The first thing she remembered about The Firm was not the staircase, though everyone remembered the staircase, nor the oil portraits, though the portraits had been arranged to make memory look hereditary. It was the smell of rain drying slowly from wool coats in the reception hall, a smell of weather being disciplined into professionalism. Outside, London had been washed that morning into its usual colour, a grey so old it seemed less a shade than a constitutional principle, and the taxis moved along Fleet Street with their patient black backs shining under the rain. Inside, there were lilies in a porcelain bowl, three receptionists who spoke in lowered voices, and a brass nameplate so polished that the building appeared to have been founded before language had become casual.
Here Be Dragons
Here Be Dragons is a philosophical novella about a brilliant lawyer who loses institutional power and discovers that her mysterious intuition was never magic, but a method waiting to be mapped.
