Jason, Veronica

by Never Call It Love

  When Peggy entered the salon only moments later, her visitor, now with veil flung back, rose from a French-style settee of fruitwood upholstered in pale yellow satin. Like the whole house, the salon was small, but comfortably, even luxuriously appointed.

  "Miss Montlow?" Tactfully, Peggy did not offer her hand.

  "Yes."

  "I am Mrs. Frazier-Fitzsimmons."

  There had never been a Mr. Frazier-Fitzsimmons. Peggy had assumed the name when, at the age of eighteen, she had realized that she did not have to continue through life as Bertha Crouch.

  "How do you do?" Elizabeth said.

  What a beauty, Peggy thought. That lustrous brown hair, those gray eyes, that figure, with a waist so slender that the high breasts beneath her dark brown velvet gown looked fuller than they actually were. Of late years, Peggy had sometimes, at a price, introduced lovers weary of her own charms to certain young women. Wistfully she thought of the price she could obtain for this one.

  "Please sit down, Miss Montlow." Peggy moved to the bell rope hanging beside the marble-manteled fireplace. "May I offer you refreshment? Tea, perhaps?"

  "No, thank you," Elizabeth said swiftly. Then, aware that she might have sounded ungracious: "I cannot stay long. I have much to do before I leave London at four o'clock."

  "I understand." Peggy sat down in a yellow satin armchair, facing her visitor.

  "I have come here about my brother. Did Christopher come here for tea last Wednesday afternoon? And did he... stay here until the next morning?"

  Peggy cast her eyes modestly downward. "Did he tell you that?"

  "Yes."

  Peggy thought of how Christopher Montlow had visited her the previous Wednesday, but not until many hours after teatime. In fact, Lucia and Giuseppe had already retired to their quarters above the carriage house, and Peggy herself, in her upstairs bedroom, had begun to feel sleepy, when she heard a handful of gravel patter against the windowpane. She had gone to the window and looked down. Kit Montlow had stood down there in the garden, pale hair shining in the rectangle of light cast by her window.

  She had felt glad to see him. Since she had first met him in Hyde Park the previous summer, they had been to bed seven or eight times. She had found his youth a stimulating novelty. And he had proved to be a potent lover, although a somewhat selfish and impatient one. She descended quickly to the lower hall, where a tallow night lamp burned on a table near the rear door, and let him into the house.

  "Kit, you young scamp! Why didn't you go to the front door?" Then she saw from the look on his face that this was no ordinary visit. "What is the matter? Are you in trouble?"

  "I may be."

  "With the law?"

  "Perhaps."

  "Then get out of here! Immediately! I cannot afford any trouble with the law."

  "You won't have any. I'm not asking you to say anything whatever to anyone connected with the law."

  "Then what are you asking?"

  "Probably my sister will be here in a day or two. I want you to tell her that I came here at teatime this afternoon—came here for the first time, do you understand? And that I spent all of tonight with you, and then left early in the morning."

  She looked at him shrewdly. "Is that what you are going to tell her?"

  "Yes, and my mother, too."

  "Then you must have been up to something really bad tonight, if you would rather have them believe you were here! Now, what has happened?"

  "My house on Kingman Street was broken into, that's all."

  "By you?"

  "Why would I break into my own house?"

  "I don't know why. I just know that you might do anything. Now, what happened?"

  "There was a girl with whoever broke into the house. She's... hurt."

  Peggy took a step backward. "I don't want to hear anything more about it!"

  "You don't have to. All you have to do is tell my sister what I ask you to."

  She studied him. "Are you sure you are not hoping I will furnish an alibi for you to the bailiffs?"

  "Don't be a fool, Peg. Of what use would be an alibi furnished by you? Who would believe a woman everyone knows to be a whore?"

  She took the insult with narrowed eyes, but calmly. "You're very foxy for a lad of eighteen, aren't you?"

  "If you convince my sister I spent all of tonight with you, she and my mother will furnish me with an alibi, one that will be believed."

  She considered, no longer afraid that he planned to involve her with bailiffs or the law courts. Clever young devil that he was, he had realized, even before she herself did, that such help from her could only harm him. She said, "And in return, what will you do for me?"

  He stripped a ring from his finger and handed it to her. Even though she had seen it before, she held the ring close to the lamp and looked appreciatively at the glowing ruby. It was worth a hundred pounds, possibly more.

  "Just what do you want me to tell your sister?"

  They talked for several minutes. Then he moved toward the door. She asked, "What are you going to do now?"

  "Walk fifteen miles to the Hedges. I should get there well before morning. I don't dare hire a horse. The stable owner would remember me."

  "And when you reach the Hedges?"

  "I'll hide in the carriage house until dark tomorrow night, just in case there might be someone watching the place, and then slip into the house."

  He had said good night to Peggy then, and gone out the back door.

  Now, eyes still cast down, Peggy said to Elizabeth Montlow, "If he himself told you that he spent the night with me..."

  "He did."

  Before she turned to more lucrative endeavors, Peggy had appeared on the London stage. Her theatrical training served her well now. The eyes she lifted to her visitor were filled with timid shame.

  "It's true, Miss Montlow. He appeared on my doorstep last Wednesday afternoon about four o'clock, and reminded me of the time last summer when a young friend of his had introduced us. I gave him tea. And then he began to talk wildly of how he had been unable to get me out of his mind all these past months..."

  Her low voice faltered for a moment. Then she went on, "I know it must seem incomprehensible to a young lady like you. But I let him stay the night. In the morning I left him, still asleep, and went downstairs. Lucia, my maid, had just returned from the market. She told me there was some rumor about your house on Kingman Street, and about a girl, and about Bow Street Runners looking for Christopher.

  "When I went upstairs to my room and told him, he was terribly distressed and frightened. In an instant, he reverted to a little child. All he could think of was getting as fast as possible to his mother and to Liza, as he called you."

  Elizabeth, taking a deep breath, felt as if a terrible weight had been lifted from her.

  "I know it must seem depraved," Peggy went on, "my allowing a young boy to make love to me. But perhaps his very youth was the reason. I could not help having this... this motherly feeling for him. You see, Mr. Frazier-Fitzsimmons and I—we had been married only a year when he died—he and I never had a child.... But then, you don't want to hear about that."

  She was correct. Elizabeth did not want to hear about the sort of maternal feelings that could lead a woman to bed down with a boy half her age. All she wanted, now that she had learned the truth, was to leave this house.

  She got to her feet. "I must go now. Thank you, Mrs. Frazier-Fitzsimmons. I am very grateful to you."

  "Grateful?" Peggy looked puzzled. "For telling you that your brother and I...? Oh!" Shock widened her brown eyes. "You can't mean because of that girl found in front of your house here in town. Surely you never believed that Christopher had anything to do with that!"

  Although she colored slightly, Elizabeth's voice remained even. "I had to make certain."

  "Is Christopher all right? Surely your coming here does not mean that he had been... arrested?" For the past hour, ever since her coachman had brought back the latest news from a Covent Ga
rden grog shop, Peggy had known that Christopher was in custody.

  "Yes, he has been arrested. But I know now that everything will be set to rights eventually. Thank you again, Mrs. Frazier-Fitzsimmons. And good-bye."

  She went down the steps to the hired carriage and asked the driver to take her to the Bow Street house of Sir John Fielding. A younger half-brother of the novelist Henry Fielding, Sir John had been knighted for having founded his Bow Street Runners, London's first organized defense against crime.

  As the horses drew the vehicle swiftly over the cobblestones, Elizabeth felt almost lighthearted, so much so that she could enjoy the sight of smart private carriages moving along the street, and well-dressed men and women strolling along the sidewalks. Now that she knew that her brother had been guilty last Wednesday night of nothing except consorting with a notorious whore, she felt not the slightest scruple about lying to save him. True, such a lie, told under oath on the witness stand, still would constitute perjury. But she would not be perjuring herself to obstruct justice. She would be doing so to prevent a possible miscarriage of justice, one that might leave Christopher hanging dead from a noose, and her mother dead also, or wishing she were.

  When she reached the Bow Street house, she gave her name to a cheerful-looking youth who guarded the door. He returned in a few minutes to lead her through a room where ragged miscreants sat dejectedly on benches under the watchful gaze of a pair of burly Runners. Then he stood aside for her to enter a smaller room.

  A man with a massive head and a leonine mane of gray hair stood up from behind his desk. "Good afternoon, Miss Montlow." Even though she had heard that he had been blinded by an accident at the age of nineteen, the sight of the closed eyelids in his broad face was a shock.

  "Please sit down." She took the straight chair on the opposite side of the desk. "May I say that I regret the circumstance that I am sure brings you here?"

  "Not so much as I do, Sir John. My brother is being held for no reason. On the night in question, he was fifteen miles from London. He was with my mother and me, in our house near the village of Parnley."

  He said, "You will be willing to swear to that in court?"

  Something in his tone made her nerves tighten. She had heard eerie tales of this blind man's powers. It was said that he could recognize more than three thousand London criminals just by their voices. Had he also developed a sixth sense that told him when someone was lying?

  "Certainly I will so testify. But why should his case come to court? I see no reason why he should have been arrested at all. Surely your bailiffs told you that both my mother and our servant stated that my brother had been with us Wednesday night."

  His voice was perfectly neutral. "They told me. But he cannot be released. He has already been remanded to Newgate Prison to be held for trial at the next General Sessions."

  "May I ask upon what evidence? Surely not just because the... the crime was committed in our empty house!"

  "Upon additional evidence submitted the morning after the crime by an eyewitness, a maid employed by a family across the street. She did not tell immediately everything she had seen. Perhaps in her excitement she forgot it. Perhaps she hesitated to accuse a neighbor of her own employers. But the next morning she did tell them, and her employers brought her here to give her evidence to me.

  Elizabeth's pulse was beating hard in the hollow of her throat. "What had she seen?"

  "Your brother has very distinctive hair, has he not? Yellow hair so pale it is almost silvery, the sort of hair that is usually observed only in young children."

  "Yes."

  "When the youths were carrying the girl into the house, one of them lost his hat Because of his hair, the housemaid recognized him as Christopher Montlow."

  "Just by his hair? There must be thousands of young men in London with hair that shade."

  "Not thousands. Scores, perhaps."

  "I don't care if there is only one other! The man she saw could not possibly have been my brother. And I shall so testify." It did not matter, she told herself, that this blind man did not seem to believe her. He would not be the judge at Christopher's trial, nor a member of the jury.

  "That is your privilege, Miss Montlow." After a moment he added, "You might be interested to know that we have questioned the four youths who were sent down from Oxford along with your brother. Oh, yes," he said, almost as if he could see the start she gave, "we know the circumstances of their having been sent down."

  She sat there in silence, heart pounding. Could one of those boys, out of some sort of malice, have tried to implicate Christopher?

  He went on, "All of them, including Lord Stanley's son, say that they have spent every night since being sent down at Lord Stanley's house here in London. A manservant confirms their story."

  From his tone, she could not tell whether he himself believed it.

  "Each of them says that at no time were they near the Montlow house on Kingman Street. But they also say that your brother, although he stayed with them for the first two nights after they left Oxford, was not with them Wednesday night."

  "Of course he was not! He was at our house in the country."

  "So you have told me."

  A silence lengthened. Then Elizabeth said. "The girl. Has she been identified?"

  "Yes. She was an Irish girl, Anne Reardon. She was seventeen. Her guardian had brought her to London to arrange her marriage to an ironmonger's son."

  Pity swelled Elizabeth's heart. Only seventeen. And a respectable girl, apparently. Whoever they were, those youths who had savaged her until she went screaming to her death—they deserved hanging.

  "Was it her betrothed who identified her?"

  "No, her guardian."

  "Who is he?"

  "An Irish baronet, with lands near County Cork. His name is Sir Patrick Stanford."

  She stiffened. Patrick Stanford, that tall, graceful man who, in a ballroom filled with clashing perfumes, had somehow made her think of green fields, and cool fresh air, and waves pounding on a rocky coast. That rugged-faced man whose touch as they moved through the figures of the dance, and whose dark gaze, moving from her face to rest on her almost bare bosom, had stirred her senses.

  Would he, like John Fielding, not believe the testimony she was determined to give?

  She said, eager to end the interview, "May I take some money to my brother?"

  "I am afraid you cannot see him today. Certain formalities, necessary whenever a new prisoner is admitted, will not have been completed as yet."

  She reached into her reticule and drew out a small chamois bag. "Then you will see to it that he gets these five sovereigns?"

  "Certainly. I will send for a clerk and have him make you out a receipt."

  Five minutes later, as the carriage moved down the Strand toward the Inns of Court, Elizabeth no longer felt lighthearted. She was troubled by the thought that the housemaid's evidence, although obviously mistaken, might count against Christopher. Too, now that she knew more about that young girl, she felt doubly oppressed by the thought of her cruel death. And in her mind's eye she kept seeing Patrick Stanford's dark face. It had worn a smile at their first meeting. She did not like to imagine how his face would look the next time she saw it.

  But at least her interview with the family solicitor, when she reached his gloomy office in the Inns of Court, was more comforting than that with the blind man. No look of skepticism crossed Mr. Fairchild's thin old face when Elizabeth explained why Christopher could not possibly be guilty.

  "Dear, dear!" he said. "What a shocking ordeal for you and your dear mother. But don't worry, my child. No jury will convict him after you and Mrs. Montlow testify that he was with you that night."

  "Nevertheless, I want him to have the best defense possible."

  "Of course. I was about to suggest Sir Archibald Wade, a most able barrister for this sort of case. True, we could engage someone whose fees are lower..."

  "No." This was no time to economize. "Please get in
touch with Sir Archibald." She rose. "I must leave now, Mr. Fairchild, if I'm to catch the four-o'clock stage."

  It was not until well after dark that she walked up the brick path between the untrimmed boxwood bushes. Just before she reached the front door, her mother opened it, her face taut with anxiety.

  In the hallway Mrs. Montlow said, in a low, rapid voice, "Donald Weymouth is here, in the side parlor."

  "But he wasn't to return from Bath until several days from now!"

  "Nevertheless, he is here. He has been waiting for you for over an hour." she paused. "Well? Did you see her?"

  "Yes. He was with her from Wednesday afternoon until early Thursday morning."

  Mrs. Montlow's face went slack with relief. "Thank God! Then you will—"

  "Of course I will testify that he was with us that night." Joyful tears sprang to Mrs. Montlow's eyes. Elizabeth said, with contrition, "Mother, forgive me for not having believed him right from the first."

  "Of course I forgive you. And I was wrong this morning to call you unfeeling. I know it is because you have strength of character that you had to... make sure. And I realize that sometimes in the past the boy has been... rather strange." Some memory shadowed her eyes.

  Elizabeth had never told her mother about the kitten dangling from its noose, nor the crumpled print in Christopher's clothespress. Had there been other such things of which her mother had been aware, but had preferred to keep secret?

  Mrs. Montlow said, "Did you see Christopher?"

  "I was not allowed to. But I left the money for him, with Sir John Fielding. And I saw Mr. Fairchild. He thinks Christopher is in no danger whatsoever."

  "But he will have to stand trail?"

  "Yes, Mother. Now, about Donald. What did you tell him?"

  "Just that Christopher had been arrested, and why, and that he could not possibly be guilty, because he was with us that night."

  "What reason did you give him for my being in London?"

  "I said you had gone to take Christopher some money and to consult with Mr. Fairchild."

  "Good. I had best go to him now. May I ask him to supper?"

  "Of course, my darling."

  Elizabeth went down the hall. Evidently Donald had heard her footsteps, because when she entered the parlor, he was already on his feet, a thin young man in a dark gray coat and breeches. He crossed the room to meet her and to take her outstretched hands. "Elizabeth!"