Mystery Loves Company

by Sheri Cobb South

  “No, that won’t do.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but why not?”

  “Because a house in Town wouldn’t be equipped with such a thing. Think, man! Lady Washbourn’s still-room would be attached to the country house, where his lordship’s orchards are.”

  “Oh,” said Pickett, rather nonplussed. “Yes, I see.”

  “So I expect you’ll be wanting to go to Surrey, to Washbourn Abbey.” Mr. Colquhoun turned in his chair and looked up at the large clock mounted on the wall over his bench. “If you hurry, you can catch the noon stage from Cheapside, and reach Croydon by nightfall.”

  “You don’t mind?” Pickett asked, taken aback by his magistrate’s ready capitulation to a scheme which he’d thought would take considerable persuasion.

  “I’m not entirely convinced, mind you, but your theory holds enough validity that it must be eliminated, anyway. I only hope you can find sufficient evidence to either condemn her ladyship or confirm her innocence.”

  “So do I,” said Pickett with feeling.

  “And now, you’d best be going home.” The magistrate regarded his most junior Runner with a twinkle in his blue eyes. “Besides packing your bags for the journey, I expect your farewells are likely to take some time.”

  * * *

  “I wish you were not going back to Sussex so soon, Emily,” Julia complained to Lady Dunnington when she called in Audley Street that morning. “Whatever shall I do without you?”

  “The same things you were doing before I arrived,” Emily pointed out. “Shopping, visiting Hookham’s Library, walking in St. James’s—” She broke off this catalog of entertainments to make a practical observation. “Even if I were to stay in London, I would not be able to accompany you for much longer. Little Lady Genie is making her presence increasingly difficult to hide—and I do mean increasingly,” she added, and although she made a moue of distaste, she patted the bulge of her abdomen with affection.

  “But I wasn’t doing anything before,” Julia confessed. “Not really. There are only so many times one may arrange flowers for the hall, or plan meals for the week, or give instructions to the housekeeper, or darn one’s husband’s stockings—oh, but I must mark that one off my list, for I bought him new ones, and got rid of the old. Monogramming handkerchiefs, perhaps,” she murmured, recalling the one with which he had dried her tears.

  Lady Dunnington wrinkled her nose. “Monogramming handkerchiefs does not sound like my idea of being giddy to the point of dissipation, but so long as it gets you out of the house”—she shrugged her shoulders.

  “Actually, I would probably have the haberdasher send over half a dozen—or perhaps a full dozen,” Julia amended, thinking of the additional hours the extra embroidery would fill.

  “Julia Runyon Fieldhurst Pickett, are you in hiding?” Emily demanded.

  “Of course I’m not! Well—yes—I suppose I am—that is, sort of,” Julia confessed sheepishly.

  “Then you are regretting your mésalliance!”

  “No, not at all! If anything, my feelings for John have grown stronger over the last two months. It is only that if I go out, I am sure to be stared at, and whispered about, and pointed out—if I am not given the cut direct, which is equally likely.”

  “You knew it would be that way,” Emily pointed out, albeit not unkindly. “Still, you went to the theatre last night, did you not?”

  “Yes, but that was different, for John was with me. I can face anything so long as we are together. I have only to look at him to know he is worth ten of whomever is doing the snubbing.” She sighed. “But he has to work during the day, and so I am left rather at loose ends.”

  “He might give it up,” the countess pointed out. “Your jointure was set up in such a way that it continued even after your remarriage, did it not?”

  “Yes, and I suggested that.” She shuddered at the memory. “It did not go well.”

  “No, I daresay he is not the sort of man who would be content to live as Mr. Julia Fieldhurst.”

  Julia came swiftly to her husband’s defense. “Nor would I want him to be!”

  “I must say, I think the better of him for it. But my dear, you cannot hide from the ton forever. You must face them down. The sooner you do so, the sooner they will find something—or someone!—else to gossip about.”

  “I know you’re right,” Julia conceded. “Still, it is a great deal easier said than done.”

  Emily leaped to her feet as quickly as her increasing bulk would allow, and held out her hand to Julia. “Then let’s confront them together, shall we?”

  With some misgiving, Julia took her friend’s hand. “And what of little Lady Genie?” she asked, gesturing with her free hand toward Emily’s middle.

  “I shall wear my fullest pelisse, and unless we are walking into a stiff wind, I daresay no one will notice. And if they do, they will have two shocking women to talk about, instead of one!”

  Emily in full flow was a force to be reckoned with, and she shot down one by one every objection Julia put forward. By the time they reached St. James’s Park, Julia was more than reconciled to the outing; in fact, she actually looked forward to it. The trees in the park were unfurling their new greenery, and the flowers were beginning to bloom, and it seemed to Julia that the abundance of Nature served to reflect the promise of her new marriage.

  Alas, they had not gone far along the path before her earlier fears were confirmed. Several ladies of long acquaintance took great pains not to meet her eye, and others gave her only the curtest of nods in passing, while two young bloods ogled her quite boldly through their quizzing glasses, as if her descent in the world excused them from showing her even the most basic forms of courtesy.

  Her detractors, however, had reckoned without the Countess of Dunnington. “Why, Mrs. Langford-Hicks!” Emily exclaimed, hurrying forward to seize the hands of a starchy-looking female who had shown every indication of drawing her skirts aside lest she be contaminated by some accidental contact with the former viscountess. “How delightful to see you looking so well!”

  “Lady Dunnington,” acknowledged the woman, detaching herself gingerly from Emily’s grasp. “How do you do?”

  “All the better for having my dear Julia’s company,” she declared, dragging Julia into the conversation, will she or nill she. “You are acquainted, are you not?”

  Having no choice, Mrs. Langford-Hicks nodded stiffly. “Your ladyship—er—that is—”

  “Mrs. Pickett,” Julia said, supplying the proper term of address with more than a hint of defiance.

  “Yes, for she has recently remarried, you know,” Emily put in.

  “So I had heard,” their companion said, wrinkling her nose as if she smelled something that offended her. “To a Bow Street Runner, or some such person, if rumor doesn’t lie.”

  “Oh, but not just any Bow Street Runner, for her Mr. Pickett is quite the cleverest of the lot, and very likely the handsomest as well.” Lady Dunnington went on to describe Pickett’s person and prospects in such glowing terms that that young man would scarcely have recognized himself. “I should not be at all surprised if he is made a magistrate by the time he is thirty, and knighted by forty,” she concluded. “Then all those who snubbed him in his Bow Street days will look a pretty set of fools, won’t they?”

  “Really, Emily,” Julia chided, choking back her laughter until Mrs. Langford-Hicks had withdrawn stunned and reeling from the assault. “I had no idea your opinion of John was so high!”

  “No, and if you ever tell him I said such a thing, I shall deny it with my last breath! But Mrs. Langford-Hicks’s pretensions needed depressing, for what was she before her marriage but Mr. Langford-Hicks’s housekeeper?” Seeing Julia’s expression of shocked delight, she added, “Oh, didn’t you know? Quite the scandal of ’92, it was—or do I mean ’93? Either way, she has no room to look down her nose at anyone. And the fact that you made your come-out ten years later and had never heard the tale only proves what I have
been trying to tell you: people will forget—or at least lose interest—when some new scandal comes along.”

  Whatever Julia might have said to this assertion was to remain unspoken, for at that moment she was hailed by a feminine voice.

  “Mrs. Pickett! You are Mrs. John Pickett, are you not?”

  Gratified that someone, at least, seemed eager to acknowledge her, Julia turned and beheld a young woman with crimped dark ringlets and a walking dress so lavishly decorated with frogs and braid that the crimson sarcenet beneath the ornamentation was scarcely visible. “Yes, I am Mrs. Pickett. How may I be of service to you?”

  “Lud, I’m sure there’s nothing you can do for me! I’m Lady Gerald Broadbridge, you know.”

  In fact, Julia had recognized her husband’s first love from the moment she saw her approaching, but she refused to stroke the young woman’s vanity by letting on. “I’m pleased to meet you, Lady Gerald,” she said, curtsying. “Tell me, are you acquainted with Lady Dunnington?”

  Sophy appeared less than gratified by the introduction, no doubt because a countess must take precedence over the wife of a mere fourth son, even if his father was a duke. “Lady Dunnington,” she said without enthusiasm, dipping the briefest of curtsies.

  “Lady Gerald.” Emily, who knew to a nicety how to dampen pretensions, gave Lady Gerald Broadbridge a curtsy that somehow combined the dictates of courtesy with just the right amount of condescension.

  “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, both of you,” Sophy said, turning to Julia with a mixture of eagerness and malice. “But especially you, Mrs. Pickett. I knew your husband, you see.”

  “Yes, I know,” Julia said, maintaining her smile with an effort. “He once worked for your father, I believe.”

  Sophy was not best pleased with this reminder of her own humble origins, but, having claimed acquaintance with John Pickett, she could hardly deny the charge. “Yes, he was Papa’s apprentice. How you would have laughed, if you could have seen him as I did, all black with coal dust! He was quite mad for me, you know—in fact, he begged me to marry him.”

  “Yes, so he told me,” Julia said, determined to rid Sophy of any illusion that John Pickett still nursed his youthful passion as a deep, dark secret. “What a good thing it is that we are not allowed to marry our first loves! When I was sixteen, I conceived a grand passion for one of the stable hands.”

  “For me it was my dancing master,” Emily agreed.

  “Yes, but John was nineteen,” Sophy pointed out.

  “Worse and worse!” exclaimed Julia. “When I was nineteen, I married Fieldhurst!”

  Emily nodded. “It is curious, is it not, that young ladies are considered marriageable at nineteen, or even younger, but how many young men of that age do you see embarking upon matrimony? One might assume it takes them longer to mature.”

  “Perhaps it is Nature’s way of preventing them from making disastrous marriages,” Julia suggested blandly.

  “Like yours with Lord Fieldhurst?” Sophy suggested with a brittle smile. “I only hope poor John lasts longer than your first husband did.”

  “So do I,” agreed Julia, resolutely ignoring Sophy’s too-intimate use of her husband’s first name, as well as the implication that she had been responsible for Lord Fieldhurst’s death. “But if—God forbid!—he does not, at least he will have the satisfaction of dying happy. I only hope Lord Gerald may be as fortunate.”

  Sophy looked a bit puzzled by this remark, as if sensing some insult she could not quite pin down. “Speaking of my dear Gerry, I mustn’t keep him waiting,” Sophy said a bit too brightly, glancing over her shoulder at the portly, red-faced gentleman tottering along the path in their direction. “So pleased to make your acquaintance, Lady Dunnington, Mrs. Pickett.”

  She spun on her heel and hurried away in Lord Gerald’s direction, the dyed ostrich plumes on her bonnet bobbing indignantly with every step.

  “Cat!” said Emily, choking back her laughter.

  Julia glared at Sophy’s retreating back. “Yes, isn’t she?”

  “I was talking about you, my dear. ‘I only hope Lord Gerald may be as fortunate!’ Really, Julia, I didn’t know you had it in you.”

  “I suppose I should be ashamed of myself, but I could not let her flatter herself that John has been wearing the willow for her all these years!” She sighed. “It’s very lowering to think that one’s husband, who is in all other respects an exceptionally clever man, could have succumbed to the wiles of such a creature!”

  “Did you flatter yourself that because you were the first woman in his bed, you must also have been the first to touch his heart?” Emily shook her head. “Your Mr. Pickett may be young, but he is a healthy, red-blooded Englishman, you know, and if it’s true that he was once a collier’s apprentice, I daresay few respectable females came his way. I should have thought it more remarkable if he had not succumbed. In any case, it seems to me that you, with your stable hand, have little room to talk.”

  Julia looked rather shamefaced. “There was no stable hand. Well, there were, of course, but I never had the slightest romantic interest in any of them. I only wanted to put that dreadful female in her place.” She shot a resentful glance at Lord Gerald Broadbridge, his belly straining the buttons of his flowered waistcoat as he ambled along with labored steps that suggested his lordship suffered from gout. “Look at him! He must be more than twice her age, for Lord Gerald is fifty if he is a day—and looks every bit of it, thanks to years of running with Prinny’s Carlton House set. And yet he is held to be a prize catch, while my poor John is an anathema, so far as Society is concerned—at least until they have need of him,” she added bitterly.

  “It’s the way of the world, Julia,” Emily said, not without sympathy. “You may flout the rules at your peril, but you will never change them.”

  15

  In Which the Honeymoon Comes to an Abrupt End

  After leaving Bow Street, Pickett did not head for Curzon Street at once, but instead set out for Grosvenor Square. There was one bit of business that had to be addressed before his journey. He knew it was a necessary preface to his inquiries at Washbourn Abbey, but this knowledge did nothing to lessen the feeling that he was betraying Lady Washbourn in suspecting her of the very crime against which she had engaged him to protect her.

  He shook his head as if to clear it. Mr. Colquhoun had cautioned him long ago against becoming personally involved in the cases that would come his way—and those warnings had been repeated with a vengeance when the newly widowed Lady Fieldhurst had first crossed his path. In all other cases (well, most of them, anyway, at least those that had not involved the lady who was now his wife), he believed he had succeeded in maintaining a professional distance. But something about Lady Washbourn’s situation echoed a bit too closely his own. Like the countess, he too had wed above his station, and although the parallels were not exact—he had no fortune, for one thing, nor did he believe Julia harbored the slightest desire to put a period to his existence—the failure of the Washbourns’ marriage seemed somehow to bode ill for that of the Picketts.

  Having reached the Washbourn residence in Grosvenor Square, he sent up his card to her ladyship, and was soon shown into the now-familiar drawing room.

  “Good morning, Mr. Pickett,” the countess said, rising to greet him. “Have you any news for me today?”

  “I’m afraid not,” he said, waiting until the butler had closed the door behind him to continue. “I must go to Washbourn Abbey to follow a—a possible lead, however.”

  “A lead? At Washbourn Abbey? What—?”

  “I can say no more at present, your ladyship,” Pickett said hastily. “Pray don’t ask me questions I can’t answer. In the meantime, though, I wonder if you might give me a letter to take to your staff there. I should hate to travel all the way to Croydon only to be turned away at the door.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  The countess moved without hesitation to the writing desk before the window, a
pparently never suspecting that in granting his request, she might be sealing her own fate. Either his suspicions were wide of the mark, Pickett reflected, or the lady was confident he would find nothing that might implicate her. He rather hoped it was the former.

  For the next several minutes, there was no sound save for the scratching of pen on paper. At last Lady Washbourn returned the pen to its standish and sprinkled sand over the wet ink, then folded the single sheet and sealed it with a wafer.

  “That should suffice, Mr. Pickett,” said her ladyship, handing him the letter. “I have given instructions that everyone on the staff is to cooperate fully with your investigations, including answering any questions you might ask or showing you anything you may wish to see. I trust that will be sufficient.”

  “Yes, thank you, your ladyship.”

  He tucked the letter into the inside breast pocket of his coat and took his leave, feeling rather like Judas must have done.

  * * *

  He returned to Curzon Street to find Julia absent, and was conscious of a pang of disappointment; given that they were soon to be separated, he didn’t want to lose a minute of her company in the meantime.

  “She should be back very soon,” Rogers assured him. “She has gone to Audley Street to call on the Countess of Dunnington. If you would care to send a message, sir, I shall have young Andrew, the new footman, deliver it.”

  “No, that won’t be necessary,” Pickett said, suppressing a sigh. “I’ll just go upstairs and pack my bag. With any luck, she will have returned by the time I’ve finished.”

  “You are going away, sir? Will you require Thomas to accompany you?”

  “Good heavens, no!” Pickett said, alarmed at the very idea of trying to conduct a discreet investigation with a valet in tow. “I don’t expect to be gone above a day, so I can manage very well on my own.”

  “Thomas will be disappointed, sir,” observed Rogers.