“May I be of some assistance?” He literally looked down his nose at me. I had heard that expression before, but never actually seen it. I could practically count his nose hairs. The way he said it told me assistance was the last thing I could expect.
“Yeah. I need a room. Major Harding told me I was billeted here.”
“Your name?” I thought I could hear him shudder as he looked me over. I made a mental note that dried vomit seems to impress folks in England even less than it does in the States.
“Billy Boyle.”
“We have a room for a Lieutenant William Boyle?” There was a hint of hope that a more distinguished and cleaner member of the Boyle family would walk through the door behind me.
“Yep, that’s me.”
“Sign the register, please.” I admired him for hiding his disappointment so well. He even smiled when he handed me a key attached to a large disc and directed me to the elevator-the “lift,” he called it, which I figured was just what I needed. My room was on the fourteenth floor, but the elevator-lift-went only to the twelfth. There was no thirteenth, but a flight of stairs led to the fourteenth, which was actually the thirteenth floor. Lucky me.
I dragged my duffel bag behind me, thumping up each step. The hallway was narrow; it didn’t look much like a fancy hotel to me. I unlocked my door and went in. There was a small bed, a table, and a bureau, and one very small window that jutted out from a slanted ceiling. No bathroom. Then I got it. This was a servant’s room. That slanted ceiling was the roof. I had visited our cousin Margaret Boyle with my mom when she came over from Ireland to work as a domestic on Beacon Hill. She’d had an attic room just like this in the mansion where she worked.