Frost Fair

by Edith Layton

  “Thirty has that effect on women,” Will commented.

  “Fifty, obviously, on men,” Lucian said, “at least, to judge from my uncle. And what does she say about my uncle’s death? Did she pretend to heartbreak?”

  “Not at all. She just said it was a bizarre thing to happen. But then she thought, and said that since she didn’t know him that well, really, she doesn’t know if it was bizarre or not.”

  “Think the dragoon did for your uncle?” Will asked Lucian.

  “Possible,” Lucian said.

  “Well, I think he’s paltry, and wouldn’t have the courage,” Maggie declared.

  “He may not have treated your new friend fairly,” Lucian told Maggie with amusement, “but he is a soldier in a crack regiment, not just a decoration at the palace gates, so he’s used to dealing death.”

  “And if he’s paltry,” Will said, “remember, whoever coshed the baron could have come up from behind him with a club. It don’t take courage for that, just determination, and enough strength to carry him off after.”

  The coach was silent a moment, except for the usual sounds of creaking leather and the steady distant hoof beats on the cobbles below. The viscount sat opposite Maggie, the runner, beside her. Her nostrils fluttered, picking up unaccustomed rich masculine scents of shaving soap, starched linen, leather, boot polish, and sandalwood. Rich men’s scents. Or at least, she thought, those of men who didn’t haul fish or push carts. The fainter aroma of her own rose perfume that she’d splurged on for this visit wasn’t half as exciting.

  They’d hired a carriage because they didn’t want anyone seeing the viscount’s crest on the door of anything she drove up in. The one Maldon had rented was warm and cushioned and well-sprung, the finest she’d ever been in. She was dressed in style, and surrounded by two powerful men. She felt like a real lady. But these two men had brought her here, waited for her to come out, and now they were waiting for her to go on. She knew what they wanted to hear.

  “It wasn’t Louisa,” she said with decision, “it couldn’t be. She wanted to marry him, Lord help her. I told her she was lucky to have escaped that.”

  “You two did get on, didn’t you?” Lucian commented.

  “Well, we’d much in common, after all,” she said. “I was married off to Bernard for my own good, and she was going to marry your uncle for her good. Be sure, I told her not much good would have come from it. All he wanted was an heir, and if she thought children would have made her happy even if he didn’t, what if they hadn’t been blessed, eh? An empty cradle would have made her life even more of a misery, even if it wasn’t her fault, for there’s no man born who’d admit it was his fault, is there?”

  The two men were silent. She’d showed them more of her own life than she’d meant to do. She flushed, glad it was too dim for them to see.

  “Your pardon,” she said, too gaily. “See? I’m dressed like a lady but talking like a fishwife after all. Ladies don’t discuss such things, at least not with the gentlemen, do they? But it’s almost all fishwives do talk about—their fertility. Oh no—now I’ve done it. I doubt ladies are even allowed to say the word, are they?” She laughed hollowly. Well, but it was what she was, and if she’d forgotten, her unruly tongue had reminded them, hadn’t it?

  “Any rate, she wanted to marry him. But the lieutenant didn’t want her to, so that’s where I’d go next were I you,” she told Will. “He’s still trying to get on her good side, but she don’t trust him by half.”

  Will was silent, thinking. Not the lady then, he hadn’t thought so, and still didn’t think so, and that was a relief. The reward money was mounting, soon he’d have other runners poking their noses in. Nothing better than a fast arrest, a speedier conviction, and more money in his pocket. It would have been hard going, convicting a lady born. But a soldier now, even a decorated one….

  Lucian sat deep in thought too. The little fishwife was surprisingly clever and observant. But even if she hadn’t been blinded by her obvious fellow feeling for Louisa. He doubted Louisa had done anything to permanently postpone her wedding. He had wondered if she’d asked anyone to do it for her, though. He still did. His hopes, so high in the morning, were dim again. “So we’re back where we started,” he said quietly, “back to the gossip about me and conjecture about Mrs. Pushkin.”

  “No,” Will said. “We’ve got a new player.”

  “Oh! Play reminds me!” Maggie said, sitting up as though she’d sat on a tack. “Do you know what else he did? He asked her to go out to a masquerade with him! A public masquerade. At the opera house, tomorrow night. She told me about it. You see, he told her that if she got into costume no one would know who she was, so they might as well take advantage of it and go dancing together. Not a week since he was buried and he asked her that!”

  Lucian laughed. “Uncle asked from beyond the grave?”

  “Oh, sorry,” Maggie said. “Just the gall of the man got my mouth running before I could get the words straight! The lieutenant asked Louisa to go with him. Well, she gave him a flea in his ear, she said. He didn’t turn a hair, just said that as she’d never loved your uncle, and didn’t grieve for him, and no one would ever know—and so then why shouldn’t she go out? Can you imagine?”

  “Clever lad,” Will said, nodding approval.

  “Yes, very,” Lucian agreed.

  “But it didn’t do him any good,” Maggie said smugly. “She won’t. He said he’d go anyway—and live in hope….” She stopped, and thought, and turned to Will.

  “No,” he said before she could open her mouth again. “If anyone goes to the masquerade to see what the dragoon’s up to, it’ll be me. It’s one thing to have you chat up the lady for us, Mrs. P., and I grant you’ve done better than I could’ve hoped. But I’m not sending you to a public masquerade to play Cleopatra with the lieutenant.”

  “I can go anywhere I please,” Maggie said boldly.

  “Aye, alone, and be taken for a whore, is that what you’re after?” Will asked.

  Maggie gasped and Lucian blinked. It wasn’t a word he would have used around a lady…but then, she wasn’t one, he remembered. Maggie did too, and her face grew red.

  “I’ll take the girls with me then,” she said angrily.

  “Aye, and so then be taken for a procuress with your two chicks for sale,” Will said. “I’m not just being mean, Mrs. P. Females have to be careful at public masquerades. They’re prime places for the flesh trade. But you know…it isn’t such a terrible idea, at that. No, I don’t mean selling yourself, so don’t puff up like an adder. I mean going to the masquerade. The lieutenant goes there, he drinks, as we know he’s in the habit of doing, and he talks…maybe too much. I’ll go, I think. You fancy coming along, my lord?”

  “Me?” Lucian said, and thought a public masquerade? Obviously, there were dimensions to his sleuthing he hadn’t fathomed yet. He wondered if he should. He decided of course he would. “But there is the fact that I’m in mourning…” he said, frowning.

  “So might half the men there be, that’s why masquerades are so popular,” Will said. “The costume’s not so important, the whole idea is the mask. But I do apologize if the suggestion offends, interfering with your grieving, I mean to say.”

  Lucian’s bark of laughter was his only answer.

  “So I thought,” Will said, “and you don’t have to unmask at midnight if you slip out before. You’d be surprised at how many of your friends will be there. Dukes dancing with housemaids, duchesses dallying with footmen, apprentices with sweeps—all will be sporting with whoever they please, whoever they are. Desire’s the thing, and the game is everything else. The only danger is of some fellow seducing his own wife by mistake. There’s drinking and carrying on, that’s the whole idea. Didn’t you ever go? I thought it customary for young gents to slum at such in their salad days.”

  “I married young,” Lucian said, “and missed those sorts of treats, I’m afraid. Mrs. Pushkin is not the only one who wed to oblige her fa
mily. Only I was fortunate, I have a son to show for the experience. By the time my wife passed on, I’d passed the age for such sport.”

  “Ha,” Will said, “were that the case, the place would be empty, instead of crowded to the doors—which it will be. Graybeard or stripling, they all go.”

  “But I thought noblemen could marry for love,” Maggie blurted, and then was sorry she’d been so blunt with such a gentleman. She blamed it on a false sense of intimacy caused by the warmth, the dim light, the closeness of the three of them in the gently rocking coach. She tried to see the viscount’s expression in the glow of the coach light. But all she saw were shadows shifting across that high-planed face.

  “Indeed?” the viscount said, and she could imagine that eyebrow of his lifting. “Now, here I’ve always imagined love to be a pretty fiction, or at least, a luxury of the lower classes.”

  Maggie’s back went up, but before she could retort, Spanish Will spoke. “No,” he said, “love’s a luxury of the unmarried, of any class.”

  The tension vanished in their laughter.

  “Still, speaking of the masquerade, I really think I could do you a service, and we are in this together now, aren’t we?” Maggie said, for the sake of argument. She’d already decided to go.

  If they were going, so was she, and that was that, even if she had to resort to getting Flea to go with her. That wouldn’t be too bad at that. He was slow, but loyal and very strong, and in a mask he could be a professor, for all anyone would know. The only problem would be getting him to leave off work for an evening. Auntie Jane did her business at night, and Flea was conscientious. But there was no need to think about it now.

  “If Louisa went, I might be able to speak with her again,” she said. “At least, I’d know her even in a disguise, and better than you, since I’ve passed more time with her.”

  “No, that you wouldn’t, Mrs. P.,” Will said, “for whatever she wore, I’d know first.”

  “Another boy keeping watch for you there?” Lucian asked.

  “Two, one round the back as well as one out front,” Will said without hesitation. “It’s no problem, there are more hungry boys in London than there are dinners, my lord.”

  “You’re spending your money freely,” Lucian commented.

  “Well, you have to spend some to earn some,” Will replied. “And runner though I be, I’m warm enough in the pocket. I make money and plow it under again, and it grows like any crop. I make investments, and they do well enough for me, and for my old age—if I reach it.”

  “Investments?” Lucian said, as though he’d said ”worms.” “A risk, I’d think.”

  “Do you not risk, you can’t gain,” Will said. “I’m not speaking of blunders like the South Sea Bubble. No. Nice, steady investments in trade that grows—tobacco, sugar, rum, all the stuff of the New World. And the occasional flutter when I feel lucky. But money doesn’t breed by itself any more than we do. It needs company.”

  Will thought a moment. The viscount and the fishmonger each had told something intimate about themselves tonight, whether by accident or on purpose. She’d spoke of her barren state, my lord had mentioned his loveless marriage. It was that kind of night, there was a queer air of intimacy in the carriage. He needed to work with the pair of them, and knew when a fellow wanted to gain confidence, he had to share confidences. And the most intimate, important thing Spanish Will could think of in his life was his money.

  “Mrs. Pushkin has her works of art,” he explained carefully, “but a good cracksman up her drainpipe could leave her a beggar sooner than you can wink, as could a fire or a flood. Even a bag of gold under the mattress can only grow dust. You’ve got your estates and your tenants, my lord, but a bad year or a bad manager, and there the money goes. No. Investments are the thing.”

  Maggie thought nervously about the hollow under the floorboards in her bedroom, just under the bed. Lucian thought of his estate manager, and couldn’t remember the last time they’d talked.

  “But I do put down the hire of my starving lads as an expense, and Bow Street does pony up for it,” Will added slyly. “Because a penny saved is also a penny earned. And seeing as how the Lady Louisa has difficult sight lines from her front door to the back, you could say I’m on my way to helping Bow Street become a charitable institution.”

  “I wish I could see her again,” Maggie said wistfully, thinking of her tea with the lady. “I mean to say, socially. But though I said I would, I know that can never be. She’s a very nice lady,” she told Lucian. “You’ve been too hard on her, you don’t really know her.”

  “Match-making?” he asked languidly.

  “No,” she said honestly. She couldn’t see the exquisite nobleman and the plain lady together, and found to her surprise that if she tried, she felt jealous, and that was so absurd that it disturbed her, and she fell silent.

  “Then it’s only a matter of getting costumes,” Will said suddenly. “I can hire one from a shop at Covent Garden. No doubt you have one, my lord, being such a social fellow. And you can rent one too, Mrs. P.”

  Maggie gaped at the runner. “Well, you’d come anyway, wouldn’t you?” Will asked her resignedly. “At least this way I can keep an eye on you.”

  Maggie was in high spirits when they got to her house. “Tomorrow evening, then,” she told Will as he handed her out of the coach. She fairly danced up the steps to her doorstep, for all the world as though a dead man had never been discovered there. But if it weren’t for him she wouldn’t be so glad—she resolved not to think about that now. Joy wasn’t that common a visitor to her door either.

  Lucian walked her to the door, and waited for the girls to open it for her. Their faces, when they saw who had brought their mistress home, were studies in speculation, awe and envy. So too, Maggie imagined her neighbors’ faces, behind all their curtains, to be. She was delighted.

  “You made her very happy,” Lucian told Will as he settled in his seat again and the coach drove away.

  “I do like to leave women happy,” Will agreed. “A happy lass is one who works harder for you, you can ask any procurer, do you doubt it. Or any lover,” he added with a laugh.

  “Indeed,” Lucian said, but it was almost a question.

  “Oh, indeed,” Will said expansively. “A man who thinks only of his own pleasure gets only that, and it isn’t half as much as a man gets when he gives pleasure. It’s what any pimp worth his hire learns at his first lover’s knee. But how would most men know that? One, two, three, and here’s your fee, is how it is most of the time with them, and half of them with their own wives, at that. And she’s left laying there, thinking murder, or mayhem, or at the least, how he’ll look wearing a pair of horns. Or so I’m told.”

  Lucian’s answer was silence as he mulled the thing over. He’d never had a complaint. But then, in all honesty, he reminded himself, he paid his mistresses handsomely. And the straying wives who bedded him were insatiable—for scoring social coups, rather than the act itself. Those he’d known, in the biblical sense, were more interested in keeping track of their illustrious lovers and so outshining the other roving ladies they knew, than taking any particular pleasure with the gentlemen they obliged. Clara hadn’t liked it much at all. He hadn’t expected her to, though he tried and she’d been very sweet about it. But they liked a man to take his time? He’d never heard that before. But who would he have heard it from? It made a man think.

  “Being a runner teaches a man interesting things about females, my lord, never doubt it,” Will went on as though he’d heard what wasn’t said. “Speaking of which, we’ve other inquiries to make than at the masquerade, but I didn’t want to mention them with the lass in the coach. She’s too sharp by half, and not half enough afraid, to my way of thinking.”

  “She is indeed, unexpectedly so.”

  “No, not unexpected. She’s smart and determined. More than that, she’s had to do for herself for years now, which is why she was such a prime suspect for me. That’s also
why she’s not half bad as a helper now. A rare treat is our little red-headed shrew, isn’t she?”

  “Indeed, she is that,” Lucian said, and found himself smiling. Rarely quick and bright, there were moments in the coach just now when he’d forgotten she was a female. At her door, when she’d smiled up at him, he’d forgotten her hair color and her freckles too. And that she was no lady. But neither was she a slut, as he’d thought before. Whatever she was, she continually surprised him. And that was rare too.

  “But cunning though she may be, she’s no use for what I’ve in mind now,” Will said. “What I need from you, my lord, is more in the nature of advice. I’ve a notion to start asking questions at knocking shops, and wondered if you’ve any suggestions as to where I should start first?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Lucian said. “‘Knocking shops’?”

  “Aye. Pushing schools, brothels—whorehouses, my lord. That’s the chiefest industry in this district, and the only other logical place an elderly gent might be after visiting after dark, you see.”

  “My uncle?”

  “Aye, yours, mine and ours, my lord. You’re telling me he was a monk?”

  “Why, no, that is to say, I don’t know, I never thought…”

  “Well, think. He was healthy enough to want a wife, he must have been doing something about that itch before he thought about making it legal. Did he have a mistress?”

  Lucian decided not to be insulted. What the runner said had shocked him, but thinking about it, distasteful as it was, it made sense. “A mistress? I doubt it,” he said, after a minute, thinking about his own mistress. “Remember, he was a frugal man.”

  “Then he must have paid a visit to a house of accommodation every now and then,” Will persisted, “or else he picked them off the street, which isn’t the healthiest way to buy pleasure. So, what I’m asking is if he had any kind of preference, do you think? It’d make my job that much easier. If I have to go to every whore shop in Spitalfields and Whitechapel, I’ll spend the rest of my life doing it. And that isn’t even thinking about Seven Dials, which is also near where he was found. I was wondering if you could narrow it a bit for me. Do you think he might have fancied men or boys, or little girls, or being whipped, for example?”