Free Justice Hall by Laurie R. King

luncheon?”
    “They may be stopping here for a day or two. Perhaps more,” Marsh told her.
    Her eyes went wide in dismay. “What, over the week-end? Oh, Marsh, why didn’t you tell me earlier we were having additional guests?”
    “It was just now decided.”
    “Well, next time you must let Mrs Butter know in advance.” It was a gentle scold, for the sake of keeping face before guests, but she must have heard the edge to it because she turned to me with a little laugh. “Men—they just don’t understand the servant problem, do they? We have to coddle Mrs Butter—where would we be if she up and left? Anyway, lovely to know you won’t be leaving right away, do feel free to stay on until Monday—we’ll have to get together for a nice long girlish chat. And at least we won’t have to worry about thirteen at table Saturday night.”
    She stepped over and kissed the air near her brother’s cheek, which gesture he accepted without a flinch, and then she swept from the room. Alistair slowly let out a gusty breath, and reached for his cigarettes. All four of us twitched, like a group of hens settling their ruffled feathers, and I reflected that my own visceral response to the accents of power and privilege had at least become more controllable over the years. I was still intimidated by women like Phillida Darling, but I did not show it outwardly.
    “We were, I believe,” Holmes said, recalling us to our state before Lady Phillida had entered, “speaking of the nature of change.”
    Alistair shook out his match and cut into any response his cousin might have made. “Not here. Not with that woman and her husband listening in at the windows. I even caught the daughter with her eye to a key-hole last week.”
    “This afternoon,” Marsh said, sounding resigned. “After lunch we will put on our boots and remove ourselves from windows and key-holes.”
    The lack of hope or even interest in his voice stung me into speech. “We did come here to help,” I told the duke sharply.
    As if I had not spoken, he flicked his cigarette into the fire and left the room.
     
     
       Luncheon was every bit as difficult as we had been led to anticipate, with Marsh silent, Alistair monosyllabic, and Lady Phillida making constant gay forays in her quest for information. Sidney Darling appeared after the rest of us had settled to our first course, full of apologies (“Trunk call to London; business couldn’t wait”), bonhomie (“Alistair old man, been a while”), and charm (“Perfectly splendid to meet friends of my brother-in-law; what a perfectly lovely frock on you, Miss Russell. I say, any relation to Bedford?”). Sidney Darling was a tall, thin, languid, inbred aristocrat with protruding blue eyes and the pencil-thin moustache and sleek light hair of a film star, dressed in a height-of-fashion dove-grey lounge suit with Prince of Wales turn-ups. His topics of conversation ran the narrow gamut from horse racing and shotgun makers to the best spots to winter along the Riviera. His response to our lack of interest in those accepted passions of the leisured class was mild surprise followed by a pitying smile. Sidney Darling did indeed set one’s teeth on edge.
    Despite their traditional interests, however, I could see that the Darlings were not cut to the peer’s age-old pattern. Certainly, they were the very definition of old money—at least, the wife was; nonetheless, the Darlings moved in a social milieu that included film directors, the sons and daughters of American tycoons, progressive European novelists, and the sorts of artists more often seen in newspaper columns than on museum walls. This was, I thought, the new generation of the entitled, whose traditional studied lack of interest in the getting of money, the dictates of fashion, or human beings outside their circle was being modified to include the people and places, music and talk of the West End, Europe, and even brazen America. Indeed, Lady Phillida’s own