The Dark Enquiry by DEANNA RAYBOURN

Author:DEANNA RAYBOURN [Raybourn, Deanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781460393970
Publisher: MIRA
Published: 2011-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

Brisbane declined to eat with us, pleading an engagement related to the ending of the Richmond case, but Plum appeared just in time for the fish course and I fixed him with a suspicious eye.

“Oughtn’t you to be with Brisbane, tying up the loose ends in Richmond?”

“Brisbane said he could settle Richmond alone,” he said, his expression a study in blandness.

“Feathers. He sent you to watch over me.”

Plum cocked his fez to a more rakish angle. “What if he did? It gave me a chance to dine with my two favourite sisters. Ooh, is that crab?”

He applied himself to the fish course and we talked of various things for the rest of the meal. Or rather, Portia talked—almost entirely about the baby—and Plum and I listened.

After the sweet course was cleared, we withdrew to the drawing room for tea and spirits, and Nanny Stone appeared, dressed in severe black bombazine and carrying the infant Jane.

“It is time, my lady,” she said to Portia. She settled Jane the Younger into Portia’s lap and took herself off with an air of satisfaction.

“What was all that about?” Plum asked.

Portia primmed her mouth. “Nanny Stone has apparently been chatting with the other nannies in the park. She has discovered that it is customary to have one evening off per fortnight and has decided to take it. And Sunday afternoons.”

“Good God, don’t tell me the nannies of London are organising,” Plum put in waggishly. “Do you think they will strike like the dockworkers?”

I rolled my eyes at Plum. “Those poor fellows have only just gone back to work. It is far too soon to jest about it.” The dockworkers had spent five weeks on strike in order to protest their abhorrent working conditions. Before them had been the gasworkers and before them the match-girls. It seemed all of London was protesting something, and I for one seldom read the accounts in the newspapers anymore. Their stories were simply too awful to contemplate, and I knew Portia felt the same.

“Of course the nannies are not organising,” Portia snapped. “It is simply that Nanny Stone is entitled to some private time and we mutually decided that she should be employed under the same terms as other nannies.”

It was unlike Portia to be so prickly, and as I stared at her furrowing brow, a terrible suspicion began to creep over me.

“Portia, dearest, have you ever actually been alone with the baby before?”

She muttered something unintelligible and I poked at her knee.

“Very well! No. I have never actually been alone with her. I do not know what the trouble is. I adore her, of course. I am her mother. But infants are difficult and I am not entirely certain of what needs be done when.”

“Of course not,” I soothed. “We all know how much you adore her. That is not even a matter for discussion. But most mothers have many months to prepare for motherhood. Yours was a more sudden attachment.”

“Precisely,” she said, her brow relaxing a little.

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