conversation he saw the extent of the establishment. Etheridge had kept ten maids altogether, including an upstairs maid, a downstairs maid, the tweeny, a lady's maid for Helen, laundresses, a parlourmaid, a kitch-enmaid, and scullery maids. And of course there was a housekeeper. There were two footmen, both six feet tall and nicely matched, a butler, a valet, a bootboy, and outside, two grooms and a coachman.
He watched them all relax and become easier as he told them one or two mildly humorous stories of his experience and shared tea and some of the cook's best Dundee cake, which she kept for the servants' hall. He observed the lady's maid more closely than the rest of them. She accepted some good-natured teasing because her position in the servants ranking was higher, despite her being only twenty-five or twenty-six, but as soon as he turned the subject towards Helen and James there was a very slight alteration in the angle of
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her chin, a tightening of the muscles in her shoulders, a carefulness in her eyes. She knew the pain of a woman who loves more than she is loved, and she was not going to betray it to the rest of the servants, still less to this intrusive policeman.
It was all Pitt had wanted, and when he had eaten the last crumb of his cake, he thanked them, complimented them, and went outside to find the coachman, who was busy cleaning harness in the mews.
Pitt asked the coachman if he'd noticed anyone taking an unusual interest in Etheridge's journeys, but he did not expect to learn anything. What he wanted to know was where James Carfax went, and how often.
When he left in the late afternoon he was in time to catch a hansom back across the river to St. James's and the famous gentlemen's club of Boodle's, where the coachman had said James Carfax was a member. The man had been discreet, naming only the places where such a young man might be presumed to go: his club, very occasionally his place of business, the theaters, balls and dinners of the usual social round, and in the summer the races, regattas, and garden parties which all Society attended, if they had the rank to be invited and the money to accept.
It was growing dark when Pitt found the doorman at Boodle's and with a mixture of flattery and pressure, elicited from him that Mr. James Carfax was indeed a regular visitor to the premises, that he had many friends among the members and they often sat far into the night playing cards, and yes, he supposed they drank a fair bit, as gentlemen will. No, he did not always leave in his own carriage, at times he dismissed it and left hi the vehicle of one or another of his friends. Did he return home? Well it was not for him to say where a young gentleman went when he left.
Was Mr. Carfax overall a winner at cards, or a loser? He had no idea, but certainly he paid his debts, or he would not remain a member, now would he?
Pitt agreed that he would not and had to be content with 96
that, although the thoughts that disturbed him were growing in his mind, and nothing he had learned dispelled them.
There was one more thing he could do before going home. He took another cab, from St. James's down the Buckingham Palace Road and south to the Chelsea Embankment to Barclay Hamilton's house close to the Albert Bridge. There was no use asking any professional or social acquaintance of James Carfax the sort of thing he wished to know. But Barclay Hamilton had recently lost his own father to the same grotesque death as Helen Carfax's father had met with. He could reasonably be pressed with questions more direct and might be free to answer them without fear of the social condemnation others might feel, the sense of having betrayed those who implicitly trusted him.
He was received with some surprise, but civilly enough. Now that he had the opportunity to see Barclay Hamilton on his own, and not in the circumstances of the immediate impact of bereavement, Pitt found him a man of quiet charm. The brusqueness of his manner at their first meeting had completely vanished, and he invited Pitt into his sitting room with as much curiosity as it was courteous to show.
It was not a large room, but graciously furnished, obviously for the comfort of its owner rather than to impress others. The chairs were old, the red and blue Turkey rug was worn in the center but at the outer edges still retained its stained glass vividness. The pictures, mostly watercolors, were not expensive, perhaps even amateur, but each had a mood and a delicacy that suggested they had been chosen for their charm rather than for monetary value. The books in the glass-fronted cases were arranged in order of subject, not to please the eye.
' 'I don't let my housekeeper touch anything in here, except to dust it,' Hamilton said, following Pitt's gaze with a faint smile. 'She complains, but obeys. She is greatly put out that I will not allow her to decorate the back of every chair with an antimacassar and put family photographs all over the ta-
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ble. I will permit one of my mother-that is enough. I don't care to feel stared at by an entire gallery.'
Pitt smiled back. It was a man's room, and it reminded him of his own bachelor days, although his lodgings had consisted of only one room and had
