Frost Fair

by Edith Layton

He always kept his head, he always knew what to say, but her appearance startled the comment from him. Although he knew her name, he still couldn’t accept it, “You are Mrs. Pushkin? Surely not,” he said.

  She was insulted, though she couldn’t say why. Perhaps it was his sneer, or the way he seemed to imply she wasn’t good enough to be herself. She sought something cutting to say.

  But was spared the effort. A shadow detached itself from the doorway behind her visitor and strolled into the room.

  “Well,” Spanish Will Corby said with great interest, looking from one of them to the other, his dark head to the side. “Well, well. I leave for a day, and see what happens? I’d say there was something smelled high as a dead fishie here, but I’ll spare you the jest, because it’s beneath me. Still, now the thing of it is, I’m wondering. Are you two getting acquainted? Or only just meeting again?”

  Chapter Five

  The runner walked into the room and circled the nobleman and the widow. They were so startled by his appearance they froze in place. The Viscount Maldon looked uncomfortable, if a man made of ice could seem so. But a ruddy flush suddenly bloomed on the bony ridges of his high cheekbones. Will noted the widow seemed miserably aware of the situation too. Probably because of her get-up. She was a female and they didn’t like to be caught at a loss. Being rousted out of bed made wearing a dressing gown respectable, and she’d clutched a clean and pretty peach-colored one around herself that first time they’d met, he remembered.

  She didn’t look very respectable today, not in that blood-stained apron and those cracked oversized old boots. She made a swipe at an unruly strand of her shocking hair, looking nonplused. For once, the cool viscount looked just as uncomfortable. Spanish Will was very pleased with his catch in the fish shop this morning.

  “Well,” Will said again, gazing at one of them and then the other. “I had no idea. You two know each other?”

  This shocked them both into speech.

  “Hardly,” Lucian drawled.

  The inference infuriated the widow as much as an outright insult. “I should think not!” she snapped, glowering at Lucian.

  “Then may I ask why you’re here, my lord?” Will asked, turning his attention to Lucian. “When last we met I told you I’d contact you if I’d any news, and so I would have done. But now I find you here? It makes me wonder, it does indeed.”

  “Wonder what?” Lucian asked, the flush on his cheekbones more hectic now. He had nothing to be embarrassed about, Lucian told himself, but somehow the fact that he’d gone ahead without telling the runner made him feel he had let down his side of the bargain. He had, of course, but he shouldn’t feel as guilty about it as he did now. It was the runner’s voice, he decided—Spanish Will acted as wounded as he did suspicious.

  “Wonder what?”

  Will raised one dark brow at the question. He smiled. “Like uncle, like nephew?”

  The widow looked confused. Lucian did not. He inhaled sharply. “I do not know this young woman,” he said grimly. “I am here precisely because I wanted to know if my uncle did.”

  “Uncle?” Maggie asked in a little voice.

  “The dead man on your doorstep turns out to be the Baron St. Cloud, uncle to the Viscount Maldon here,” Will explained, his eyes never leaving Lucian’s. “But if you was wishful of knowing that, my lord, I’m wondering why you didn’t just ask me? Instead of making me have to follow you all the way here so you could ask me the same thing? Seems wasteful.”

  “You followed me?”

  “Oh aye. I didn’t plan on seeing Mrs. Pushkin again ’til tomorrow. No reason to, just yet. Bitter cold out and snowing like fury for such a trek. I usually like to get all my ducks in a row before I take aim, but when I saw you leave your mother’s house and head down here, I broke my own rule and called a hack in spite of…”

  “You followed me?” Lucian said again, only his glittering eyes and tightened voice showing his rage. “But I am the fellow who put up the reward, as you said. Why would you follow me?”

  “Oh, my lord,” Will purred, shaking his dark head. “Had I tuppence for every murderer who posted a reward for his own crime so as to throw us off the scent, I’d quit my job tomorrow, I’d be that warm in the pocket. A gent thinking that if he offers money for a capture he won’t be suspicioned? Nothing more common, I assure you. But it’s useless. I’m Bow Street. We can be bought, in some ways, I’m sorry to say. A crime with gold in it tends to get seen to sooner, there’s truth too. But some things can’t be bought, no matter what the newspapers say. Murder is one of them.”

  The viscount’s face went white as snow—or his dead uncle’s—Maggie thought. “So you suspect me?” Lucian asked incredulously.

  “My lord, I suspect everyone. It’s my job,” Will said simply.

  Lucian was stunned into silence. He’d talked with the runner, and joked with him, laughed with the man too and respected him in a weird fashion, and in the end thought they’d achieved a sort of unity. And now to discover that all along he was being watched, weighed, considered as a suspect? In the murder of his own uncle? He? That was what one got for attempting anything like friendship with someone of the runner’s class, Lucian thought furiously. He’d been duped and then betrayed by a Bow Street runner, and what was even worse, he found he was hurt by it.

  “And so long as I’m here,” Spanish Will went on, “and both of you are too, there’s a few questions I may as well ask.” He took out his notebook and looked around the storeroom. “But it’s cold as death in here. There someplace warmer we can go?” he asked Maggie.

  Not her own apartment, Maggie vowed. The rooms upstairs were hers, and hers alone, and not for the likes of the brutal runner and the nasty nobleman. The gentleman hadn’t even bothered to introduce himself to her, and as for the runner—well… This place was as good as any for the likes of them. She almost smiled at the thought of these two big men suffering from the cold. Good. The colder they got the sooner they’d go. And the more wretched they’d be if they insisted on staying. The room was so frigid they all spoke puffs of white smoke every time they opened their mouths, even the icy nobleman.

  Will answered himself before she could. “…there’s always Bow Street, I suppose,” he mused, his dark eyes malicious and bright.

  “But I’ve a business to see to, right now,” Maggie said, her chin jutting out.

  “So have I,” Will said, and waited.

  Lucian crossed his arms on his chest. It was all he could do right now. He was so furious with the runner, and at himself, that it helped him ignore the cold. The fishwife could entertain them in a block of ice, for all he cared.

  Maggie paused, then nodded, curtly. She was freezing and neither man cared. And her heart failed her at the thought of going to Bow Street. It would have to be the front room across the hall then. A private room, to be sure, but not hers alone. She shared it with the girls and little Davie. It was where they sat at night, reading and talking. A fire always burned in the hearth these days so it would be warm when they came in of an evening after work.

  “I’ll just tell the girls to carry on without me then,” she said haughtily. “I’ll be right back to take you someplace warmer.” She marched out, but stumbled, mind and body, a step later. A baron, she thought as delayed shock set in and she felt her heart catch, a baron, no less, dead on her doorstep.

  “Sell off the last and close early,” she told Alice quickly. “We’re done for the day. Then clean up. I’ve got to talk with the runner now.” She looked at all the avid faces of her waiting customers. “They saw Spanish Will go in the back?”

  Alice nodded, thrilled. “Aye, and the gentry cove too!”

  “Then get word to Old Mack, the Guy brothers and Mrs. Gudge,” Maggie said as she left. “Tell them to bring all they’ve got tomorrow morning. We’ll need more than the usual then too.”

  Maggie returned quickly. She wordlessly led the runner and the nobleman down the hall, and opened the door to the front room oppos
ite the shop. The two men stopped in the doorway, staring.

  The walls of the salon were apple green, and there was an old Turkish carpet on the shining wood floor. A sofa and two comfortable chairs were arranged by the fireside. A polished walnut table bore a silver bowl filled with fruit and nuts. The mantel over the hearth had a china shepherd and shepherdess strolling along it. A few small landscapes hung on the walls, and the front window was covered by long rose draperies. There was a bookcase, well filled. It was a simple but colorful and inviting room, especially so on this snowy winter afternoon.

  Davie was lighting the lamps in the room—lamps filled with good smokeless oil, Maggie thought proudly. It wasn’t as elegant as her own salon upstairs. She’d furnished it for the children. It was comfortable and cozy as the homes they’d never had. It was also obviously not what the two men were expecting.

  Lucian was shocked again. Cozy, warm, inviting, he raised his long nose, detecting a fresh and pleasant scent. Maggie noticed. Well, he could sniff ’til tomorrow morning, she sneered to herself, all he’d get was a snout full of lemon oil and beeswax. The fish stopped at the door, she made sure of that.

  “Is this warm enough for you?” she asked Will sweetly. “We can move the fire screen so you can stand in the hearth, if you need.”

  That won a slash of a white smile from him. “Oh, it will do,” he said, shucking off his greatcoat.

  Lucian did the same, and took a step into the room—halting when he saw the runner didn’t follow. Then he saw the widow looking pointedly at their boots. He looked down too. Curls of wood shavings and God knew what else from the street and her shop clung in clumps to their soles and shining sides. He had no idea of what to do. It wasn’t a problem in his household—the staff would see to it if a visitor tracked in dirt. But his visitors seldom did. His street had sweepers who were always busy at work. His friends came in carriages and if their boots were wet, his servants saw to it after they’d gone. So far as he could recall, he’d never had to tramp through such muck before.

  Spanish Will paused too. He looked around for the boot scraper. It was in the outer hall. A few swift slides along its iron blade with each foot and he got rid of most of the muck. When he was done, Lucian, with an inward shudder, did the same, wondering what his valet would think of the damage done to the perfection of his boots. Then they entered the salon.

  They stood looking at each other in silence. Spanish Will spoke first. “My lord, this is Mrs. Maggie Pushkin, proprietress of this establishment. Mrs. Pushkin, this is the Viscount Maldon. We’ve come to talk about his uncle.”

  Lucian gave the barest suggestion of a bow, countered by Maggie’s merely dipping her head in a mockery of a curtsey.

  “What’s there to talk about?” Maggie demanded, her face tight. “He had the bad fortune to die on my doorstep, and that’s all I know about him. I wonder if I should ask Davie to take your coats at all.”

  “Oh, I’ll carry mine,” Will said, “and no harm done. But we do have to talk, Mrs. P. Because it just doesn’t make sense that a fine gent like the Baron St. Cloud would come all the way from Montague Square on such a bitter night just to die at your door, and strip himself off before he did, at that. That makes no sense at all.”

  “Well, if you’re still suggesting he had business with me, that makes no sense either,” she said angrily, “unless he got a yearning in the middle of the night for some fresh flounder!”

  “I’m thinking he got a yearning for something fresh, all right,” Will agreed, leering at Maggie, “but not cold or scaly, neither.”

  “I most sincerely doubt that,” Lucian said at the same time Maggie cried, “You’re mad!”

  An unlikely ally, and not one she appreciated, Maggie thought, eyeing Lucian as he turned to stare at her.

  “Then maybe we ought sit and talk about what he did fancy,” Will said patiently. “Middle of the night or no. Then we might yet make some sense of it.”

  The men gave Davie their coats, and then sat, gingerly. Maggie lowered herself to a chair—but stopped before she sat, in an awkward recover.

  “If you’ll wait a moment,” she said calmly, though her face grew red. “I just have to show Davie where to hang your coats to dry them properly.” She left the room as languidly as any grand lady. But once out of sight, she dashed down the hall. They’d flustered her, she’d almost sat on her good furniture in her working clothes!

  Once in the kitchen, she whipped off her apron, peeled off the boots, and hurriedly rinsed her hands in lemon water, as she always did after work. There was only time to drag her hair back into a semblance of order. They might be deciding her fate out there, hanging her without hearing her, she thought frantically, panting as she rushed back down the hall. But when she neared the salon, flushed and lemon-scented, she heard nothing. The men were ignoring each other. The runner was jotting something in his notebook, the viscount was staring into the fire, his face as expressive as a rock.

  “Now, then,” she said, sitting on the edge of a chair near the fire, folding her hands in her lap, neatly as a tabby cat, “what must I tell you to convince you?”

  “What you tell me makes no nevermind,” Will said, not even looking up from his notebook. “Because I expect it’ll be same as before: you didn’t know him, never saw him before and don’t know what I’m talking about. Right? But I was thinking that if we three sat a spell and talked about the baron, we might find out why he was here. Mrs. P.—you might remember more. My lord,” he turned to Lucian as Maggie began to protest, “tell us something about your uncle, why don’t you?”

  Lucian looked at Maggie. He raised an arc of an eyebrow. “You really think it necessary to discuss him here?”

  Maggie bridled. “You may take yourself off and discuss him on the roof for all I care!” He might be gentry, but she was her own mistress and didn’t have to bend to any man except her king anymore.

  Will nodded. “I do want to discuss him.”

  “Well then, let me think,” Lucian said, sounding as bored as someone placating an annoying child. “What is there that you don’t already know? He is—was—just turned five and fifty. And due to marry the Honorable Louisa Everley this Sunday. She’s some years his junior, some score of years, though she’s no dewy miss herself. She’s got thirty years in her dish, an age the world would consider youngish if she were a man, but not a woman. Life is unfair to females, is it not, Mrs. Pushkin?”

  So much for reconciliation, he thought, as the widow glowered at him in response. He shrugged. “At any rate, it’s an age that put her firmly on the shelf—until Uncle asked for her hand. Which surprised us all. He was a reclusive man. At least I saw him seldom, and never on the town. If we met it was at family affairs, which was rare too, because I’m not in the way of being a family man. My brother knew him better. I’ve no idea why he sought his company—but then I’m ten years my brother’s senior, we aren’t close either…”

  “Your uncle’s interests,” Will cut in to say, “his diversions, his daily routine, my lord.”

  Maggie smiled at that, like a child who hears the teacher correcting a classmate she didn’t like, Lucian thought, annoyed again. This time, because the image he conjured up was too uncomfortably apt. He’d been out of the schoolroom a long time, and didn’t like feeling he’d been put back in it. Especially by a man he’d treated as an equal, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

  The nobleman’s face was disciplined and hard, but his color betrayed him, Maggie thought with pleasure. And his eyes could speak violence while his face registered nothing but weariness. It must be a talent, she decided, cultivated by the very rich.

  “He collected books,” Lucian said, pinning the runner with his cold gray gaze, “on botany and biology. That was about the sum and substance of the man. He belonged to the Royal Society, the Alfred, clubs for scholarly men, but he seldom went to them. He had no interest in politics or parties, or fashion or anything else I can recall. He was wealthy, he was boring, he h
ad absolutely no reason I can fathom for being in any part of London by night, much less being found murdered, and most especially not here.

  And no,” he went on as Maggie glared at him, “so far as I know he’d no interest in females—except for Louisa, of course. But that was necessity rather than ardor. He belatedly realized he had no heirs. That was all he wanted from a wife.”

  The widow’s expression went from anger to rueful disgust. Both Lucian and the runner noted that with interest.

  “Still no memories?” the runner asked her.

  “No, but that’s because I’ve so many barons buying up my fish, I can’t place him,” she snapped. “Give over. You heard it for yourself, he didn’t fancy females. And as I’m not the sort most men would fancy, why not admit I’ve no part in this?”

  “Then who’d fancy leaving him on your doorstep, do you think?” Will asked pleasantly, though he leaned forward and stared at her. “He was found here, and so here is where I must start.”

  “You might start with his family,” Maggie snapped. “Most people who end up dead at someone’s hands end up that way at the hands of someone they know.”

  “Ah. And so you are an expert on murder, Mrs. Pushkin, are you?” Lucian said mildly, though raising a brow.

  Will was vastly pleased. The nobleman and the widow were trying to push each other up the steps to the scaffold. If they did know each other, all to the better. If they didn’t, one might push the other to saying something unplanned anyway.

  “I had nothing to profit from his murder,” Maggie said with a tight little smile.

  “Nor had I,” Lucian said with a chilling one. “Not only have I an adequate fortune of my own, but I’m the last person he’d leave his to.”

  “Ah, but he won’t be being wed this Sunday,” Will said, his face smooth as his voice. “And since he had no children, and you’re the head of your family now, my lord, you’re now his heir. Or don’t I correctly understand how the gentry does it?”

  “No, you’re right—or would be if he’d an entail on anything he owned, which he did not,” Lucian said. “He didn’t have any property of note. Only his townhouse and funds. He could leave those wherever he pleased, and I doubt it pleased him to leave them to me.”