the table, still vigorous despite his bowed back and drooping face. “Why them? We’ve money enough for the room to be hempty a few nights.”
“They live upstairs,” Bertha Grizzlehurst insisted, though her face paled to match the lobster flesh peeking from the shells.
“I’ve no need o’ hassistance when it comes to my broadsides! My broadsides is known ’ither and yon and every street betwixt!”
“I don’t think positivical is a word,” Clarke observed.
“Can you prove positivically that it hain’t?” he shouted in high dudgeon.
“No,” I hastily owned, “but wouldn’t it be better to employ words which actually exist?”
“Hexistence nothing.” He regarded me with an outraged eye. “You lot will hexplicate how Mr. Vesalius Munt came to have his neck spitted like a guinea fowl, and then—”
“The room can’t be empty!”
The shriek—high but thin, like the feral cry of a shrew—rendered all three of us mute. Following this decree, Mrs. Grizzlehurst, three plates balanced on her left arm and a fourth in her right hand, set the meal upon the table.
When finished, she sat and stared at her husband; a silence of grotesque dimensions ensued.
“We’ll sup first,” Mr. Grizzlehurst said contritely, “and then—then, mind—we can talk about halternatives.”
Clarke and I ate as Mr. Grizzlehurst slurped from a lobster shell; Mrs. Grizzlehurst only gazed at her plate, relief softening her ratlike features. After supper had ended, I jotted down an account of Mr. Munt’s murder, prudently leaving out my guilt whilst doubling the gore. I did not need to ask whether it would suit; it was a mingling of my memory and imagination, and as such was criminally engaging.
Hugh Grizzlehurst read my work, snorting in approval.
“I decide which crimes deserve hadvertisement,” he admonished.
“Of course.”
“You get not a cent—just lodgings, that’s hessential.”
“Absolutely.”
“And what’ll she do, then?” he demanded, pointing at Clarke.
“Teach music lessons,” Clarke said dreamily. “All we must do is find a piano, and I shall partner with the owner quick as thinking.”
“Well,” said Mr. Grizzlehurst. He regarded his spouse as if struck by sudden melancholy. “They live upstairs, then, it’s settled.”
Smiling, Mrs. Grizzlehurst cleared the plates and uttered not another word that day . . . nor the day after that, nor the day after that, which ought to have set off plentiful warning bells in my ears and did not, more’s the pity for everyone involved.
• • •
Clarke set out to partner with a pianist upon the morrow. A week later, having failed in many attempts, she disappeared one morning and sent me into a hair-tearing panic—wondering whether she had met with misadventure, wondering whether she had tired of me. She materialised ten minutes after supper ended (which Mrs. Grizzlehurst always served us whether we had paid her the extra fourpence or not) with three shillings, which she pressed into my palm.
“I stood upon the street corner, practicing, before meeting with Mr. Jones, but I needn’t bother over using his piano.” Her smile engulfed her pretty face despite the small scale of her lips. “I always thought I had a knack for music, though Miss Lilyvale’s praise wasn’t precisely encouraging.”
“You made this much warming up your voice?” I stared stupidly at my hand.
“Imagine what I’ll earn when I’m doing it on purpose,” she concluded, skipping upstairs to wash.
Thus Clarke settled into an unlikely occupation as a street singer, trilling “Cherry Ripe” and “Poor Old Mam” whilst I penned atrocities; had we not been educated at Lowan Bridge School, learning daily despite our sorrows, I shudder to picture what would have become of us. She was even happy, I think, warbling like a strangely technical songbird, whilst I took heinous tales from my employer and translated them to actual English, with sufficient spilt viscera to please everyone.
These might have been idyllic circumstances, but they were not.
Mr. Hugh Grizzlehurst’s behaviour when drunk owned peculiarities which it failed to evince when he was sober; furthermore, these whimsical quirks tended to be visited upon the person of Mrs. Bertha Grizzlehurst. In fairness, Mr. Grizzlehurst only imbibed when he had been unsuccessful, and—as my help and his experience rendered us jointly successful—this was seldom. When every other month, however, the British Empire had been distressingly peaceable, Mr. Grizzlehurst would arrive home with a jug of gin which could either have been imbibed or employed to strip the paint from the chipped green rocking chair.
When Clarke and I had retreated upstairs, ducking to avoid the low slant of the ceiling beams, we would hear shouting. At times, the shouting would prove the climax, and we should find