The Madness Underneath: Book 2 (THE SHADES OF LONDON) by Maureen Johnson Page B

don’t you pop round, and we’ll have a nice chat?”
    I could see, even from this brief exchange, what Charlotte was talking about. Julia was nice, but she was clinical. When you spoke to her, she was clear and firm. You didn’t “pop round” to Julia’s. You had an exact time, to the minute. This Jane sounded more like a friend. She gave me an address in Chelsea, and when I asked her what Tube stop that was, she was dismissive.
    “Oh, just get in a taxi, dear. I’ll pay for it when it arrives.”
    “What…really?”
    “Really. Just come over now. I have some time.”
    I regretted making the call already. I had agreed to see this strange woman, and now I really had to go. She was even paying for my ride, which was just…incredibly odd. But health stuff was different in England. Well, I’d done it. I’d called, and now I had to go see this woman. I told myself that doing something was better than having this dithering breakdown.
    While I was in the cab, winding across London, it began to pour rain. Chelsea was on the west side of the city, far, far from Wexford. And London is a very sinuous place. I don’t think there is a straight line in the entire metropolitan area. Water ran down the cab windows, so much that I couldn’t even see where we were. I just caught the glint of signs and the redof buses. By the time the cab stopped, the downpour was so fierce, I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it from the curb to the house. This is why English people do not leave home without umbrellas. I was an idiot.
    The cab ride came to thirty-six pounds. That was an incredible amount of money to have to pay for a ride across town, and I felt a twang of panic. I didn’t have that much on me. I’d gotten in this cab on the word of some person on the other end of a phone. I looked at the house, wondering what happened now. The house that was set back from the road and gently guarded by a brick wall with a black iron gate. Through this gate came a woman carrying an industrial-sized umbrella. I presumed this was Jane, as she went right to the front window of the car. As she spoke to the driver and gave him the fare, I heard her voice. This was Jane.
    Jane Quaint looked like she was somewhere around sixty. Her hair was a furious orange-red, which stood out in stark contrast to her very pale, very delicate skin. The color couldn’t have been natural—that kind of pulsating orange rarely exists outside of fruit and tropical birds. She had on an outfit that consisted of many wraps and folds and layers of fine gray wool that looped around and around from about five different directions. I couldn’t tell if it was a shawl or a sweater or a dress. It bagged down to the knees, where it seemed to turn into pants. The whole thing was bound together at her right shoulder by a long silver pin in the shape of a twisted arrow.
    I opened the door carefully as Jane reached over, making room for me under her umbrella.
    “ Wretched day,” she said. “Come inside. Let’s get ourselves out of this.”
    The gate surrounded a small square of brick-paved ground, with a few small potted trees. The house was certainly large by London standards—three stories high, three windows across. It was completely detached, an impressive pile of bricks with a porticoed entryway.
    Jane set her umbrella in a stand in the large entry hallway, which was very dark. It was papered in a rich black wallpaper with a recurring fan pattern in metallic gold. All the decorations were generally dark, lots of black with gold accents. I fixed my eye on a life-sized porcelain leopard in the corner, colored silver and black.
    “I’m still very fond of the tastes of my youth,” she explained. “I was a bit of a rock-and-roller back then. After that phase was over, I went into psychology. But I kept the decor. I find if you keep things, they tend to come back into style eventually.”
    “I like it,” I said.
    “That’s very kind. One friend of mine describes it