MARY: Why would he want that? Anyway, his files were a complete mess. With the organizational system I devised . . .
CATHERINE: Oh please.
CHAPTER XXI
The Letter from Austria
It was August, three months after the night we had decided to live together at 11 Park Terrace. We were sitting in the parlor with the windows open to let in any breezes that might be flitting around the stagnant streets of London. The weekly meeting of the Athena Club was about to start.
The parlor did not look the way it had three months ago. Justine had painted it yellow, and there was a band of flowers around the top of the wall, close to the ceiling. That had been Beatrice’s idea. She insisted we must do away with the darkness and drab of previous centuries—we must have beauty and light. Also, she liked flowers. So we had yellow and green and blue walls, and the furniture had been re-covered in Indian fabrics, and there were Japanese porcelains on the mantelpiece. She had bought them cheaply at a church rummage sale. She and Mary argued about the expense, but since Beatrice brought in more money than the rest of us, it was only fair that she should spend some on fabric and porcelain if she wanted to. We had to admit that we rather liked her taste, so we let Beatrice decorate and try to talk us into supporting the Labor Movement, Aestheticism, and Rational Dress. Mary retorted that we were conspicuous enough without dressing differently from everyone else, but she had bought a bicycle. Mrs. Poole was scandalized. Those three months had brought certain changes to our household. Justine talked more, although it was usually about the meaning of life. We tended to stop listening when she said “Rousseau” or “Kant.” Surprisingly, Diana was the one who listened to her most often. Sometimes she even tried to read Justine’s books, although we had seen her curled up on the sofa with her head uncomfortably pillowed on the Critique of Judgment. We had taken down the walls between the servants’ rooms on the third floor, and Justine used that space as a studio. The entire third floor smelled of turpentine. She particularly liked to paint flowers, and children, and pastoral scenes. Catherine was working on her first novel, and two short pieces of hers had been published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. During the day, we often heard the click-clack of her typewriter. Beatrice’s plants had taken over the laboratory, spreading over the tables and up the walls. Except for Justine, we only went in there briefly, because the air itself had become poisonous. It would make you start to feel faint, and eventually you would lie down and die. But nothing could harm Justine, so she visited Beatrice whenever she liked.
Every weekday morning, Mary walked across the park to assist Sherlock Holmes. She had, to her great pleasure, participated in solving several mysteries. In “The Case of the Missing Finger,” by Dr. John Watson, published in The Strand, she had even been described as “a young woman of prepossessing appearance.” We were worried that Watson, whose wound was almost completely healed, had developed a secret passion for Beatrice. Whether it was requited or unrequited, we did not know.
BEATRICE: Don’t be silly. He has always been simply a good, kind friend.
Diana continued to be a trial to us all. We were considering poisoning her with one of Beatrice’s concoctions. No, not really, although Catherine swore that if Diana used her typewriter and messed up the ribbon one more time, she would bite that girl through the throat, just wait and see.
DIANA: I would have liked to see you try! You were so annoying, always moaning about how difficult it was to write a novel. And look at you now, Miss Author.
CATHERINE: The first one was hard! Almost as hard as this one . . .
Alice continued to insist that she was only a housemaid and not at all interested in adventures, thank you very much, but she was getting particularly good at Latin, almost as good as Beatrice. And Mrs. Poole was still Mrs. Poole. She would probably never change.
MARY: She never has. She’s still the same Mrs. Poole she’s always been. Only more so.
Since his escape from Newgate, we had not heard of or from Hyde. We assumed he had made it to the continent, where he could stay hidden for years if necessary. Prendick had disappeared as well. To Lestrade’s consternation, the Whitechapel Murders were still considered unsolved, and learned men wrote treatises advancing possible solutions, all of them wrong. We continued to investigate the Société des Alchimistes, although we had not yet found out as much as we would have liked. Our investigations were ongoing.
It was Saturday, the day of our official club meeting. We were all sitting on the sofa or in the armchairs, except Diana, who sat cross-legged on the floor. Even Beatrice was sitting in an armchair rather than by the window, since she was less poisonous now.
DIANA: She’s still poisonous enough!
Mary was presiding. She usually presided over our meetings, although we had no official club president. But she was the best at organizing and keeping us all from talking over one another. As usual, our first order of business was finances. What had we made that week?
Mary: Two pounds.
Justine: Ten pounds from a commissioned portrait. This was not a usual sort of payment and could not be counted on again. But two of her paintings had been accepted into a gallery in Soho.
Beatrice: Five pounds seven shillings.
Catherine: Nothing. She had already received an advance for the novel she was writing, and had no magazine sales to report.
Diana: Nothing, yet. She was trying to persuade Mary that she should become an actress. If Mary would just let her appear at the Alhambra . . . Yes, the girls showed their legs, but so what? We allocated ten minutes for Diana’s arguments, and one minute for Mary to say “No.”
That made a grand total of seventeen pounds, seven shillings for the week. Not bad, much better than we had been doing at first. It was difficult feeding seven mouths and maintaining a large house. But we were managing.