incident, he’d mentioned that one of his acquaintances was seeking a companion for his aunt. ‘A tremendous old lady,’ he’d said over lunch at the Savoy. He took Dolly out for a ‘treat’ each month when he came to London, usually when his wife was busy shopping with Caitlin. ‘Rather eccentric, I believe, lonely. Never recovered after her sister’s death. Do you get on with the elderly?’
‘Yes,’ said Dolly, concentrating on her champagne cocktail. It was the first time she’d had one and it made her a bit dizzy, though in a lovely unexpected way; ‘I expect so. Why not?’ Which had been good enough for the beaming Dr Rufus. He wrote her a reference and put in a word with his friend; he even offered to drive her to the interview. The nephew would have preferred to close up the ancestral house for the duration, Dr Rufus explained as they wound their way through Kensington, but his aunt had put the stopper on that. The stubborn old thing (you really did have to admire her spirit, he said) had refused to go with her nephew’s family to the safety of their country estate, digging in her heels and threatening to call her lawyer if she wasn’t left in peace.
Dolly had heard the story again many times since in the ten months she’d been working for Lady Gwendolyn. The old woman, who drew special pleasure from revisiting the slights inflicted on her by others, said that her ‘weasel’ nephew had attempted to make her leave ‘against my will’, but she’d insisted on staying ‘in the one place I’ve ever been happy. It’s where we grew up, Henny-Penny and I. They’ll have to carry me out in a coffin if they want to move me. I dare say I’ll find a way to haunt Peregrine, even then, if he dares to take it on.’ Dolly, for her part, was thrilled by Lady Gwendolyn’s stand, for it was the old girl’s insistence on staying put that had brought her to live inside the wonderful house on Campden Grove.
And oh, but it was wonderful. The outside of number 7 was classic: three storeys up and one down, white stucco render with black accents, set back from the pavement behind a small garden; the inside, however, was sublime. William Morris paper on every wall, splendid furniture that wore the divine grime of generations, shelves groaning beneath the exquisite weight of rare crystal and silver and china. It existed in stark contrast to Mrs White’s boarding house over in Rillington Place, where Dolly had handed over half her weekly shop-girl wages for the privilege of sleeping in a one-time closet that seemed always to smell of corned-beef hash. From the moment she’d first stepped through Lady Gwendolyn’s front door, Dolly had known that no matter what it took, no matter how many pounds of flesh she had to give, she must somehow come to live within its walls.
And so she had. Lady Gwendolyn had been the one fly in the ointment: Dr Rufus had been right when he said she was eccentric; he’d failed though to mention she’d been marinating in the bitter juices of abandonment for the better part of three decades. The results were somewhat frightening, and Dolly had been convinced for the first six months that her employer was on the verge of sending her off to B. Cannon & Co. to be turned into glue. She knew better now: Lady Gwendolyn could be brusque at times, but that was just her way. Dolly had also discovered recently, much to her gratification, that where the old woman’s companion was concerned, curtness masked a real affection.
‘Shall we run through the headlines then?’ said Dolly brightly, returning to perch on the end of the bed.
‘Suit yourself.’ Lady Gwendolyn gave a rubbery shrug, flap-ping one small moist paw over the other on her paunch. ‘I’m sure I don’t mind either way’
Dolly opened the latest edition of The Lady and flicked through to the Society pages; she cleared her throat, adopted a voice of fitting reverence, and began to read out the goings-on of people whose lives sounded like fantasy. It was a world Dolly had never known existed; oh, she’d seen the grand houses on the outskirts of Coventry and heard Father speak in important tones occasionally about a special order for one of the better families; but the stories Lady Gwendolyn told (when the mood took her) about the adventures she’d had with her