Laura Schlitz - Splendors and Glooms

Lizzie Rose sniffed. Parsefall was frightened, she could tell. She could also smell the constable, who had had sausages for breakfast, and who, if she wasn’t mistaken, had a baby at home. Lizzie Rose smiled at him trustingly. Surely a man with a baby would not be unkind.

“All right, now.” Constable Hawkins countered her smile with a stern look. “How old are you, girl?”

“I’ll be fourteen in February,” Lizzie Rose answered promptly. “And Parsefall’s eleven,” she added, so that Parsefall would not have to speak. Parsefall’s age was in fact open to question. No one in his past life had kept track of his birthdays, and Parsefall changed his age whenever it suited him.

“And what relation are you to Mr. Grisini?”

“None, sir,” said Lizzie Rose. “My father was David Fawr, the actor. He died of diphtheria two years ago — my mother, too, and our troupe disbanded. Some of my father’s friends wanted to take me, but they couldn’t afford to keep me. Then one of the actors knew Mr. Grisini —”

The constable had stopped listening. “David Fawr?” he said eagerly. “Why, I saw David Fawr as William in Black-Eyed Susan ! I’ve never forgot him. The way he spoke that speech about the old apple tree —”

“Aspen tree,” Lizzie Rose corrected him. “Yes, sir, my father was famous for that speech. People used to cry —”

Sergeant Croft interrupted them by clearing his throat. The constable looked as if he couldn’t remember what to ask next. The sergeant prodded him. “Start with yesterday afternoon.”

Constable Hawkins spoke purposefully. “Miss Fawr, you spent yesterday afternoon in Chester Square, at the home of the Wintermute family.”

“Yes, sir,” agreed Lizzie Rose. “We had a performance.”

The sergeant took a step closer to the children. “One of the servants said you had tea with Miss Clara Wintermute,” he said. “Is that true?”

Lizzie Rose met his eyes fearlessly. “Yes, sir, it is. It was very kind of her, wasn’t it, Parsefall?”

Parsefall raised his eyes and said curtly, “Yes.”

“Didn’t it strike you as uncommon, that a young lady like that should take the trouble to arrange a treat for you?”

“Oh, yes, sir, it was uncommon,” Lizzie Rose said warmly. “There’s not many a young lady as would be so kind. We had strawberry jam,” she added, and smiled at the constable, who smiled back.

“What did Miss Wintermute say to you?”

Lizzie Rose paused, remembering. “She told us her name. And she said she’d seen one of our shows in the park, only we didn’t remember her. We meet so many children when we do the shows. But Miss Wintermute remembered us and asked us to take tea with her. I think she was lonely.”

“Lonely.” The constable exchanged glances with the sergeant. “Lonely enough to run away from home?”

Lizzie Rose looked startled. “Run away from home? Oh, no, sir!”

“Did either of you invite her to come here?”

Lizzie Rose shook her head. “No, sir.” She raised one hand, indicating the room around her. “She was a young lady, sir. It wouldn’t have done; it wouldn’t, indeed.”

“Did she say anything — anything — about coming here to visit you?”

“No, sir.”

The constable sighed and tried again. “Did she mention any friends — any plans she had — any places she liked to go?” Lizzie Rose went on shaking her head.

“Did she say or do anything out of the common?”

Lizzie Rose thought. “She gave us presents,” she said. She appealed to the policemen. “Let me show you.”

She let go of Parsefall’s fingers and went back into her bedroom. A moment later she emerged with a handful of tissue paper.

“She gave us each a little packet to take home,” she explained. “We each had an orange, a whole one, and a paper cone full of sweets. And she gave me ribbons.” She lifted a coil of ribbon and let the mingled colors fall in spirals. “Green and blue and white — all the best colors for my hair. She’d only seen me once, but she remembered. She gave Parsefall presents, too, didn’t she, Parse?”

Parsefall assented glumly. “Wooden animals,” he said resentfully. “’S’if I woz a baby.”

Lizzie Rose frowned at him. “Hush. Her brothers are dead. She can’t know what boys like.”

For the first time, Parsefall spoke to the constable. “Did she run away?”

The constable said shortly, “May have done. Housemaid went into her room early this morning to tend the fires. The young lady was gone. We’ve checked the houses around the square. No one’s seen her. We wondered if she might have come here.” He looked around the room as if he expected to find Clara crouching behind an armchair. “The servant girl said she was very interested in the puppets. Stagestruck, she said.”

Parsefall lifted his chin. “She liked my skeleton act.” His voice was shaky, but his lips curled in a smirk. “Laughed herself into fits she did. She wasn’t much like a young lady then.”

Lizzie Rose shook her head so hard that her plaits swung back and forth. “All the same, she wouldn’t have run off without telling anyone,” she said firmly. “It would be a cruel thing to do, after her poor mother lost the others. Miss Wintermute would understand that. She wasn’t silly, and she wasn’t a baby. She was twelve.”

“Her mother’s distraught, that’s for certain,” the sergeant observed, “and her father’s no better.” He turned from the constable back to Lizzie Rose. “Are you sure she said nothing that might provide a clue?”

“No, sir. Could she — could she have been kidnapped?”

The two men exchanged glances again. It seemed to Lizzie Rose that they must have asked each other the same question. But the constable answered, “It don’t seem likely. No one broke into the house. The front door was unbolted from the inside. Windows were all secure — and nothing’s missing, though there’s plenty of value in the house.”

Parsefall raised his head. “If you ask me,” he said, “she didn’t like livin’ with deaders.”

“Debtors?” repeated the constable, at sea.

“Deaders,” Parsefall said staunchly. “All them dead people. She was tired of ’em.”

Lizzie Rose squeezed his hand warningly. “He means her brothers and sisters,” she explained.

“They was all over the ’ouse.” Parsefall dug his thumbnail into Lizzie Rose’s palm. “Dead pictures and dead-masks. They smear plaster on the deader’s face to make the masks — did you know that? ’Orrible, I call it.”

“Parsefall —” began Lizzie Rose.

“All I’m sayin’ is, I wouldn’t want to be wiv ’em all the time,” Parsefall persisted. “I don’t blame ’er for runnin’ away.”

“She didn’t run away,” Lizzie Rose snapped.

Constable Hawkins turned to his superior. “All the same, I’d like to take a look through the rooms.”

“She isn’t here,” Lizzie Rose said. “She wouldn’t have run away, but if she’d come here, we’d know it.”

“There was fog this morning,” the sergeant said in a low voice. “She might’ve started out somewhere and lost herself in the fog.”

“Very likely,” agreed the constable. “Still —” He turned from the chaos of the room to Lizzie Rose. “If you’ll let me look behind that curtain, miss —”

“I sleep in there,” Lizzie Rose said, flushing. “I’m afraid it’s untidy.” She wished she had made her bed.

The constable waved her apology aside and ducked under the sequined curtain. Sergeant Croft scrutinized the room, gazing from one corner to the next. He opened a large trunk that contained puppets in their calico bags, and took apart a stack of wicker baskets to make sure there was no child hiding in the largest one. The constable came out of Lizzie Rose’s little room and headed for Grisini’s bedroom.