“Are you asking for my opinion?” Neale said, scornfully. “I thought you were after facts.” He looked away. “Sellis despised the principles of royalty, just as he hated religion. Anything that was moral.”
“And you? Did you share those views? I’ve heard you two saw eye-to-eye on quite a few things.”
“Oh?”
“The maids chatter, Neale. They’ve said some rather interesting things about the nature of your – ” he let the space develop “ – association with Sellis.”
“Don’t be absurd.” His cheeks reddened. “Haven’t you worked it out yet, Mr Prosecutor? The attack was intended to lay the blame on me. Sellis knew I’d be sleeping in the next room. The schedules are no secret, they hang in Mrs Varley’s office. That foreign bastard intended I should be discovered with the Duke’s body. He dug a pit for me, but fell into it himself.”
Wyre sensed a fracture. “The servants say the two of you were often together in the Valet’s Room.”
“I’ve never found myself in an improper situation with another man, if that’s what you mean.”
“No? I hear the pair of you had a fight. From what I can gather, it sounded more like a lovers’ tiff.”
The valet took a step forward. “Who told you that? Scullery maids? Filthy creatures.” He put out his tongue. “I did once fight with Sellis. What of it? It was my fault, if you must know. I pulled a newspaper out of his hands. But it was nothing. We made up immediately.”
“Squabbling over a newspaper? Must have been quite a story. Someone you know get nabbed in Vere Street?”
It was a dry bite, and Neale smiled at it. “I don’t have to indulge your fantasies, Mr Wyre. The Chief Magistrate has taken my affidavit. I didn’t kill Sellis. Saying I did won’t make it so. For your information, I was taken to see the corpse, and I assure you it didn’t bleed in my presence.”
“One other thing, were you acquainted with a man named Thomas?” The valet’s face gave nothing. “Someone studded him in his room last week. Professional job. Parlez-Vous’ signature. This afternoon, an apprentice yager found himself on the wrong end of a horseshoe. I’d lay odds on you knowing him, too. While we’re at it, Robert Aspinall hasn’t been seen out lately. Friend of yours? I’m starting to think you’re a dangerous man to know. ”
The valet shook his head slowly.
“Drop the pretence, Neale. The servants look at you and see a hero, but I know better. Now, you’d better tell me who Mr Parlez-Vous is.” The valet looked amused. “Fine.” Wyre affected a shrug. “You might as well know you’re my prime candidate.”
“You’ll have to win your promotion another way,” Neale said with contempt, pushing past Wyre. The heels of his polished shoes created little detonations along the corridor.
The sun struck low in the lattice windows, filling the hallways with tincturing light. Ahead, Wyre discerned the outline of Mrs Varley. She was dusting off plant leaves.
“Piazza?” he said as he drew level.
“Next set of double doors.” Before he could go, she reached out to touch his sleeve. “I made a bad impression earlier, Mr Wyre. I don’t like flummery any more than you. But . . .” She faltered.
Wyre frowned. “But, Mrs Varley?”
“I didn’t like to say in front of Mr Read, though I shan’t sleep if I don’t tell.” Her lip began to tremble; another stern look from the lawyer elicited a quick stream of words: “They say, sir, the Yorkers do, that someone found the Duke . . .”
“Found him?”
“With Mr Sellis’s wife, sir. Beneath a petticoat coverlet.”
Wyre stared mutely. He remembered what Read had said about the Duke standing godson to Sellis’s fourth child. That decision to give the brat the Duke’s name, Ernest Augustus . . .
“Who found them in that situation?”
“Mr Sellis himself, sir.”
“I thought you said – ”
“I don’t know what the house is coming to, Mr Wyre. There’s Margaret lashing out at Mrs Neale in Birdcage Walk, and Sellis attacking the Duke . . . It’s all topsides under.”
“Margaret did what?”
But the housekeeper was already scuttling away, ignoring his command to return, her gait something between a hop and a dip.
Margaret had struck at her mistress? That dark blush beneath Mrs Neale’s eye – not a birthmark, then. He struggled to absorb it . . . Margaret Jones, in thrall to her gospels. As for Cumberland being discovered with Mrs Sellis . . . the whole thing was taking on the character of a closet drama or, rather, Greek revenge tragedy. Had the Duke really made use of both Sellises, driving each mad with envy? He’d heard of such things. If true, both husband and wife might have felt they had reason to play the assassin. He fleshed out each scenario in his imagination: first, Mrs Sellis gratifying Cumberland to pay her ganymede husband back for having done the same, then punishing the Duke in turn by slashing him in the night. Next, Sellis: discovering his wife unhooked in the arms of his royal employer . . . Wyre winced. What man wouldn’t wish to slaughter his cuckolder? If anyone ever abused Rose in that manner!
The piazza door appeared. Wyre stepped out into blenching sun. Making his way across the nestled squares, he spotted a tiny, thin figure looking down at him from the Palace’s helmeted garrets and cocklofts.
Watching, being watched. It was a way of life here.
He stopped by the stables to collect Leighton’s dandy-charger, and wheeled it up the gravel path to the low arch that led out onto St James’s Road. The crowd had thinned a little. Wyre lifted his leg over the bright yellow perch, leaned forward so his chest was resting on the cushioned perch, and pushed off.
He got halfway to Mrs Mason’s apartments when he threw his heels down hard, swung the machine round, and plotted a new course for Great Windmill Street.
“There’s no news – ” he said quickly, seeing Miss Crawford’s expectant expression. “I thought we might visit an old client of mine. I promised I’d keep him abreast, and I’m always able to think more clearly after talking to him. Differently, at any rate. The experience is a bit like becoming aware of your own tongue. Nothing’s the same for the rest of the day.” How absurd he must sound.
Miss Crawford merely nodded, stepping out of her doorway as she was, bare-shouldered, no pelisse. He watched as she went past him, one tiny hand on the dark iron railings. Rose’s shoulder blades were smooth and fluted, whereas hers looked like two harmonic arches of a harp, with muscles for strings.
“Yours, Mr Wyre?” She stared at the yellow hobby horse, which he’d padlocked to a downpipe.
“Yes. It’s a long story.”
They walked the mile to No. 17 South Molton Street in humid air, saying little. There seemed too much at stake. How like hog’s grease missing from a carriage axle was the lack of smoothing pleasantries – sooner or later the wheel would burn.
William’s door made a scraping sound as if something had got trapped beneath the bottom rail. A mountain of radiating flesh greeted them in the doorway. Wyre flinched inwardly – he should have mentioned this strange side to William’s character. Miss Crawford, however, showed no signs of discomfort, as if a full view of rolling regions was entirely in the usual run of things.
“Huguenot blood,” the printer whispered to Wyre, his eyes shining with pleasure, as he showed Miss Crawford through the cramped hall to the parlour.
The table was its usual muddle of colourful sketches and half-completed oils-and-tempera. Today, there were also some intriguing head-and-tail-piece designs evidently intended for a larger project. A meeting with William was always a meeting across forms.
Face angelic, devilish, the printer fetched a dark decanter of wine, three glasses pressed to his pale, grey-haired chest. Pouring brimmers, he demanded a précis of the last two days.
“The whole thing’s a thick, wet darkness,” Wyre said, after conveying the gist of events (swearing William to secrecy first). “It’s impossible to see through. You could hold the Palace in the pal
m of your hand, peer through ten windows at once, and still see nothing.”
“Learn to see by the ear, through the tongue,” William said, insinuating his own tongue through his lips. It flickered there.
Miss Crawford twisted the stem of her glass between finger and thumb. “Do you really think the Duke was attacked out of jealousy?”
“A terrible overreaction, if so,” William said, chin propped on his fists. “Desire isn’t an enemy to be brought under control. It helps make us what we are. Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”
Miss Crawford looked uncertain. “I’m sure Mrs Sellis views it differently.”
“My dear, when the passions throw us into violent agitations, we feel a thousand different sensations. It first awakens the animal fibres, and later the spiritual.”
Wyre prayed William wouldn’t start on his pet topic, the acclivity – sexual climax as the surest route to the divine being. That wasn’t why he’d brought Miss Crawford here. Mercifully, the printer’s wife arrived with a plate of cold meats and the three of them fell to discussing the hooks and reveals of the Sellis affair.
“So you see,” Wyre said, having followed all his avenues to dead ends for the tenth time, “it’s as if an invisible veil has been thrown over everything. It shouldn’t hide anything, but somehow it does. Sellis is discovered lying on his bed, practically decapitated, but the razor, thick with his blood, is found yards away on the carpet. How could he have inflicted such a wound on himself, then toss away the blade? It defeats logic.”
William snorted. “I hope you haven’t been using logic as your yardstick.”
In a quiet voice, Miss Crawford said: “People convulse when they lose large quantities of blood.” Both men looked at her. “I’ve seen animals do it,” she went on. “Sellis might have flung the blade from him in his death throes.”
Her words struck the lawyer in the same way a child’s painting can surprise with a garden of perfect serenity or a shipwreck scene whose boiling sea it is possible to imagine slipping beneath forever.
“But then there’s Neale,” Wyre continued. “He’s a provoking little coxcomb . . . but murder? The trouble is, all explanations seem equally plausible. It’s a paradox of choice. Perhaps I’ve taken too much in.”
“The dervish rejects nothing that’s offered him,” William said unhelpfully, resting his chin in the V formed by thumb and forefinger.
Wyre felt suddenly, unbearably weary. “My friend Leighton died in vain. I haven’t uncovered an atom of hard evidence, nothing that troubles the official approach. Sellis will go down as a madpash suicide.”
“Sometimes it’s necessary to look inward at the sun,” William said kindly, pouring more jingling claret.
“I don’t like bright lights.”
“Sir, you take only a professional view of things. I take a spiritual one. Experience,” he added, with a mischievous smile, “is always a voyage to the end of the possible. Push forward, encounter the story where it is.”
“Leighton used to say something like that . . .”
“Did he, indeed? Sounds like he was a fine fellow.” William jumped to his feet, returning from his wall cabinet with a wooden fossil-box. Lifting the lid, he took out a spiral talisman; dull and rough on the outside, it glistened wetly within. “I purchased it from a female collector on the south coast.” He held the stone to the lamplight. “She believed it to be some ancient species of maggot, ossified into crystal.” He passed it to Miss Crawford, who stared as if struck. “I look at it whenever I need to remind myself of the impressions small lives can leave on hard objects.”
Wyre sat back; the wine was making him dizzy. A bloom risen on Miss Crawford’s dark cheeks. She asked for directions to the water closet.
The printer watched her go, waited a moment, then held up a finger for silence. A little pause, followed by a protracted tinkling sound. William’s eyes gleamed like the figures in one of his rapturous pictures.
“Sometimes,” he whispered, “the yard must be slack and slender, and sometimes extended and swollen. That’s why the Creator made it of two bodies, not bony as in a wolf or dog. If its substance were formed so, it would be continually as hard as a stick, and a great nuisance to us.”
A reply was beyond Wyre. It was time to leave the printer to his truths.
On the porch, William hugged them together in a wide embrace. “In a place of roses, children, be a rose. In a place of thorns, a thorn.”
They’d gone a few yards along the uneven pavements when the printer’s placid manner underwent an abrupt transformation.
“A new mode of existence is coming,” he roared after them. “First the corroding fire. The gates will be consumed, their bolts and hinges melted.” Wyre pressed Miss Crawford’s hand as they dissolved into the fierce, chartered streets, William’s voice still audible over the hubbub.
All this, even this house, will fall to the wrecking ball . . .
Wyre pulled Miss Crawford into him. She didn’t resist.
“He gets like this sometimes, but it was important to me you meet him.”
All too soon, they arrived at the entrance to Great Windmill Street. Wyre bid Miss Crawford goodnight.
“Thank you, Mr Wyre. For a few hours, I was able to – ”
He took her hand, and raised it to his lips. The slightest pull.
Wyre waited till she was indoors, then unlocked the dandy-charger. Below the steps, the baker was at work, glimpsed through his floury, subterranean windows.
Still feeling the effects of William’s dark wine, if merely wine it had been, Wyre pushed off unsteadily. He’d be going to bed nursing . . . How did William put it?
52. Mr Gew
Mrs Mason had laid the early edition of The Gazette at the foot of his bed. Most of the front page was given over to a spectacular rout at some northern Peninsula port or other (fifty cannon confiscated, a sailor’s head attached by a single nerve), but it was a small paragraph at the bottom that caught Wyre’s attention:
Yesterday evening a man’s mutilated body was discovered floating in the Thames at Southwark. The top and back of the head had been shattered. The flesh was still tight, suggesting he was not long in the water. Bow Street refuses to speculate on the man’s identity.
Was that Wardle’s shattered cranium? Hardly the shining apocalypse Southcott had promised him.
He pulled on his jacket. It was the last day of the inquest.
Wyre stabled the running machine, the royal horses shifting uneasily, as if glimpsing futurity in the form of padded perches and wooden wheels.
Paulet was waiting at the steps, but Wyre declined his offer of guidance to the Cupola Office. It was time to demonstrate some independence, if only to a valet.
The day’s first informant was Mrs Sellis. She was attractive, despite shadowy rings beneath her eyes. Fair-haired, though darker than Mrs Neale. She stood, hands clasped demurely at her lap, a perfect Venus pudica. Did she accept her husband’s guilt, or did she know better?
Read began. “Was your husband in good health?” For once the question invited depth.
“Joseph complained of giddiness.” Her tone was flat and oddly incurious. She despised Read – he could see it in her eyes. “I advised him to lie in the fresh air.” She smiled bitterly. “But you mean was he mad.” Her fingers tightened on the folds of her skirts. “He was as sane as either of you.”
Read ignored that. “Were you aware he’d spoken to other servants about his wish to leave the Duke’s service?”
“He may have alluded to it. I reminded him of our many advantages here, and told him not to make me unhappy by mentioning it again.” She turned her head to the side. “Anyway, that was more than two years ago.”
“Did he owe any money?” Wyre asked, in an effort to shake the interview out of the formal scheme into which it was settling.
She paused before answering. “If he did, I never heard him talk of it.”
“May have alluded . . . If he
did . . .” Read parroted. “Tell us everything that happened that night.” His voice was sharp as gunshot now. “You’re to leave nothing out.”
She began again, but her narrative retained an unspontaneous quality. As she started to dilate on the Duchess’s amiability and great kindnesses to her family, Wyre interrupted her.
“Tell me, Mrs Sellis, did your husband have any cause to be angry with his Highness?”
“The Duke was always kind.”
Thinking of her coal and candles again. “No cause for resentment. None whatsoever?”
She appeared to consider. “There was one thing, but it was trivial.”
“Humour us,” said Read.
“Joseph used to ride everywhere with his Highness. In the spring, the Duke had a box built on his carriage. On the outside. I believe it is called a dickey. My husband was ordered to ride there. Joseph said it shook him.” Her eyes dropped. “Riding backwards always made him ill.”
He took notice at that. The Crispin Street letter had alluded to a dickey box. To precisely this grudge, in fact. At last an informant had ventured something that could be verified externally.
Read merely snorted. “Hardly enough to warrant slashing a man in his sleep. A dickey box!” He pulled a face.
“How often did your husband take his shift in the Duke’s chamber?” Wyre asked.
“Three times a week. Neale and Mr Paulet were responsible for the other days.”
“Did your husband and Mr Neale see eye-to-eye?”
The phrase took him to her eyes. Cornflower blue, like Rose’s.
“They never got along.” Her mouth twisted; then, in a voice perfectly even, she said: “Mr Neale is a fly-blown quim.”
Read reacted to the word as if slapped. “Keep it respectable,” he blustered. “You’re a woman, damn it, and before the King’s representatives! Now, what was the cause of their animosity?”
She stood silent for a moment, then replied, “Mr Neale insisted on sleeping with a loaded pistol, which he hung up above the valet’s bed in a little red bag.”
“We know all about the pistol,” said Read, his manner perfunctory.
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