I CLOSED THE door, dismayed at the loud click the catch made. It had not done that last time.
Why not slam it? Ruby suggested, but I did not have time to remind her of how she had knocked over a harp while creeping through Schönbrunn Palace on Christmas Eve at midnight.
After locking the door I took out the key.
Dolores, I made out in the gloom, was still in bed. I had considered borrowing Gerrund’s safety lantern but, as he pointed out, the smell of the paraffin would give me away. That seemed sensible, but Ruby believed it was more because he did not want to lend it to me after I had bent a prong of his carving fork while trying to pick a faulty lock in my writing box.
‘I need to talk to you first,’ I said.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘To decide what is the best course of action.’
Dolores wriggled under the covers.
‘I thought you had come to rescue me.’
‘That was going to be my first question,’ I assured her. ‘Do you need rescuing?’
‘I most certainly do,’ she said. ‘What is your name?’
‘Violet.’
‘That is a pretty name,’ she mused. ‘It reminds me of a flower.’
Well shiver my timbers, Ruby sarcasmed. It was an expression she had picked up from the odious and odoriferous Captain Fisheye.
She raised her head to look about. ‘Why does Martha not come?’
‘She is not allowed to.’
‘Oh,’ Dolores greeted my statement in surprise. ‘Edward said that she did not wish to see me.’
‘She called many times, in person and on the telephone, and she wrote to you.’
‘I was not told,’ she said, ‘but then I suppose that I would not be.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why indeed?’ Dolores coughed. ‘I wrote a letter to Martha and threw it out of the window in the hope that someone would post it for me.’
‘Somebody did,’ I confirmed, ‘and Martha went to the Café Cordoba every day for a week.’
‘Oh,’ Dolores mused. ‘She must have consumed a lot of coffee and I am not sure that it is good for her nerves.’
‘Can you walk?’ I asked.
‘I have not tried recently.’
In other words no, Ruby contributed, or at least not properly.
‘Not even around this room?’
‘Where is there to walk to?’ Dolores asked with interest as if there were a scenic route that she had yet to discover.
‘To the window,’ I suggested.
‘Edward says he will have me chained to the frame if I do that again.’
‘Why does he keep you here?’
‘It is our home.’
‘But why are you locked in?’
‘So that I do not escape,’ she explained as one might to an especially simple-minded simpleton.
I tried a different approach.
‘You used to be allowed out and about.’
‘I know,’ she agreed dreamily, ‘but I was naughty.’
‘In what way?’
‘Very.’
Give her a shake, Ruby urged and I had heard worse suggestions.
‘What did you do that was naughty?’
Dolores mulled that over.
‘It is difficult to know where to begin.’
‘Try the beginning,’ I suggested tetchily and hoped that I was not in for a long and tedious catalogue of faults in household management or social blunders, like the time that my mother had seated a man next to his wife at dinner, forgetting that they were happily married.
Dolores stroked her chin.
‘Might I see the key?’ she cajoled. ‘Pleeeese.’
‘Why?’ I asked, but she held out her hand and I saw that she was not wearing a glove, as I had thought when I first visited her, but was wrapped from her knuckles to her wrist in a grimy bandage.
‘I need to know what kind it is.’
She is either an imbecile or mad, Ruby declared.
Puzzled, I handed it over and Dolores turned it side to side.
‘I can only tell by tasting it,’ she said, giving the handle a lick. ‘I think it is…’ and, before I could stop her, Dolores popped the key into her mouth like a child with a sweet, savoured it for a moment and swallowed.
‘What on earth!’ I cried and she opened her mouth like a patient proving that she has taken her medicine.
‘All gone,’ she declared.
An imbecile, Ruby decided, while I stood ready to pat Dolores on the back, but a key it transpired, unlike a wad of Beeman’s, slips down comfortably for she smacked her lips appreciatively and said, ‘Delicious.’
‘But now we are both trapped,’ I told her, aghast.
‘Do not worry,’ Dolores reassured me, though I most assuredly would. ‘Sit on the bed beside me and I shall tell you exactly how naughty I have been.’
And demented, Ruby added ominously.