Delilah and Angelique made decision after decision, swiftly, deftly, and secondhand rugs and settees and chairs and the like were acquired and given new life and proud place in the large suites and the little sitting rooms. All the suites were clean, but only one was officially ready for tenants, complete with comfortable beds, fluffy pillows, counterpanes as welcoming as hugs, little writing desks, and a rather compact sitting room, with chairs and a settee, that a family could loll about in when they weren’t joining the rest of the guests of The Grand Palace on the Thames.
Some construction was still underway in the bottom corner near the little kitchen, next to the scullery, and it was roped off with tarps and the like so one couldn’t trip on a loose board or get pierced by a nail, so Angelique steered her aunt away from it. Angelique and Delilah had discussed the notion of one day, possibly, needing an additional cook. It wasn’t a topic they looked forward to broaching with Helga.
Aunt Lizzie was delightedly breathless by everything she saw. “You always were the most efficient girl, Angelique. So very clever and good. I am not surprised at all you live in a grand palace and have a viscount for a husband.”
Angelique laughed.
But even as they strolled through she was aware they still had a good deal more work to do; they couldn’t expect servants, especially the young maids, to run to and from buildings in inclement weather; they would need footmen to do some of the heavier work, though Dot had been assured that she was the Head of Answering the Door. She anticipated that interviewing them would be entertaining, indeed. Well. Operatic, she’d called their life here. What need had they for musicales, when life was so varied and splendorous from moment to moment?
But they would need tenants soon. Annexes did not pay for themselves.
She heard Dot coming at a run. “Mrs. Bree—Durand. Mrs. Hardy sent me. There’s a family you see...”
Dot paused to suck in a few breaths.
“A family?”
“A family that wants to stay!” Dot was beside herself with glee.
“Oooh, a family! How exciting, dear!” Aunt Lizzie said.
“We expect the word has gotten out about our exceptional service,” Angelique said regally. But frankly she was excited, too.
“There was a snake, you see—” Lord Vaughn’s hair seemed to have been combed with a rake, and his eyes were still a bit wild.
“And Papa thought he might try to shoot it.” This came from a young woman of about seventeen or eighteen years old. She had clear gray eyes and red-gold hair bound up in plaits. “I’m Claire. He shot a hole through the wall, and through the ceiling.”
“And lest you think I’m one of your eccentrics, well, I’m not in my dotage yet and this was not one of our little English adders, oh, no. It was a dangerous sort of snake, brought here alive from the jungles, I believe, by a naturalist bloke, and St. John won it in some kind of wager and brought the poor creature home, whereupon it escaped. St. John is a blight upon us all.”
He said this with an interesting blend of long-suffering bitterness and affection and fixed a baleful gaze.
“St. John is bored,” said St. John, who, far from being a blight, had the sort of good looks that could cause whiplash, a wicked gleam in his eyes, and a way with an indolent slouch. “And I’ve scarcely slept for days. I didn’t mean for the poor creature to getout. I would have brought it back to where I got it. Only meant to put the fright on Claire and Lillias. And it worked, too. I wondered when we might be shown to our rooms?” He turned to Delilah and Angelique.
They politely ignored him for now. They knew St. John’s type.
“That poor creature won’t last a day in our English weather,” his father said. “Unnatural.”
“Ha! I’d like to see that snake survive here at the docks,” said Claire, with a certain amount of relish. “It’s tremendously thrilling. Did you see the man who was relieving himself against the—”
“That’s quite enough,” said Lady Vaughn. Her voice was quiet, stern, loving, and she managed to put a stop to the chatter just like that. She was hollow-eyed from lack of sleep and one got the sense that her coiffure was usually flawless, but right now it was a bit fuzzy. She was clearly the source of her daughter’s coloring.
One also got the sense that one did not argue with Lady Vaughn.
“So it will be us,” she told Delilah and Angelique, once she’d created a little quiet. “Our family. My husband and I, our son, our daughters Claire and Lillias, and we hoped you’d have room to house us all whilst repairs are underway. And our lady’s maids and... Where the devil is Lillias?”
She looked at her husband.
Whose gaze ricocheted about the room.
“I hope Lillias isn’t another snake?” Angelique said gently.
“Same difference,” St. John said, with a yawn.
“Our oldest daughter,” Lord Vaughn corrected, scowling at his son.
“We’ve some rules we expect our guests to follow, but they’re meant to foster camaraderie, rather than make a guest feel restricted, and we find all our guests typically embrace them.”
“We agree to them,” Lady Vaughn said at once. “All of them.”