Never Land the First Fish

Chapter Nine

This was the third place Julia had dragged him to look at. No. To be fair, she insisted that she could go on her own, but Gills was not about to let her wander all over an unfamiliar city without any escort but the hansom cab driver.

The cab pulled up before a brick building six stories high and ten windows wide, each window pedimented in mock-stone work, grey against the light buff of the bricks.

Julia ran lightly up the short flight of stairs to the double doors in the centre of the building, one of which stood open. Gills stopped to pay the driver to wait while they examined the place. "I expect we'll be quick," he told the man. Julia had rejected the last two places in less than fifteen minutes apiece, and the second one had been very similar to this.

Inside the building, Julia was already talking to an older woman with a thin wiry body, a prune-wrinkled face, and a basilisk stare that set a hitch in his stride as he approached.

"This is a women's boarding house," she informed him, taking a belligerent step in his direction. The Irish lilt in her voice in no way softened it.

Julia put a hand on her arm. "My brother is helping me with my search, Mrs O'Neal."

"Brother, is it?" She snorted. "Brother or no, he'll have to stay in the visitors' parlour, Miss Marloughe. No males allowed, isn't it, except in this foyer and visitors' parlour. That's the Rules of the house, Mr Marloughe. No exceptions."

Gills found himself ushered into a small and depressingly gloomy room, filled with overstuffed chairs and gleamingly clean side tables covered with cloths and sporting ornaments and vases of dried flowers. The small fireplace in which a fire was laid but not lit was topped by a large mantel smothered under even more ornaments. Paintings of landscapes and kittens, unimpressively executed, crowded the wall, almost obscuring the busy pattern of the dark wallpaper.

And there he stayed.

In the first place they'd viewed, they hadn't got beyond the front desk, an ornately-carved edifice worthy of an elite bank, set in a reception hall replete with marble and expensive artwork. Julia had asked the cost of accommodation – six dollars a week – had thanked the impeccably dressed matron who had arrived to answer their question, and had turned on her heel to leave.

"It's perfect," Gills insisted. "If you won't continue at the hotel with Maddox and me, let me pay your rent here. It's cheaper than the hotel, so that should please you, and I wouldn't worry about you if you were here. You'd be safe, Julia, and you'd be comfortable, too. Your own suite of rooms! Isn't that worth a little extra?"

The stubborn woman insisted that she was going to pay her own way, now that she had a job, and the desirable residence cost half as much again as she earned. "Besides," she pointed out in her undeniably aristocratic accent, her chin tilted at an arrogant angle, "I'm a maid now, Lord Joseph. Maids don't stay in places like this."

But the second place defeated even her unexpected frugal streak. No-one came when they rang the bell on the dusty counter top just inside the door, so they made their own way up to the third floor, passing empty niches that may once have held statues or vases in the building's grander days as a private house.

Numbers on the doors led them to the advertised apartment, and the woman who came to their knock appeared respectable, if weary. She let them into a relatively commodious but cluttered apartment. A large room, furnished as a living room, and four other rooms visible through open doors. "The kitchen is through there," their hostess explained, pointing, "those two rooms are for me and the children, and this would be your room, Miss Marloghe."

Extracting themselves took a few minutes, as the woman interrupted them twice to disappear into one of the rooms she'd indicated as her own to resolve problems – the first, a loud argument in childish voices, the second a loud crash followed by complete silence.