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fled from the cats into the kitchen, where she found Marian Beaseley clearing away the breakfast dishes. Kate's arrangements about domestic help were as peculiar as her other habits. She didn't like live-in servants; in fact, the whole master-servant relationship irritated her considerably. Yet it was impossible to run the big house single-handed. Kate had solved this dilemma in a characteristic manner and with the uncanny luck that usually accompanied her most eccentric ideas. Who else but Kate could have discovered a family that felt just as she did about privacy, and who were willing to work only for someone who ignored their presence as thoroughly as they ignored hers?
    The Beaseleys, husband and wife and assorted children, did most of the work in and around the house, with the assistance of a commercial cleaning team that came several times a year, but it was rarely that one actually saw a Beaseley in action.
    They functioned like the little elves that helped the DEVIL-MAY-CARE 29
    kindly shoemaker, although their big-boned, harsh- featured faces were not at all elfin--sliding smoothly out of a room as one entered it, and vanishing without comment when the work was done. They didn't need to be told what to do, they simply did it. The Beaseleys refused to work for anyone else. This was understood by the other families in the neighborhood after an unfortunate encounter between Marian Beaseley and an innocent new resident, who had visited the Beaseley house in the hope of hiring a "daily."
    Kate's peculiar reputation in the neighborhood hadn't been helped by this relationship. Although there had been Beaseleys in the area for two hundred years, people had a tendency to regard them as Kate's familiars, or as victims of a form of occult blackmail. Some of the more superstitious residents really did think Kate was a witch. Oddly enough, this idea increased the respect in which she was held; people were afraid of her, but they thought of her as basically benevolent--if she was not provoked. Indeed, Ellie thought, Kate's reputation was probably as much protection as the dogs.
    The Beaseleys had one defect as servants--they never waited on anyone. Indeed, the idea of Marian Beaseley, hawk-nosed and leather-skinned, bending servilely over a tray of canapes was enough to boggle even Ellie's excellent imagination. If one had the inclination, it would be interesting to trace the conglomerate ethnic groups that had contributed to the Beaseley heritage. There was Indian blood there, surely; some black genes, some Scotch-Irish--heaven knew what else. They were inbred to a shocking degree, but the results were surprisingly efficient. And perhaps no one but Kate, who had her own form of pride, could have understood the fierce independence and pride that moved the Beaseleys.
    Ellie had a lot of respect for it; she nodded to Marian, who replied with a grunt--a surprisingly affable
    3O Elizabeth Peters response--poured herself a cup of coffee, and left the kitchen.
    She headed for Kate's workroom--the one room in the house the Beaseleys never touched. It was a wonderfully comfortable room. Odd, that the word "comfort" should come to mind so often about a house as grandiose and bizarre as Kate's home; but for all its pretentiousness and elegance the house had nothing in it that had been selected for the purpose of impressing anyone. Every object was something Kate liked for its own sake.
    Ellie was one of the few people who knew where the money for all this had come from, one of the few who knew of Kate's brief, unhappy marriage. She had inherited a modest fortune from her husband, but it was she who had built it into a large fortune through judicious and inspired investments. That was Kate's undeniable talent, a talent so great as to verge on genius, and the one thing that bored her to the point of nausea. As soon as she had made the money she needed, she had dropped out of the market and proceeded to spend the income doing the things she