The Case of the Peculiar Pink Fan by Nancy; Springer Read Free Book Online Page B

mastiff-like man bellowed, “This way, urchins!” and strode onward. Huddled shoulder to shoulder, clutching each other’s hands, with their faces displaying the terror I felt, the orphans followed more slowly. From behind, the matron herded them as they all disappeared from my view beneath the stairway from which I watched. Even though I knew that the ha-ha man had not seen me, and would not have recognised me in any event—even so, my heart thumped, and while ladies never sweat, or even perspire, certainly I felt my personage pass into the condition known as “all in a glow.”
    The butler returned upstairs, his white face so eloquently blank that I dared not ask him who the ha-ha man was. Indeed, I dared not speak.
    With difficulty I made myself let go of the stair railing to which I had been clinging. In icy silence the butler showed me to a door. “Miss, um, the journalistic personage of whom I informed you, my lady,” he announced me as he opened it. He intended, it seemed, to allow his mistress to remain ignorant of the invasion downstairs, at least for the moment and in my dubious presence.
    “Yes. Quite.” As the viscountess brusquely gestured for me to enter, she scarcely looked at me, thank goodness; after a moment I was able to take a deep breath and regain some measure of calm. Her ladyship did not, of course, invite me to be seated; a common news-reporter would not be staying long. Nor did she give me a chance to ask her any questions; she quite took charge. “I want you to see what I wore for the pink tea.” On cue, a maid-in-waiting emerged from a walk-in closet, carrying a fabric confection of pink. “That is a Worth gown,” the viscountess declared, and she began to read aloud from a salon program. “‘This exquisite tea-gown is fashioned from pink chine pompadour taffeta with graceful godet pleating, trimmed around the—’ Write it down! I want you to get it all just as I say.”
    Obediently I scribbled, meanwhile aware that the jade damask at-home day-dress the viscountess wore might be described every bit as elaborately; indeed, it seemed to me one might almost be presented to the queen in it. It could not have been more apparent to me that this woman had aspirations above her station.
    “‘—trimmed around the neckline with puffed white tulle over scallops of pearl-studded sateen, while a double strand of rare pink pearls begins at the bust and drapes to the right side of the skirt, fastened there with a clasp of pink gold inspired by Michelangelo’s sibyls of the Sistine Chapel’—have you got all that?”
    “Yes, my lady,” I lied. “And might I inquire the names of those who attended, my lady?” Now that I knew who the viscountess was, I wanted to find out who had been the other dragonish dowager accompanying her, with Lady Cecily, on the occasion when I had first encountered them. I hoped the other ogress’s identity might be disclosed by the pink tea guest list.
    “Oh! Yes, I have the list here. There was the Countess of Woodcrock, of course.” (She said this in such a by-the-bye manner that I knew the countess was her prize catch for the event.) “Lady Dinah Woodcrock; Count Thaddeus was unfortunately unable to attend. And then there were the three daughters of the Earl of Throstlebine, the Honourable Misses Ermengarde, Ermentrude, and Ermenine Crowe, escorted by—”
    This went on and on, until I began to despair of ever sorting it out.
    “…and the Baroness Merganser. Lady Aquilla Merganser. She is my sister, you know.”
    “Oh, really?” My interest was not feigned; did this sister by any chance look almost exactly like her? Was Lady Aquilla Merganser the one—
    “Indeed. Aquilla married rather beneath her station, I fear.” (Pompous nonsense, for, practically speaking, a baron is no better or worse a creature than a viscount.) “Her husband did not attend, but she brought along her son, Bramwell, and his fiancée, the Honourable Cecily Alistair.”
    Yes!