The Cunning House

by Richard Marggraf Turley

  Of course he wasn’t.

  “The sexual body calls forth desires in certain individuals the majority find repugnant. A while ago, a women in Faubourg Saint-Germain was imprisoned for removing the scrotums of her lovers while they slept. She used the skins to make purses. But the key to the pathology is repetition. Put simply, Mr Wyre, it doesn’t stop. Unless, of course, the perpetrator is apprehended. But they rarely are.”

  “Are you suggesting Sellis was the victim of – ”

  “I’m suggesting precisely nothing. Drawing inferences must be your business.”

  The ensuing silence was the dynamic hush of a Quaker meeting. Wyre flipped open his watch . . . due in the Palace in half an hour. He got to his feet, reeling a little from Habib’s coffee; he fished for a silver tuppence, which he placed on the table, bust up. The surgeon slid it back with a look that said it all.

  Paulet was waiting at the piazza entrance. “Morning, sir,” the valet said cheerfully. “Mr Read’s already arrived, but I’d give him a few minutes, if I were you. He’s got Mr Adams with him.” In a stage whisper, he added: “They’ve changed the jury foreman at short notice. Mr Read’s not happy.”

  Wyre gave him a curt nod. No small talk this time. He set off. As he passed the trellised hunting scenes, punctuated by endless doors, an image rose of Mrs Neale and the Porter banging on that to Sellis’s off-duty sleeping quarters. Had Mrs Neale’s husband been on the other side, wielding a razor? And had the cool, blonde woman known? It hardly mattered. In mere hours, the inquest jury would proclaim Sellis’s death biathanate. It would enter the record.

  All the latticed windows along the east wing were lined with black cloth. Servants scuttled around, arms heaped with dark crepe wreathes in preparation for the Princess’s funeral. Did the corridors come full circle? If he ran quickly enough, would he see the back of his own head?

  He pulled up abruptly. It wouldn’t do. It wasn’t good enough. Putting out an arm, he stopped one of the passing servants, a fair-haired girl with limpid eyes. “Where can I find Mr Neale?”

  Wyre followed the serving girl’s instructions, finding himself in a windowless, oak-panelled side passage. He turned the last corridor, and almost collided with Margaret, running at full pelt in his direction, hems clutched in one hand, cheeks streaked with tears.

  “What the devil, girl! Watch where you’re bloody going.”

  The maid turned to him, eyes gleaming. Whatever she was about to say was lost in heaving sobs. She pushed past, and was gone. He’d heard Palace vixens were highly strung. Welsh, on top of that.

  A percussive clack of billiard balls sounded along the passageway; Wyre followed the sound to a door that stood a little ajar. Through the crack, he saw the valet crouching over a table, lining up a shot with his mace. Taking Sellis’s letter from his jacket pocket, where it had lain since the previous day, Wyre burst in, and slapped the letter down onto the green baize, the side of his arm sending an ivory ball spinning off into balk space.

  The valet started, turning with blazing eyes.

  Wyre spoke first. “You seem to have the run of the place.”

  Neale quickly mastered himself. “His Highness likes me to practise every day. It helps him raise his own game.” The colour still high on his cheeks, he resumed his crouching position, cannoning a white into the reds, scattering them.

  Wyre pointed to the envelope. “Aren’t you curious to see who it’s from?”

  Neale snatched up the letter, giving it a cursory glance. “The accusations are false. Read could have told you that.”

  “You deposed under oath that you assisted Mr Jackson in binding the Duke’s wounds.”

  “If I said it, then I must have.”

  “No.” Wyre shook his head. “Jackson had finished tending to the Duke by the time you returned.”

  Neale’s face betrayed no emotion. “And what, pray, was I about all that time?”

  “You were helping a dead man into bed.”

  Neale shifted the mace from one hand to the other, as if considering whether to attack the lawyer with it. “Some dogs will bark at thunder, but you’ll find we don’t like yappers here.”

  Wyre ignored that. “Joseph Sellis folded up his clothes. He hung them neatly over his chair – even turning out the collars to keep off the dust. Only moments later, he’s supposed to have slashed his own throat.”

  “Even if I’d set off with the intention of murdering Sellis,” Neale said coolly, “his room was locked from the inside. They had to break it down. How am I supposed to have got inside?”

  Wyre regarded him. “What was Sellis to you, Neale? An accomplice who’d lost his nerve? Someone you needed to dispose of before he had a chance to drop you in it?” He leaned in closer. “Or was he something else?”

  “Don’t be absurd.” The valet made a show of lining up a new shot.

  “There’s no use trying to hide fire with straw.”

  His eye still on his ball, Neale replied, “Wouldn’t your time be better spent looking for the man who owns the tinderbox?”

  “And who would that be?”

  Neale turned then, and gave him a withering look. “Nothing in the world could induce me to confess to a crime I didn’t commit. Sellis was an Italian brothel-rascal who planned to murder and rob his master. Fortunately for everyone, he couldn’t even finish off a sleeping man.”

  “That’s a good story.”

  “Think what you like.” Neale shrugged. “The jury will reach its own verdict.” With a resounding crack, he sent the white ball careening off three cushions into a pocket.

  Wyre pointed to the trembling net. “You’ve run a coup. And Neale . . .” he added, retrieving Sellis’s letter from the cushions, “I mean to sink you.”

  Read was sitting hunched over a document. He looked up with spidery eyes as Wyre entered.

  “Mr Best wasn’t pleased to hear about your little piminy yesterday. Whatever passes for a talking to at the Courthouse, you can expect one when you return.” He ran his index finger slowly along the gold-leaf border of the great rectangle of green leather on the desk. “Any more private investigations I should know about?”

  Should he let the magistrate into his coffee with Cline? No, Leighton was a dead topic for Read.

  The older man drove a broad fist into his cupped hand. “Come on, let’s get this over with. The jury convenes at midday. I need to finish my report. Christ’s fingers, I just want to be out of here.”

  The morning and early afternoon sessions took formulaic depositions from three housemaids, a prick-me-dainty of a footman, two scullery maids and a kitchen boy. Then it was the turn of those servants who’d fallen to the salmon. More of the same tutored, seamless narratives. When the signatures had been collected, Read arranged the vellum into a stack and passed it to his secretary. “See these are conveyed to the jury foreman. If he hasn’t changed again.” He turned to Wyre. “Write your report. I’ve accommodated you in every way. That should be reflected.”

  Wyre looked at him, startled. “What about the jury? I assumed I was to – ”

  “Go home, Wyre,” the Chief Magistrate replied simply. “Watch a play. Or a hanging. They’ll be dropping that White boy this evening. Half past seven, I believe. Most irregular. If you leave now, you’ll still get a place near the front.”

  Wyre’s protests were useless. The arrangement between Read and Best covered the duration of the depositions, and not a minute more. Read was playing it to the letter. Wyre was beaten.

  62. In the House of a Bad Man

  Wyre left the Cupola Office; it felt like he was falling through the corridors, rather than walking along them. He caught sight of his reflection between two antechamber mirrors, and sensed the ranks of himself closing in from both sides. He crossed a long, ornate Chinese carpet with a distinct impression of not gaining any ground. Wyre stopped at a water closet, and stepped in. Digging his yard out from under his shirt tails, he relieved himself into the ancient valve contraption, listening to th
e water drum on the cast-iron bowl. The whole time in St James’s . . . he’d seen nothing, achieved nothing. He’d been sent from pillar to post by mollies, disciples, agents, valets, never even getting close to the penetralium itself. He and Read had done no more than draw their fingers across the surface of a great lagoon. As for plumbing its depths . . . For a start, Jackson had all but escaped the inquiry, though Wyre was as sure as he could be the Royal Surgeon had embellished Cumberland’s wounds. As for Neale – Sellis’s co-conspirator, or destroyer, or both, he’d done enough to swing. Even Mrs Varley knew more than she was letting on. A cudding housekeeper! On top of it all, he’d nothing to give Miss Crawford in return for her retainer. The chances of finding Aspinall alive were tiny, and diminishing with the hour.

  Perhaps molly briefs were all he was good for. The flushing mechanism engaged at the third attempt. He felt too harried to occupy himself with the flowery ewer of water on the table nearby. Threading his way along the corridor, the sense of something, an unwanted part of himself – residue – was palpable. Read was right. It was time to go home.

  “Mr Wyre – ”

  A woman’s voice . . . To his left, a door opened inwards, revealing a vertical sliver of unbonneted head. Margaret Jones – Mrs Neale’s maid, cracked on religion. Her features contorted, anguished, she waved him in, closing the door behind him with the flats of both hands as if she wished to shore it up against something unimaginable. Her dark hair was tricked up – something of the Roman about her. Her skin had that pallor the Italians called morbidezza. How had she known he’d pass this way?

  “Are you quite well, Margaret?” he said in as casual a manner as he could muster, as if being beckoned by women into strange interiors was in the usual run of things.

  She buried her face in her short, powerful maids’ fingers, and wailed: “Mr Wyre!”

  “If you have anything to say, you’d better say it now,” he said, more sternly now. “The jury’s about to convene.” A caged linnet at the back of the parlour turned on its perch. “Out with it, child,” he snapped. “It’s your duty to report bad deeds to the authorities.”

  “They’ll burn for it, sir!” she said in a strangled voice.

  “Who will burn?” Wyre showed her the expression prosecutors reserved for cutpurses in the dock.

  Her fingers dropped to her pinafore. “Mr Hill, our preacher, warned us about sins of the flesh. We stood out in th’ rain to y’ear him speak of their dirtiness. What will it avail, but vengeance?” A strange light appeared in her eyes. “I saw the devil in the gravel pit.”

  Wyre sighed inwardly. Another dupe of the millennium. “You listened in the rain?”

  “If you d’ love the gospels like the Welsh do, you wouldn’t mind a drop of wet.”

  “Who will burn?” he repeated.

  “I dun’ like to tell, sir. His wrath will strike th’ whole municipality, turn all our hours t’ ashes.” She buried her face in her hands again.

  Why such obsession with the city’s spiritual profanation? Hadn’t there’d been enough of that kind of talk? He decided to play along. “Destruction, Margaret? You mean like the cities of the plain? That’s what you mean, isn’t it? It’s what the church says two men together will bring. You mean sodomy, don’t you?”

  Her lips parted at the word. “Mr Hill tol’ us to spit on the ground an’ wash our tongues. He tol’ us to spit hard.”

  “Such creatures should be hauled into bright light,” Wyre said, nodding, stepping into her rapture. “If all men were like that, it would be the end of life.”

  Tears made dirty tracks down her cheeks. “Mr Hill says tha’s how the Welsh lost their lands. In torrents of vice.”

  “That’s a bit hard on a whole nation, Margaret. But vice is indeed the royal road to hell. Tell me everything.”

  “Not here, Mr Wyre. There’s too many maids about. They listen at doors.”

  She should know. Minor employees were an integral part of the never-sleeping ear, the never-blinking eye. Read had dismissed the Palace’s scrubbers and potato peelers too easily.

  They both had.

  The maid brushed away loose strands of dark hair that had become stuck to her cheeks. “We’ll go there, sir . . .”

  He gave her an inquiring look.

  “To the black pit itself.”

  Margaret’s route to the Duke’s bedchamber was direct and swift, cutting into the narrow service corridor – a dank passage with steep corners. In a matter of minutes, they were standing outside the twin three-quarter-sized doors, one sectioned off with a velvet ribbon; then they were moving in file along the diagonal aisle to the royal quarters. The sun was low now, practically level with the room’s window. A mass of dark hung behind the glowing orb.

  “What did you see, Margaret? Tell me. It needn’t go further.”

  She smoothed her pinafore down over her midriff. “I’d come back t’ fetch th’ dirty linen.” She gestured at the closets to the rear of the Duke’s chamber. “It were late, sir, almost eleven.” Those ridiculous Welsh inflections, stronger now. “I y’eard voices.” She went over to Cumberland’s bed, half-perching on the edge, and pointed to the paper-thin partition. “They was coming from the Valet’s Room.”

  “That wasn’t the first time you’d heard things, was it, Margaret? You’ve sat on this bed before. Listening. Who told you to do it?” He looked at her hard. “Was it Mrs Sellis?” He pictured Margaret sitting on the Duke’s silk sheets, jotting down the vile sounds she heard in that small, neat handwriting of hers.

  “No, sir. It wern’ Mrs Sellis.” Her expression was sullen now. “Anyway, it were different this time. It sounded like someone were – ” She bit her tongue. “It were different,” she said simply, wiping her eyes. “After it stopped, I gathered up the linen an’ left. I took the back way, sir, which passes the rear door to the Valet’s Room. It was a little ajar.” She looked up at him, then immediately cast her eyes down again. “Sometimes the latch dun’ fall properly.”

  “You were spying, Margaret. What did you see?”

  “Two men . . . at the foot of the valet’s bed.”

  “One of them was your master.”

  “He wore a royal coat, sir. Scarlet and gold lace. Blue cuffs and collar.”

  The maid was describing the Duke’s regimental jacket.

  “What was he doing, Margaret?”

  “Standing behind the other man.”

  “An Italian wedding . . .” Wyre’s lips were dry. “Who was the other?”

  She looked at her feet.

  “Who?”

  “Mr Sellis, sir.” Margaret stifled a sob.

  The degenerate swine. He regarded her, suddenly mistrustful. “Did Mr Neale instruct you to tell me this? You like him, don’t you? I heard you had a set-to with his wife on Birdcage Walk.”

  “Lies, Mr Wyre,” she said plaintively.

  That soft, mendacious Welsh face. He fought an urge to slap it. If any of this was to convince a judge, he’d need details. The intimate variety. Was Margaret good for them?

  “Did you see the Duke take out his yard?” A formula he’d posed countless times before.

  Margaret eyes widened in alarm. At first he thought she’d make a dash for it, but instead she gave a short nod.

  “You’re quite certain of that?”

  “Every woman knows, sir,” she said in a trembling voice. “It were a fat, pale-headed thing.”

  “And did he place it inside Sellis?”

  The sluices burst. “I’ve heard of a maid,” she sobbed uncontrollably, “who had to stand in the pillory for reporting on her master. The judge said she couldn’t have recognized what he’d done without taking part in the guilt herself.”

  Wyre recalled the case. “That’s untrue, Margaret. Tell me what they did.”

  She used her pinafore to wipe away tears. “Wha’ Mr Hill warn’d us against.” Her face fell as if she’d fallen victim to a salvo. “Sir, I’m a good woman in the house of a bad man.”

&nb
sp; “Be precise, Margaret. I need to know exactly what they did. You said it was different this time. Different how?”

  A palpable agony of indecision, then: “Mr Neale was there.”

  Wyre’s heart caught on his ribs. “In the room?”

  “He was watching ’em, sir. He held a pistol t’ Mr Sellis’s head. It were cocked, sir.”

  Wyre stared. “You’re quite certain? If this is fiction, there will be consequences.”

  “I ran off, sir, an’ met Mrs Neale in the corridor. She asked me where I’d been so late. She asked me if I’d seen Mr Neale.”

  “And you told her?”

  “I told her I hadn’t.”

  Wyre struggled to take it in. The maid had just placed all three men together that night. Two brutes, one man brutalized. Was the picture finally beginning to acquire what William would call its lights?

  “You should have told me all this earlier. Now it may be too late.”

  “Will I be punished, sir?” says Margaret, twisting a blue locket ring around her finger; enamel, heart-shaped.

  Wyre imagined a pair of strong arms thrusting her up against the wall, hands moving under her rose-coloured petticoat.

  “Will I be punished, sir?” she repeated.

  “There’s no proof of what you say, Margaret. It’s no more than hearsay.”

  Her eyes dropped, and moved slyly to the side. “The sheets from that night are still in the closet.”

  What? He looked at her carefully. “Show me.”

  He followed Margaret to the closets at the back of the Duke’s bedchamber. In one of the cupboards was a pile of neatly folded linen. She pulled out a crumpled sheet from the bottom. How had it survived the washing rota? In one corner, the Duke’s lion-and-unicorn was visible, picked out in coloured thread. His initials danced above. E.A. Margaret carried the linen to the bedchamber’s window, and shook it out. Then she held it up to the light. Transparent patches . . . Wyre had seen such translucent stains untold times before – on linen sheets, jackets, shirt-tails, cuffs. There was no mistaking it.