I reached out and poked her with my big toe.
“Get that thing off me,” she said. So I poked again. “Ew, I’m serious, Bex, you know I hate feet.”
But she was laughing, and so was I.
“We can go out next weekend, I promise,” I said, wiggling a cheese-topped cracker in her face, another button I knew I could push.
“Okay,” she said, but I could tell she was still smarting. “You win. But only for tonight.”
*
To look at the area around Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the largest public square in London, you’d think you’d stumbled upon a residential neighborhood—which, in fact, it used to be. The three-and four-story brick or stone buildings once housed a variety of highborn folk who must have had a real thrill in 1683 when a would-be assassin of King Charles II was beheaded there. Maybe watching a public murder during afternoon tea is why they all moved west and gave up their real estate to the business world. Queen Eleanor’s lawyers have an office there, as does the Royal College of Surgeons, and at numbers twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, there’s Sir John Soane’s Museum, my professional home and my refuge.
Sir John was an architect, and an inveterate hoarder, and the space is crammed to the gills with his eclectic souvenirs: almost eight thousand books, sixty or so Greek and Roman vases, three hundred and twenty-three gemstones, a pair of leg irons, and a mummified cat. The byzantine, tight space means the museum only admits eighty people at a time, and it scrupulously bans cell phones, so it could never become dangerously jammed with amateur paparazzi once people figured out I was on staff. This meant I could fill in for a docent without causing much of a stir, and I was grateful not to be treated like a plague (if my notoriety was good for business, the Soane never once exploited that). And in late May, I hit the jackpot. The Soane was so pleased that Paint Britain was a hit—bigger museums were sniffing around about partnerships—that my boss Maud rewarded me with the Picture Room when the regular docent caught a mysterious rash. The Picture Room is a compact space where Soane ingeniously turned the walls into doors as a way of multiplying the amount of art he could display. Every twenty minutes, whoever is assigned to that room opens them to display a layer, sometimes two, of hidden paintings and architectural renderings hiding behind them. All told, there are about a hundred, usually commanding the most experienced historians.
And the space is snug. So after I gave my second pack of gawkers a moment to appreciate the initial view, I hustled all twelve of them back out and pulled open the south planes to reveal William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress. The eight paintings depict a debauched evening of gambling, drinking, and whoring in an infamous London tavern before the titular rake is imprisoned and then sent to Bedlam, and in Soane’s day it was considered scandalous. As I explained this, an eleven-year-old boy near the front made bored clicking noises.
“If it’s so scandalous,” he scoffed, “then where are the sexy bits?”
“An excellent question,” said a guy in the back in a dark ball cap, a leather jacket, and aviators, whom I hadn’t noticed earlier. “Where are all the sexy bits?”
And then Freddie took off his sunglasses, grinning, and stuffed them into his pocket.
“Holy shitballs,” an American girl hissed.
“Shh, don’t make a stir, or we’ll lose the intimacy of this moment,” Freddie told her. “I love A Rake’s Progress. Also the working title of my autobiography.”
Everyone tittered, except the cranky octogenarian who’d asked me if this was the Tate.
“You heard the young man,” Freddie prodded me. “I believe he wanted sexy bits.”
I glanced at the boy’s mother, but she seemed as interested in where this might lead as the rest of the room, so I pointed to the orgy in the third painting. The kid peered closer.
“I’ve seen worse on TV,” he said.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Freddie said, edging to the front. “You’re right. Hugely disappointing. What I’ve been longing to see, though, are some saucy drawings of buildings.” He rubbed his hands together. “Are there any of those sexy bits around, please, madam?”
“But of course,” I said, stifling a laugh as I closed up A Rake’s Progress and opened the opposite planes. I sped through the rest of the spiel, so as not to give Freddie much time to make a spectacle of himself; he did his best PPO Furrow imitation and clapped loudly when I finished.
“Brilliant,” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen, please head down to whatever terrifying hellhole that rickety staircase takes you to.”
“That’s the Monk’s Parlour,” I explained. “For the imaginary monk.”
They stared at me blankly, then clattered down into the basement.
“This Soane chap really was a nutter, eh?” Freddie said, the floorboards creaking under his feet as he took in the sheer quantity of stuff—no, Stuff—all around us. “I only own one piece of art. It’s a photo of me scoring a goal past Father at a polo match, and it’s priceless.”
“I hate to break it to you, but I’m pretty sure you own a lot more art than that,” I said. “How did you get in without anyone freaking out?”
“A lady named Maud let me in the back,” he said. “She’s a firecracker, that one. Told me she’s knitting trivets as a wild change of pace from scarves. If you’re keeping score, that means changing from a rectangle all the way to a square.”
“That’s our Maud,” I said affectionately.
“I hope to be a steadying influence on her, in time,” Freddie said. “But first, come have a long lunch and a pint.”
“I can’t blow off work anymore, Freddie.”
“Aha, but I told Maud I was on a fact-finding mission about fundraising.”
“Is that true?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “And if Maud thinks you chucked a potential patron, she’ll never speak to you again about how the bridge tips from the Sunday Times are working.”
We dined at one of the ancient gentlemen’s clubs to which the monarchy belongs—or, perhaps, which belong to the monarchy. It was a dimly lit cavern full of burnished oak and leather and antique globes no one ever spun, and was staffed solely by cantankerous old men, one of whom seated us with a whiff of mistrust and stepped on my foot as he went.
“Don’t mind him,” Freddie said. “He’s been making that face ever since Gran forced them to let in women.”
He ordered a shepherd’s pie and I got a big plate of crispy battered cod and chips; we made small talk until the food arrived, at which point Freddie picked up the table’s bottle of malt vinegar and deluged my fries before taking a few.
“You’re welcome,” I said dryly.