The Dark Enquiry (A Lady Julia Grey Novel)

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  “But it is unclean!” they cried, horrified at the notion of attending to nature in any proximity to where one slept, and if there was one thing I learned from my time amongst the Roma, it was how devotedly hygienic they were. There was a scrupulous system dictating where one washed, where one retrieved cooking water, where one’s horses drank. They did not permit their horses to take water from the municipal troughs, for they found them dirty and stagnant, and their beasts were given only the same fresh running water that they themselves drank, although from farther downstream. For all their reputation for filth, they were cleaner and tidier than many aristocrats I have known, and I wondered briefly if that was where Brisbane had acquired his fastidious bent along with his musical talents.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” he murmured into my ear at one point in the evening.

  “I was wishing you would play tonight,” I told him. “It is seldom that you pick up your violin anymore.”

  Those witch-black eyes stared into mine, and he lifted my hand. Without taking his gaze from my face, he pressed a kiss to the palm, smiling a little at my sharp intake of breath.

  “Brisbane,” I murmured.

  “I am yours to command,” he said, dropping my hand and striding easily to where one of his cousins was tuning a violin. Brisbane said something to him, and his cousin surrendered the instrument with a smile and a slap to his back. Brisbane ran his hands over the silken curves of the wood, his brow furrowed as he applied his deft touch to every inch of the instrument. He plucked a string, sounding a note as plaintive as a sob, and then he picked up the bow. A hush fell over the crowd, and I saw the smiles of anticipation.

  He waited a moment more, heightening the longing of every soul who waited, winding the tension higher and hotter until at last he touched the bow to the string. The first note was a cry of yearning. He conjured the voice of the violin, and it was as fluent as any human voice. It spoke, it sobbed, it wailed in anguish. And then, when it seemed as if no further agony could be wrung from it, the voice began to change subtly. At first it was the merest note slipping sinuously between the lamentations. But soon the notes came faster and closer together, strung together like pearls on a thread, each one round and ripe and luminous. He kept his eyes closed as he played, his fingers moving in a fashion I knew only too well. The melody was a seductive one, calling forth desires for dark pleasures and unshriven sins. The shadows hid my blushes, but I was deeply aware of the trembling that had taken hold of me.

  Brisbane played on, tormenting me deliciously with the demands of that voice. It seemed to come from everywhere, surrounding me, whispering in my blood as the music flew on the night air. It was as if he meant to play for the moon itself and the stars bent near to listen. My lips parted and my thighs shook, and I was not surprised to see a few of the men take their womenfolk by the hand and disappear into the shadows. One or two of the girls rose and began to dance, stamping and clapping, and in the midst of it stood Brisbane, playing with such complete abandon he seemed not to see them at all.

  Suddenly, the feverish melody seemed to scream its ecstasy, ending in a long, profound wail of satisfaction, the note spinning out until Brisbane could sustain it no further. He dropped the bow and the crowd erupted in cheers, passing him a bottle of pear brandy and calling for an encore. He played another piece then, this one a simple, beautiful bit of melody that conjured tranquillity with a touch of melancholy. It was a wistful lullaby from antiquity, haunting and unforgettable, but gently so. I was glad of the respite, and I fanned my heated cheeks as Lala leaned near.

  “We have a saying, you know. When a musician plays like that, it’s because the Devil is in him.”

  Her manner was arch and sly, and I suspected she knew precisely how affected I had been by Brisbane’s music.

  “Then I have nothing to fear,” I said lightly. “Everyone knows the Devil takes care of his own.”

  It was some time before Brisbane was permitted to put the violin aside, and I had sufficiently recovered my composure when he rejoined me.

  “So, wife,” he said, “how like you the Gypsy life?”

  “I find it astonishingly relaxing,” I told him truthfully. “What simplicity! No house to worry over, no vast wardrobe to keep. No investments or property or staff to manage.” I threw out my arms, growing expansive. “Only the sky and the stars and the earth itself.”

  Brisbane plucked the cup from my hand. “That is quite enough brandy for you.”

  “I mean it,” I told him. “It is entirely unfettered.”

  “And wholly unstable,” he added. “You have succumbed to the lure of Gypsy romance. Understandable,” he hastened to add. “Most folk do if they spend a few days with them. But it is barely autumn now. Imagine this life when it grows cold, when the snow is so thick upon the ground you can find nothing to eat and the ice must be broken before the horses can drink. Or when it is high summer and the grass is burnt dry and there is no respite from the searing sun.”

  “Well, that does not sound very nice,” I admitted.

  “Or when there is only enough food for half the tribe and you have to fight with your own cousins to see who gets to eat that day,” he went on, his eyes deeply shadowed. “When you have outgrown your only coat and you have to steal a newspaper to put inside your shirt to keep the cold out. When you pick a pocket and your mother whips you because your fingers were clumsy.”

  His voice had taken on a faraway quality, and I said nothing as he went on, half to himself. “Or the men come, gorgio men, with dogs and torches, turning out the vardos and throwing your only food upon the fire because the law will let them, and their children spit on you and call you names while their mothers smile. That is what it is to be a Gypsy,” he finished.

  “Sometimes I am very stupid,” I said, my hand stealing into his. He lifted it, suddenly, pressing a hard kiss to the palm.

  “Never stupid. You simply find the best in everything. I cannot comprehend how to do that,” he added, shaking his head in wonder. “It is enough to be near it.”

  I turned my head, deeply moved by what he said, and gave a hard sniff. I turned back after a moment. “Yes, well, thinking the best of people is not going to solve Madame’s murder or find our blackmailer,” I reminded him.

  He gave me a nudge. “Come, back to the tent. It is time to talk.”

  We slipped away to our tent and Brisbane dropped the flap, cocooning us into our own little world. It was cosy, and I rather liked it, but Brisbane had nothing but business upon his mind. He moved the bedding aside to reveal a patch of dirt and began to scratch it with his penknife.

  “We have two points of enquiry in this investigation. First,” he said, drawing a slash with the blade, “is the blackmailer’s money. I brought five thousand pounds with me to Highgate, and yet there was no opportunity to leave it. The blackmailer was content to draw me out and equally content to leave without his purported goal—money. Why?”

  “Because he had a greater purpose,” I returned promptly.

  “So it would seem. But why was the opportunity to attack you worth more than five thousand pounds?” He fell silent, musing a moment. “It tells us one thing,” he said finally. “That he has no accomplice in whom he can place his trust. If he had, one of them could have collected the money whilst the other set the fire. He must be acting alone.”

  He made a second mark in the dirt. “The second point is Monk’s enquiries into the finances of the guests of the Spirit Club. If they are in difficulty, it would prove a motive to blackmail.”

  “But not if the funds were never collected,” I said, taking the blade to scratch a question mark next to his slash.

  “And why attempt to break into the house when they believed you to be there? It would have made far more sense to do it when they knew both of us to be out.”

  He took the knife back and traced the outline of the ground floor of our house. Apart from the silver, all of our real valuables were kept upstairs, either in my dressing room or his.
There was no profit to be had in setting fire to the house, only damage.

  “I cannot see it,” he muttered. “Why can I not see it?”

  He closed his eyes. He remained quiet a long moment, then suddenly opened his eyes and hurled the knife towards the ground where the taut blade stuck fast, the handle quivering slightly.

  “I cannot see it,” he said again, his voice tight with frustration. “It must be revenge or manipulation. Either the blackmailer cares more about destroying Bellmont and you than money, or he wanted to ensure that I would stay to play his game by involving you. There is no other explanation.”

  “And no way to know which at present,” I soothed. I took the knife again and made a fresh mark in the earth. “But there is another point I realised after our discussion with Ludo today. He said Agathe was a fraud as a medium, that she knew clever tricks, but nothing more. Yet when I left her, she mentioned my mother.”

  Brisbane’s brows rose. “The Countess March?”

  “She mentioned her by name, Charlotte. And she spoke of her perfume. Agathe knew who she was.”

  Brisbane gave a smothered roar of frustration. “Did you not think it might be significant to mention this to me at some point?”

  “I just did,” I pointed out.

  He thrust his hands through his hair. “Julia, if she knew who your mother was, she knew who you were. That means she had to have made enquiries into your past before you came.”

  I stared at him, suddenly quite cold. “That is not possible. She could not have guessed my identity. I was very careful.”

  “Did you sign the guestbook?” he demanded.

  I pulled a face. “Of course not! At least not in my own name. I used an alias. Honestly, Brisbane, how stupid do you think me?”

  He ignored the question. “Did you give her your hat?”

  “Naturally. It is impolite for a gentleman to keep his hat once inside.”

  He said nothing, but merely waited for me to reach the proper conclusion myself. I gave a groan. “Oh, God, that is how she does it! Every gentleman must give up something—a hat, a coat, gloves, a walking stick. She takes them and examines them for clues, for information to pass to Madame to use in the séance. And the label in my hat says J. Brisbane,” I related miserably.

  “And she would have seen the label in your hat and noted it for the future.”

  “But why go to the trouble of investigating me?”

  “The others she likely already knew. They were either clients Madame had seen before or they made appointments in advance to give Agathe time to learn as much as she could about them and relate those facts to Madame.”

  “But I was unknown,” I mused. “An unknown who had given her a false name. That must have piqued her curiosity. From there, she would have noted the connection between my real surname and Bellmont. But wait—” I broke off, puzzling it over. “Would she have connected the Comte de Roselende with Lord Bellmont’s sister?”

  Brisbane mused a moment. “She would have at least noted the coincidence. And she would have been entirely prepared for your next visit in either guise. She would have spent hours researching your history, memorising just enough detail to be artfully dropped into conversation to persuade you of her talents. It is a classic medium’s trick and vastly easier when one’s clientele comes from a particular class whose movements are chronicled in the daily newspapers and society columns,” he observed.

  “Any lending library could provide her with the information, and no one would notice the nondescript French-woman whiling away her time, nor would they connect her with Madame. A perfect system,” I remarked.

  “Perhaps too perfect,” he said. He reached into his pocket and retrieved a newspaper clipping, which he passed to me. “I slipped away this evening to meet with Monk. He brought that.”

  I pursed my lips at the notion that he had gone to meet Monk without me, but even as my eyes dropped to the print, the words died stillborn on my tongue. The clipping was from the Times and reported the facts in stark detail. I thrust it back at him.

  “Oh, God,” I murmured. “I do not want to read it.”

  But I did. Brisbane passed it back wordlessly and I forced myself to read the facts dispassionately. And the facts were these—that a woman had been killed at Victoria Station by falling onto the tracks just as a train was pulling in. No one saw her fall. No one knew if she had simply lost her balance or thrown herself onto the tracks. She had been killed instantly, and papers on her person confirmed her identity as Agathe LeBrun, a practising medium currently holding sessions at the Spirit Club.

  Agathe was dead. No matter how many times I repeated the words, I could not make sense of them. I had liked her far too well for the murderer of her own sister to have expected this.

  “Why was she killed?”

  “Because she knew something she oughtn’t,” Brisbane supplied.

  Together, we talked the matter through, examining it closely from every angle. “She was privy to her sister’s affairs,” I recollected. “She knew her secrets.”

  “And they were partners in their profession,” Brisbane put in. “Madame could not have perpetrated her frauds without assistance.”

  “So that makes Agathe a valuable source of information, both about Madame and her clients,” I continued. “She knew who came to see Madame and why. She discovered information that could be used against them.” I hesitated, then lifted my eyes to Brisbane. “Do you think she knew about Bellmont?”

  He paid me the compliment of honesty. “I think it possible.”

  “And do you think she was the blackmailer?”

  “To what purpose? I could understand it if she took the money, but Bellmont’s blackmailer did not. If the five thousand had been taken, I would have sworn to you that not only was Agathe culpable of blackmail, but that she was killed by one of her victims. But without the money, there is no motive.”

  I had felt the noose tightening about my brother’s throat, and I gave a little lurch of relief. “So, all we can say with certainty is that Agathe knew too much. Knowledge is power. Agathe must have overplayed her hand and made the murderer nervous.”

  Brisbane stroked his jaw. It was heavily shadowed and I knew he missed his evening ablutions. It made him look even more the part of a Gypsy, and I found it rather dangerously attractive.

  “It is no good,” he told me. “We do not know if the murderer and blackmailer are one and the same. Until we determine that, we are wandering in the dark.”

  I turned that over in my mind. “Madame’s murderer might have killed for one purpose—to remove Madame. That is all. Once his object was achieved, he might have disappeared. The information left behind, the letters, Agathe’s observations, those may be the root of the blackmailer’s crime. But in that case, the blackmailer must be Agathe or a close associate. Or—” I sat forward, excitement rising. “Or, Agathe might have been blackmailing the murderer.”

  “Because she saw something she ought not and did not tell the police.”

  “Precisely! I was wrong. Agathe did not kill Madame, but she knew something about the person who did. She did not tell the police because she hoped to use the information to her advantage.”

  “Exposing one’s knowledge to a murderer is a dangerous game,” Brisbane reflected.

  “But there was something rather clever about Agathe,” I reminded him. “Doubtless she thought she could achieve her aim.”

  “Which was?”

  “Money, of course. Isn’t that always the aim of blackmail?” But of course, it was not. Hadn’t Bellmont’s blackmailer left the money untouched in his quest to course for bigger game? Too late, I saw the flaw in my hypothesis. “Oh. There would have to be two blackmailers! Agathe and Bellmont’s, for—if as you say—money was her aim, she would not have left the five thousand uncollected.”

  “And we already decided that Bellmont’s blackmailer had no accomplice, else he would have seen to it the money was retrieved whilst the fire was set,” Brisba
ne put in.

  “Damnation,” I muttered. I had quite liked that theory. We fell silent again, and I nibbled at my lip as I thought. “Perhaps they were partners who did not trust one another,” I said slowly.

  Brisbane flicked me a glance and retrieved his cigar case. He extracted another of his thin Spanish cigars and lit it, exhaling a narrow stream of fragrant, seductive smoke. “Go on.”

  “Imagine this. Agathe and Madame embark upon their professional partnership which requires Agathe to acquire knowledge, dangerous knowledge. Together they use this knowledge to pry money out of clients, either with promises of greater contact with the other side of the spirit world or with direct threats to expose their findings. One of the clients does not take kindly to this and manages to arrange for a delivery of aconite root to the kitchen of the Spirit Club.” I paused and frowned. “You know, that in itself is quite telling, is it not? To poison all of the horseradish of the club was a reckless act. Either the murderer was quite certain only Madame would eat it, or he did not care how many died so long as Madame was dead.”

  “It would likely have suited his purposes if more than Madame died,” Brisbane advised. “If half a dozen people were dead, it would make the intended victim almost impossible to identify with certainty.”

  “Oh, that is clever! And monstrous,” I added. “Where was I?”

  “Horseradish,” he supplied, puffing out another stream of smoke.