A Lady's Guide to Passion and Property

by Kate Moore

  To Harry’s mind the customer took an unconscionably long time deciding between one shaving soap and another. When the fellow finally left with his purchase, Harry greeted Kirby. “Where’s the big man?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t say, Captain.”

  “Has Goldsworthy said anything about starting the club up again?”

  “Not a thing.”

  Harry wanted to push on through the red velvet curtain at the rear of the shop, stride across the garden, and slip into the club as he’d done for the past year.

  At that moment Miranda, Kirby’s seventeen-year-old daughter and chief seamstress, burst through the curtain. Her gaze flew to Harry, and she checked her steps. “Oh, it’s you.”

  “You were expecting someone else?”

  She shrugged. “No one comes here anymore.”

  “Except customers, I imagine.” He suspected she meant that no beaux came for her anymore, as the club’s majordomo and junior spy, Nate Wilde, had done. The lad had been unable to resist Miranda’s lush chestnut beauty from the first time he’d seen her. “Where’s Wilde?” he asked.

  Miranda tossed her curls. “I’m sure I don’t know. You should look among his fine friends.”

  Harry nodded and went on arranging the jars on the shelf. She meant the Jones brothers, a trio of one-time bastards who’d risen in the world by taking on the powerful Duke of Wenlocke to save their youngest brother. The middle brother, Will Jones, had plucked Nate Wilde from a life of thievery in the darkest streets of London and made him into a first-rate aide on their cases. Harry didn’t usually work with a partner, though Wilde might be useful. Wilde had a knack for disappearing in a crowd like one more London workingman.

  “Thanks, Miranda. Shall I find Wilde and send him your way?”

  She came around the counter and started to rearrange the jars and tins he’d displaced. “Of course not. I’m sure I’ve no thought of him in my head.”

  Harry grinned at her. The girl was a terrible liar.

  She handed him a jar of scent. “Here’s what you’re looking for,” she said.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I can take care of the captain’s purchase, Father, if you want to have your tea.”

  Her father nodded and disappeared through the curtain. They could hear him shuffling along the hallway to the rear of the shop.

  “Captain, I saw Mr. Goldsworthy go into the club this morning. Wait til Papa’s at his tea, and I’ll get you into the club,” she whispered, and added in a louder voice, “And that’ll be six and four.”

  “Thank you, Miranda.” Harry stepped out of the little shop to wait.

  The girl was as good as her word. Minutes later she led Harry through the shop and across the sodden garden to the rear of the club, using her own key to let him in.

  She put a hand on his sleeve as he went to slip past her. “Can you get Mr. Goldsworthy to open the club again?”

  “I mean to try,” he said.

  Inside the club cold and darkness reigned. Though they had been few in number, their band of spies had kept a kitchen and a small staff active. And always there had been the sound of hammers and saws as the work of perpetual renovation, part of the club’s disguise, went on. Harry groped his way along the dark passage from the kitchen to the servants’ stair and up to the first-floor coffee room. Velvet curtains drawn over the tall windows reduced the room to a shadowy cavern. Harry turned away from the empty couches and the cold ashy hearth. His glance caught on the leather gloves he and Blackstone had worn to spar with each other just days before the end. Blast Goldsworthy and the whole lot of them in the Foreign Office!

  He took the wide center stairs up to the big man’s office and opened the door.

  By appearance and temperament Goldsworthy belonged more to the Tooth and Nail than to any gentlemen’s club in London. Tall, bluff, and hearty, like a stout country farmer or a rich London merchant, Goldsworthy had a presence that filled a room. Behind his vast desk, he appeared as rough-surfaced and immovable as an ancient oak. The desk itself was more intimidating than a hillside gun battery with a sixteen-pounder trained on all who approached.

  “Lad,” Goldsworthy said, looking up, his big hands lying slack across the paper-strewn desk. “What brings you back? You can see we’re quite closed down.” A single lamp burned.

  Harry stepped into the room. It was colder than the servants’ stair. “Not me, sir. I’m still on assignment. When will the club reopen?”

  Goldsworthy shook his great head with its russet locks. “These things take time. Government, you know, moves slowly.”

  Harry did know. He knew how often the army in Portugal or Spain had been left waiting for needed supplies promised to Wellington—men or horses, weapons, or even pay. It was a wonder that Wellington had won as many battles as he had. “What can we do to move the government along? Do we need to talk with Chartwell?” Lord Chartwell was the Foreign Office official with whom the spies dealt most directly.

  “What we need, lad, is a big success.”

  “Shutting down a Russian agent and sending his British accomplice fleeing was not big enough for Chartwell?” Harry thought the spies had done quite well in their last adventure.

  Goldsworthy’s face didn’t change, but Harry detected an uncharacteristic slump in the big man’s shoulders. “It’s true enough, lad, that we got Malikov, but Chartwell’s convinced there’s someone still out there, papers still going missing.”

  “And you sent me after a blind man?” Harry felt duped. He’d been hungry for action, and he’d been sent on a fool’s errand.

  “Did you find him?” Goldsworthy sat taller in his chair, an arrested look on his face.

  “If I did, what would be the point?”

  “All threads weave together, lad.” Goldsworthy pinned him with a sharp gaze and repeated his question. “Did you find him?”

  “I did.”

  “Good work, lad. You’ve not told a soul now, have you?”

  “No one.” From the big man’s satisfaction, Harry could almost believe the blind man mattered. But Goldsworthy had not seen Adam Pickersgill shouting nonsense and waving his arms.

  The big man nodded. “Has he talked?”

  “He’s simple-minded, sir. Childlike. He talks about cats and ale and his own daily tasks.”

  “You haven’t asked him about the murder, then?” Goldsworthy started shuffling the papers on his desk. Goldsworthy’s paper search tactic was one of the ways the big man kept his spies on their toes and in the dark. The man never parted with information easily.

  Harry waited. For once he could bargain for information. He held a card the big man needed. “It would help to know who the victim was.”

  The paper shuffling stopped. Goldsworthy’s face wore an expression of a man in the grip of the past. “One of our own.”

  “A member of the club? When?” Harry knew as he asked the question that it could not be a recent murder. For old blind Adam to have witnessed the murder, it must have happened years earlier.

  Goldsworthy appeared lost in his own recollections. “Never mind, can the blind man talk?”

  “I doubt he can tell us directly what he knows, but he has these fits or episodes when he says quite a bit, shouts wildly, as if some scene is being enacted in front of him.”

  “You’ve seen these episodes?”

  Harry nodded. “One of them.”

  “Is the man mad?”

  “More like he’s caught up in the past.”

  “Where did you see the man’s fit?”

  “He occupies a bench in the public room at an inn.” Harry watched the big man’s countenance for any sign of recognition.

  “An inn at the start of the Dover road?” Goldsworthy heaved his bulk up from the desk and crossed the room to a large map of London on the wall. He lit a second lamp and with a fi
nger pointed to the inn’s location. “The Tooth and Nail, is it?”

  Harry nodded. “Some neighborhood men were talking about a stage coach robbery when something they said set the old man off.”

  Goldsworthy frowned. “So these episodes are seen and known in the neighborhood?”

  “Common knowledge, sir.”

  Goldsworthy looked grave. His eyes shifted back and forth rapidly, a sign that he wanted action. “I don’t like it,” he said. “We have to keep the man safe until we can understand what he’s saying. Take Wilde with you.”

  “So, you’ll reopen the operation?”

  Goldsworthy shook his head. “Never closed it, lad, but not a word to anyone.”

  “And the money?”

  “All in good time.” Goldsworthy waved a huge hand. “What do we know about the man? Anything?”

  “His name is Adam Pickersgill. He was in service in a country house before he was blinded.”

  “Was blinded you say? Not born blind?”

  Harry shook his head. The case meant something to Goldsworthy. The big man didn’t want to let it go, even if his superiors at the Foreign Office came down hard. Harry offered another detail. “That’s what the innkeeper’s daughter says. According to her, Adam was blinded in an attack on the road and wandered into the Tooth and Nail, where her father took him in. Who was the target of that attack, sir? Surely, it was not a simple-minded servant.”

  Goldsworthy had a faraway look in his eyes. “One of our own, lad, one of our best agents.”

  “In what year?”

  “It was ’06. There were French agents in the émigré community acting against us. Our...man was about to expose an extremely dangerous enemy.”

  Goldsworthy shook himself, and the faraway look disappeared.

  “I could keep Pickersgill safe until we’re up and going again, sir, with a bit of blunt.”

  Goldsworthy’s brows lifted, but he lumbered over to a cabinet piled high with rolled-up maps. With his broad back to Harry he opened the cabinet. Harry listened to the sound of a key turning, a metal lid opening, and the crackle of crisp paper. When Goldsworthy turned back, he offered Harry a sheaf of bank notes. “You’ll report to me here. Make sure no one sees you coming or going.”

  It was a small victory. Harry kept his smile to himself and tucked the money in his pocket.

  * * * *

  With the spy club closed, Nate Wilde had found a room in the home of his friend and mentor Will Jones. For two weeks bells had rung in the grand house, but not for him. Every morning a tweenie laid his fire and a manservant brushed his coat. The butler said, “Very good, Mr. Wilde,” as he came and went. It was everything he wanted, but not the way he wanted it. He hardly knew himself in his borrowed dignities.

  Each morning of the first week he’d read the papers over coffee he didn’t have to make and plates of eggs and bread he didn’t have to clear away. The papers were full of apprenticeships and bankruptcies and situations for clerks, but a desk was the death of a man. If a man sat behind a desk, the world went by beyond his reach. His hands grew soft and white, his shoulders hunched, his waistline grew, and his ambitions shrank. A desk was no way for a man to make his mark in the world.

  In the second week, Nate tried going with Will to the meetings of the parliamentary committee drafting Peel’s act to make a London police force, but sitting in a room, listening to old men in wigs and whiskers argue about the difference between this word and that made him squirm. If he were a Member of Parliament, he’d drag the lot of them down to Bread Street to learn words they’d never heard before like clicks and dibs and lagging and what happened to a merchant’s goods when someone cried fat’s a running.

  Today he’d left the parliamentary committee behind and headed out to confront London itself. Somewhere in the great sprawling city, a door would open for him. And when it did, he’d walk right in, and when he’d made his mark, he’d... But there was no use getting ahead of himself. Hours later his wanderings had led him nowhere but back to Bread Street where he’d been born.

  The street had changed in seven years. Some of the old houses had been knocked down in the cleanup after the holding vats burst on the roof of Truman’s Brewery at the top of the street. The beer flood had killed six people and splintered plaster-and-lath buildings on the east side of the street.

  Then Sir Xander Jones had come with his East London Gas Company and torn up the streets and laid the pipes and put up lamps. They glowed now in the gloom of a dark wet day. Maybe it was those lights, but Nate thought more of the buildings had doors than he remembered, and in some windows he saw the answering glow of real candles. In one window at Number Forty, curtains hung. Bread Street was putting on airs.

  It still stank of beer and piss, fish and turned oil. At the foot of the street he turned up the black velvet collar of an old coat he’d picked up from Bowen, a used clothes dealer on Monmouth Street. The green coat, stained and frayed at the edges, with one remaining button, covered his finery sufficiently that he thought he could walk the length of the street without any of its residents deciding to take a cosh to his head and empty his pockets.

  His pockets were empty, as a precaution. He’d worn his oldest boots. New boots would invite trouble. His gaze swept the street for idlers at the usual corners where a cosh man might lie in wait. Just before the open court where the street took a bend to the west, a woman sat hunched on a step under a ragged shawl with a babe in her lap and a pint pot between her hands. A word would pass from her to her man around the corner as Nate passed. The iron cosh would slide down the man’s sleeve into his hand, and the blow would descend before the woman stopped speaking.

  Nate was an old hand at such lays. He could do the ambling shuffle that marked a man as a Bread Streeter, and snarl a greeting at the woman as savage as a punch. She lifted the pint pot and gave him a furtive glance.

  Nate started walking, heading for the top of the street, where he could see the new vats at the brewery and the red brick corner of the school that had once belonged to Reverend Bredsell. He fingered the coins in his hand. He might get a bloater from the fish shop on the other side of the court for old times’ sake.

  The woman with the babe in her lap took instant note of his movement. She set her pint pot down upon the curb with a clink.

  “Watcher lookin’ fer, loovey?” she asked.

  “A bloater’ll do me.”

  “Yer a fine one, ain’tcha? Give a mite for the babe?” She extended a dirty open palm.

  Nate ignored the woman’s hand, watching the corner beyond her. As he came abreast of her, he heard the shuffle of feet scurrying his way.

  He tossed a coin in the air, setting it spinning toward the woman, and lunged forward. As a man rushed out of the shadows, cosh raised, Nate dropped to a crouch, one leg extended behind him. He swung his back leg at the charging man’s feet.

  His attacker fell heavily, and Nate was up and on him, flipping the man onto his back and pounding the man’s cosh hand against the paving stones until the iron bar clattered against the stones, and Nate snatched it up and thrust it in his pocket.

  He stared down into a thin white face pitted with pox scars in which a pale beard struggled to grow and the eyes bulged. The man’s chest heaved. He spat at Nate, and cried to the woman, “Do ’im, Biddy, ye useless female.”

  Biddy picked up her pint pot, sloshing its contents, and held it away from her. “It’s a full pint, Tom. Ye never let me waste a pint.”

  “Do ’im, or ye’ll feel my fist,” Tom snarled.

  Biddy lifted the pint pot, only slightly hampered by the babe. Nate held up a coin to show her. “I’ll take that beer off ye, Biddy,” he told her. “Put it down easy.”

  Biddy’s gaze shifted from Tom to Nate’s coin. The coin won. She lowered the pint pot to the cobbles. Nate tossed the coin into the middle of the street. Biddy scrambled afte
r it and kept on scrambling into the court.

  “Now, Tom,” said Nate. “Yer drink’s waiting for ye when we’re done.”

  “I know you,” the fallen man said. “Yer that bleedin’ boy that brought down Bredsell.”

  Nate grinned. Now he knew why he’d come to Bread Street. He’d needed a fight, needed a foe, but a tougher one than Tom had proved to be.

  In the old days Nate had been one of Bredsell’s boys. He’d lived at the school and followed gentlemen and reported to Bredsell on their doings and been paid for it. And if he’d chanced to land before the Bow Street magistrate, Bredsell had arranged his release. At the time, Nate’s great ambition had been to return to Bread Street one day as a High Mobsman with a purple silk waistcoat, rings on his fingers, and a gold watch as big as a turnip. He could laugh at those ambitions now. He had an account in Hammersley’s Bank and shares in the East London Gas Company and more besides.

  The fight he needed was not against the likes of Tom, but against a real foe, England’s foe in the great game she played with Russia. Nate would go back to the club and rattle Goldsworthy’s cage and get the old man to put him back on a case. Nate thought Captain Clare still had a case, and that would do for him.

  As the husband hunter begins in earnest to seek her happiness, she assumes a new position of authority in her life. From childhood she has been guided in her choices by the wisdom of parents and guardians. But only she can be mistress of her heart. No one else can command its affections or inclinations. The husband she seeks will be that man who admires and respects her for her independence of spirit and habit of self-command.

  —The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London

  Chapter 4