A Gentlewoman's Guide to Murder

by Victoria Hamilton

  Miss Purley’s voice was joined by Miss Gottschalk’s, which soon overcame the other. Emmeline stopped to listen, as did most of them. Miss Purley had a pretty voice and competent pronunciation, but she stopped singing. The young German woman’s vocal ability was outstanding, shown at its finest when she switched to another piece that she sang alone.

  When Miss Gottschalk finished, Emmeline applauded and said, “I don’t recognize that piece, Miss Gottschalk. What is it?”

  “It is a new opera, La Vestale, by Gaspare Spontini. I do not have the sheet music here and so am doing it by … by heart, I think you say? I have just learned it. It has not been performed yet except, I understand, in France. I do not do it justice,” she said, laying her hands on the pianoforte keyboard and playing a brief run. “I sing it too slowly, too … lethargic? Is that a word? But it is how I feel it.”

  “You sang it beautifully,” Emmeline said. Miss Purley joined the praise, but the young German woman, her cheeks coloring pink, shook her head and leafed through the music; she played “Weep You No More, Sad Fountains” next, and sang with Miss Purley.

  Emmeline turned back to Woodforde to resume their conversation, grateful for the break so she could turn away from personal topics. “Do you know any of the gentlemen here tonight?”

  He eyed her quizzically. “Why do you ask?”

  “Did I imagine the tension between my uncle and Mr. Wilkins? He is a solicitor, correct?”

  “Yes, but his more lucrative pastime is as your uncle’s man of business.”

  “What does that mean, exactly? It is said so commonly, but I’m never sure of the definition of a ‘man of business.’”

  Dr. Woodforde shrugged, his elegant bottle-green jacket bunching at the shoulders as he sat back, one leg crossed over the other. “He takes care of your uncle’s investments. I know that because I have invested in a company your uncle formed, not without some persistence on my part, and Wilkins handled the transaction. I began to think the canal company must be the most lucrative investment since the invention of the loom, Wilkins tried to dissuade me so earnestly.”

  “Tell me about this canal company. I had not heard of it before tonight.”

  “I believe, as your uncle does, in canals as a means of opening up smaller communities to the benefits of easy transport of goods. I have joined with Sir Jacob and some others in their enterprise to link Maidenhead, a town in Berkshire—you know my origins there, and I have family still who own farms in the county—with the rest of the country, using a canal linking it to the Thames. So I have finally invested in the Maidenhead Canal Company.”

  “Why would they attempt to keep you from investing?”

  “A whim of Wilkins, I believe. Your uncle expressed no such reluctance.” Woodforde cast a disparaging glance toward the solicitor, who was tapping his cane on the floor in time with the music, much to the irritation of his betrothed, who shot him an annoyed look that he didn’t appear to notice. “Despite my vivacious charm, the solicitor does not like me. Perhaps it is the whiff of the laboratory.”

  Emmeline smiled. “More likely your erudition, Woodforde; he does not impress me as a man of culture or even learning.”

  “Anyway, when Wilkins would not speak with me about investing, I was forced to go directly to your uncle. As I said, he at least, though he did his best to dissuade me at first, was most gracious and I have no reason to be dissatisfied with my investment, though plans seem to be moving but slowly. Not a foot of canal dug so far, but I acknowledge there is much work to do in land acquisition and convincing towns along the route of the benefits to them. Every gentleman here is on the list of investors, as well as others. It is the future of this country. We must find a means of conveying goods more efficiently, and canals will serve the purpose far better than cart.”

  “Perhaps Wilkins is not so good a man of business as he fancies himself.” Emmeline had a moment of alarm; could the solicitor be cheating her uncle? But she had more confidence in her uncle’s perspicacity than to think that possible. “How odd that I’ve never heard my uncle speak of the canal company.”

  “But why would Sir Jacob speak of canal building to you? So charming a companion, Miss St. Germaine, must ever inspire more interesting topics.”

  “Now you are doing it too brown, Woodforde,” she said, giving him an impatient look. “You know I’m not one for flattery.”

  His dark eyes narrowed and his lips, generous and well-shaped, twisted in an unbelieving frown. He leaned forward and murmured, “So I have understood for many years, and yet when last we attended the theatre you entertained quite a flirtation with another of Samuel’s old friends, Viscount Nearley. Your behavior convinced me that you would receive flattery in quite a different manner than in the past, at least from some gentlemen.”

  Emmeline winced, fixing her attention on the couples by the piano. Miss Gottschalk was still playing, but not singing; instead, Miss Purley and Mr. Fulmer were competently performing a duet while Wilkins still turned the sheet music pages, though his fiancée appeared pained and stiff.

  She had to answer; she did not like Woodforde criticizing her so freely. The trouble was that his observation was true, as far as it went. Emmeline had been overly flirtatious with the viscount after he had heaped her with fulsome praise, but she had never expected Woodforde to notice. Nearley’s title gave him an entrée into society that made him a valuable contact, one she hoped to use at a later date. She could not explain that to Woodforde without disclosing her secret identity as the Rogue.

  “Do I detect a critical tone, Doctor?” she said coolly, unwilling to let her old friend become her censor. She met his gaze with steady sobriety. “Did I somehow give you the impression that your correction of my manners would be welcome? If so, it is a mistaken impression.”

  He nodded gravely. “I beg your pardon, Miss St. Germaine. Perhaps I was out of line, but I was speaking to an old friend who I would not like to see damned as a flirt.”

  Once more it appeared that she had stepped out of line, that narrow corridor of behavior allowed a lady in her position. “Heaven forfend, for flirting is a skill roundly condemned in polite society,” she retorted. “It is a practice that is never used as a means to attract and secure what is deemed most valuable to a young lady: a husband.”

  “I had not known you were seeking to marry,” Woodforde replied, tilting his head with interest.

  Emmeline bit back her instant retort that she was not looking to marry. She had intended it only as a facetious rejoinder, but now she had no judicious answer. “Let’s not quarrel, Woodforde,” she said. “Shall we speak of relatively innocuous subjects? The news?” Her tone grim, she went on: “I understand Princess Amelia is confined to her bed. Some say she will not, this time, recover.”

  He nodded at the change of subject. “I fear extreme care, in her Royal Highness’s case, has weakened her. The closeted atmosphere at court and in their family … it is debilitating for a sensitive girl. Her Majesty has relied upon her daughters for everything, especially as the poor old king declines. No, Princess Amelia will not recover this time.” His gaze gentled. “’Tis almost the anniversary of Maria’s death, is it not? You must be thinking of the royal family with sympathy.”

  “A sympathy I would not normally express,” she said with a quick, pained smile. They’d had in the past many spirited debates concerning her anti-monarchist sentiment and his less republican philosophy. “You’re right, Woodforde. I’m thinking especially of the royal princesses right now with tender regard. Losing a sister—can it be almost six years now, since Maria died?—was the most painful experience of my life, certainly worse than losing a mother I remember with great fondness but lost before I knew how to value her, and losing my father, which was a blessing in so many ways. I still write Maria letters I can never post.”

  She sighed and shook off the melancholy that perpetually lingered on the edges
of her consciousness, ready to pounce and overwhelm her at the mention of the death of her younger sister. Oddly, with Woodforde she felt she could say things she didn’t even tell Fidelity or Gillies. For them she must stay strong, but with him she could be weak, momentary though it was. Taking a deep breath, she lifted her chin. “Enough sentimentality. Like any young lady I prefer to focus on ‘horrid’ news, like the murder of Sir Henry Claybourne. As a medical man, you must be interested?”

  “Because doctors are perforce fascinated by death?”

  “Are you not?” She lowered her voice and leaned toward him, watching his brown eyes. “I understand he was slit from throat to bowel, as gruesome a death as could be visited upon a human. It was announced thusly to my group of charity ladies by two ghoulish young females who were agog and full of details from their newspaper uncle, Sir James Schaeffer.”

  “It seems that young ladies are prone to wild exaggerations.”

  Her interest sharpened; she had been facetious, but perhaps Woodforde did know something of the case. The medical community was small. “As are newspapers. Is it not true, then?”

  Miss Gottschalk finished her piece to applause, which both Emmeline and the doctor joined. Miss Purley was implored by Mr. Fulmer, her fiancé, for another, a Thomas Moore Irish melody that she sang with great accomplishment, as it suited her light, pretty voice.

  Woodforde had not answered.

  “So you know about the unfortunate gentleman?” Emmeline murmured.

  “I think to call him unfortunate is to severely diminish the brutality of the manner of his death.”

  “Meaning, you know something of it,” she said impatiently, glancing at his solemn profile. “How so?”

  “His body was brought to St. Barts,” Woodforde said, naming the hospital where he had taken his training and still worked on occasion. “John Abernethy requested it once he learned of certain … abnormalities.”

  Emmeline gave him a sharp look and wondered what he was not saying. She knew of some abnormalities of the knight’s inglorious body from her own viewing, and felt her color rise. It was unfortunate that one side of her life would collide with another, at times, and leave her flustered and in want of her usual calm. “Abnormalities?”

  His brown eyes glittered in the candlelight as he cast her an aggrieved look. “Miss St. Germaine, you are not asking what bodily abnormalities the man displayed, are you?”

  “If you are so shy to speak of them, I must conclude they are of a personal nature, perhaps to his male parts.”

  Woodforde sighed but did not appear shocked. Over their long friendship she had lost the capacity to offend his sensibilities. “You would be right. He contracted the type of diseases most often caught from dalliances with women of a certain profession. Though it is rumored that he had become less likely to venture outside his home for his …” He cleared his throat and shook his head.

  She decided against pursuing that line of conversation. There were limits to what she would allow herself, even with an intimate friend like Woodforde. She remembered the cankers she’d witnessed herself on Sir Henry’s sex organs and believed that was what the doctor spoke of. It explained why Claybourne had chosen to import his own virginal victims rather than consort with the girls of Haymarket; an innocent delivered to him fresh from the orphanage was better for his purposes than the resident of a brothel.

  Emmeline swallowed and blinked, feeling ill in the overheated drawing room. “So,” she said, forcing a calm interest into her tone. “I take it Sir Henry was not disemboweled, then? The papers’ authority seems to be the poor fishlad who found him.”

  “He was not so gruesomely executed as that,” Woodforde said. “The lad was likely dining out on the news as much as any society matron will on a tidbit of gossip. Sir Henry had been soundly beaten and his throat cut. There was much blood at the scene, I understand, and it may have given the boy the impression of disembowelment.”

  She shuddered, as she knew she must. “I’m surprised if he was beaten and then slain, that no one heard him cry out?”

  “The magistrate asked the same question, and he has men speaking with the neighbors.” Woodforde nodded to Sir Jacob, who smiled over at them and then returned to his conversation with Fidelity, Mrs. Yarbrough, and Lady Quisenberry. “Dr. Abernethy was able to tell him something about the attack.”

  “I warned you I was fascinated by the horrid, Woodforde; now you have begun, you must satisfy my bloodthirst. What did he tell the magistrate?”

  “Well, the gentleman had been dead for some time. Several hours, likely.”

  “How could he tell that?”

  The doctor frowned down at his folded hands. “There was some lividity on his body, a hypostasis of the fluids.” He glanced over at her. “Are you sure this talk does not upset you, Miss St. Germaine?”

  “Perhaps it should, but it does not.”

  His well-formed lips twitched and he tossed back a lock of hair that lay across his forehead. “Well, then, I shall treat you like one of the students I tutor at St. Barts, shall I?”

  She eyed him slyly. “My sex being no impediment to my understanding?”

  “I have never considered your sex to impair your rational mind, Emmie. I think you know that of me.” He cleared his throat and looked away, then back to her. “In our body, even as we sleep, our heart pumps our blood and it courses through our arteries and veins. Death renders that still, of course. With no heartbeat to push the blood, gravity takes effect. The blood pools in the lowest part of the body, leaving a deep red, even purplish stain under the skin. In the unfortunate gentleman’s case, and despite having bled out quite a bit, that happened along the side of his body in contact with the pavement: his left hip, leg, and torso.”

  “I see. So the doctor could judge with some accuracy the time of death?”

  Woodforde shrugged. “Though we have never observed the actual progression of lividity and so do not have an exact analysis—something I may remedy with research if I am allowed—in Dr. Abernethy’s opinion the man had died several hours before he was found. Rigor mortis—that is the stiffening of the body—was also well established, as was lividity; the night was cool, so it would retard the progress of rigor somewhat, but not a lot. That places his death at between eleven, when the household was shut up, and one or two at the latest, as the fishlad found the body and alerted the watch at about five.”

  “Isn’t it odd that the watch did not see him?”

  “Not at all. If the killer or killers had timed the attack perfectly, it would be over and his body lying in the shadows. The watch does not venture down the alley. They merely walk Samuel Street, down Chandler Lane, and along Blithestone.”

  “And a watchman was beaten by the two men, I understand. The hue and cry would be after the men fled, but in relation to the beaten man and in the direction the miscreants fled, not down the knight’s alley.”

  “You make a good point. Anyway, Dr. Abernethy believes Sir Henry’s throat was cut first, and he was beaten as he lay dying.”

  How very brutal, Emmeline thought, her stomach churning. The murderer or murderers would have a considerable amount of blood on them, then. Perhaps someone noticed their state, some wife or friend. She must be open to the possibility, though, that the fleeing men were not the assailants at all, but perhaps had discovered Claybourne’s body and fled to avoid trouble. She wondered if a weapon had been recovered.

  “But …” She stopped, and thought, and nodded. “So your good friend the doctor surmises that Sir Henry’s throat was cut, thus severing his vocal cords? He was not able, then, to cry out.” She touched her throat as it closed at the thought.

  Woodforde looked at her with some surprise. “You reason well, Miss St. Germaine. That is exactly what the doctor thinks.”

  The cutting of the vocal cord may have been planned to effect the knight’s silence, or it was merely a
happy—perish the thought—coincidence. Astute or fortunate: there was no way to tell which of these the killer had been. “The magistrate has not yet learned who did the man in?”

  “No.”

  Emmeline’s heart pounded and her mouth dried. She took a sip of tea and affected a nonchalant tone. “It was likely the same men who beat the watch. The papers say that, too, but also speculate on the identity of the gallant lady who is said to have raided his home earlier in the evening. Some even say she must be the murderer.”

  Woodforde gave her a sharp look. “Gallant lady? I suppose that is one way of looking at a woman who purportedly entered the house illicitly and stole away a scullery maid and the family silver. I would say wicked rather than gallant, myself.”

  It was all a matter of perspective. Emmeline remained silent and returned his gaze, keeping hers as guileless as was possible.

  “I know you claim an interest in the horrid, Miss St. Germaine, but this is more so than usual. Why so much interest in this particular crime?” he asked when she didn’t respond.

  “Woodforde, we have always discussed such matters. If you remember, we spoke in depth of the Duke of Cumberland’s unfortunate incident in May, and indeed his valet had a very similar wound to Sir Henry Claybourne. I’m still unconvinced that Sellis inflicted it upon himself.” She cocked her head and gave her friend a teasing look. “All young ladies are fascinated with such shudder-inducing crime. It is a part of our charm.”

  He nodded to acknowledge her facetious tone. “In case you are wondering, in my opinion no lady could have inflicted the wounds on Sir Henry that he received. I do not believe the ‘gallant lady,’ as you style her, could be the murderer. It would have taken some strength to sever the vocal cords.”

  At that point, her uncle gathered them together and organized tables for whist. Paired with Woodforde against Miss Gottschalk and Mr. Wilkins, Emmeline needed all her wits to not disgrace herself, for both the solicitor and his fiancée were intelligent and fierce players. The topic of the day did come up again at the card table, when Miss Gottschalk made some remark about the Avengeress.