A short walk brought them to Great Windmill Street, an out-at-elbows district of broken flagstones and transoms minus half their fanlights. Miss Crawford’s lodgings lay above a bakery. At the bottom of her dark, cast-iron steps, tucked away at the side of the building, she drew a banknote from her skirts.
“Your fee, Mr Wyre.”
A heavy dray, laden with barrels, thundered by.
He held up the note. Ten guineas, to be drawn on a Bath and Wells bank. His eyes met hers. “Shall we consider it a retainer instead? If, that is, you still wish me to take Robert’s case.”
She gripped both his hands, the gesture both tender and urgent. But no kiss on the cheek for him. They agreed the moment she received any news of Aspinall, she would write to Wyre at St James’s, care of the old bird, Mr Read.
“If you’re sure it won’t impinge.” Her voice was barely audible now.
The lawyer made his way back to Mrs Mason’s apartment, those three elements – The White Swan, Wood’s Close, St James’s Palace – circling each other now in his imagination in a strange tableau where a white bird beat up through a beech copse against a bleak façade.
3.
JACKADANDIES
41. The Penetralium
Wyre woke in sodden sheets, his breath coming in hot gasps. He thought of St Lawrence on his gridiron, braising sweet and black. The day’s slow burn had already begun . . . Leighton! It sunk in all over again, the loss of what his friend used to call, jokingly, their double singleness. Groaning, he reached for his watch, a wedding gift from Rose. The dial showed an enamelled river scene with a picturesque bridge; if only he could dive into its suburban cool. Half past eight. He was due at the Palace in an hour. Throwing on his best legal-blue jacket, grabbing his leather bag, he dashed downstairs, wheeling out Leighton’s dandy-charger from the foyer.
After teetery beginnings, blue bag slung over his back on its shoulder strap, Wyre got along tolerably well (the action was like skating). Wobbling to a halt at the bottom of St James’s Street, he dismounted in front of an enormous crowd that had gathered there. It craned collectively for news, generating what, in the fashionable way of speaking, would be called a tumult of mighty harmonies, while above the mob waved a forest of placards, many of them advertising sectish sentiments. A balloonist floating with the whole city beneath his feet might see the fluid bedlam on the ground as a choreographed show, beautifully silent.
Wyre pushed his hobby horse through the unruly crowd, the Palace’s twin octagonal turrets looming, their red-brick gothic filigrees somehow managing to be both grand and childish. A row of high shuttered windows gave the appearance of gun ports: he imagined them opening, cannon muzzles being nudged out to deliver a broadside onto the commoners below.
On the cobbles ahead, a brown straw figure dressed in crude approximation of a royal livery crackled into wayward sparks, and he heard the faithless valet Sellis denounced as a smut-ball, frenchified molly, Tyrant’s henchman, extorter, cuckolded husband and escaped lunatic. A gamut of possibilities. In the middle of the throng, a hooded man sat hunched over two jangling wooden figurines, evidently meant to represent Sellis and the Duke of Cumberland. The valet’s marionette, his hair an ominous slick, brandished a sabre in time to the other’s fiddle.
The puppet gazed up balefully as Wyre drew level. “Remember wot you are. Eyes yer may ’av, but they see not. Ears yer may ’av, but they hear not. Speak yer may, but not a word more than is set down for yer.”
Wyre pushed on, arriving at a makeshift cordon. The postings there regarded his cries of ‘Courthouse’ with rehearsed scepticism, eying his yellow running machine dubiously. Eventually, one of the swads lowered his firelock and waved a languid finger for him to pass.
Best had done his bit. He was in.
He trundled the running machine beneath a low arch. Suddenly, an insulating silence seemed to hang over everything. Liveried manservants moved about the grounds on flagstone paths like gorgeous high-stepping birds.
Someone was waving from a porched recess atop a narrow flight of steps . . . a nattily dressed man with oiled hair. Wyre went over.
“Mr Paulet,” the man on the steps explained, as he reached the bottom of the steps, “valet to his Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland. You’re to come with me, sir. Mr Read’s waiting.” He smiled good-naturedly. “Some find the layout of St James’s something befuddling.” He pointed at the dandy-charger. “I’ll find someone to take it to the stables.”
Wyre followed Paulet along passages lined with tapestries; most of them rang the changes on hunting and allegorical scenes – hunters cornering a stag, peasants watching in a horseshoe as a boar was speared. It was the peasants’ thinly stitched limbs, rather than the doomed animal itself, that evoked the fraying openness of the living body. In a couple of places, Wyre caught a whiff of caramelized wood. He remembered last year’s lurid newsrag reports: sections of lead roof descending in liquid torrents, maids forced to flee in their petticoats.
“Almost there, sir,” Paulet said over his shoulder, opening a yellow baize door to reveal a modest-sized ballroom. As the valet led Wyre across an expanse of sprung parquet, he crooked his left arm, exaggerating the bounce, playing the chaperone of some debutante or steely marchioness.
A blonde-haired, chignoned woman was arranging flowers along the window bank in a colourful transposition of the natural world. Shapely, dressed in a pale green dress, she worked confidently, none of the self-effacing mien of a servant. Her lips were rosy, astonishingly so, but the effect against her ice-white face was disturbing. Her blue eyes gleamed with an intensity he’d encountered only in felons convinced they were blameless. Two little girls, their hair up in yellow ringlets, played at her feet.
“This is Mrs Neale, sir,” Paulet said, as they drew near. He stopped, and waved at the children. “She’s awful good with blooms. She’s been teaching her maid, Margaret, some of her tricks. Between them they’ll soon brighten the place up.”
Neale? This must be the wife of the Duke’s man, the hero of the hour. Up to his beaver hat in it, Yardley had claimed. There was a blemish under the woman’s right eye, which she’d evidently tried to conceal beneath a shimmer of paint. A birthmark or rash, perhaps a bruise.
“The flowers are for the King’s birthday, Mr Paulet. We’re doing what we can to raise the spirits of the house.”
“It could do with a lift . . .” Paulet clucked his tongue, “everything that’s happened.” He gave the children another little wave. “This is Mr Wyre,” he pantomimed with his lips. “He’s helping Mr Read with his investy-gations.”
Mrs Neale took her hands from the spikes and sprays of her window tray, wiping off nothing on her apron. She was what Rose’s conduct books described as poised.
“The sooner things return to how they were, Mr Paulet. The Duke raised a cuckoo in Joseph Sellis.”
“His Highness was duped like the rest of us.”
They set off again. The matching baize door at the other end opened onto a short stretch of corridor, which in turn led to an antechamber and two adjacent three-quarter-sized doors. Paulet indicated the left one.
“Valet’s Room, sir,” he announced. He rapped sharply, cocked his head, rapped again.
Hands clasped behind his back, jacket heavy at the cuffs, leather blue-bag at his feet . . . the man standing at the empty hearth was Bow Street embodied, a man of the old stamp. So this was Leighton’s ‘old bird’, Mr Read. He must have been on the cusp of the grand climacteric, but still looked vigorous. Powerfully built, too.
“No need for introductions,” the Chief Magistrate began, eying Wyre with obvious suspicion. “The Secretary of State’s office has been in touch. Friends don’t come much higher.” He smiled without warmth. “Best must have been itching to get one of his men in place. Have to say, I was expecting Cavendish.”
Wyre swallowed the slight. “Is this where Sellis’s body was found, sir?”
Read scowled. “Don’t worry, we’ll get to the c
arcass in a minute. This is where the on-duty man, Neale, slept that night.”
The Valet’s Room was narrow, with an unusual coffered wooden ceiling and fireplace almost comically too large for the space. Apart from a hanging portrait of a queer-looking figure in a hat, the walls were unadorned. The bed was wooden-framed and ascetic; an ugly nail stuck out from one of the bedposts, bent in the middle from being badly knocked in. Someone didn’t know their job. There was a desk with a hinged, leather-lined writing flap, a bedside table and a tallow lamp. That was it. A functional room.
Gules of light from the single window caught in the net of fine floating dust.
Wyre’s eyes were drawn back to the portrait. Something was off. The sitter was decked out in a woman’s full crimped coiffure, but finished with a gentleman’s broad-brimmed feathered hat. It was left to a pair of breasts – improbably high – to put the question beyond doubt.
Read was watching with a bemused expression. “Let’s drop this nonsense. What’s Best up to?”
Wyre decided to keep things formal. “The Courthouse has intelligence pointing to a second attempt on the Duke’s life. Even assuming the papers are right about Sellis’s guilt, there may be an accomplice who – ”
“Even assuming?” Read’s eyes had narrowed to slots. “The evidence is plain.”
“Mr Best’s in possession of a manservant’s note informing on a drummer-boy. It’s signed ‘Mr Parlez-Vous’.”
Read snorted. “Some molly footman who saw a chance to dispose of a rival.”
“Or part of a wider plot . . . According to the papers, the Duke himself told Mr Neale he feared a second assassin was concealed in his chamber.”
“Forget the claptrap you read in the rags. Sellis was working alone.” He sighed irritably. “We’d all have preferred it if Sellis had been taken alive. A public execution draws a line under things. Instead – ” he jerked his thumb savagely at the window “ – we’ve got a mob at the gate, shrugging itself up into a frenzy. It’s like the fucking Bastille all over again. Everyone from clerics and shoemakers to revolutionary Goldilocks ventilating opinions.” He rounded on Wyre. “Just see you don’t add to it.”
“Sir, one of your own agents, Mr Leighton, confided to me shortly before he died – ”
“Leighton?” Read scowled. “Yes, I’ve heard you two were acquainted. Sorry to be the one to break the news, but the man was cracked. Did you ever consider that?”
Wyre couldn’t let that pass. “When I last saw him, he seemed perfectly reasonable.”
Read’s lips formed a cold smile. “Madness often wears the mask of sanity. Have you ever heard of anyone volunteering to work as a fly? What, he didn’t tell you? That’s right, your friend was a jampot.”
Wyre pressed his lips together. Just minutes into their first meeting, and their bearing had already hardened into mutual unease. “Mr Leighton thought Sellis a cog in a larger wheel. Shouldn’t we at least consider the possibility?”
“Giff-gaff!” Read exploded. “Sellis was working alone. The empiricals prove it. You can’t hide the sun in a sieve.” He glared at Wyre. “Who’d you rather believe, me or some sodomite fantasist?”
“He wasn’t a – ”
Read waved his hand as if Wyre’s objection was patently specious. “Let’s not do the Corsican’s work for him.”
Charged silence. He needed to get things back on an even keel, or his time at St James’s would be fruitless.
“You mentioned empiricals, sir.”
“That’s right. The first being that Joseph Sellis was a foreign lover of arseholes. That’s what the maids think, and they’re usually right about such things.” He glared again. “The real scandal here was appointing the dog-fox as a royal valet in the first place. That was on the negligent side of careless. Did you know his family was gifted an apartment on the upper floors? Think anyone else got that treatment? Cumberland himself stood godfather to Sellis’s fourth bastard, christened Ernest Augustus.”
“The Duke’s own name,” Wyre said, more to himself than to Read.
“Fine way to repay his Highness.” Read sniffed.
“Why would a favoured man behave in that way?”
“Weren’t you listening? His wife claims he was from Sardinia, but members of the royal household say he was whelped in Corsica, Boney’s own turd of an island.”
Read stepped from the hearth, presenting an unimpeded view of the absurdly over-proportioned marble fireplace. Behind the dog-iron was a back plate that depicted the Sussex Protestant martyrs chained together, half-relief. Talk about desiccated humour. If the fire was meant to be their portal into paradise, it had trapped them in hell. On the far right was an old man, hands clasped in prayer, his face angled to heaven, shedding silver tears that glistened in the soot.
“Has Sellis’s wife been interviewed?”
“She’s on the list. We have depositions from half a dozen servants who, incidentally, agree on all the particulars. Neale’s account, too. Naturally, I started with that.” Read stretched his chin clear of his collars. “First man at the scene. Hero of the hour.”
Hesitantly, Wyre said, “Does his version accord with the Duke’s statement?”
Read’s expression darkened. “The Duke’s statement? Damn it, man, Cumberland’s recovering from an insult to the brain. I haven’t spoken to him. Not officially.”
Wyre was unable to hide his surprise. “I’m sorry, sir. It’s just from the newspaper reports, I assumed you had.”
Read looked uncomfortable. “Blame the attending constables. Or somebody bribed a servant. Word gets around quickly in a place like this.” He pulled at his cuffs. “The inquest jury convenes on Friday. Yes, I know it’s tight, but if you don’t like it, take it up with the Court of Royal Verge. Besides, there’s more than enough time to collect the remaining affidavits, if you don’t drag things out unnecessarily. Cumberland’s included, before you ask. His Highness wants this business put to rest as much as we do.” The whitest flight of spittle landed on the magistrate’s sleeve. “Anyway, what’s to decide? Sellis’s carcass was found in his apartment on the other side of the palace, where he’d fled after taking his master’s own sabre to him. Both doors to the cull’s private room were secured from the inside. The bastard slit his own throat when he heard guards at the door.” He wiped his forehead with a dark blue handkerchief. “We found his slippers in one of the closets at the back of his Highness’s bedchamber. Holy blood, man, the traitorous fucker’s name was sewn into them.”
As tactfully as he could, Wyre said, “Actually, sir, I wanted to ask about the slippers.”
“Christ! Come and see them for yourself,” Read thundered. They’re exactly where we found them.”
Wyre went after the magistrate. The door adjacent to the one to the Valet’s Room led into a narrow passageway, which ran diagonally for some yards.
“You’re about to enter Cumberland’s bedchamber,” Read said over his shoulder, stopping. “Don’t worry, the Duke moved his sleeping quarters after the assault. We have the run of the place.”
The Duke’s room was tastefully, and expensively, furnished: a gilt wardrobe inlaid with ivory birds, a glossy table with fluted legs, an enormous sofa with velvet cushions. A mahogany hand-organ stood in one corner. Light streamed in through a bank of high, latticed windows. The royal couch itself was set into a deep alcove, lined with handsome cabinet wood.
“If a bed could tell tales, eh?” Read said, with a hint of the tavern.
If he’d understood the spatial lay-out, the Valet’s Room must lie directly behind it, sharing the wall. Wyre leaned across the bed to give the partition a stiff rap – a hollow report confirmed the wafer thinness.
“Jesus wept, those are his Highness’s silk sheets. Come on, the closets are this way.”
At the back of the royal bedchamber was an antechamber containing three closets. The magistrate opened the middle cubbyhole, revealing a space just large enough to conceal a man. On a shoulder-high shelf stood
a round dark-lantern, and on the floor a pair of crimson Arab slippers, looking as if someone had just stepped out of them.
Read scowled. “This is where Sellis waited for the Duke to nod off.”
“Are you certain the slippers are his?”
Read beetled his eyebrows. “Whose side are you on?”
“Doesn’t it strike you as a strange thing to do, sir? Removing your slippers to kill a man.”
What he wanted to say was that inferring a killer from a pair of slippers was tantamount to starting with a verdict then working backwards to find the supporting facts. That was a tyrant’s jurisprudence.
Grunting, Read bent to retrieve one of the slippers. “See, those are his initials.” He handed it to the lawyer.
The extravagant slippers were leather, not silk as The Chronicle claimed. The ornate monogram itself was based around two letters, J.S. Wyre had a sudden vision of Mrs Sellis stitching devotedly at initials destined to become the very abbreviation of treason.
“May I ask who found them?”
“Mr Neale,” Read said briskly.
“Has Sellis’s wife confirmed these are her husband’s slippers?”
Read looked warily at the lawyer.
“Sorry, sir, but I’m not sure they’d convince a Courthouse jury.”
Read glared at him for a moment, then the damn broke. “Listen here, I couldn’t give a tinker’s toss how you wheedled your way into this investigation, or whose yard you polished, but just so you’re aware, Best isn’t the only one who can pull strings.”
Someone a-hemmed behind them, a stout man with pronounced wings of greying hair.
42. Depositions
“Mr Adams, Coroner at the Court of Royal Verge,” the man spoke, as he offered a pudgy hand. Shaking it, Wyre imagined how the radical Thelwall must have felt on being arrested by Walsh, forced to yield to system.
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