamer burst through the door from the front hall and staircase into the receiving room, and we got our first look at her.
And—
“Ruth!” Sarah said, and her voice was somewhere between shocked, appalled, and disappointed.
Ruth paid her no mind whatsoever, just flung herself at Hiram, claws out. And I do mean it literally: her fingers were curved like talons, and she was raking her nails down his cheek.
Even as I flung myself forward to keep her from sinking her claws into Hiram’s face, I recognized her. Although the last—and first—time I’d seen her, she had looked quite different, in an expensive ensemble of royal blue chiffon with polka dots, standing in the lobby of the Essex House Mansions, waiting for Flossie for an evening at the theatre.
Now, a scowl contorted her plain face into something distinctly harpy-like. She was hatless, so I could see the dishwater blond hair Sarah had described—cut into a simple Dutch Boy that had nothing at all in common with Lady Laetitia Marsden’s ditto. Laetitia, much as it pains me to admit it, has a lovely head of sleek, jet black, shiny hair that’s regularly trimmed (probably with the help of a ruler) and which frames her face in a way that manages to simultaneously bring out her high cheekbones, the sleek line of her jaw, and eyes the blue of cornflowers. I may dislike her, but she’s an exceptionally pretty woman.
Ruth wasn’t pretty, nor was her hair particularly attractive. It was neither as sleek nor as shiny as Lady Laetitia’s, and it hung limp around her plain, rather doughy face.
All of this ran through my head as I grappled with her, trying to catch her wrists to keep her nails from Hiram’s face, at the same time as I did my best to haul her away from him. Hiram, meanwhile, swung about him with the cane, not caring who he hit, so I had to dodge that, as well, and now yet another individual joined the fray.
I heard a shriek, and the clacking of heels across the floor, a staccato, rapid rhythm, and the next moment, a hand had landed in my hair and fisted a handful of it. A second later I was yanked backwards, away from Ruth and Hiram. I squawked, outraged, but kept my grip on Ruth and pulled her back with me.
I heard a scraping sound, like metal on wood, and something from Wolfgang in German, but I was too busy to pay attention to it. I was already preoccupied with not losing my grip on Ruth while at the same time trying to dislodge whoever—not-Flossie?—was behind me. As a result, I was hanging onto Ruth with one hand, while I jabbed the other elbow backwards into the body of the woman behind me. She was soft, quite not-Flossie like in body shape, and as a result, what I was doing seemed not to have much of an effect. I wasn’t able to hit her where it hurt.
Sarah had flung herself into the fray now, as well, but she also concentrated on Ruth, perhaps because Ruth had attacked Hiram, or perhaps simply because Ruth was someone she knew. Ruth must have betrayed Flossie, the real Flossie, and betrayed the Schlomskys, or we wouldn’t be here.
This all sounds rather calm and collected, I expect. It wasn’t. It was an absolute, full on brawl, complete with screams and thuds, swearing from the men and shrieking from the women, furniture breaking and people rolling on the ground pounding on one another. I may make it sound orderly and chronological, but it was anything but. It also took place over a much shorter period than it takes to write or read—or for that matter experience. I can’t imagine that it was much more than a minute or two from beginning to end.
The end came when something heavy hit the front door of the house, and then hit it again. In the back of my—admittedly rattled—mind, I suppose I probably assumed it to be the Hackney driver. We had left him outside on the road and requested him to wait for us—the last thing we wanted, was to be stuck in the wilderness of Thornton Heath with no way back to London. If he had heard the sounds of the brawl, it might make sense that he would come to our rescue.
That was if I had been able to string those kinds of thoughts together into a sentence, which of course I wasn’t. By then, Sarah Schlomsky had taken Ruth out of my hands, quite literally, and had knocked her to the ground and was beating on her with her handbag. Sarah, I mean. She was quite a bit heavier than Ruth, and was sitting on top of her, giving Ruth no opportunity to buck her off. Ruth was squealing and trying to cover her face from Sarah’s patent leather bag, but that was all she could do.
I, meanwhile, had my hands full with fake Flossie. And there the situation was quite different. I’ve always been a couple of inches taller, but she has always had me beat by a stone or two. As soon as I let go of Ruth in favor of throwing off the imposter, the fake Flossie had turned her attention to trying to throttle me. There was hair pulling and kicking and screaming and rolling, and hands wrapped around my throat, trying to squeeze the breath out of me. Black spots flickered in front of my eyes, and in the middle of it, as I said, the front door burst open and several sets of footsteps pounded into the front hall, and from there into the receiving room, and dining room, and kitchen.
“Police!” a voice bellowed. “Don’t move!”
The light caught on something metallic that whistled through the air in my direction. Fake Flossie squealed as if she’d been stabbed—I found out later that she actually had been—and collapsed on top of me. I made a sound that was half scream, half moan, and tried to scramble out from under the limp body that was pinning me down, but I couldn’t shift the—forgive the expression—dead weight.
Until someone wrenched her off me, and I was lifted to my feet.
“Philippa!” Wolfgang’s voice said, and pulled me close to his chest.
I sagged in his hold for a moment—long enough to get a whiff of cigarette smoke and laundry soap and starch—before another pair of hands grabbed me and yanked me backwards. And then I found myself wrapped in Christopher’s arms while he berated Wolfgang over my head.
“Good God, Natterdorff, have you no sense? Who brings a sword to a fist fight?”
Sword?
I tried to turn around so I could look for the sword, but Christopher was holding me too tightly. His frame was trembling, and so was his voice, and while I suspect that Wolfgang probably heard it as anger, I knew better: it was a reaction to fear. He had come into the house and seen me and been afraid of what had happened to me.
“You could have chopped Pippa’s head off!” Christopher continued. “You came within a few inches of killing my cousin!”
“I was—” Wolfgang protested, but Christopher was beyond listening to reason.
“If anything had happened to her, we would have killed you, you realize that, don’t you? Crispin or Francis or I, or my father… one of us would have murdered you in cold blood if you had hurt her!”
“Christopher,” I muttered against his shoulder, at the same time as Tom’s voice uttered a warning, “Kit.”
I could clearly feel Christopher’s reluctance, but he shut his mouth. And opened it again, to talk to me this time. “Are you all right, Pippa? He didn’t get you, did he?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. But no, nothing hurts.”
That wasn’t strictly true. I could feel the ache of blossoming bruises pretty much everywhere, and my scalp still tingled from having handfuls of my hair pulled viciously.
