Chapter 6

Chapter Six

The Schlomskys were not what I had expected. I thought they would be like everyone’s—or at least like my—image of the stereotypical American couple. Loud, and brash, and dressed just a degree or two over the top from what was tasteful. A bit like Flossie herself, to be honest, with her indulgence in fluttering pink panels and beads and tassels. But they weren’t. Not even close. Mrs. Schlomsky wore a perfectly plain and boring summer ensemble in navy and white, off the rack instead of haute couture, and without a flutter or a tassel in sight. The skirt was several inches too long to fit with current fashion, and so was the lady’s hair. No bob for Mrs. Schlomsky.

She and her husband were clearly used to people bowing and scraping to them, however. When Evans didn’t jump quickly enough, the millionaire Mr. Schlomsky poked at him with his walking stick.

“My daughter. Where is she?”

“I don’t believe Miss Schlomsky is in the building,” Evans said as he skipped away from the point of the cane.

“Not home?” The parents exchanged a glance.

“I knew we should have sent another telegram,” Mrs. Schlomsky muttered. “The first one probably didn’t make it here. If she’d known we were coming, she’d have been here.”

“If she knew we were coming,” Mr. Schlomsky added, “she would have been at the hotel last night. Or at least first thing this morning.”

I cleared my throat, and they both looked at me as if the vase of flowers on the sideboard had given voice. “Hello,” I said, feeling a bit awkward about it. “My name is Pippa Darling. Flossie and I are… um… friends.”

Or at least Flossie had always been friendly to me, and more than friendly to Christopher and Crispin. Christopher had always been terrified of her, and although Crispin was far more capable of taking care of himself, I still didn’t appreciate her constantly throwing herself at him.

Naturally I didn’t say any of those things to the Schlomskys, who were eyeing me up and down. “Friends?” Mrs. Schlomsky echoed, a bit blankly. “Flossie?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Is there a reason I shouldn’t be friendly with your daughter?”

She didn’t answer immediately, and I added, “She’s my neighbor. We’re around the same age. She’s quite open and welcoming, you know.” A bit too welcoming with certain people, perhaps, but we wouldn’t go into that. “And my flat-mate is the youngest nephew of the Duke of Sutherland,” I added, “so it’s not as if we’re unsuitable company?—”

“No, no,” Mrs. Schlomsky waved me into silence. “You misunderstood me. I’m delighted that Florence has made friends. She was always so quiet and studious at home.”

Quiet and studious?

“The change of scenery must have been good for her,” I said, because quiet and studious were two of the last words I would have used to describe Flossie.

Then again, most parents probably have no idea of what their children get up to when left to their own devices. I didn’t think Uncle Herbert and Aunt Roz knew that Christopher dressed in drag and went to monthly balls under the guise of Kitty Dupree, and Uncle Harold hadn’t had any idea of the excesses Crispin indulged in until Simon Grimsby, the late Duke’s valet, exposed them back in April. And Wiltshire is only a few hours from London, so Uncle Harold, Uncle Herbert, and Aunt Roz had less excuse than the Schlomskys for not knowing what their offspring was up to.

For a second it occurred to me to wonder whether my own parents, had they been alive, would have recognized the person I had become. Would I even be the person I was now had the war not derailed everything in Europe?

Probably not, I had to admit. If I had spent a peaceful life with my parents in Germany, I would be a different person than I was. I had become Pippa Darling instead of Philippa Schatz from leaving home at an early age, and from being integrated into the Astley family from then on, and from Christopher, around whom most of my existence had revolved for the past twelve years.

No, coming to England had changed my life, and had changed me into someone different than I would otherwise have been, and it wasn’t unlikely that the same thing had happened to Flossie, on her own for the first time in a strange country.

“When do you expect our daughter back?” Mrs. Schlomsky inquired of Evans, who looked mildly surprised.

“I wouldn’t know, Mrs. Schlomsky. Miss Schlomsky didn’t tell me where she was going or when she was returning.”

I hadn’t seen Flossie this morning. I hadn’t seen her yesterday either, although Crispin had said he’d done. Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t seen her since I’d delivered that telegram two evenings ago.

“Did you say you’d sent a telegram?” I asked the Schlomskys.

They both stared at me, startled, but after a moment, Hiram Schlomsky nodded. “We did, young lady. We crossed from New York to Southampton on the RMS Berengaria, and spent a night at the Star Hotel before we came up here to London yesterday. We telegrammed Florence from Southampton the first night. We assumed she would come and find us at the Savoy when we got here, and when she didn’t, we decided to give it a night. And now here we are.”

He spread his hands. Or at least he spread one, the other still held the walking stick. The head was shaped as some sort of animal, I saw. Something monstrous and curly with horns, perhaps a yak or a bison.

“I think I saw your telegram arrive,” I told him. “Or at least I saw a telegram arrive. I was the one who brought it upstairs to her. Did it begin with the word surprise ?”

They both nodded. “We didn’t tell her we were coming,” Hiram Schlomsky rumbled. “We haven’t seen her since she left Toledo last fall. We wanted to surprise her.”

“Well, unless someone else sent a telegram that began with surprise on the same day, it got here. I stood right in front of her when she opened it.”

“Then she should have come and found us,” Mrs. Schlomsky said, her tone somewhere between peevish and worried.

I nodded sympathetically. “I’m not sure why she didn’t, but she was alive and well as of yesterday evening. I haven’t seen her myself since the telegram arrived, but Christopher saw her later that evening, and Crispin saw her yesterday. Lord St George.”

I exchanged a glance with Evans, who nodded. “Your daughter was on her way out at the same time as Miss Darling’s cousin last evening. That was the last time I saw her, as well. The door is locked at eleven, when I go off duty. She must have come in after that.”

Or not come in at all, although of course I wasn’t insensitive enough to actually say that.

“Perhaps you’d be so kind as to open the door to her flat for us, Evans?” I asked. “I’m sure Miss Schlomsky would want her parents to be as comfortable as possible while they wait for her.”

Evans hesitated, and I added, “They’re probably the ones paying for it, you know.”

Flossie hadn’t a job, so her parents’ fortune surely provided her rent and spending money, in the same way that Uncle Herbert was the one paying for Christopher’s and my flat and our allowances. Evans would have let Uncle Herbert up with no questions asked if my uncle were to show up here and wanted to go upstairs. Evans had even sent Uncle Harold up without announcing him just a month or two ago, and Crispin’s father had nothing whatsoever to do with the financials for the flat. In justice to Evans Uncle Harold is, of course, a duke, and his son and heir had been crashed out in my bed at that point, so there were mitigating circumstances.

And no, it wasn’t the way it sounds. I slept on the Chesterfield in the sitting room that night, in case you somehow got the idea that we’d been sharing. Naturally, that was what Uncle Harold had been worried about. As if sharing a bed with me could have ruined his son and heir any further than Crispin had already ruined himself.

“Of course,” Evans said. “One moment.”

He disappeared behind the counter to dig out the keys to Florence’s flat. I turned to the Schlomskys and smiled politely. “I trust your trip to London was uneventful? And you’re staying at the Savoy, you said?”

They nodded.

“I had dinner there just last night,” I said brightly. “And tea the day before. Lovely place, isn’t it?”

“It’s adequate,” Sarah Schlomsky informed me, as if it was likely that Toledo had anything better to offer.

“No trouble on the ocean voyage, I hope?”

“A bit of bad weather south of Greenland,” Hiram Schlomsky said with an expansive wave of his cane. “Nothing to worry about.”

Indeed.

By then, Evans had returned, jingling Florence’s keys enticingly, and we headed into the lift. “Florence and I live on the same floor,” I explained as the lift took us up two stories. “She’s to the left down the hallway and I am—we are; I share a flat with my cousin—to the right, but Florence and I see one another rather frequently going up and down. And she’ll knock on our door occasionally and come in for a drink.”

“A drink?” Mrs. Schlomsky said blankly. She glanced at her husband.

I nodded. “Cocktails are rather the thing among the younger set here in London. It might be different where you are from. Florence tried to explain to me where it’s located. The mid-west, she said?”

I had absolutely no idea where the mid-west might be—somewhere in America, obviously, although Flossie’s directions had made no sense whatsoever. One of them had included the words, ‘drive west for eighteen hours,’ which would have put us in the middle of the Atlantic if we had tried to do it from here—but it sounded rather corn-fed. Millions of dollars aside, the Schlomskys might not be familiar with London society, or any other society, either. There might be no society to speak of in Toledo.

“Our daughter doesn’t drink,” Sarah Schlomsky said, as the lift doors opened and Evans got busy pulling the grille back from the opening.

I opened my mouth, and closed it again. Of course Flossie drank. I had watched her do it, in my very own flat. I had also seen her come home rather giggly on more than one occasion.

I didn’t insist on my version of reality, though. If the Schlomskys wanted to believe that their daughter was a studious and quiet teetotaler, to try to convince them otherwise would only annoy. They’d see the truth for themselves once Flossie turned up.

So I trailed behind instead, as Evans led the way down the hall towards Flossie’s door. And then I waited as he knocked on the door, and fitted the key in the lock, and twisted it, and pushed the door open. “Miss Schlomsky?”

Sarah Schlomsky pushed past him with Hiram right behind. “Florence, darling? It’s Mother!”

She headed into the flat while Evans wiggled the key back out of the lock and stood for a second, undecided, with it in his hand.

“I’ll give it to them,” I said, holding out my hand. “I know you’re not supposed to leave the lobby empty.”

Evans hesitated. “It’s the only spare key, Miss Darling. If it gets lost…”

“Just leave it on the table, then.” I nodded to the small console sitting by the foyer wall under a modern painting of colorful blobs. “We won’t lose it. We’ll need it to lock the front door again, for one thing. So no chance it will be locked in here.”

Evans nodded.

“I’ll tell them to drop it off with you on their way out,” I said, and lowered my voice. “Listen, Evans…”

“Yes, Miss Darling?”

“The last time you saw Miss Schlomsky?—”

He eyed me.

“When she went out last night, with my… with Lord St George, was there anything about her that you noticed? Anything—” I hesitated, “unusual?”

“No, Miss Darling,” Evans said.

“Nothing? Crispin said she seemed distracted…?”

“No, Miss Darling.” The doorman shook his head. “She appeared just as normal. Came out of the lift chattering to Lord St George as usual.”

“And clinging to him,” I said sourly, “I suppose?”

“Yes, Miss Darling.”

Yes, of course. “I don’t suppose you have any idea where she was going?”

Evans shook his head. “No, Miss Darling. Lord St George helped her into the motorcar and I watched them drive off, but I don’t know where they were headed.”

“They left together?” Crispin hadn’t mentioned that part.

Evans nodded. “Yes, Miss Darling. To the left down the street.”

In the direction of the Savoy Hotel. And also in the direction of quite a few other things. There’s quite a lot of real estate in the area between the Essex House Mansions and the Savoy Hotel. There are also Hackney cab stands, and entrances to the Underground, and at least one train station. Flossie could have been headed anywhere in London or beyond, really. The fact that she’d left with St George didn’t mean anything. She hadn’t been with him when he brought me home a couple of hours later, so at some point they had parted ways.

“Thank you, Evans,” I said. “That’s helpful. I’ll make sure you get the key back.” I shooed him gently out the door before I went off in search of the Schlomskys.

Flossie’s flat was in most respects a mirror image of Christopher’s and mine. Parquet floor in the foyer, sitting room beyond. In this flat, the bedrooms were to the right and the kitchen and dining room to the left, while in Christopher’s and my flat, it’s the opposite.

And Flossie’s tastes ran to the more modern and—dare I say it—garish. Christopher’s and my flat is mostly furnished with castoffs from Sutherland House. When Uncle Herbert had agreed to let us move out of Beckwith Place and in together in the Essex House Mansions, he had raided the attics of Sutherland House for anything he thought we might need. A few small things had been brought up from Wiltshire, but most of the bigger pieces had merely made it across town from the surplus in Mayfair. As a result, our flat was furnished in semi-threadbare heirlooms and almost nothing later than 1870.

Flossie, on the other hand, must have bought everything new. It was all streamlined, very art deco and modern, and all mixed with Florence’s favorite pink. The array of pillows on the Chesterfield ran the gamut from palest shell pink to hot fuchsia, and from velvet to silk and everything in-between. There were enough tassels and flourishes to outfit the entire mansion block, not just Flossie’s flat.

I averted my eyes politely from the stack of gossip magazines on the low coffee table. I recognized the covers, and knew that several had images of St George inside; I had seen them myself, and the fact that Flossie had a collection of them on her table struck me as foreboding.

Or at least it would have struck me as foreboding had I had the slightest fear that she would succeed in her attempts to vamp Christopher’s cousin. I didn’t. If St George ended up married to someone who wasn’t his secret lady-love, it was more likely to be Lady Laetitia Marsden instead of Florence Schlomsky.

The Schlomsky parents were back in the bedroom wing. I could hear their voices in the background as I made my way across the parquet floors, past the too-modern, too-flashy furniture, and to the hallway.

Flossie must have claimed the slightly bigger back bedroom—Christopher’s in our flat—for her own. Christopher had tried to talk me into taking it—it had a window looking out on the courtyard, while the front bedroom, closer to the hallway, had no natural light—but I had insisted. I was only living there through the generosity of Uncle Herbert, and I wasn’t going to deprive Uncle Herbert’s son of the nicer bedroom. Besides, I sleep better when it’s dark, anyway. Might as well avoid the ambient light from outside and make it easier. It’s never really properly dark in London at night, with all the street lights.

What was my bedroom in the other flat had been turned into Flossie’s closet, I discovered as I got closer. I glanced through the open door on my way past, and then stopped as my brows climbed up my forehead.

Where I had fit an entire bedroom set into the room—bed, tallboy, dressing table and chair—Flossie’s front bedroom held nothing but apparel. Clothes and shoes and handbags and hats, hanging on racks, piled on shelves, lining the walls. Christopher would have been in heaven—or at least he would have been if he and Flossie were anywhere close to the same size. To me, it looked excessive to the point of obsession. Not to mention how very pink it all was.

And it wasn’t even well-maintained. Silk scarves were piled in baskets, shoes without shoe-trees were tossed on the floors with no attempt to line them up neatly. Unmentionables in pretty pastels—mostly shades of white, cream, and pink—overflowed their drawers. And in the middle of the room, Sarah Schlomsky stood with her mouth open, taking in the mess with wide, shocked eyes.

I smiled sympathetically. “Was she more tidy at home?”

Christopher had certainly been more tidy at Beckwith Place than he was now. I was mostly the same, I thought, but then I hadn’t spent so much of my time suppressing who I really was, either.

Not that Christopher is careless. All of Kitty’s paraphernalia is housed in my wardrobe and on my dressing table. Living alone, in a flat in London, made it much easier for Christopher to do what he wanted and to be who he was, but we did still get occasional visits from family, and there was no point in flaunting his monthly cross-dressing.

Mrs. Schlomsky was clearly shocked down to the toes of her very sensible shoes to see her daughter’s excesses. She looked around as if she had never seen anything like it.

“This is—” She ran down and looked around one more time before turning to me. “Is this really my daughter’s apartment?”

Flat , I translated in my head. And nodded. “Yes, Mrs. Schlomsky. This is Florence’s flat. There’s another bedroom in the back. I’m sure she’s sleeping in that one.”

There was no room to sleep here.

A tiny wrinkle appeared between her brows. “Where does Ruth sleep?”

“Who is Ruth?” I didn’t think Flossie had a flat-mate. I had certainly never seen one, and surely I would have, when we had lived in the same building for half a year now.

“The maid,” Sarah Schlomsky said, as if it were obvious, when in fact it was anything but.

“I don’t think Florence has a maid,” I said, since I knew very well that she didn’t. “She’s never mentioned a maid, and I’ve never seen one, either.”

Mrs. Schlomsky sniffed. “Of course she has a maid, you silly girl. We wouldn’t have sent our daughter halfway around the world without a maid.”

“Of course.” I nodded politely. “It’s just that I’ve never met the maid. And I don’t know where she’d be sleeping. There are only two bedrooms in this flat, and if this one is in use as a closet…”

There was the pantry, I supposed, if Florence was heartless enough to relegate her maid there just so she herself could make use of both bedrooms. But that didn’t explain why I had never seen or heard of Ruth.

Mrs. Schlomsky glanced around again, but there was no way to deny what I had just said.

“Hiram!” She brushed past me without so much as a by-your-leave. “Hiram!”

Her voice disappeared down the hallway to my right. I stayed where I was long enough to take another look around the room—around Flossie’s closet—before I followed, past the lavatory and to the bedroom at the end of the hall.

I reached the doorway in time to see Mrs. Schlomsky confront her husband, both hands on his arms. “Ruth, Hiram! Where is Ruth?”

Mr. Schlomsky looked around, as if expecting the missing Ruth to materialize out of thin air. She didn’t, and it’s hard to say whether she could have, had she wanted to. The room was chock full of furniture, to such a degree that there was hardly any floor space left. I stayed in the doorway, since doing anything else would have put me as close to Hiram Schlomsky as his wife was currently, and that would have been practically indecent.

Flossie had a reproduction four-poster bed with gauzy hangings—I knew it was a reproduction because I have slept in the real thing at Sutherland Hall—along with a matching tallboy and a makeup table with a chair, and a small loveseat and a footstool and of course a night table or two—one on each side of the bed. The loveseat and footstool were both upholstered in rose velvet, while the draperies and bed-hangings were shell pink. A fussy lawn nightgown, dripping with ribbons and lace, lay across the counterpane.

At this point, the sheer level of pinkness was overwhelming. I knew that Florence favored the color—had seen her in dress after pink dress—but I hadn’t realized that everything else inside her flat would be in shades of pink, also. It was cloying and too sweet and a bit like being inside someone’s mouth after they’d sucked on a peppermint.

I tried to push it aside to focus on the Schlomskys and their dilemma. No Florence, and now no Ruth.

“I don’t know, dear,” Hiram told his wife. “She’s not here.”

“But she has to be here, Hiram!” Flossie’s mother clutched at her husband’s forearms, her voice turning shrill. “They both have to be here!”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said from the doorway, and they both turned to me. Sarah frowned, and Hiram pursed his lips. I added, “Honestly, it happens to a lot of young people when they get out from under their parents’ thumbs.”

They both narrowed their eyes, and all right, it might not have been the most diplomatic way of putting it. I soldiered on. “Your daughter probably decided to enjoy her freedom while she was away from home. So she let go of the maid and started to take care of herself. It’s not a bad thing. Independence and an ability to take care of oneself are healthy.”

Sarah Schlomsky drew breath, her chest inflating like a pouter pigeon, and I braced myself. But instead of letting the breath out on invective in my direction, Mrs. Schlomsky merely informed me, in a tight but civil voice, that, “Our daughter is not the independent sort.”

“She came all the way to England by herself,” I pointed out. “Someone wouldn’t do that who wasn’t at least a little bit interested in independence.”

“Florence came to England for her health,” Mrs. Schlomsky said stiffly.

“Her health?” There’s nothing healthy about the British climate. It’s chilly and gray and wet most of the time.

Hiram Schlomsky put a hand on his wife’s arm to stop her from responding. “Didn’t you say you know our daughter, Miss…Sweetling, was it?”

“Darling,” I said, while I thanked my lucky stars that St George hadn’t been around to hear that. He would never let it go.

Hiram nodded. “Miss Darling. Of course.”

“And I do know your daughter. She has lived down the hall from me for as long as I’ve been in the Essex House Mansions. And she’s a friendly sort, so I’ve seen rather a lot of her.”

They exchanged a look. Mrs. Schlomsky murmured something, and her husband shook his head. “You’re sure we’re talking about the same girl?”

Who else would we be talking about? “She’s around my age,” I said. “A little shorter than me, a bit more curvy.”

I have what is generally known as a boyish figure, with not much in the way of hips or a bust. Perfect for the current fashions. Florence, meanwhile, took after her mother; both of them shaped in the traditional mold.

“She has brown bobbed hair and a round face with pink cheeks,” I continued. Mrs. Schlomsky opened her mouth and then closed it again. Perhaps Flossie had acquired the bob since she left America. Nothing unusual about that, either, especially if her mother didn’t approve of short hair. “She has an American accent. And lots of… um…” I flushed, “she has a big, bright smile and very nice teeth.”

They both nodded. “That does sound like our Florence,” Hiram Schlomsky said.

Well, of course it did.

“I don’t know where she might be,” I added. “We don’t spend much time together outside of the Essex House. But I’m sure she’ll be home safe and sound by this evening. She does keep a busy schedule. She probably just spent the night with a friend.”

“Do you know any of her friends?” Sarah Schlomsky wanted to know, and I had to tell them both that I didn’t.

“I’m afraid we don’t travel in the same circles. Christopher and I stay away from his parents’ generation—” We hadn’t come to London to deal with the peerage, had we, nor to make advantageous marriages, “—but we’re also not terribly keen on the Society of Bright Young Persons.”

I saw enough of St George as it was. And I had seen entirely too much of Lady Laetitia Marsden and her ilk.

“Is she—” Sarah Schlomsky’s brows drew together. “Does Florence spend time with the Society of Bright Young Persons?”

“Not as far as I know,” I assured her. The stories about the Society’s exploits must have made their way across the pond too, it seemed. “The one time Crispin was on his way to a Jungmann sisters bash and he gave Florence a lift, she was going to Lady Montfort’s, she told me. He hasn’t mentioned meeting her while he’s been out running around with his friends.”

They usually met right here at the Essex House Mansions when they met at all, usually in the lift… although it was perhaps best not to mention those encounters to Flossie’s mother. If she had been shocked to learn of her daughter’s new cosmopolitan wardrobe and bobbed hair, she would be appalled to hear about Florence’s exploits with young men—or at least her exploits vis-à-vis St George, which were the only ones I had witnessed.

No, much better to let Flossie breach that subject herself when she came home.

“Hasn’t she told you what she’s been up to?” I ventured instead.

“We hear from her once in a while,” Sarah Schlomsky said. “Not as often as we expected.”

“Or we were afraid of,” her husband added, sotto voce .

Sarah gave him a look before turning back to me. “We’d feared Florence would have a difficult time acclimating. You’re all so reserved compared to what we’re used to.”

She gave me a disgruntled look. I opened my mouth to apologize, but before I could, she had gone on. “But it seems as if she’s settled in all right. I’m glad.”

“For what it’s worth, Florence has always seemed happy whenever I’ve seen her,” I said. And added, a bit grudgingly, “She’s very personable.”

A bit too much so, especially where certain members of the opposite gender are concerned.

“We’re a friendly bunch in Toledo,” Hiram Schlomsky said, preening, even as his wife gave him a jaundiced look.

“Well,” I said, “I’m certain Florence will turn up today, or if not, at least she’ll be here tomorrow morning. Perhaps she got her dates mixed up and thought you weren’t going to be in London until today.”

They glanced at each other, but didn’t respond.

“If there’s anything I can do in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to let me know. I live just down the hall.” I gave them the number of our flat, and added, “We’re not on the telephone, but you can always ask Evans to knock us up.”

They exchanged a glance, and Sarah Schlomsky’s lips twitched. “If you wouldn’t mind, Miss Sweetling—” her husband began.

“Darling.”

“—Miss Darling. If you see Florence, would you contact us at the Savoy to let us know that she’s back?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’d be delighted.”

Evans was much more likely to see her than I was, of course. He’d catch her coming in, as long as she did so before eleven o’clock. Although I supposed it wouldn’t be all that much of an inconvenience to stop by a few times tonight and knock on Flossie’s door…

“We’ll leave word with the doorman on our way out,” Sarah Schlomsky said, “but we would appreciate it very much if you would keep an eye out too, Miss Darling. As a friend of Florence’s.”

“Of course.” I smiled politely. “It was lovely to meet you both. I’ll look forward to seeing you both again soon.”

They murmured something in response, and I withdrew, down the hall to my own flat and to Christopher’s company.