No Place for a Lady Read Free

don’t believe I said a word in reply, or even curtsied.
    “Who was that man?” I demanded of Mrs. Scudpole.
    “Number 2A,” was her unhelpful reply.
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “He’s hired out suite 2A, hasn’t he?”
    “Where? What was he doing here?”
    “Lives on the next floor, Mistress. I’ve nothing agin Mr. Alger. He always pays regular, unlike some.”
    “He lives here? Do you mean my aunt hired rooms?”
    “Gorblimey, didn’t you know? She’s hired out every square inch above the first level, even the attics. Mind you, if it’s only yourself and the old malkin,” she said, tossing a glance at Miss Thackery, “there’s plenty of room for you both on this floor.” She leaned against a bow-fronted chest and settled in for a coze. “Now in your attics, you’ve got Professor Vivaldi. He’s—”
    “Thank you, Mrs. Scudpole. That will be all for now,” I said, and stared at her until she stood up straight. “I shall speak to you after we have had tea. It has been a tiring day.”
    “You owe the butcher three pounds and four-pence,” was her parting shot.
    Meanwhile Miss Thackery had arranged the tea table. “I was watching from the doorway and wondered what that fine gentleman was doing upstairs,” she said. “He looks well, but he would not be renting rooms in this part of town if he were respectable. I daresay he is an actor from Drury Lane.”
    “An actor! Yes, that would explain it. He was very handsome, was he not?”
    “I thought his manner unpleasantly encroaching. You must give him a good setdown next time he comes mincing in.”
    She helped herself to a sandwich. “This mutton is quite good, Cathy,” she said. “You will feel better able to cope with the situation after tea.”
    So saying, she poured tea into two chipped cups, and we had our first meal in our new home on Wild Street.
     

Chapter Two
     
    After tea and cold mutton, we felt sufficiently restored to tour that part of the house my aunt Thal had occupied. Miss Thackery, who can find a reasonable explanation for anything, soon settled how my aunt came to be living in this squalid place and hiring out rooms.
    “You recall, Cathy, her husband had something to do with the theater,” she said. “A sort of manager, I believe. It would make sense for him to buy a house near Drury Lane. I daresay the neighborhood was respectable when he bought the house, and you know how difficult it is to move once you are established. So when her husband died, your aunt Thal just kept on here—and hired out rooms to pay the grocer. One can see how it came about.”
    “And all the unnecessary furnishings?” I asked, wondering how she would leap this hurdle without proclaiming my aunt a certifiable lunatic.
    Mrs. Scudpole, who occasionally peeped her head in at us as we toured—and obviously had no notion of the meaning of the word “privacy”—spoke up from the doorway. “Only way she could get her blunt out of some of the folks she rented to, wasn’t it? If they owed her, she seized their belongings. Bit by bit, she furnished the flats herself, but there was things left over, like.”
    “Quite a few things,” I said, squeezing past a dining room table with one full set of chairs around it—and another dozen against the wall.
    “She never used this room,” Mrs. Scudpole assured us.
    “Where did she eat?” I was curious enough to inquire.
    “Wherever she liked.”
    “Where is the master bedroom?” I asked.
    “Right at the end of the hall.”
    We went to the end of the hall and entered another used-furniture warehouse. Three dressers, two toilet tables, and against the far wall, one hideous canopied bed. A second bed would not have gone amiss as both Miss Thackery and myself are accustomed to sleeping alone. Unless the second bed were to hang from the ceiling, however, there was no room for it in the bedchamber.
    “That there bed belonged to Mrs. Siddons a dozen years ago,” Mrs. Scudpole told us.
    I lifted the