A Mystery at Carlton House

by Jennifer Ashley

  “Of course,” Grenville looked surprised the man felt he had to ask. “I’d be delighted to know your opinion. It is only a small assemblage, I must warn you. I haven’t the space to acquire much. But I pick up trinkets as I travel.”

  I hid a smile at his notion of “trinkets.” In Alexandria and Cairo, he’d bought a hookah; a necklace of large beaten squares of gold for Marianne; a solid silver statuette of a cat-headed god; and several scarabs made of gold and jewels that now held pride of place in his collection room in the upper story of his house.

  “I will have the page copied for you at once,” Higgs said. “The drawings on it possibly not, however. Those were done by Mr. Cosway himself, from memory—his sight is not what it was. He’s fallen out of favor with the prince, but he is still interested in what goes on at Carlton House.”

  Another person I might speak to, I decided. “And Mr. Floyd,” I said. “Would it be possible for me to see him?”

  Higgs heaved another sigh, lifting the ledger from the table. “I have no idea, Captain Lacey. I have not been granted permission to visit him. I have sent letters, but who knows if they have been given to him? If you can speak to him Captain, please do. I would like to know how he fares.”

  There was not much more we could say. Higgs closed the ledger, promising to have the page copied and delivered to Grenville. We thanked him for his time and help, Grenville saying he’d arrange an appointment for Higgs to view his personal collection. We departed, another footman appearing to lead us up a back staircase to the main floor.

  We found Donata in an anteroom near the hall to the front door. She stood by a red velvet draped window that looked out into the dark garden, and was quite alone, no sign of the Prince Regent.

  She turned as we entered, statuesque in her velvet gown and cloak, the candlelight of the immense gold and crystal chandelier glittering on the diamonds in her hair. Again I marveled that such an exquisite woman had taken up with a broken soldier like me.

  “Imagine,” Donata said, as she glided to join us, “lighting all these rooms when no one is using them. Such a waste. No wonder the Regent’s finances are constantly in threat of being cut off. Did you learn anything useful?”

  Donata took my arm as she reached me, but she gave me a quiet look, not an impatient one. She knew I’d tell her all.

  The same haughty footman who’d let us in ushered us out, Jackson and Grenville’s coach waiting at the bottom of the steps. I handed in Donata myself but hung back and let Grenville ascend after her.

  “Go on with your evening,” I said, looking in at them as Grenville took his seat. “I need to speak to someone.”

  Grenville raised his brows, but Donata gave me a nod. “Yes, I saw him lurking about. I’m off to Lady Featherstone’s for a rout, but Grenville can escort me. You dislike routs.”

  “Grenville would be honored to,” that man said, pressing his hand to his chest. “We shall be the envy of all who enter, my lady.”

  They would be, two people at the height of elegance, both dressed in the very latest fashion. I, on the other hand, would be skulking through a park in the darkness, searching for a criminal.

  “We will speak when I return home,” Donata promised, and then sent me a steely look. “You will fill in anything Grenville leaves out, will you not? Good night, Gabriel.”

  One of the prince’s footmen shut the heavy carriage door, the youngish man keeping his expression carefully neutral. I imagined he’d seen many an odd person come and go from this mansion, could tell many tales if he saw fit. The conversation below stairs at Carlton House must be very interesting.

  I walked through the columned gate after the departing coach and turned left, making my slow way down Pall Mall toward St. James’s Palace and beyond to Green Park at the end.

  While this part of St. James’s had become very fashionable, Green Park could be a dark and unsavory place at night. If no public entertainment was going on in the vast expanse of lawn and trees, the forlorn park filled with those up to no good.

  I’d concluded Brewster wanted to meet me here, because when I’d seen him in the gardens at Carlton House, he’d jabbed his fingers to his left, pointing toward this park, before he’d disappeared from the moonlight, back under the shadows of the trees.

  I disliked wandering the area by myself, so I kept to the edge of the park, where I could dive back into the lighted streets of St. James’s if necessary. Highwaymen used to lurk in the park, so Lady Aline, who knew everything there was to know about London, had told me. In her day even, she’d said, when she’d been a little girl, which meant about forty years ago.

  “Guv.” Brewster’s voice came out of the pitch dark, and an instant later he was beside me.

  I suppressed my start and frowned at him. “You could have come with us,” I said. “And not pretended to hurry off home. Londoners are used to seeing me with a guard.”

  “Didn’t fink ye wanted me seen by His Royal Highness’s servants.” Brewster sniffled, drew out a giant handkerchief, and wiped his nose. “In case ye wanted me following anyone at some time.”

  “Good thought,” I said. “But I hope you haven’t caught a cold for it.”

  “Naw. The air just makes me sniffle, is all. Em will see that right. Did you find out what was nicked?”

  “Yes—the curator will send me a list. Although, I wonder …” I trailed off but felt the weight of Brewster’s stare.

  “’S too cold out here to wait for you to wonder, Captain,” he said. “If ye tell me what was nicked, I can help ye look for it.”

  I let out a breath, which fogged in the air. “I was pondering the fact that small items have been moved from room to room and not actually stolen. I wonder if the missing things have left the palace at all.”

  Brewster sent me his long-suffering look. “If you was to cease speaking in ponderings and wonderings, and tell me exactly what you need to find, I can tell ye where to start looking.”

  “I did not memorize the list exactly—but a silver gilt cup with a lid, a porcelain table clock by a master clockmaker, and a miniature painting of a nude woman in a gold frame.”

  “When was they nabbed?”

  “Recently,” I said. “I can’t be more specific, because I do not know. Mr. Floyd was arrested a few days ago, but things have gone missing or have been moving about for months, so Mr. Higgs says.”

  “Right.” Brewster didn’t linger to mull over my information. “Come with me, Captain. I suppose we can get a hackney—it’s a bit of a walk and it’s bloody cold.”

  “Certainly,” I said. “I’ll be happy to get out of the wind myself. Where are you taking me?”

  Though I would swear that no one stood near us—the entire park looked deserted on this chilly, windy night—Brewster stepped very close to me and spoke quietly into my ear.

  “To a Nazareth,” he said. “One for pretty trinkets. Only ye can’t breathe a word of where ye’ve been or what ye’ve seen. Understand me?”

  Chapter 8

  The threat underlying the words was clear. Brewster and I had become friends of a sort, but I never doubted that he’d break my neck if I endangered him, his friends, and most especially, his wife. Because he liked me, he might kill me as painlessly as possible, but he’d kill me all the same.

  “I do understand,” I said. “I give you my word, I shall not tell a living soul what I see tonight.”

  Brewster studied me a moment longer before making up his mind. “All right then,” he said, and motioned for me to follow him out of the park, back to the light.

  I found a hackney at a stand in St. James’s Street. A crowd of young dandies wove drunkenly through the road, never minding vehicles or horses that nearly ran them down. They were moving from the gentlemen’s clubs to the hells, those secret dens where fortunes were lost on the turn of a dice. Plenty of wealth changed hands in the clubs as well, but at least in the hells a man could take his ladybird with him for comfort.

  Brewster rode inside the h
ackney, warming his big gloved hands under his armpits as he sat across from me.

  “Ye ruined me taking me to foreign parts,” he growled. “It was godawful hot, but I grew used to it, like. There’s no sun in London, is there?”

  “We can make another journey to Egypt next winter,” I suggested. “Stay longer, bring our wives.”

  “Bit hard on the ladies, wouldn’t it be? And you’re thinking I’ll be working for you that long, are ye?”

  “I merely mention it,” I said, not taking offense.

  Brewster grunted and fell silent. I always found him a good companion, because he didn’t expect witty conversation from me—no conversation at all, in fact.

  He’d given the driver a direction, which I hadn’t heard, so I watched out the window, curious, as we moved down Pall Mall to Charing Cross, and thence to Whitehall.

  We passed the grand buildings that housed the Horse Guards, the Admiralty, the Treasury. The gentlemen who sat all day in these offices running the kingdom would soon turn their steps to join their sons and nephews in the clubs and hells just up the street in St. James’s.

  Not long later, we crossed Westminster Bridge, the bulk of Lambeth Palace to our right as we reached the other side of the river. A little way past this, Brewster thumped on the hackney’s roof and bade the driver to stop.

  The coachman pulled to a halt, and Brewster climbed down, automatically reaching back to steady me to my feet. We did this ritual seamlessly now, Brewster knowing exactly how much support to give me to both help me stand and save my dignity.

  When I hobbled forward to pay the fare, Brewster stopped me. “Don’t bring out your coin in a place like this. I already settled it.”

  The coachman, not waiting for our debate, slapped his reins on his horse’s back and rattled away from us toward the bridge. We were left on a quiet street that was very dark, the buildings on either side of us close and unlit.

  “Keep to my heels,” Brewster said. “Don’t stray. I don’t want to explain to your lady wife why I carried you home full of knife holes.”

  I nodded and kept my hand firmly on my walking stick, the cane within it comforting. My other hand went to my coat and the small knife tucked inside it. London, especially at night, was a dangerous place, its pockets of civilization few and far between.

  Brewster took me along the narrow lane and out into a wider street that sloped down to the river. The noisome smell of the Thames came strongly to us, though it was not as bad here as it would grow farther downstream, after it passed the bulk of the city. Upriver was Chelsea, Richmond, and open country.

  Even so, the air was rank with the odors of fish and sewage. Brewster kept a steady pace as though he didn’t notice the stench, until we were under the end arches of the bridge itself. Shingle crunched beneath my boots, the gravel extending from the sluggish river.

  Brewster guided me onward around the bridge and through a tiny lane that ended in a large door. The door opened not to a building, to my surprise, but to another street. London, a very old city, was constantly shifting, roads and buildings moving and occasionally merging into one another. The lanes back here had obviously been built over at some point, houses rising through and over them instead of bothering to go around.

  No doors opened from the brick passage, but it was wide enough for us to walk side by side had we wished to. I followed Brewster, however, trying to keep the thump of my walking stick quiet.

  Another turn led us into open air, but we were enclosed by walls so I wasn’t certain there was another way out. Here I saw market stalls, or at least tables with men and women behind them, goods on top. The tables were thin and rickety, as though they could be taken apart and carried off at a moment’s notice.

  “Mind.” Brewster hung back to speak into my ear. “Not a word.”

  I nodded, but in any case, I was too interested in what I saw to speak.

  Some of the stalls held fairly ordinary items—bowls and plates a housewife might buy for her kitchen, garden tools, bolts of cloth, cooking utensils.

  Another table contained mirrors of all shapes and sizes; another, empty frames for pictures or the mirrors at the last table; another, porcelain cups and saucers, mixed and matched; and another, cutlery. Very fine cutlery, if I were any judge. The heavy forks and knives with which I ate food at Donata’s table had taught me about quality silver, and these were that.

  I would have thought a market for stolen goods would be frequented by only a few people, sales taking place in whispers, but the place was thronged. Respectable-looking women with maids or cooks in tow shopped among the stalls, and men of all sorts, from gentlemen in City suits to laborers, browsed the stalls, picking up things and haggling over the price.

  I was familiar with vendors from Covent Garden and other markets who hawked their wares with a cross between good-natured banter and volatile abuse, and here they were no different.

  “That is perfectly good silk, madam—never turn up your nose and walk away from it. You’re a fool if you do. You’ll never see better. Naw, don’t look over there—his things are foul imitation. If ye want real silk, ye’ll take mine. Tell ye what, love—I’ll throw in these handkerchiefs, softest linen, woven in the Low Countries, I swear on my grave. Can’t say fairer than that.”

  “I can see you’ve got a few coins to spend, sir,” another called out to me. “Buy a trinket for your ladylove. Look at these little boxes, best from France for her snuff or her buttons. Or these lockets—beautiful paintings to wear ‘round her lovely neck.”

  I glanced at the wares on his table, spying miniatures of beautiful people enclosed in delicate ovals, snuffboxes of enamel and gilt, and gold vinaigrettes studded with tiny jewels. These lovely things had no doubt come from a lady’s or gentleman’s dressing table. That lady or gentleman might have been robbed of them, or they might have sold the things to raise money on the sly. So many in polite society needed extra coin to pay gambling debts, and so many feared to tell the husband or wife, father or mother, guardian aunt and uncle, that they were up to their ears in debt. Hence the lucrative market in trinkets.

  I passed on, and the vendor called after me. “Won’t see better, nor cheaper. Make it up to your lady for being out all hours—do!”

  I continued walking, the only way to counter persistent vendors.

  Brewster had halted at another stall by the time I caught up to him, this one with the finest fichus and caps I’d ever seen. Donata liked caps of very thin linen to wear about the house, and fichus for her day dresses. I would be tempted to purchase one for her if I didn’t highly suspect they’d been filched from one of her neighbors.

  The wizened man behind the linen table was a tiny fellow, and it took me a moment to realize he wasn’t sitting down. He stood perhaps five feet high, his small limbs matching his size. His suit almost swallowed him, his cravat covering the bottom of his chin. He had gray hair and small black eyes, but a large smile and a matching voice.

  “Tommy, me dear old darling! Been donkey’s years since I’ve seen ye. How’s the missus?”

  “Em’s well,” Brewster answered, his voice more friendly than usual. “How’s your Violet?”

  “Keeping. Keeping. The old girl has plenty of life in her yet. What brings ye here of all places, me old sweetheart? I thought ye’d left us for the higher life. Apprentice, is ’e?” The man jerked his chin at me, laughing silently.

  “This ’ere’s the captain,” Brewster said.

  This simple statement made the man’s dark eyes widen. “That captain? Good gawd, don’t we run in ’igh circles? Pleased t’meet ye, Captain. I’m Billy. Billy Boxall, but don’t go telling everyone ye know me.”

  Billy Boxall. The name had a familiar ring. “Aren’t you …?”

  “A world-famous jockey, that’s me.” Billy chuckled, the cravat moving. “Had the finest racers between me legs at one time in me life. Won many a Derby, haven’t I, Tommy?”

  “Aye, Billy’s a dab hand with the gee-gees, Captain,”
Tommy said generously. “Can’t stand the beasts meself. The captain here was a cavalry officer.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Billy said, looking me up and down. “I don’t envy you there. Too many horses killed in battle. Would break me heart.”

  “It did.” I had lost two fine horses, brave lads, both of them. I had grieved a long time when I’d had to put them down—still did when I thought of it. “But that’s behind me.”

  “Heard ye fight battles of a different nature now,” Billy said. “Pulling murderers and handing them to the Runners. Good on ye, Captain.”

  He gave me a nod of approval, a likely receiver of stolen goods admiring me for having men arrested. I had already learned, however, running errands for James Denis, that there were different levels of morality among the criminal classes. A cold-blooded murderer was a far different thing from a petty thief.

  “Poppy about?” Brewster asked Billy.

  Billy mulled this over. “Saw her a few weeks back, I fink. Now, where was it?”

  Brewster gave him an impatient look. “De ye know or not?”

  “Try the Ox’s Head,” Billy said. “She ever liked that house.”

  “Right.” Brewster gave him a nod but didn’t seem ready to rush off. “Anything new about?”

  Again, Billy considered, taking his time. “Egyptians is the rage. And kettles, but they’re fetching less than they used to. A few gewgaws, some pretties. What’cha looking for?” Kettles, I’d come to know from Brewster, meant watch fobs, which rhymed with kettles and hobs.

  “Gilders, maybe some tickers and kettles,” Brewster said. “From high places.”

  Billy straightened up. “Sorry, mate. Don’t know nuffink about that.”

  Brewster scowled. “Who does know? Come on, lad.”

  “Only one man nicks from ’igh places lately,” Billy said.

  “Who’s that then?”

  Billy gave him a pitying look. “You ought to know. You work for ’im.”