Death Among the Ruins by Pamela Christie Page A

special hell all their own.
    “I concede their usefulness as vermin catchers,” said Arabella, “but I dislike listening to their love songs whilst I am trying to sleep. Nor, as now, do I enjoy the sound of a lapping tongue in my near vicinity that may lately have lapped the blood of some disease-ridden rodent.”
    “So. You don’t -a like the cats,” said Mrs. Fiorello, in a tone that placed Arabella squarely in the camp of the damned. And she strode from the room, her head high, and her cat’s somewhat lower.
    Arabella could probably have had the room to herself for as long as she wanted it now, but rather than remain there and risk another unwelcome interaction with her fellow creatures, she decided that the fates were impelling her upstairs, and upstairs she accordingly went.
     
    “Mrs. Janks,” said Fielding, “don’t it seem odd that we’ve had no word from the missus, tellin’ us as to when she’s coming home?”
    “No, Marianne, it don’t seem odd a bit! I’ll tell you, I shouldn’t want to come back at this time o’ year if I was in Italy!”
    A storm was at that moment battering Lustings’s outer walls and hammering against the drawing room windows, where the staff reclined in sated bliss after an enormous evening meal.
    You are shocked, are you not, to find servants in the drawing room? Admittedly, it is a trifle unusual. But before she left, Arabella told the housekeeper that the staff might treat her home as their own whilst she was away. Except for Tilda, of course, who had a tendency to break things, and had to be watched for that reason.
    “Is Italy nice, then?” asked Doyle. She had the happy ginger tomcat on her lap, and was rubbing his chin.
    “Oh, yes; it’s ever so warm and pleasant there. Tsk! I wish my lady’s clients would learn to follow the seams, ’stead o’ just ripping away in the middle like they does!” (Mrs. Janks was mending one of Arabella’s delicate nightdresses, which a prominent parliamentarian had torn practically in half with his teeth.) “Italy’s where they grow the grapes, you know,” she added.
    “Grapes!” cried Fielding.
    “And oranges. Grapes and oranges grow wild all along the boulevards, which aren’t proper streets, but rivers. That’s all they have there—rivers. All the buildings are on islands that bob about ever so, till a body feels right sick. But it’s sunny and warm, with monkeys and parrots in all the grape trees, and the Pope himself going up and down in a giant shell boat, pulled by dolphins.”
    Mrs. Molyneux was French by birth, and had once been to Italy. But she quietly attended to her mending, and allowed Mrs. Janks’s pronouncements to stand unchallenged, because, reader, Mrs. Moly had worked in other establishments, including Lady Ribbonhat’s, and had learned to prize a peaceful household above high wages and titled employers. She also understood the importance of cherished beliefs, and would never destroy the inner visions of anyone she liked, no matter how silly or inaccurate.
    “Sometimes,” Mrs. Janks continued, “the buildings come loose from all the bobbing and lean way over, so that to get into one you have to pass underneath it and be pulled up through a window. What’s wrong, my dear? Are you all right?”
    “I zhust . . . have somesing in my eye,” said Mrs. Molyneux, bending over her lap and hiding her face in her apron. “Zere!” she said, sitting up straight. “I am quite all right again!”
    The cat was now smiling to itself on Fielding’s lap, and purring loudly.
    “We shall have to get rid of this fellow before the missus gets home, ” said the housekeeper.
    “Oh, but Rooney’s such a nice cat, Mrs. Janks,” Tilda protested. “Maybe Madam will fall in love with him and keep him for always.”
    “Rooney? Is that what you call him? Whatever for?”
    “I named him Rooney,” said Doyle. “Because he is so noble. He is called after a boy I knew in Tipperary once, who had just the same