“I am certain your aunt can be prevailed upon to escort Miss Bingley wherever she cares to go. Lady Castlereagh requires our help and so we set off in the morning.”
“Surely,” Bingley said, “the coachman has done it. He must have done, but how will we find the scoundrel? He could be on his way to the continent by now. Are we to bumble our way around Europe, asking after a coachman?”
“Let us not decide what to do this instant.”
Privately, Darcy shared some of Bingley’s misgivings. Visiting posthouses to ask after an errant lady’s maid was one thing and hunting down a thief bold enough to attack Lady Castlereagh was quite another. He could only hope that Quinn had experience dealing with this particular sort of business.
Darcy took a sheet of paper from his desk and composed a note to the Bow Street man.
Horatio Quinn was a short and energetic individual. He had kept himself trim through a judicious amount of fast walking through various parks and neighborhoods. He did not keep himself trim for his health, but for the better effect of his large collection of waistcoats. Mention the name Horatio Quinn to any Bow Street man, and that man would nod knowingly and murmur, “The one with the waistcoats.” His favored style was colorful and, to his mind, witty. Mrs. Johnson, his long-suffering housekeeper, was handed his carefully drawn sketches and tasked to embroider them. She might protest that a pattern of parrots smoking cigars was not the thing, but if Horatio Quinn thought it was the thing, on it would go.
In the small pocket of all these many interesting waistcoats he kept a gold-plated quizzing glass. He had once seen Beau Brummel whip out such a glass and vanquish another gentleman by gazing through it with a combination of flair, irony and disdain. Horatio had immediately taken on the habit and practiced his own quizzing look—knowing, world weary and incisively intelligent. He’d found it cracked more than one suspect and, even when it did not, it felt noble in the doing.
For ten years, Horatio Quinn had lent his services to Bow Street on various cases. However, once he’d hung out his shingle as a private investigator, he began to see that England’s aristocrats had all manner of mysteries to be solved and would pay handsomely to have them solved. He had made a tidy sum these last three years and put aside a sizable nest egg. One day, when he no longer cared to work, he would move to the country and live a life of leisure. He supposed he would be very old when the time came, as he was not a leisurely sort of person. In the meanwhile, he’d moved to a comfortable address that afforded him a room for a proper library. Sitting there of an evening, book in hand and absorbing facts that might come in handy someday, he felt as fortunate as any duke.
Just now, Mr. Quinn regarded his housekeeper through his quizzing glass with deep satisfaction. She held a letter delivered to him from Fitzwilliam Darcy. Since his last triumph in locating Lady Castlereagh’s feckless maid, he had been awaiting a summons to the next emergency. For a lady as high in society as Lady Castlereagh, there was always a next emergency. With any luck, one of those confounded canines had gone missing.
He tore open the letter and scanned its contents, a broad smile emerging. “Mrs. Johnson, the most excellent sort of news. Lady Castlereagh has been robbed and beaten.”
Mrs. Johnson, well-used to her employer’s original ideas about what constituted excellent news, merely said, “Shall I pack for you, then?”
“Yes, yes indeed. I’m off to Hertfordshire on the morrow. Now for my waistcoats. I shall wear the turbaned monkeys and then take the flamingoes drinking champagne, the sixes and sevens teacups, the squirrels playing whist and, as a nod to Lady Castlereagh’s menagerie, the kangaroos at cotillion.”
Mrs. Johnson only nodded, but privately hoped that Lady Castlereagh was blind. For the lady’s own sake.
As the sun streamed into the drawing room, Lady Castlereagh took the letter handed her by Elizabeth. She tore it open.
“It is from Darcy,” Lady Castlereagh said. “They shall arrive before noon on the morrow.”
Elizabeth waited expectantly, hopeful that the lady would provide more information than she had so far. She was desperate to have some detail on the three gentlemen. If they were rough sorts, some kind of plan or protocol must be instituted. What relationship did Lady Castlereagh have with these men? Were they friends or servants? Were they suitable to have in the dining room, or would Lady Castlereagh not deem them appropriate to dine with? If they should not dine with the family, would they eat in the kitchens? Or a tray in their rooms? It was all so untoward, not knowing what to do with a person.
Elizabeth had always regarded herself as exceedingly liberal but now that she was faced with unknown personages, she found she very much wanted to know their station. It was not only for her own comfort, but for their own. They would expect something, but she knew not what. To make a mistake would embarrass everybody.
“He seems confident that they shall be able to provide assistance,” Lady Castlereagh said. “But then, Darcy always does seem confident. Of course, who knows about Mr. Quinn? He is practiced in his demeanor and, in any case, one can barely think clearly when faced with those remarkable waistcoats of his. I shall have a better idea of their real confidence in the matter when I lay my eyes on Mr. Bingley. That man wears his heart on his sleeve.”
“My lady,” Elizabeth began cautiously, “I wonder, will the gentlemen dine with us? Or would you prefer they have a tray in their rooms?”
“Why on earth should they have a tray in their rooms?” the lady asked.
“I am sure I do not know. I only thought that persons equipped to investigate such a matter might be…rough sorts.”
Lady Castlereagh was vastly entertained by this idea, as evidenced by her quick laugh. “Oh, heavens,” she said. “Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy is to be a rough sort. Too amusing. I shall tell him you said so, it will be a very good joke.”
Lady Castlereagh paused. “On consideration, I had better not tell him. Darcy is everything fine, but if he has a failing, it is he does not appreciate wit directed at his own person. Mr. Brummel discovered it to his chagrin, as have many before him.”
“So they shall dine with us,” Elizabeth said, very much relieved.
“Miss Bennet, Mr. Darcy is heir to Pemberley, a very great estate to the north. Mr. Bingley’s family comes from trade, but that does not make him less of a gentleman in my eyes. He has lived as a gentleman all his life and there are many a titled individual who might take a lesson from Bingley’s kindness, tact and social graces. As for Mr. Quinn, he is our eccentric in the group. A Bow Street man who has taken on some amusing airs that you will see for yourself. Despite Mr. Quinn’s unusual choice of career, he is the younger son of a landowner and so perfectly respectable and eligible to sit at your father’s table.”
“I shall tell Hill of the arrangement,” Elizabeth said. She thought she would forestall telling her mother more than the fact that the gentlemen were respectable and would sit at table. This was no less than Mrs. Bennet expected as she had already deemed the men fabulously rich and wishing to be married.
Elizabeth experienced an uncomfortable flutter at the idea of Mrs. Bennet discovering Mr. Darcy’s great estate to the north. And, she would find it out. Her mother had already written to Elizabeth’s aunt to discover more about the three men. Mrs. Gardiner was well-informed on the inhabitants of town, regardless of whether they were those she mixed with. She was certain to know of Mr. Darcy, and Mr. Bingley too. Once Mrs. Bennet was informed of the facts, wheels would begin turning, plots would be hatched, and battle commenced.
Darcy’s party had departed the outskirts of London and now engaged in a slow journey through the countryside. He would have liked to go faster, but for all Quinn’s experience solving crimes, he was not much of a horseman.
Darcy had concealed his perturbation at Quinn when he had first set eyes on him. Was it really necessary to own, much less wear, a waistcoat sporting monkeys wearing turbans? Was not a simple white, or even a stripe, deemed sufficient? Why must the Bo
w Street man dandy himself to such a ridiculous degree? Every person they passed on the road stared agog, and rightly so. Had he been able to foresee the circumstance he would have ordered his carriage and hidden the Bow Street man inside it.
He sighed, supposing allowances must be made for retaining the man’s expertise. Neither Darcy nor Bingley had the first idea where to start to unravel this mystery. They must be led by Quinn, regardless of what atrocity the man cared to put on his person.
“Quinn,” he said, “Lady Castlereagh, if I know her well, shall expect we arrive with some sort of plan. Bingley and I are out of our depth when it comes to it.”
Quinn appeared pleased to discover Darcy and Bingley out of their depth. He waved his hands. “A common mistake to those uninitiated in the art of unraveling a crime. Amateurs will wish to race in and take action, as if any action at all is bound to come out right.”
Darcy bristled at being named an amateur, though he knew perfectly well that he was. Bingley seemed more relieved than anything else.
“That is exactly it,” Bingley said. “Just now, I was thinking, well we ought to race off and do something. But what?”
“As you see it, Mr. Bingley,” Quinn said.
“If we are not to set off in action,” Darcy said, wishing Quinn would illuminate him, “what are we to do?”
“War room,” Quinn said. He sat back and folded his arms, as if ‘war room’ explained everything.
Noticing Darcy scowling at him, Quinn said, “You see, Mr. Darcy, when one is confronted with a crime such as this, one’s first instinct is to act on the very last facts. In this case, Lady Castlereagh was set upon, her jewels are missing, and her coachman and grooms disappeared. Naturally, we wonder, where have the reprobates responsible gone off to, and how can we catch up to them?”
“Of course that’s what we wonder,” Darcy said. “It is our entire reason for going.”
“But we have not examined all the other facts. Facts occurring before the last, perhaps for some days, weeks or months. You see? We cannot make a guess at who they are or where they have gone merely by the last facts. In a war room, we shall examine all the facts of the case.”
“I cannot imagine that there are any other facts but the last,” Darcy said.
“There are always facts before the last, Mr. Darcy. Always.”
Bingley did not appear any more confident than Darcy that there would be prior facts to consider.
Seeing their dubious looks, Quinn said, “I shall give you an example. Some years ago, I investigated the death of a man in rented rooms. Simply examining the last facts, one might have presumed he died of accident. He was smoking, and there was a fire. What could be more clear?”
Darcy nodded. He did not appreciate men smoking late into the night in his own house, as Pemberley had once caught fire in such circumstances when he had been a boy. He had woken to the house in uproar and was rescued through the smoke by his father. Even now, he retained a dread of a midnight fire and employed a man whose sole job was walking the house at night to see that nothing of the sort occurred.
“However,” Mr. Quinn continued, “upon examining prior facts, I was certain this was a case of murder. I noticed instantly that the house was remarkably undamaged, and even the room itself experienced little damage. I surmised that the fire had been doused quickly. A little too quickly, in my view. Then, I examined the shopkeepers in the neighborhood. I discovered the landlady had bought enough laudanum the week before to last a direly ill person a month. Why? She could not say. Where was it? She did not know. A missing quantity of laudanum, a man died of smoke, and property no worse for it.”
“Yes,” Darcy said. “I see. The landlady has done it.”
“But why, Mr. Darcy?” Quinn said, rubbing his hands together. “Why should she do it? What could she hope to gain by it? The dead man had nothing to get.”
“I am absolutely stumped,” Bingley said.
“As was I, almost. On further inspection of the house, didn’t I find a secret passage right behind the chair the man died in? And didn’t I find men’s clothes hidden in it? I was convinced the landlady and a mysterious man were in league and it was murder. However, I still could not fathom who or why.”
“I am sure I do not know,” Bingley said. “I have a friend, Crutchfield, and his landlady is delightful. I shouldn’t like to think of her planning to kill off poor old Crutchfield.”
Quinn ignore Bingley’s fear for Crutchfield. “Then came the breakthrough, as it always does. I’d been looking at the thing all wrong. It might not be what the landlady was out to get. It might very well be something she wanted to avoid and, if so, it must have to do with the mysterious man. I set a watch on the house, and who do you think we spotted going into the house in the wee hours of the morning? Notorious Jack Klepper, an outlaw who’d escaped prison and the noose just months before. Then I knew all—she’d been hiding her man and her poor lodger discovered it. They killed him to keep it quiet. She dosed his tea with enough laudanum to kill him, then they lit a fire to lead us all to believe that smoke was the cause of death. They made their fatal mistake in putting the fire out so quickly, so as not to unduly damage the lady’s house.”
Darcy could not deny that Quinn knew his business. Not in a thousand years would he have guessed there was an escaped criminal lurking in a secret passage.
“So you see how these things have to be pieced together? We will require a room in the house to be used for our purposes. On a large table of some sort, we will lay out every fact and examine it backwards and forwards. Between us, we will piece the story together and discover how we should act.”
“Will they have such a room as that, Darcy?” Bingley asked. “A suitable war room?”
“I do not know. I have never heard of the Bennets, I do not believe they keep a house in town.”
Bingley nodded, then said, “Ah, well, I suppose we shall find them a jolly lot. It seems whenever I meet someone I haven’t known, they are rather jolly.”
And that, Darcy thought, summed up Bingley perfectly—he would befriend everybody from all four corners of the world. For himself, he would reserve judgment on the Bennets. Lady Castlereagh had deemed them fit to stay with, so they were certainly a gentleman’s family. That, however, did not signify much. His neighbor, Mr. Tuttle, was a gentleman landowner, but the man would not know a salad fork from a pitchfork and was in the habit of drinking too much at the Rose and Crown.
Chapter Three
The morning had been a tense and quiet affair in the Bennet’s drawing room. Since it had been known that the three gentlemen would arrive sometime in the early part of the day, the household could not seem to settle upon anything. The maid wandered in and out of the room, occasionally staring at the fire, though it did not need tending. Lydia and Kitty pretended at their sewing and Mary pretended at her book. Mrs. Bennet occasionally spoke in a low tone to herself, generally along the lines of “Well. Three gentlemen.” Elizabeth and Jane bent over their sewing, determined to accomplish something.
It was only Lady Castlereagh who seemed at ease, and she would make various statements about how it was all sure to come right once Darcy, Bingley and Quinn were on the case.
Despite her nerves at receiving the three strangers, Elizabeth was intrigued by what she might witness. What did men do to discover a criminal? She had not the faintest idea. It was fascinating to imagine being faced with the task. Her only attempt at solving a mystery was predicting how Valancourt might be reunited with Emily in Mysteries of Udolpho, a dreadful gothic novel that she had enjoyed exceedingly. She had been wrong at her guesses and so she did not expect she would guess any better in this circumstance. She must be patient until somebody else could explain to her what had occurred.
She could not fathom how they would make a start. They had no clues at all. Lady Castlereagh had not yet regained any memory of the event. All that was known was her coachman, grooms and jewels were gone.
A clatter of horses int
errupted her thoughts. She threw down her sewing and turned to Jane. The gentlemen had arrived.
Elizabeth presumed that her father had been waiting in his library, with ears tuned for the sound of hoofbeats, as he was in the hall before anybody else. He gave Lady Castlereagh his arm to escort her to the drive, while the others filed out behind him.
A tall and dark-haired man leapt down from his horse. He was strikingly handsome, Elizabeth thought, though there was a strange intensity to his demeanor. He was followed by a man with a mass of lighter-colored curls, and another that Elizabeth must guess was Mr. Quinn. Lady Castlereagh had named the Bow Street man an eccentric and Elizabeth had certainly never seen a more eccentric mode of dress.
“My dear Darcy and Bingley,” Lady Castlereagh said. “And Mr. Quinn, how do you do?”
Darcy and Bingley bowed. Mr. Quinn bowed too, but he added so many unusual flourishes and arm waves to the operation that Elizabeth wondered if he were not in the midst of inventing a new dance.
“Gentlemen, allow me to present Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, who have been so good to open their house to me, and here is Miss Elizabeth Bennet, the lady who stayed with me in my carriage until help arrived,” Lady Castlereagh said. “You are to know that Miss Bennet is a resourceful sort of person. She tamed Monday and Tuesday at once and conducted herself with all good sense.”
Elizabeth blushed furiously. She was not used to being singled out. Rather, with so many sisters about, she was in the habit of comfortably lurking among them.
Mr. Darcy peered at her. Mr. Bingley nodded vigorously. Mr. Quinn rubbed his chin, as if the fact he’d just heard might be salient at some later date.
Mrs. Bennet said loudly, “I hope all my daughters are equipped with good sense.”
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