“Lady Brackenstall was no ordinary person.” From “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, p. 608.
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Lady Brackenstall was no ordinary person. Those given to superstition indeed questioned whether she was a person at all, and not some phantasmal presence clinging to the creaking hallways and wrought-iron ballustrades of Larchmere Manor. And she was a lady–une grande dame, bien sur–only in the ironical sense of the word. Une grande dame de la nuit, in point of fact.
Lady Brackenstall was–even lady Brackenstall would admit–now well beyond her prime, having been the proprietress of Larchmere Manor for over 25 years. Even presuming she had been a precocious young entrepreneur (and she had been), flinging open the heavy double doors of her establishment at the tender age of 20 or even 18 (and she had), the madame was still firmly settled in middle age.
But settled there with dignity. That was important. Many women her age, Lady Brackenstall had observed, grieved their youth like untimely widows, feeling abandoned and betrayed by each crease and fold, each wiry gray hair springing up where once only golden or chestnut waves had once flowed. Those ladies were preyed upon in their desperation by every door-to-door snake oil salesman and bent-backed midwife on the Eastern seaboard, soaking in vile tinctures, rubbing their skin with greasy liniments, wrapping it in stinking poultices, imbibing foul-smelling tonics and teas made of thistle of this and nettle of that.
Lady Brackenstall, ever with an eye for a swindle, steered clear of such nastiness. Without a husband to keep, already shunned by the social circles who might otherwise judge her, and uniformly feared by all who mattered, Lady Brackenstall embraced age as one relishing a due reward. She donned silk kimonos, brewed herself expensive little cups of Portuguese coffee, and had tropical flowers and sweet-smelling sachets placed all around her boudoir. She took breakfast in bed, never before 11:00, and commanded respect from all the young beautiful things in her employ.