Good Night, Mr. Holmes by Carole Nelson Douglas

fashionable street extending behind the Thames Embankment, valued for the river view it offered residents.
    I walked to No. 27, having been duly put afoot several doors away, and went to the tradesmen’s entrance, as behooved a servant. Here, much to my surprise, I was greeted as if a guest and a welcome one at that.
    “I’ve come to pour,” I announced to the harried cook garnishing platters of tidbits.
    “You must be Huxleigh, the parson’s daughter!” she hallooed as though hailing the Second Coming. “Saints be praised! Mrs. Stoker will be relieved to see you.”
    “I don’t know how my arrival can relieve our distinguished hostess,” I began modestly.
    ‘Tut, tut,” the buxom cook hushed me. “Amy!” she called to a maid. “Tell the Missus that Miss Huxleigh’s here, and in good time, too. What a jewel,” she concluded, pinching my cheeks until they burned.
    A pretty, rather cool-mannered woman rustled in shortly after, her taffeta train sweeping the kitchen stones.
    “You’ve come to pour—Miss Huxleigh, isn’t it?”
    “Yes.”
    “Oh, thank God! Is there anything you require?” she asked, her pale hands wringing prettily with all their rings a-winking.
    “Only a seat and the proper equipment.”
    The lady laughed. “You must think us mad. But the maid who poured last Sunday cast a cupful of hot tea over Mr. Whistler’s hand. Such an uproar! Think what symphonies in pigment have not been fashioned this week because of it. Come, I’ll show you the table.”
    She pivoted sharply so her train would properly follow and led me upstairs into a handsome drawing room where an even handsomer silver service stood guard over snowy linen and a regiment of empty cups and saucers.
    “Irene—Miss Adler, that is—explained that you have the steadiest hand in London, having poured for a Shropshire parson, and we do know how clumsy country gentry can be.” Mrs. Stoker beamed happily while I ensconced myself behind the white linen and assumed my most competent demeanor. “Is there anything you require, my dear?”
    “Nothing at all, save that the samovar be kept filled and hot.”
    “Oh, the maid can manage that. It’s the handling of the china and its contents that are needed.”
    She pivoted and fluttered off as a towering, red-bearded gentleman paused in the archway, leaving me to regard an empty room.
    It was not to remain so. As the clock struck three guests began to arrive. I had never seen such an assortment in my life. Each seemed to have stepped from some garish theatrical poster. I sat among these milling strangers, dispensing tea as I had been taught, my only words a dulcet “Milk?”... a tart “Lemon?” ... and a simpering “Sugar?”
    Ladies in languishing Aesthetic dress, their polonaises edged in key-design embroidery and their hair banded by golden fillets, slouched past, redolent of the glories that were Greece. Sunflowers and lilies, the favored flowers of the Aesthetic movement, decorated many gowns. I even spied a green carnation in one gentleman’s lapel and began to regard the towering Redbeard, in conventional dress for all his larger-than-life size, as a bulwark of conventionality.
    It became a game to pick out famous figures from their cartoon versions in Punch: the dapper little man in cutaway coat and monocle, a lightning strike of white streaking his thick black hair—the very Mr. James McNeill Whistler whose hand had suffered from the ministrations of my predecessor.
    I trembled inwardly as he approached my post. “Tea, sir?” I inquired.
    The small hands, so delicate for a man’s, twitched. “If you can pour it into a cup instead of a cupped hand, my good woman,” he shrilled in an American accent.
    This I managed, even while searching the crowd for the one familiar figure I had expected—Irene’s. Where was she? Surely she was not asking our cabman to drive endlessly along the river?
    “My earnest congratulations,” Mr. Whistler remarked in Prussic acid