A Spear of Summer Grass - By Deanna Raybourn Page 0,35

slack and the glass rolled gently to the mattress. I dropped a kiss to his beautiful, sulky mouth and tied my silk scarf around one of his wrists, hitching it firmly to the bedpost. I saw myself out.

7

I returned to Fairlight to find Dora supervising a crew of young men as they scrubbed the kitchen. She threw up her hands when she saw me and joined me on the veranda for a sundowner.

“It’s impossible. I can’t get them to understand that one doesn’t clean with dirty water and the soiled rags must be changed for new ones. All they’re doing at this point is moving the filth around. At least I found an assortment of tins that look safe enough. I told Pierre to have them opened and heated up for dinner.”

“Told Pierre? In what language, pig Latin?”

“Pantomime. If nothing else my skills at charades should improve vastly from living here. And I haven’t the faintest notion what’s in the tins. The labels have all come off, so it will just be a sort of surprise potluck.”

“Drink more and it won’t matter,” I suggested. She hesitated and I waved the bottle at her impatiently. “For God’s sake, Dora, it’s just a drink. Don’t be such a goose.”

With reluctant fingers she held out her glass for a refill. My bad influence was beginning to take hold, I decided. “Where did you get off to? I began to think a lion might have carried you away.”

I gave her a loaded smile. “Our tenant is none other than Kit Parrymore.”

She choked on her gin and it was a full minute before she could speak again. “You’re joking.”

“I would never joke about that body,” I said, stretching my arms high overhead.

“Oh, Delilah, you didn’t!”

I shrugged. “It was either that or eat his cooking for lunch. And he’s a rotten cook.”

“What is he doing in Africa?”

I told her and filled her in on the neighbours while I was at it. When I finished, she passed me an envelope.

“This came while you were fornicating with the neighbour.”

I took it and lifted a brow. “Don’t be poisonous, Dora. Hmm. Heavy stationery. Someone likes expensive paper.” I sniffed. “And jasmine perfume. God, it smells like a French whore rolled herself in the envelope.”

I pulled out a note and squinted at the scrawl of green ink, then passed it to Dora. “I can’t make it out. What does it say?”

She peered at it, holding it this way and that like a cryptographer studying a particularly tricky cipher. “Apparently Helen Farraday is delighted you’ve come and would like to host a little dinner in your honour to introduce you to the neighbourhood.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“She doesn’t let grass grow under her feet, does she? But then she never did.” Mossy had used her as an object lesson when I was making my debut of how one ought not to behave. Helen had come out when I was still in pigtails and Mossy was changing husbands as often as she changed her knickers. A Chicago heiress, Helen had taken one look at the pickings in the windy city, loaded up her meatpacking money and headed for London. She wanted an Englishman, someone with blue blood and a five-hundred-year-old name. She’d gotten neither with Rex. His family money had come the generation before and left with it, too. But he was charming as the devil and twice as handsome. Mossy always said he was the best dancer she’d ever met, and he could have had his pick of a dozen girls. Why he chose Helen was anybody’s guess, although Mossy suspected he’d been intrigued by the gossip that Helen was a nymphomaniac who had seduced three of her tutors and one of the housemaids. Of course, the money wouldn’t have been much of a deterrent, and from all accounts the marriage had been happy enough. There was infidelity of course, but since it was on both sides, nobody had reason to complain.

Dora tucked the note back into the envelope. “Will you go?”

“Of course. And you’re coming with me.”

“I wasn’t invited,” Dora said pointedly.

I shrugged. “Since when has that ever stopped me? Helen must not realise you’re here or she would have included you. I’ll write and let her know. Besides, Kit will be happy to see you. He asked after you today.”

“Did he?” If the light had been better, I was quite sure I would have seen her blush.

I slept a little better that night, probably for being in a bed at last. Dora had