The Nine Lanterns

Mr. Joseph Pendleton's studio was on the third floor of a house in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, two doors down from the public-house known as the Rose. It was reached by a stone staircase on the outside of the building, a relic of some eighteenth-century arrangement by which the upper floors had been let separately, and the stair was worn at the centre of each step into a shallow concavity by the feet of a century of dancers. Wren arrived there at a quarter past eleven on the Wednesday morning, having spent the preceding hour in Camberwell, where Mr. Alfred Latham, the naval surgeon, had confirmed to him that he had never received any message from his niece, that he had never been given any reason to expect her on the Saturday at Henrietta Street, and that he would have gone at once had he known she was in any trouble whatsoever. Mr. Latham had, moreover, produced for Wren a letter from Phoebe dated the fifteenth of March, in which she had mentioned Mr. Pendleton three times, and in tones that the uncle had not, at the time, been able to interpret. Wren, reading the letter, had formed his own interpretation. Pendleton received him in the studio itself. It was a long room with a wooden floor that had been waxed that morning, three tall windows on the street side, a row of iron sconces for gas, and a practice-bar running along one wall. At one end a small upright piano had