Mystery Loves Company

by Sheri Cobb South

  “I’d never thought of painting as being so expensive a pastime,” he remarked, and wondered aloud whether the shopkeeper numbered any of the aristocracy among his clientele.

  “Aye, several,” the man said proudly. “Especially those with daughters who paint in watercolors.”

  As Lord Washbourn’s daughter was still an infant, Pickett doubted she was painting much of anything except the seat of her clouts. “I wonder if you’ve ever done business with an acquaintance of mine,” he said. “Lady Washbourn, whose husband is the earl of that name.”

  “Washbourn,” the shopkeeper echoed thoughtfully, his brow creased in concentration. At last he shook his head. “No, I can’t say I recall her ladyship, nor her lord, neither.”

  “Ah well, their daughter is a bit young for art lessons as yet,” Pickett said, displaying a talent for understatement.

  “When her little ladyship is ready, I hope you’ll put in a word for me with her parents.”

  Pickett agreed to this, privately hoping that the girl’s mother would still be alive at that point to take his advice, and took his leave. He repeated this exercise at some half-dozen art supply houses in all, each one chosen for their proximity to the Washbourn residence, and received the very same answers. He gained a new understanding of the difficulties of reproducing Nature’s hues on canvas, which had apparently become somewhat easier with the accidental discovery of Prussian blue a century earlier, but came away with no firm knowledge of how Lord Washbourn might have come by this substance.

  At last, finding himself in the vicinity of Curzon Street (and painfully aware that he had parted from Julia on less than idyllic terms), he set out for Number 22 with the intention of having a bite to eat in the company of his wife before returning to Bow Street. He entered the house, and found her in the hall, just putting off her bonnet and pelisse.

  “Why, John, what a pleasant surprise,” she said, lifting her face for his kiss. “Are you hungry? Shall I ring for tea and sandwiches?”

  He agreed to this plan, and within a very few minutes they were seated side by side on the drawing room sofa.

  “Only think, if I had been five minutes later, or you five minutes earlier, we should have missed one another,” she remarked as she dispensed tea into two delicate Sevrès cups. “I have spent most of the morning closeted with Lady Washbourn.”

  Pickett set his plate down with a clatter. “You what?”

  “I called on Lady Washbourn,” she said again, bewildered by his reaction. “I knew her refusal to leave her husband had you baffled, and I thought—quite correctly, as it turned out—that she might be more inclined to confide in the widow of a viscount than in a Bow Street Runner.”

  “Thank you for reminding me of my place, my lady,” he said, tight-lipped. “For a while there I was in danger of forgetting it.”

  She set down the teapot and gave him a reproachful look. “Oh, John, don’t be that way! Your ‘place’ has nothing to do with it. Poor Lady Washbourn has so few friends, thanks in large part to the machinations of ‘Aunt Mildred,’ that I thought she might welcome a confidante.” Seeing he was not satisfied with this explanation, she added coaxingly, “You used to like my help.”

  “It was my only excuse for spending any time with you,” he pointed out.

  “Oh, was that it? How stupid of me! I actually thought I was being useful!”

  “Of course you were,” he amended hastily. “But on those occasions we worked together. You didn’t go haring off on your own like this without so much as a by-your-leave!”

  “Oh, so now I must ask your permission before I pay a simple morning call?” she demanded, her bosom swelling with indignation.

  “Not a simple morning call, no. But this was something more than just a simple morning call, wasn’t it?”

  “It is only common courtesy to call on one’s hostess the day after an event to thank her for her hospitality!”

  “This isn’t the day after the event,” he pointed out.

  “No, for an inquest was held the morning after. And I don’t see why you are making such a great to-do over nothing! I should have thought you would be grateful to me for discovering the real reason for Lady Washbourn’s refusal to leave Town, while you were wasting your time calling on that horrid Lady Gerald Broadbridge!”

  “I wasn’t calling on Sophy; I was calling on her father, and she just happened to stop in.”

  “She actually paid a morning call?” Julia exclaimed in scandalized tones. “I hope she had her husband’s permission!”

  “Will you please leave Sophy out of this? As it happens, I tried to call on Lady Washbourn myself—I wanted to ask her who painted that enormous portrait over the mantel—but I was turned away with the information that her ladyship was otherwise engaged.”

  “But that’s easy,” Julia insisted. “The artist was Mr. Henry Tomkins, of the Royal Academy.”

  He blinked at her in confusion. “Lady Washbourn told you this?”

  “She didn’t have to. Mr. Tomkins is the most fashionable portraitist in London at the moment, and his depiction of light and texture is quite distinctive. So you see, you didn’t have to ask Lady Washbourn, after all. You had only to ask your wife.”

  Perhaps it was the note of triumph in her voice, or maybe her rather smug smile, that goaded him beyond endurance. “Very well,” he retorted. “Perhaps my wife can also tell me when it was painted, and whether Lord Washbourn watched the proceedings, or showed any undue interest, or whether Mr. Tomkins happened to misplace any of his paints during the process.” Finding her lost for speech, he prompted, “Well, Mrs. Pickett? Am I not to have the benefit of your expertise?”

  Whereupon Julia, to her own dismay and her husband’s horror, promptly burst into tears.

  “Julia?” Pickett slid from the sofa and dropped to his knees before her, taking her hands in his and alternately chafing and kissing them in a futile effort to stem the flood. “Julia, sweetheart, don’t—please don’t cry,” he pleaded helplessly, utterly floored by the sight of the same woman who had only a year ago faced the prospect of the gallows with an almost stoic calm now dissolving into tears at a few cross words (at least, he thought there had only been a few—hadn’t there?) from her husband. “Never mind, my love, you had no way of knowing I meant to call on her ladyship. I’m a beast to speak to you so.”

  Her tears showed no signs of abating, and he transferred both her hands to one of his own, so that he might have a hand free to reach into his coat pocket for a handkerchief. Unfortunately, this proved to be a relic of the days before his marriage, when he had been obliged to purchase such things at secondhand; consequently, it bore someone else’s monogram in one corner. Apparently the sight of it disturbed her, for it seemed to Pickett that her tears fell all the harder.

  “Look,” he said in increasing desperation, recalling something else he’d felt in his pocket while fumbling for his handkerchief. He reached in once more, and drew out a small coin purse. “Today I got my wages for the week—twenty-five shillings. Let’s blue it all, shall we?”

  This suggestion, it seemed, was unusual enough to make her emerge, puffy of eyes and red of nose, from the folds of his secondhand handkerchief. “What, all of it?”

  “As you said yourself, it’s not as if we need it to live on.” He was rather proud of the careful neutrality in his voice. “What do you say? Dinner at Grillon’s? The theatre? Not Drury Lane, obviously, since it burned to the ground, but they must be staging something at Covent Garden.”

  “Oh, John, do you mean it?” she asked, smiling tremulously through her tears.

  Her eagerness made him feel ashamed. Since returning from their wedding trip, they had made only one social appearance—the Washbourn masquerade—and even that had been a matter of professional necessity. For his part, he could think of nothing more pleasurable than coming home to his wife at the end of the day; he tended to forget that she was accustomed to evenings filled with social engagements, to which his solitary c
ompanionship must pale in comparison.

  “I do,” he announced recklessly. “I’ll take you anywhere you like, and you may dress me up however you wish.” He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. “I have to be getting back to Bow Street now, but shall I stop by Covent Garden Theatre and purchase tickets?”

  She readily agreed to this plan, and kissed him fondly (several times) in between profuse apologies for wrecking his plans for the investigation. He was obliged to insist, with perhaps more diplomacy than truth, that she had done no such thing, and they parted on such exceedingly good terms that he was halfway to Bow Street before it occurred to him that he just might have been played for a fool.

  No, his heart argued with his mind, it isn’t possible. She’s not that sort of woman.

  But his misgivings were not allayed when he stopped by the box office at Covent Garden Theatre, and discovered that the evening’s offering was a comedy with the inauspicious title of The Bridegroom Deceived.

  * * *

  Julia, for her part, reflected upon the incident with mingled shame and bewilderment. Why, she had never done such a thing before in her life! In fact, she despised the sort of female who resorted to tears and hysterics in order to get her own way. She had no idea what had brought on the sudden bout of crying, much less the reason for its equally sudden cessation, but in retrospect she could see how her uncharacteristic outburst might be interpreted in just such a light. It was too galling to think he might believe her capable of such manipulative scheming.

  There was only one thing to do, then, to make sure she was restored to her husband’s good graces: she would spend the afternoon lying down with cold compresses over her eyes to reduce the swelling, and then, when he returned to Curzon Street that evening, she would devote herself to the task of captivating him anew.

  * * *

  Thus it was that, when Pickett returned to Curzon Street that evening with a large bouquet of flowers in his arm (having purchased this from the same market at Covent Garden where, in his younger days, he had once picked pockets or pinched the occasional apple), Rogers relieved him of his hat and gloves and informed him that he might find madam upstairs preparing to go out for the evening.

  Pickett thanked the butler for the information, then took the stairs two at a time. He tapped lightly on the bedroom door, then opened it, stepped inside—

  And froze, the flowers in his hand forgotten. His lady stood by the window (was it possible that she had been watching for him?), dressed for the evening’s entertainment in a high-waisted, low-necked gown of some diaphanous white fabric that appeared golden in the light from the setting sun. He had seen her like this once before, only on that other occasion it had been the fire in the grate that had gilded her like the touch of Midas.

  “You remember,” she observed with some satisfaction, seeing the recognition in his eyes.

  He opened his mouth to answer, but no words came. He shut his mouth, swallowed, and tried again. “You were wearing that dress on the night we met.” It was a curiously romantic interpretation of the evening of a man’s murder, but perhaps understandable under the circumstances. Pickett shook his head in wonder. “If anyone had told me then that in less than a year you and I would be married, I would have thought he belonged in Bedlam.”

  “The best thing Frederick ever did for me was lead me to you.” Her gaze dropped to the burden in his arms. “But what’s all this?”

  He looked down at the flowers he held as if surprised to see them there, and then stuck them out awkwardly in her direction. “They’re for you. It’s just that, well, I’ve never made you cry before. I never want to do it again.”

  She found herself blinking back tears as she took the flowers from him. “Too late,” she said, laughing a little at her own foolishness. “It was sweet of you, John. I’ll have Rogers put them in water, shall I?”

  “Rogers can wait,” Pickett said, and pulled her into his arms and kissed her in a way that posed a considerable threat to the flowers trapped between them.

  At length she felt his fingers dislodging her hairpins, and was moved to protest. “John, you’re wrecking my coiffure.”

  “Hang your coiffure,” he retorted, making no very noticeable attempt to mend his ways.

  “What a domineering man I’ve married,” she complained with a marked lack of regret. “But you had best change your clothes, if we are to reach Covent Garden Theatre before the curtain call.”

  Reluctantly agreeing to this plan, Pickett shrugged off his workaday brown serge coat and washed up, then rang for Thomas to assist him into the evening clothes he’d worn for his wedding. When this operation was complete (and Pickett was forced to concede that it took less time with Thomas’s assistance than it would have taken him alone), the Picketts, man and wife, set out for Covent Garden.

  And if it occurred to either of them that they were both trying perhaps a bit too hard to avoid resuming the subject of their earlier disagreement, it is doubtful that they would have recognized this as anything but a good thing.

  * * *

  Upon being set down before the theatre at Covent Garden, Pickett and Julia were the objects of cheers and not a few jesting remarks by members of the Night Patrol just coming on duty at the Bow Street Public Office adjacent to the theatre.

  “Ignore them,” Pickett said, glaring at his colleagues before escorting his wife inside.

  She left her new evening wrap in the cloakroom (hoping that it might be spared the fate of its predecessor, which had perished in the Drury Lane Theatre fire), and then took Pickett’s arm as they climbed the stairs to the boxes above. She was rather taken aback to discover that her husband, usually so careful in matters of money, had spared no expense where this outing was concerned; the box he had hired for the evening was one of the best and, consequently, the most expensive. The tickets, together with the flowers he’d bought, must have made quite a dent in his twenty-five shillings.

  After they had taken their seats, however, she noticed his gaze darting about the theatre, and realized he was less concerned with making a lavish gesture than he was with scouting out the exits and determining the best route of escape in case of emergency; clearly, she was not the only one who retained vivid memories of their flight from the burning Drury Lane Theatre two months earlier. She could not help thinking this a good thing, as it served to distract his attention from the curious stares, raised quizzing glasses, and occasional pointing fingers leveled at them. Lifting her chin defiantly, she moved her chair closer to his and proceeded to flirt outrageously with him.

  Or at least she tried. It was difficult to flirt with a man who wouldn’t flirt back.

  “What is it, John?” she asked at last, finding his gaze fixed on some point on the opposite side of the theatre.

  “Look at that box—the fourth one from the proscenium. Is that Lord and Lady Washbourn?”

  “I think so,” she said, reaching instinctively for her reticule before remembering that the object she would have sought was not there. “I do wish I hadn’t lost my opera glasses in the fire!”

  He laced his fingers through hers. “I’m just glad that was all you lost.”

  “I lost my evening cloak, too,” she reminded him, and then gave his hand a squeeze. “But only look what I found.”

  There was no opportunity to say more, for at that moment the curtain rose and the play began. The Washbourns and their troubles were forgotten until the interval between acts, at which time the boxes emptied as aristocrats decamped to the lobby for refreshments.

  “Would you like something?” Pickett asked, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the lobby. “Champagne, perhaps? I’m not on duty tonight, you know.”

  He did not seem precisely eager at the prospect of going downstairs to fetch it, and she realized that he had been more aware of the gawking looks than he had let on. She should not have been surprised; after all, his livelihood (at least until he had married her) depended upon his being observant. Although a glass of champ
agne sounded tempting, she would not subject him to the sort of scrutiny he would face were he to go in search of it.

  “Thank you, darling, but I’m not thirsty,” she said with less than perfect truth. “Let’s just stay here, shall we? Oh, look! Now, what do you think of that?”

  Without being so vulgar as to point, she contrived to position her fan so that it directed his attention to a box across the theatre, one level lower than the Washbourn box and some distance to its right. Lord Washbourn had just entered this enclosure, and stood talking to a lady whose ample bosom threatened to spill out of her low-cut gown.

  “At a guess, I should say that was Lady Barbara Brennan,” he said.

  Julia nodded. “The very same. And in the meantime, there sits poor little Lady Washbourn all alone.”

  “There’s something we can do about that, anyway,” Pickett said, pushing back his chair and rising to his feet.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Everyone else appears to be visiting. Why shouldn’t we?”

  “An excellent notion.” She gave him her hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet. “I can’t help wondering, though, if it is simple human kindness that inspires you, or if you are hoping to learn something useful.”

  “A bit of both, perhaps.”

  She nodded wisely. “I suspected as much. Very well, Mr. Pickett, lead on!”

  He did, and as they traversed the long, curving corridor to the other side of the theatre, she noticed once more that the awkwardness with which he faced purely social situations disappeared once he became a man on a mission. Pickett, for his part, counted doors as they passed, wondering how they would know the right box when they came to it. Thankfully, this dilemma was resolved when he recognized a footman in the Washbourn livery stationed outside one such door.

  “Lord and Lady Washbourn?” Pickett inquired, just to be certain.

  “His lordship has stepped out, but her ladyship is within.”

  “Excellent!”

  The footman flung open the door and stepped back to allow them entrance.