LITMIR.BIZ

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except chase women. When she came of age, the Married Woman’s Property Act had not yet been passed, and a husband had absolute control over a wife’s money and property. Lady Sara told her father she wanted no man meddling with her patrimony. He decided he didn’t, either, and he settled a generous life income on her in such a way that her husband, if she acquired one, would be unable to touch the principal or even the income.

      “The day before that happened, I had about four hundred suitors,” Lady Sara remembered with a laugh. “The day afterward, the number had dropped to four.”

      She had nothing against marriage. She thought it a splendid institution for a man but not for a woman. Lord Byron had written, “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,/’Tis woman’s whole existence.” To Lady Sara’s extreme irritation, men were fond of quoting this to her, and she liked to point out acidly that they always quoted it out of context. Lord Byron’s lines were not for her.

      There was so much she wanted to do with her life, so much to learn, so many things to accomplish, and when she looked critically at the lives of her women friends, she saw that marriage had all but consumed every one of them. Marriage left a woman little time for anything else. Even women of her own class, with no financial worries and houses full of servants, had to supervise constantly; dismiss inept maids and fight daily battles with housekeepers and butlers; conduct their own employment bureau so as to always have a full staff available; plan elaborate social occasions; struggle heroically with catastrophe when, with a dinner party in the offing, a cook or butler or housekeeper left without notice; look after their children’s welfare and education; work unremittingly to make certain their homes were efficiently and peacefully and economically run. To what purpose? So their husbands could be freed from all domestic concerns in order to occupy themselves with more important matters. Lady Sara chose to remain single and invest her large income in the work that was her vocation, her profession, and—yes—her religion, the detection of crime.

      When I joined Lady Sara and Sir Thomas, they were already seated at the oaken conference table in her study. In the centre was the enormous cribbage board Lady Sara inherited from her father. At the moment there were only two sets of pegs on the board. One represented our investigation into the river thefts. Those pegs were still in their starting holes because we had not yet turned up a single clue. The other set represented the mystery of the two giants. The artists’ sketches provided enough information for a beginning, and Lady Sara had moved the pegs two holes forward.

      The Shadwell murder had been left in Chief Inspector Mewer’s hands. I once suggested giving the Chief Inspector a cribbage board of his own to record his cases on, but Lady Sara said no, he wouldn’t know how to use it. This was probably true. I had never been able to understand how Lady Sara used hers. She had her own subjective system for rating her progress on cases.

      Sir Thomas greeted me with friendly scrutiny. He liked to make jokes about the state of my health. He remarked, “Colin has been unusually reticent of late. Is he in love?”

      “He has been reading Mrs. Humphry’s Manners for Men,” Lady Sara said. “In the last chapter, she lays down rules for speaking with royal persons, and Colin is grappling with the notion that during such conversations he must leave it to the royal person to originate subjects of discussion and never, under any circumstances, introduce a topic of his own. If you want him to talk, you have to suggest a subject and invite his comments.”

      “But I’m not a royal person,” Sir Thomas protested.

      “You are a knight,” Lady Sara said. “That, with your other qualifications and achievements, would fully entitle you to royal treatment if ‘royalty’ really meant anything.” She added thoughtfully, “It’s an asinine rule. Most royal persons have nothing in their heads but lumber. They’re completely incapable of suggesting subjects worth discussing. Quite apart from that, it was silly of Mrs. Humphry to include such a topic in her book. How many of her readers will ever have occasion to converse with royalty?”

      “Not all royal persons are empty-headed,” Sir Thomas said loyally. “You’ll have to concede we are blessed with a great queen.”

      Lady Sara shook her head. “Her Majesty’s only accomplishment is to be herself. She has never done anything else. She was popular in her youth, extremely unpopular in middle age, and now she is popular again. All of that has been the result of her being herself. In any situation that requires nothing more of her than that, she performs magnificently. A truly great queen should be able to reach beyond herself when a great occasion demands it.”

      “What does the royal family think of you?” Sir Thomas asked.

      “Princess Louise is a good friend,” Lady Sara said. “As you know, she is a talented artist, and we have interests in common as well as mutual friends in London’s Bohemia. When I first came out, the Prince of Wales thought I was fascinating until I made it clear that I thought he wasn’t. The others don’t think of me at all except when something I do is forced on their attention. Then they dismiss me with tones of deep regret.”

      Like Lady Sara’s rooms upstairs, her study was furnished severely. There were no bric-a-brac. Everything had a place and a use. The books that lined the walls were on every imaginable subject. Although crime was Lady Sara’s principal concern, she was interested in everything about it, and since crime touched every sphere of human activity, she was interested in everything.

      The two artists, Stephen Lynes and Evan Vaughan, had just arrived, and Lady Sara was still greeting them, when the Dowager Countess, Lady Ranisford, swept into the room. She was small, plump, and as unlike Lady Sara as could be imagined. She had come over from Connaught Place because Lady Sara had told her Sir Thomas would be there.

      She brought with her Reginald Dempster, a cousin of hers and Lady Sara’s several times removed. He was a man about forty, slight of build except for an ample stomach, with a small, almost frivolous moustache. He was always impeccably dressed, and he had the air of waiting for some higher calling, although no one who knew him, least of all himself, had the slightest notion of what that might be. When he was younger, he had been, for a time, heir presumptive to a baronetcy. Then the present baronet remarried, taking a second wife much younger than himself, and in short order produced a large family that included several sons. This naturally was a considerable disappointment to Dempster and his wife—especially to his wife, since she had married him on the presumption of his inheritance. He lived on a limited fixed income, a legacy from an aunt. He was always short of money and apparently incapable of earning any even though he had received a Third in law from Oxford and had been called to the bar.

      Lady Sara considered him both a bore and an ass, and years before she had, with effort, cured him of his attempts to borrow money from her. He both thought and spoke in clichés, which she found irritating. When he delivered himself of some such profundity as, “I can’t make head nor tail of it,” she would reply lightly, “That possibly is because it has neither a head nor a tail.” We had seen little of him in recent years except when we encountered him at the Countess’s home. The Countess tolerated him because she found him amusing. He was a wonderful source of gossip about persons of note, and if she needed someone to complete a foursome for whist, or she merely wanted someone to chat with, Dempster was always available. He had nothing else to do.

      The Countess greeted Sir Thomas with formal affection, gave me a friendly nod, and graciously permitted Lady Sara to present the artists. Then she turned to Sir Thomas and asked, “Did you really see that unfortunate man?”

      “A murder victim is beyond feeling,” Sir Thomas said with a rueful grin. “I’m the unfortunate one. Lady Sara routed me out at sunrise and hauled me off to a makeshift mortuary down by the docks. Yes, my lady, I saw him.”

      “Was he really clawed by an animal?” the countess asked breathlessly.

      “He undoubtedly was clawed. I should have said ‘by an animal,’ but I’ve suspended judgment because Lady Sara has promised to show me otherwise. We can’t start until Chief Inspector Mewer gets here.”

      “Police officers,” the Countess said scornfully, “are never on time and never where they are needed.” She turned

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