Private Investigation

Excerpt From: Private Investigation

Miss Elizabeth James upset her cup and swore in a most unladylike fashion as hot tea splattered her hand and wrist and soaked into that morning’s copy of The Times, obliterating the advertisement for Professor Mainwaring’s Patented Nerve Tonic. It was her own fault of course-she had been trying to breakfast and gloat at the same time. She had graduated from the Metropolitan School for Shorthand in Chancery Lane, and what’s more she had graduated top of her class in typing, shorthand, filing and arithmetic. And she had been the only girl in the class to master the stencillographic oscillator-a complicated clockwork device that transcribed dictation, although sometimes the spelling was a little suspect.

She sucked her burnt fingers. She was so happy and distracted that she had already spooned marmalade into her tea and tried to sip her toast. As one of London’s new Typewriter Girls, she would be able to find work as a secretary or an author’s assistant. Even as a copying clerk for a government official. Although perhaps not that last. To become a typist in a government department, a girl had to be at least five feet in height without boots or shoes. Lilly might just squeak through under that requirement if the person doing the measuring was lax with her tape measure and counted her rather wild, frizzy hair. Still, she had a whole world of options open to her-all perfectly genteel. Given that these days girls were running off to be explorers and fly dirigibles and goodness knows what else, she felt practically prim and proper in her choice of career.

The five guinea fee had been a struggle. She had managed to scrape her rent together, but had subsisted during the course of her training mainly on the breakfast of toast and tea her landlady grudgingly provided each day. But now she was a professional woman, and could expect to earn anywhere between fifteen shillings and two or three pounds a week.

She mopped ineffectually at the spilt tea with her handkerchief, and sighed. Perhaps she might even be able to move to lodgings where the taps didn’t scream and clank and dispense brown, brackish water, where the bed wasn’t lumpy with a spring that dug into the small of her back no matter how she tossed and turned, and where the landlady didn’t look at her with chilly disapprobation every time their paths crossed.

Mrs Langley did not approve of working women-but then Mrs Langley did not much approve of anything. A skinny, middle-aged woman with a pointed, rather red nose that she enjoyed poking into other people’s business, she had lost her husband after twenty years of childless marriage—which was probably something of a relief to the poor man, since it meant he could finally get some peace. Except, of course, he couldn’t-every Thursday evening at six o’ clock, Mrs Langley trotted off in her respectable coat and her sensible button boots with her capacious handbag tucked under her arm to visit the shade of her late, lamented husband at Doctor Moriarty Caine’s House of Spiritual Solace. When she got a message from the other side, she came back in good humour. When no message was forthcoming, she was even more officious and sour-faced than usual.

Lilly suspected that the night before the late Mr Langley had not appeared at the séance, because this morning Mrs Langley had brought up lime marmalade with the breakfast things. Lilly cordially detested lime marmalade, and had told her landlady so many times.