Page 10 of Murder at Madame Chambon's
“I have tea coming out of my ears!Lady Maxwell, my former protégé, has just had me for tea.Now there’s someone who shows gratitude for my offering her a chance when she had none.Ruined she was, and in the streets, bartering her body for coins to keep her alive until she landed on my doorstep, and I molded the broken little former governess—”
“Vicar’s daughter.She was never a governess,” Lily interrupted, for she remembered the girl well.
“What does it matter?She was never going to marry a nobleman unless I set her up for it.”
Lily shook her head.“Faith, Lady Maxwell married the nobleman who had asked her two years before she disappeared, having been ruined by another man in the meantime.Yes, you might have supplied a roof over her head, but she hated what you required her to do in order to survive.Kitty is happy in her new position.”
“And what and where is her new position?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.Now, since you have declined tea, I hope you will excuse me, as my husband’s photographer has a question to ask.”
Relieved to finally dispatch Madame Chambon, who’d spent another five minutes grumbling but who’d gleaned nothing about the location of the girls Lily had re-situated, Lily waved in Archie Benedict, her husband’s intrepid photographer.
“Mornin’ m’lady,” the stocky little man greeted her, grinning broadly as he dumped a canvas bag onto Lily’s desk.“I got a parcel of photographs to run by you before your husband returns to his office.You have the eye, but I can’t tell that to Mr.McTavish, obviously.”
“He knows it and he’s happy to leave this to me,” Lily said with a wink as he took a seat and spilled half a dozen photographic plates before her.
Lily loved her role, writing an advice column in her husband’s newspaper and having editorial control of ‘Lost Souls’, a weekly segment dedicated to showcasing someone deserving who might win support to improve their lot in life through exposure inManners and Morals.
Though the magazine continued to be of an upstanding, educational nature, readership had increased rapidly since these inclusions and life had become busy for Lily who had to juggle her responsibilities to the newspaper and with the employment agency besides being the doting mother of an infant, not to mention loving wife and her husband’s hostess.
But she had all the help she needed to ensure nothing was neglected.And so far, everyone was happy, especially Hamish, who often commented on the bloom in her cheeks which she declared she got from doing something worthwhile in her life.
One exception was Hamish’s exacting father, who owned the magazine and, though he never complained at the increase in readership and revenue, had his own ideas on Lily having any role other than that of wife and mother.
As Lily pored over which photograph to select for the Lost Souls column, Archie asked, “My Gracie misses her friend Kitty wot’s now working for this Frenchie girl, new in town.”
“Miss Tarot is Paris-educated and very English,” Lily corrected her.“And Kitty is very happy in her employment, though it has been only a few days.Miss Tarot offers nothing but praise for her ability to prepare her for each engagement.”
“Another carefree beauty here to snare a duke or a wealthy viscount.Talking of wealthy viscounts, I hear Lord Dunstable has made a wager that he’ll be married before the end of the season.”
“Your sources are correct,” Lily said with a twinkle in her eye.“I believe, in fact, that he is the wealthy viscount Miss Tarot will indeed snare.But you knew that, didn’t you?”
Archie scratched his nose.There was little he didn’t glean in the course of his work, scouring the back alleys for potential candidates for Lily’s Lost Souls column, or London’s drawing rooms for society beauties to grace the magazine’s society pages; or when visiting his sweetheart at Madame Chambon’s.It wasn’t uncommon that some of the gentlemen visitors to Madame’s House of Assignation were those he encountered in the grand drawing rooms of the rich and titled.
But only Archie would notice.He had a spectacular ability to slip beneath notice in most situations, if he wished.With his sweetheart, Gracie, and her friends working in the basements of London’s great homes, and his photographic work taking him into the grand saloons and drawing rooms of London’s upper class, he was a marvelous resource for gossip.
Not that Lily sought gossip, but it did help to know which society matron was in need of staff or where some of Madame Chambon’s girls may have come to grief—just as Lily had, having once been married to a baronet before being discovered and reunited with her real father, Lord Lambton.
Since their touching reunion the previous year, a firm bond had grown between Lily and her father, and she was now a frequent visitor to his London townhouse in Cadogan Square.
Just as she was a frequent visitor to Covent Garden, where she mixed with the flower sellers, hat makers and dancers who earned a precarious living.
It was a photograph Archie had taken of one of these girls that had caught her interest for the next Lost Souls column.For while Archie photographed people from all walks of life on his own, he often did so at Lily’s behest if she’d had a particularly illuminating conversation with someone whom she felt deserving of a mention in the magazine.
“I’m impressed with Liza Frith,” she said, pointing to a photographic plate of a dark-haired girl with impossibly large eyes and an almost imperceptible smile that managed to hint at a wealth of knowledge.“She’s brought up ten brothers and sisters on a milliner’s pittance without having to resort to what Madame Chambon can offer her.I want to print her story as a message of hope.She’s resourceful and organized, and it’s because she has the respect of her four brothers, she’s able to operate the family unit like a business so that all resources are pooled for the common good.It’s quite remarkable, really.”
“Not if you consider that the bruvvers don’t drink and actually listen to a girl.”Archie looked at the photo with a frown.“Don’t reckon it’s quite natural, if yer ask me.”
“Considering the girls in the family earn less than half of what the boys earn yet they work twice as hard, I’d say it was a testament to Liza’s ability to make them dream of a future beyond drudgery and poverty.”Lily’s tone was warning, and Archie looked suitably chastened.“Liza is a force to be reckoned with.She’s an inspiration to the working classes.A young lady who knows what she wants.”
“Like Miss Tarot.”Archie scratched his nose.“She’s been in London less than a week and already she’s linked with Lord Dunstable, though Kitty were tellin’ my Gracie she also fancied a feller by the name o’ Captain Blackheath.”
“Well, good on Miss Tarot,” said Lily, distracted as she selected photographs.“Just as long as she doesn’t rush into anything, though she seemed a very level-headed young lady when I met her last week.”Having put aside three, she sat back, saying with a wink over steepled fingers, “So, have I perhaps secured Kitty a position as a lady’s maid to the future Lady Dunstable?Now that would be a fine elevation for a young maid-of-all-work at a brothel, don’t you think?”Lily could say that word now without feeling her face flaming.The six months she’d spent at Madame Chambon’s being nourished for Mr.Montpelier when she’d escaped as mere skin and bone from the lunatic asylum had been illuminating.Fortunately, she’d never been physically threatened.
Most of the young women at the brothel lived for the day they could forge a better life.And for all her faults, Madame Chambon was not averse to them securing an alternative as mistress or in some rare cases, wife to a man of rank or wealth—though not without a sizeable kickback to herself.
The young woman with whom Lily had shared at the brothel, Celeste, had been one of these.Quiet and mysterious, Celeste’s past had never been revealed.Not even by the police who’d investigated her murder under Madame Chambon’s very roof, though the perpetrator had since been apprehended and was now serving his sentence.
