Frost Fair

by Edith Layton

  “We knew,” Will said again. “The blow to your uncle’s head didn’t kill him; we discovered that almost immediately. Then when we were told he was taken by a seizure we realized it wasn’t a natural one soon enough. The path led to your door before you killed the apothecary. That was a waste. It’s over.”

  “Arthur, he’s right,” Lucian said calmly, although Maggie saw him swallow with difficulty before he spoke. “Now you’ll get nothing, after all. After all you’ve done. So why run? What’s the point now?”

  “Time,” Arthur said reasonably. “Time heals everything. Except in your case, of course. Whatever they tell Mama, she loves me and will forget the bad, in time. I’ll go to the Continent for a few years, or the Antipodes, the Americas, it hardly matters. When I finally return, who’ll be able prove it? I’ll be the Viscount Maldon then, after all. I just need time now.”

  Lucian’s eyes grew wild, he opened his mouth to speak, but choked on whatever he was about to say.

  “So now I must go,” Arthur said. “You’re not to follow. Or I’ll kill your red-headed whore here.” He laughed bitterly. “Uncle and nephew, both drawn to low sluts. Ye Gads! Am I the only moral one in this family?

  “Now move away,” he told Spanish Will. “Get the others to stand aside too. I’m going to take the fishwife for a walk to the embankment, and then you can have her back. In time. But don’t follow me. I’ve a pistol in her back, and another in my pocket. She only has one heart.”

  They stood aside. Lucian’s face twisted, agonized. Spanish Will had no expression, and it was terrible to see. Arthur began to walk, stiff legged, pushing Maggie forward. He went in lock step with her across the ice, in a vile parody of a game she’d seen parents play with their children, letting them stand on their feet so they could dance together as one. Maggie went across the ice with Arthur, thinking frantically.

  She wondered if she’d faint now, for the first time in her life… She wondered if that might be the best thing to do. Would he cast her aside and run? Or shoot her as she fell? Or drag her along and keep going? Would it buy her time? Or end her life?

  Then she frowned. She heard something apart from Arthur’s harsh breathing in her ear. It was so subtle at first she thought it was only her own heart cracking. But it grew in intensity. It was vibration as much as sound—she could feel it through to her bones. A moaning, a deep groaning. A monstrous creaking that sounded like some enormous ogre straining to open a locked and rusted iron door.

  She shuddered. The world shuddered. It seemed the ice itself shivered under her feet.

  Apart from that strange thrumming, a sudden silence fell, a breathlessness like the hush before a thunderstorm. It seemed everyone at the Fair paused too. The music trailed off, discordant as it died. Laughter and song, the busy hubbub and conversation, all came to a halt. Arthur stopped moving. They all stood on the frozen river in the mild breeze, listening.

  There was a sudden cracking sound. Maggie stared, disbelieving. A tent across from them suddenly vanished, as though the air had opened and snapped it up whole. But it was the ice. The ice on the Thames was parting like the waters of the Nile rushing back after Moses’s safe passage. The sound that rose now was that of the ice crazing and splitting, and thousands of people shouting as they realized it.

  It happened more quickly than anyone could have imagined. The sleeping giant awoke with a roar, shaking off its icy bonds. The crowd swung in all directions, looking to escape the very ground they were standing on. Becuase it wasn’t ground and had never been, and was about to show them now. Long and crooked fissures were suddenly snaking open under their feet. The ice splintered as people ran screaming. Tents collapsed. Arcades shattered, torches and cookfires were suddenly doused. Streamers and banners and boarwalks fell to the ice and the ice fell into the water and floated away. The printing presses that had churned out the papers celebrating the captivity of the great river dropped into the Thames like coins into a wishing well.

  Maggie and Arthur stood at the end of the last row of tents in frozen solitude, watching as widening streams grew between vanishing floes of ice. The waters separated people on ice islands that went spinning downstream. Fairgoers fell into the churning river. Some shot under the ice, others clung to debris. Maggie saw one poor soul in the distance, silently, desperately clinging to his shard of ice as it shot by. When his icy raft spun under, he clung tighter and went under with it. Another raised hands, screaming for help until the water silenced his cries.

  The Great Frost Fair was all in motion again as it shattered into pieces. The Thames bubbled and seethed, fomenting like a scummy cauldron as it boiled downstream toward the bridge again.

  Everyone who could run was scrambling for the embankments. Bargemen who had charged coin for passage over a joke grabbed their boat hooks and tried to catch people writhing in the water. Some ran for their boats to try the turbulent waters.

  But Maggie’s servants and the fishwives were suspended in time and place just as she herself was. Lucian and Spanish Will stayed still, watching Arthur. …Who stood, thinking.

  He looked at the pandemonium. He noted where the ice was, and was not. Then he suddenly shoved Maggie away, sending her sprawling. He ran then, leaping like a spring lamb over fissures and cracks, fleeing over the ice to the shore like a thousand others doing the same.

  Spanish Will went after him, the viscount at his side.

  Maggie lay on the ice, panting with pain and relief. Arthur was sprinting nimbly, far ahead of his pursuers. She saw him suddenly veer. He swung toward where Flea was standing, dumbfounded, with the children at his side. Arthur run straight toward the giant. And then Maggie saw Arthur, still running, bend and reach for the smallest of the onlookers—the little blond brothel girl—like a boy spreading his fingers to grab for the golden ring as he whirled by on the merry-go-round. Then Maggie knew he’d only exchanged hostages. He sought someone smaller, lighter, easier to carry.

  “No!” she cried in anguish. “Flea! Don’t let him. Flea! Stop him!”

  But Flea didn’t move. Maggie dropped her head in despair.

  Flea stood rock still as Arthur ran up beside him. Then one thick arm shot out. He grabbed Arthur by his high white elaborately starched neckcloth, and jerked him off his still running feet. He held him aloft for one second. Arthur’s bright blue eyes flew open in surprise, his mouth opened too, but he’d no time to speak. Flea’s heavy handsome face was grim and determined. He raised his other ham-sized fist and hit Arthur’s chin hard, and then again, and then once more before he released him and flung him away, sending him spinning, then skidding far out across the ice.

  Arthur’s pistol went flying, as he did. He landed, very still. And wearing his neck as no living man could.

  All around them, people were running and screaming. But the little party that circled around Arthur was still as Arthur himself was in death.

  Lucian was the first to speak. He swallowed hard, then dragged his eyes from Arthur. “My brother,” he whispered hoarsely, looking at each of them in turn, “slipped under the ice at the Fair. Some of you saw him fall into the water when the ice broke. I’m only sorry I wasn’t there at that moment, to help him. My mother will be deeply grieved. If we get the body back, it will ease her mind. If we don’t…we don’t. But that is all. There’s really no point to more. Is there?” He stared at Will.

  Will cleared his throat. “No, no point now.”

  Lucian looked at the other silent onlookers. “Is that understood?” he asked. “…Please?”

  They nodded.

  But no one moved until Maggie finally reached them. She came running, limping across the ice towards Lucian, weeping. She thrust a bottle to his lips. “Drink!” she cried. “For the love of God, drink.”

  Flea and Jack, combining strong body with strong mind, led the party to safety as Spanish Will slid Arthur’s body into the torrent, with only a muttered curse as a benediction.

  The others waited silently on the embankment for Will t
o return. The Viscount Maldon lay there too, retching up his horror and sorrow, doubled over gasping with pain, as Maggie kept crying and imploring him to live.

  Chapter Nineteen

  They were well dressed and strangely somber, if only because everyone else in London seemed to be smiling on such a glorious day. Even the sun seemed reluctant to set on the mild March afternoon. The tea shop was in the best part of town, the service discreet, the other customers of the highest ton. But Maggie’s heart was heavy. And Spanish Will looked glum.

  Even Lucian was subdued. It was a parting. They were never easy. This one was more difficult than most, perhaps, because they’d shared so much, and it was a final break. It was time.

  They huddled around the small table, like conspirators.

  “Look,” Will finally said, his voice tuned low. “As I see it, no man can account for his relatives. Not even a King. Good Edward had his brother Richard, didn’t he? He thought naught of strangling his nephews, did he?”

  Lucian allowed himself a reluctant grin. “Shakespeare, Mr. Corby? But I have no Plantagenant blood, I fear.”

  “Well, but he’s only right,” Maggie said staunchly. “Don’t I have sisters? Though you wouldn’t know it, they stay so far from me. Unless they need money, of course. No one can account for blood relations. Nor even husbands nor wives, come right down to it, since half the time they’re landed on you without your consent either.”

  She saw the sudden sympathy in their faces and added hastily, “Well, but even if you’re lucky enough to pick them, who can swear for another person? Just look at Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth, for example.”

  That set them all to laughing. But not for long.

  “It’s kind of you both and I thank you for it,” Lucian said, his face stark and sad again, “and you’re both right so far as it goes. But he was my brother, and I can’t forget. Not just because of what he did to Uncle, or even what he tried with me. What keeps me awake some nights is what might have been. There was yet another bar to his getting the title. He didn’t seem to consider that, even at the last. Probably because he was already considering how to rid himself of it. When I think of my young Nicholas, unaware…

  “With me gone, Nick would have been his ward. Even if not, had he escaped and gone abroad, he could have come back. He was right about that. The years change people’s appearances. Perhaps opinions too. People have short memories; they’re always rewriting history. Those who live on, sometimes win just because they do live on and there’s no one left to refute them. And what he might have done then… That ‘s the thought that’s hard for me.”

  “Then don’t think it!” Maggie said. “I know that’s easy to say, but sometimes we pick at evil thoughts the way a child picks at a scab on a knee—because it’s there, because sometimes there’s even a kind of pleasure in pain like that.”

  Lucian raised an eyebrow. It was that kind of statement that made their strange friendship so compelling. And so difficult to break off now that there was no longer any real need for it. He doubted he’d have confessed his problem to any other people. He didn’t know any who could have comforted him so well either. Like survivors of a cataclysm, thrown together because of it, they shared a terrible history and a strange sympathy for each other now too. But it was over and there was really no tangible need for their continuing to meet. The longer the days stretched from that terrible last day of the Frost Fair, the more absurd their unlikely partnership appeared to be.

  Lucian sighed at the truth of it. A viscount who kept dropping in for tea with a fishmonger? She might think he was courting. God knew what the rest of London would think. He liked her too well to offer her the role his brother thought she’d held. Besides, he had a lively suspicion she’d not only never accept it, but never speak to him again if he suggested it. Their paths were parting, but he didn’t want to leave her with a distaste for him. A gentleman had women friends, certainly. But a fishwife? And a nobleman being friends with a runner? Where could they meet and to what purpose? No, it was time to end it, and they all knew it. And still and all, it was hard.

  “It’s over,” Maggie said, looking into the dregs of her tea, “and done with. With no one the wiser. He was found and buried, and be done with him. His death is a sad fact of the Fair now—along with too many innocents.” She raised her eyes to Lucian’s. “But he was lucky in that. At least his name and yours can remain clean. And though it’s sad, you must remember it’s no reflection on you. It’s not always bad blood. Don’t you sometimes find one fish misshapen in a whole basket of sound ones? It’s an act of God. Or some sort of disease. Or in a man, even how he was raised, perhaps.”

  “How does your mother do?” Will asked, reminded.

  “She does well under the circumstances,” Lucian said, frowning. “Too well, in fact. She asks few questions, and mourns more for the look of it than the feel of it. Or so I think. She’s the sort of female who’d grieve like your Lady Macbeth might, Mrs. Pushkin. All wringing of hands and high theater. Instead, it seems to me there’s more bottled rage than sorrow. It makes me wonder. But we don’t talk about it. In any case, she asks more after Nicholas than she sighs for Arthur these days. She’s already on fire for him to be home on holiday. Not that she doesn’t dote on Nick. But Arthur was all to her, and that is strange.”

  “Maybe not,” Will said. “She’s a shrewd piece—if you’ll forgive me saying, for I mean it as a compliment. Not much passes under her window she don’t see. I wonder if she doesn’t already guess the whole of it, somehow? No one would have known good or ill of him better than she, I think.”

  Lucian shrugged. “Nothing can any longer shock me.”

  “Well, you shocked me,” Maggie said brightly, to change the subject and get that bleak fathoms deep look out of his eyes. “I can’t thank you enough for finding a home for little Millie. I worried for her here in London. Even under my care, there’d be so many dangers, memories… But to find tenants at your country estate willing to take on a little girl and raise her as their own? Even knowing her sad history? It’s the very thing for her. Maybe that way one day she’ll forget. She never could here.”

  He smiled at her. She looked amazingly like a lady today. She wore a fashionable dark blue walking dress. Her brazen hair was neatly tucked into a stylish bonnet. Her reddened hands looked dainty in little gloves. The late afternoon light showed she’d dabbed some powder on her face, but it only muted her freckles. It was so subtly done he mightn’t have noticed, except that he’d grown so used to them. Her pert nose tipped up, her green eyes shone, she was a pretty little creature, her masquerade this time as complete as it had been the night she was a mermaid.

  “And you, Mr. Corby,” Maggie said, beaming at Spanish Will. “To have Bow Street hire on Flea was surely a stroke of genius! He loves the work. The fact that you got him a room right there to live in makes him proud and happy. Well done!”

  “Glad to help. As it turns out, he helps us too. He does his work well,” Will said generously, visibly expanding under Maggie’s praise. “A fellow that size commands respect. Once I saw that he does what’s asked, when asked, without question, I realized we had ourselves a fine man. He keeps the peace, and God help the one who doesn’t let him. And I don’t doubt you can use the room now he’s gone from your hearth.”

  “But he still comes to visit,” Maggie said. “Bowdie waits for him each evening by the kitchen door. He comes to call on her as promptly as any suitor to take her for her evening walk.”

  “Bowdie?” Will asked.

  “Well, but I named her Boadicea, after the warrior queen,” Maggie said. “Davie can only manage ‘Bowdie,’ so that she is… Don’t laugh. It’s only fitting. She’ll be a queenly dog, and is growing as protective as huge.” She grinned as both men laughed.

  The runner looked amazingly handsome today, she thought. It wasn’t just the way he was dressed. His dark face was relaxed, his eyes gleamed and when they looked on her they became soft as his deep voice. Too bad, she
thought on an inner sigh, that there was no reason for him to continue to visit her as Flea did. But then, not too bad, after all. Flea only wanted friendship. It was all too clear to read what Mr. Corby wanted in those intense eyes of his.

  And the viscount, well, but he was always elegant. But who could expect a nobleman to keep calling on her? She wished he could, if only because she knew she could take that haunted look from out of his eyes, if only now and again. And it would be delightful to meet his beloved young Nicholas, if only for an hour.… Of course, she thought, snapping out of her reverie. Take a nobleman’s son to meet a fishwife? Oh, good thinking! He might take her to see Lousia again, perhaps, or so he’d said before the tragedy had begun. She wouldn’t depend on it. She was a realistic female. She had to be.

  “You’ve both helped me,” she said.

  “Well, but you helped us,” Will said.

  And so she had, he thought. But she wouldn’t help him to anything else. At least, not what he discovered he wanted now. And he wasn’t a man to tarry for no reason. No more sense tempting himself with her than there would be in calling on his good friend, the Viscount Maldon, of an evening. He’d taken the reward money from the nobleman, and that had fairly well clarified their relationship so far as he was concerned. A man could never call himself friend to a man who paid him. Nor could he befriend a woman he couldn’t sleep with. But as to that…

  …Well, Will thought, as that villain Arthur had said, time would tell. It just was not time for such a thing now. Or perhaps, ever.

  The three fell silent. Each thinking of endings, and Time.

  “Timing,” Will said at last. “We had all the facts, but timing can’t be discounted. If that lad hadn’t got to me in time at the Fair to tell me where to meet up with you.… And a handsome thing it was to give him a job of work in your kitchens, my lord, I might add.”

  “No, he deserved it,” Lucian said. “He’s resourceful. Plans to be a great chef now, actually,” he smiled. It banished his haunted expression—for a moment. A moment later, he was brooding again. “But it wasn’t just timing. Much of it was luck. He didn’t know I detested kidneys.”