straight-back chair next to his.
Mrs. Paige sniffed into her handkerchief. “They were both good girls, Miss Pramal and Miss Patel. They did their work without complaint, they studied the Bible, and they never gave a moment’s trouble.”
Maisie nodded. “Are there other women here at the moment?”
“There were three more in residence—we’ve room for more, but as I said, numbers have dropped off. The police thought they would be better off at another house—a safer place, they said. Apparently they’ve found them lodgings somewhere across the water, not far from a police station, but I don’t know which one. I dread to think what the neighbors might say—and all we ever wanted to do was some good for those less fortunate. There might have been a bit of gossip about what we did here, but once people knew our ladies were courteous and kept themselves tidy, there wasn’t much talk at all.”
Maisie suspected that Mrs. Paige might be the daughter of a vicar, or at least brought up in a home with parents who observed the tenets of the church with an intensity that bordered on the oppressive; she had a sense that the woman’s religious belief was something deeply ingrained. As she spoke, she clutched the plain silver cross worn around her neck, and her diction revealed a person not originally from southeast London. Her husband, though, seemed as if he were from a family of tradespeople, perhaps having chosen missionary work following a reigniting of faith. If she allowed her mind to create a story for him, she would say he had been affected by a charismatic man of the cloth who had visited the area when he was at an impressionable age, possibly in his early twenties, perhaps at a time when he was enduring a period of self-doubt. While he spoke well, there was the occasional pronunciation that suggested a childhood spent in the local borough. The couple had likely met later than one might expect of a youthful romance, and then forged a bond based upon wishing to do the work of the God they worshipped, with the ayah’s hostel being the culmination of that work.
Mr. Paige was a lean man, with clothes that made him seem taller and thinner than he was. Gray trousers were topped with a gray shirt, navy blue tie, and maroon sleeveless knitted pullover; errors in the cable suggested a homemade garment, and that Mrs. Paige was an easily distracted knitter. Paige’s hair was cut very short at the back and sides, as if he were newly conscripted into the army, though the weathering at the nape of his neck indicated a man who was used to being in his garden.
“Had anyone ever shown a grudge towards the women?” asked Maisie. “I know the police will have asked that question, but I must press it upon you again.”
Husband and wife shook their heads at the same time. Paige answered. “We do good work here, Miss Dobbs, and our women don’t have much time to go out meeting people, though they are over the age of consent, so they can go for a walk or to the library if they want, when their work is done. You see we have rules—about lights out and being here for Bible study—so they don’t have too much in the way of loose time on their hands. And in general they don’t have a lot of spending money. Our intention is to get them back to India when their savings allow it—and of course, we want them to go back with something, so that they’re not destitute when they disembark from the ship.”
“I understand that you thought Miss Pramal often had more funds than her allowance might suggest, Mr. Paige. Can you account for that?”
Paige shrugged. “She seemed to have more money at times, but when I asked her about it, she just said she’d always been like a mouse with crumbs, saving them up in her hole.”
Mrs. Paige interjected. “Miss Pramal sometimes had a bit of lip on her. She could say something without being obviously cheeky, but when you thought about it, you knew she meant it. As if we only gave them the crumbs off the table, and that she slept in a hole. She could be like that, though most of the time she kept herself to herself. Went to the library a lot. And she and Miss Patel would go out together, on a nice evening, just for a walk. Miss