Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone by Catriona McPherson

convincing. ‘We were Dot and Tot as children and these things do tend to stick, don’t they?’
    ‘Yes, Mrs Gilver,’ said Miss Laidlaw. ‘Let me show you around the hotel and—’
    ‘Tut, tut, Dorothea,’ her brother said. ‘Hotel? Laidlaw’s Hydropathic Establishment is not a hotel.’
    ‘—my brother can take care of the rest of the party,’ she went on, ignoring his interjection absolutely. ‘Is it too late for coffee? Let’s say coffee in the drawing room in twenty minutes then, Mrs Cronin, shall we?’ She had a pleasant voice and an easy way with herself and, as I followed her out of the grand entrance hall into a passageway, I was forced to smile at the thought which had popped unbidden into my mind: to wit, that she was a lady. I suppose it was possible, for some doctors are gentlemen and her father had been a proper doctor and not a mere salesman of patent cures and odd contraptions, but somehow one put hydropathists, or hydropathologists, or whatever they were called, into the same drawer as lay-preachers and prison visitors, nonconformists all and not likely to come from the highest tier, whose members are usually, for obvious reasons, quite content with the status quo. Perhaps her father had used his money to buy his children into society, but then what of the dinner jacket and black tie at half past eleven on a Monday morning? What of Tot altogether?
    Miss Laidlaw was pointing out ‘treatment rooms’ on either side of the passageway and I peered into one or two to be polite. In each there was a bier or couch arrangement covered in snowy bath towels and a smaller handcart, two-tiered like an hotel pudding trolley, upon which bottles and jars were laid as though to hand for operations at whose nature I could not guess. In one room there were contraptions, equally unguessable, drawn up on either side of the couch and in another, sturdy lamps mounted on tripods were trained on the empty bed. It all looked rather gruesome.
    ‘You seem very well fitted-up,’ I said, withdrawing my head again. ‘It really is rather more than an hotel.’ Rotten of me to return to the unpleasant moment, but I was interested in any sort of trouble here at the Hydro, sibling quarrels and all.
    Miss Laidlaw, in reply, trailed a hand along the dado rail of the corridor, a fancy in ceramic, which formed rolling green waves, one after another, like pin curls, stretching all the way to double glass doors at the end.
    ‘And rather less too,’ she said. ‘My father was a great deal more interested in the therapeutic side than in the question of bed and board. Tot was aghast when he saw the spartan state of the bedrooms. He was ready to give up before we even started. And I suppose, you do have to offer some comforts and entertainments as well as the actual … that’s very true.’ Then she gathered herself with a slight sniff and a rise of the chin. ‘Father would be entranced to see the modern improvements in electric heat particularly, but through here, it’s all as he envisioned it. Exactly as he laid it out.’ She opened one of the double doors and ushered me into Equatorial Africa.
    It was the changing room for the Turkish and Russian baths, I discovered, a short corridor lined on both sides with cubicles, wooden shelves and lockers at the near end. At the far end was another doorway covered over by a curtain and there were no words for the heat which rolled out as we passed through.
    ‘Phew,’ I said, letting my fur slip down to my elbows.
    ‘This is the cool room,’ said Miss Laidlaw. ‘One hundred and twenty degrees.’
    I sank down onto one of the beds arranged about the walls of the ‘cool’ room and looked around while I waited to become accustomed to it. The place was beautifully appointed: mosaic underfoot and colourful china tiles depicting Roman scenes on all the walls. At the far end, more of the heavy velvet curtains were drawn across a second doorway.
    ‘The warm room,’ said Miss Laidlaw.