The Triple Goddess Read Free Page B

attending drinks parties and dinners only to keep her ennui and youthful Weltschmerz at bay, it seemed to all that Arbella Stace was the most eloquent and communicative of women. The language of her presence was enough to convince each male in a crowd that she had eyes and ears for him alone. A flicker of her eyebrow...neither of them flickered very often, and then only infinitesimally...when combined with the attar of roses of her body amidst the haze of sweet smoke that issued from the oval cylinder of her Sullivan & Powell Turkish and Virginia cigarette, was enough to convey an illusion of intimacy that transcended the need for speech.
    Arbella worked as a Marine broker on the ground floor at Lloyd’s of London’s premises in the “New” Lloyd’s building on Lime Street, the one that succeeded the “Old” Lloyd’s opposite it on Leadenhall Street, which in turn had replaced the one in the Royal Exchange...and it went back further than that and would go further forward.
    For Lloyd’s, as an institution that owed its existence to all the probable improbabilities in the world except those of a religious or philosophical nature, was a Venice of impermanence even as it specialized in insuring and reinsuring accidents waiting to happen. At this time it was still at its zenith as an institution renowned throughout the world for its stability, reliability, and imperviousness to change.
    The name of Lloyd’s Underwriter was a byword for staunchness, honesty and probity in a man. Adherence to the highest moral standards, tradition, and old-world courtesy…these were the principles that the institution that it had been founded upon, and which allowed it to manage its own affairs unsupervised by Government authority.
    From the second floor up within the great edifice of Portland stone, above the trading levels with their arched floor-to-ceiling windows of plate glass, there were long passageways of mahogany doors with numbers on them. These were the offices that the Corporation of Lloyd’s leased to the underwriting syndicates.
    The only communal rooms were the Adam Room, where the Committee of Lloyd’s held its meetings, and the Captains’ Room. The Adam Room had been assembled, rather than constructed, by the celebrated eighteenth-century architect Robert Adam, in that it had been moved piece by piece from Bowood House, the Lansdowne family’s historic home near Chippenham in Wiltshire. It contained, in addition to a lot of fancy furniture, a carpet which might or might not have been the largest ever to have been woven in a single piece.
    And in the Captains’ Room one could get a halfway decent cup of coffee—Lloyd’s had originated in a coffee house, so it had to be freshly made—served by waiters so rude that they made their Parisian counterparts seem hospice nurses; and a curled sandwich, sausage roll, or dry slice of cake or pastry.
    The waiters in the Captains’ Room were not the same as the Waiters in the Underwriting Room. The latter were named after the men who served in the coffee house that Edward Lloyd had opened in 1688, around the time of the Glorious Revolution, the overthrow of King James II of England; and which, as the über cybercafé of its day, became the haunt of shipowners and merchants who came there to share with each other the financial risks of losing their vessels and cargoes at sea, and the emotional trauma that they experienced when it happened. The difference between the original waiters and their successors was that the modern species, instead of serving coffee, kept the Underwriting Room’s operations running by posting notices, and collecting and dropping things off around the syndicate “boxes” on the trading floors. Instead of aprons they wore smart red and black uniforms, and the doorman at the main entrance on Lime Street also sported a top hat.
    The original Lloyd’s Coffee House had so thrived on the appetite for caffeine and risk, the one perhaps fuelling the other, of