Free Splendors and Glooms by Laura Amy Schlitz

“By the by, dearie, something’s gone bad in the larder. I don’t know what it is, but the smell is very high.” She waved her handkerchief under her nose. “P’raps you could help Luce sort it out.”
    Lizzie Rose’s heart sank. Mrs. Pinchbeck’s larder was a torture chamber for anyone with a sensitive nose, and her maid-of-all-work, Luce, was the most dismal woman in London. Lizzie Rose made up her mind that cleaning the larder would be Parsefall’s job.
    Mrs. Pinchbeck returned to the drama she was enacting. “I couldn’t bear those strange men lookin’ at my boudoir,” she said with a shudder of feminine disgust. “I’ve always been very delicate and modest in my ways. ‘You keep out of there!’ I said, and I stood in the doorway. ‘Move aside!’ the copper says to me! And I said to him, ‘You may cast me aside, you may dash me to the ground as a frail, weak woman, but never’”— Mrs. Pinchbeck’s voice sank impressively —“‘
never
shall you cause me to tremble before you!’”
    It was a superb moment. Mrs. Pinchbeck thrust out her bosom and flung back her head. Lizzie Rose knelt upright. Together they struck attitudes to create what was called (in the theatre) a Picture.
    They held the Picture for a few seconds, so that the imaginary audience at the far end of the room could applaud.
    “Dear Mrs. Pinchbeck,” breathed Lizzie Rose, “how brave you were! How pure!”
    “He felt it,” Mrs. Pinchbeck said with simple pride. “I could tell ’e felt it. But that didn’t stop ’im.” Her face darkened. “’E was too set on ransacking the house.”
    Lizzie Rose’s brow puckered. She forgot the scene they were enacting. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “If Miss Wintermute ran away from home, she’d come to see Parsefall and me. She wouldn’t hide in your boudoir or creep down to the larder.”
    “They think she was kidnapped,” Mrs. Pinchbeck said sagely. “They think Grisini kidnapped her and ’id her in the ’ouse.” She took the gin bottle from under the sofa and poured a tablespoon into her glass. “It don’t matter,” she concluded, and drank. “They won’t find anything, any more than they did the last time.”
    “The last time?” Lizzie Rose echoed.
    Mrs. Pinchbeck eyed the level of gin in the bottle, sighed, and pushed it under the sofa again. “Must have been eleven, twelve years ago. It was just before I met Mr. Pinchbeck and settled down. I was in Brighton, at the Theatre Royal — I was Angela in
The Castle Spectre
— and Grisini was playing at the Dome. We was staying in the same boarding’ouse. And this little boy went missing. He’d come to the Dome to see the
fantoccini,
and afterward his nurse brought ’im backstage, because he wanted to see up close. And then — the next day it was — he went missing. Everyone thought Grisini ’ad something to do with it, because ’e was a foreigner. So the coppers come to the boarding’ouse. They was all over, poking and prying and asking their questions. But they couldn’t prove anything, because Grisini never done it.”
    The front door slammed shut. Lizzie Rose heard the sound of barking. Parsefall had returned with breakfast. The parrot, excited by the cries of the dogs, shouted, “Ruination!” The canary burst into song, beginning with a series of earsplitting chirps and ending with a trill.
    Lizzie Rose leaned toward Mrs. Pinchbeck, not wanting to lose the thread of the story. “But did they ever find him?” she said imploringly. “Did they ever find the little boy?”
    “He came back ’ome,” Mrs. Pinchbeck said, “but ’e was never the same after that. Next to an idiot, ’e was. That’s what I ’eard. But it had nothing to do with Grisini, and soon afterward, I met Mr. Pinchbeck.” Her voice warmed as she began the familiar story. “I ’ad on a white muslin gown with pink flowers, and a parasol to match, and my ’air was in natural ringlets, as took two hours to put up in