The Dark Enquiry (A Lady Julia Grey Novel)

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  He stroked my hair and said nothing, but the hand upon my head stilled for an instant, and I felt it tremble.

  I ventured a question then that I did not want to ask.

  “Are you very upset about the child?”

  He was silent a long moment, and I began to regret putting the question to him.

  “It was an abstraction,” he said finally. “It was not real to me, even when Mordecai explained that this one was gone and we could never have another.”

  “Did you never think of children then? Ours?”

  His voice was thick with emotion. “I never expected in the whole of my life that God would be so generous as to give me you. I did not think to ask for more.”

  I had never heard Brisbane speak so poignantly of God, and something deep within me that had been tightly knotted uncoiled.

  We talked a little of the details then, and we pieced together what we knew between us. It had transpired that the visit to Middlesex had been to call upon Lord Mortlake, who had finally seen fit to relate to someone his doubts about the loyalty and character of his eldest child. He had long suspected Felicity of German sympathies, but he had hesitated to call her out publicly until he discovered that she was living with Portia. Afraid of what havoc she might wreak amongst innocent folk, he had finally summoned Brisbane to confess his daughter’s treachery.

  “I could have throttled him with my bare hands for not telling us sooner,” Brisbane told me.

  “But at least he told you where to find me,” I said, my eyes drooping heavily. The lingering effect of the drug was torpor.

  “He told us no such thing,” Brisbane corrected. “He only gave us the information that Felicity was not to be trusted. We had no idea where she had gone, or—more to the point—where she had taken you.”

  “How did you find me?” I asked sleepily.

  “Never mind that now,” he murmured, pressing his lips to my brow. “Sleep.” And I did.

  For the first time since the accident, I slipped into a deep and undrugged sleep. Oddly, I dreamed a more vivid dream than any I had had on morphia. I was wandering through a garden, a beautiful place, with the most exquisite blossoms. And as I put a hand to smell one, it closed, furling its petals tightly against me. I moved to the next flower, and it did the same, and it happened again and again until I reached the garden gate. I passed through and closed the gate, looking back only once to see the sea of blossoms, nodding sleepily on their stems. I locked the gate firmly behind me and walked on. I did not look back again.

  Portia came to visit me soon after, and put the infant Jane the Younger into my arms.

  “It is the best cure,” she assured me, and to my astonishment, I found it oddly restful to hold the sleeping infant, and more restful still to give her back when she woke.

  She passed the child off to Nanny Stone and arranged herself comfortably upon my bed. “I have brought you five new novels, an enormous box of chocolates, the latest edition of Le Mode Illustrée, and a cow.”

  “I thought you meant to keep the cow to have milk for Jane the Younger.”

  “Yes, well, this particular cow seems highly unsuited to city life. It moos constantly and keeps wandering into the dining room. Most unsettling. Besides, I found a very pretty little dairy quite close to the house that seems remarkably clean and the milk is sweet. It will do.”

  I sighed. “I suppose I could send her down to the Rookery. She will make a lovely addition to the menagerie I am starting. I hope she likes peacocks.”

  “And mice,” she added with a nod towards my little dormouse. He was once more nestled into my bodice, peeping out with those black teardrop eyes. “Have you given him a name yet?”

  I told her the name and she smiled. “I think it suits him.”

  I stroked the velvety head with a fingertip. This tiny creature had been a surprising consolation during my convalescence. He was quiet and thoughtful, at least as thoughtful as a dormouse can be. I continued to stroke his head as Portia gave me a reproving glance. “You might have told me about the letters.”

  Bellmont, in true contrary fashion, had made a clean breast of the affair within the family. He was horrified to learn the lengths to which Brisbane and I had gone to retrieve them and the dangers we had faced. The knowledge that I had almost died and that Agathe had lost her life because of them was deeply sobering, and it was a humbled Bellmont who had sought forgiveness from us all. Adelaide had risen nobly to the occasion, and it was agreed that the news need go no farther, and even the children were kept in the dark. The fact that the letters had still not been recovered and might surface one day no doubt played into Bellmont’s decision to reveal all to the family, but I think even if they had been published on the front page of the Times, he would have stood it like a gentleman.

  Plum behaved with gentlemanly discretion, as well. He never spoke of Felicity again, not even to me, but he was most helpful in explaining how they came to find me on that terrible day.

  “Mortlake was useless,” he said with some disgust. “He had no notion of where she went on her own. He was just happy when she left the house. He always had some mad notion that she would harm her little brothers.”

  “Perhaps not quite so mad,” I remarked.

  Plum looked from his newly set arm to my swathes of bandages and shuddered. “Quite. In any event, it seemed possible that she had decided to bolt for Germany, and if so, she would be far likelier to get a good reception from Bismarck if she had the letters with her. Brisbane suggested she might try the Spirit Club one last time to search Agathe’s possessions in case Agathe had hidden the letters. We simply went there and waited until she arrived. It was the most terrible wait, hours until she came, and the entire time Brisbane was very nearly incoherent.”

  “Incoherent? What happened?”

  Plum looked distinctly uncomfortable. “His eyes would glaze over and he would start to speak, the same things over and over, about choking and suffocation, and not being able to breathe. We loosened his neckcloth and opened the carriage windows, but it didn’t seem to help. I honestly thought the fellow was having an attack.”

  “He was, although not the sort you mean.”

  Plum gave me a narrow look but did not ask. “Then, when Felicity came, he recovered himself enough to come with us. I honestly thought that Morgan would be able to persuade her to tell us where you were, but nothing he promised, nothing he threatened did the trick. She said nothing at all, merely sat there with that same hateful smile, as if she knew it wouldn’t matter because you couldn’t be saved.”

  I thought of those last terrible hours in the crypt and despised her a little more. “How did you find me?”

  Plum shook his head. “Even now I do not understand it. We had been questioning Felicity for hours it seemed. We had nothing from her, and Morgan actually suggested, well, what he suggested does not befit the treatment of a lady, but I considered it. Before Morgan could act, Brisbane seemed to collapse again. He folded in upon himself and crouched against the wall, he was breathing a horrible death-rattle sound, and his eyes were completely vacant, as if he could not see us at all and could only see something very far away. He could scarcely speak, he had not the breath for it. And then he said, ‘Highgate. I see the word. We must save them.’ And Morgan did not even hesitate. He pushed us into a carriage and told his driver to drive for hell. We fairly flew there, and when we alighted, Brisbane ran ahead, like a hound on the scent of a hare. He made straight for the Mortlake crypt, and when we found him, he was trying to take the stones apart with his bare hands. We had to pull him off to use Felicity’s key.”

  It was not the first time Brisbane’s second sight had alerted him to danger where I was concerned, and unnerving as it was, I blessed it.

  “It was the most terrible thing I have ever seen, and so long as I live, I will never forget it.”

  I had no doubt of it. As I turned the words over in my mind, I wondered. Had Brisbane guessed about the child? Or had he known, in the sa
me way that he had known where I would be? We must save them. There were things I would never know, and some threads of the case that would never be tied to my satisfaction.

  The question of how much Mr. Sullivan knew was one such point. He was courteous enough to send a great basket of hothouse fruit to me during my convalescence, but as I considered the untidy scrawl of his signature, something unpleasant occurred to me. During our conversation with him, Mr. Sullivan had neglected to provide us with a significant clue—that he had once followed the veiled lady to Highgate Cemetery. It was possible that he harboured some hope of uncovering her identity himself and thereby securing the gratitude of his superiors. Or he may have, stupidly, written off the incident as nonsignificant. But I realised with a pang that if we had known of her connection to Highgate, Brisbane and I might have at least searched the place and perhaps turned up some clue to her identity. I did not like to mention the omission to Brisbane, but I suspect he realised it for himself. Quite abruptly, Mr. Sullivan stopped writing for the Illustrated Daily News, and when I remarked upon it to Brisbane, he told me in a rather clipped tone that Mr. Sullivan had been recalled to Washington by his superiors and nothing more was said upon the matter. It would not have surprised me at all to find Sir Morgan’s fingers in that particular pie. As I lay long hours convalescing, my mind turned frequently to the events of the past weeks, and one detail I had suddenly recalled was that on the evening of the séance, it was Sir Morgan who prevented Sullivan from following the others from the building. It was a perfectly natural action—a gentleman checking the time and patting his pockets to find his cigarette case—but it effectively blocked Sullivan long enough to ensure that none of the three guests who had already departed could be trailed by the American. Had it been intentional? Morgan had told us that he had had difficulty in exposing the German agent, but it was entirely possible that he knew Sullivan was working for the Americans and had taken steps to prevent him from learning anything of importance. I smiled to myself. In blocking the American operative—whether intentionally or not—Morgan had unwittingly spent his own chance to discover the identity of Madame’s German contact for himself. The irony of it seemed entirely fitting.

  To Brisbane’s disgust, Felicity Mortlake escaped prosecution. She struck her head during the blast I had detonated, and when she awoke, she remembered nothing, not even her own name. Was it amnesia? Was it pretense? No one could say. Sir Morgan and her father had her consigned to the care of an asylum in Norfolk, deep in the fens, a secure place where if she were not mad, she will surely be in time. Everything else was tidied up with the deft use of Sir Morgan’s influence. Not so much as a whisper of the affair found its way into the newspapers, and if anyone wondered whatever became of Lord Mortlake’s eldest daughter, no one asked it aloud. Not a word of Bellmont’s involvement in the Spirit Club was ever spoken. I appreciated Morgan’s discretion in the matter. That and the enormous baskets of flowers he sent to my bedside. I always did love peonies to distraction.

  Of course, Sir Morgan would never be an easy person to know, and this was borne home when, some weeks after the incident in the graveyard, Brisbane took me for a ride in the carriage. It had turned cold, and I was carefully bundled in furs, a heater at my feet. Brisbane would say nothing of where we were bound, but I was glad to be out and about. My excursions thus far had been to Portia’s or to March House or to do a little shopping, and I was astonishingly bored of it all.

  In a short time, we found ourselves in the mews behind Sir Morgan’s house in St. John’s Wood, and I watched in astonishment as Brisbane tried the garden door. It was a stout affair of good oak, but it yielded to his touch. He took a quick glance to make sure we were not observed and opened it.

  “Brisbane, what are we doing here?” I whispered.

  He put a finger over my lips and beckoned me to follow. We crept through the garden like thieves, and the metaphor was an apt one, for no sooner had we reached the house than Brisbane extracted a set of objects that made his intention instantly clear.

  “No lockpicks?” I mouthed.

  He shook his head and pointed to the complexity of the lock on the French doors. But while it was a good lock, it was poorly sited, and this made Brisbane’s entry quite easy. I stood aside, plucking idly at a flower whilst he worked.

  He took a piece of brown paper that had been liberally spread with glue and unfolded it carefully. He moistened it with his own saliva and pressed it to the glass pane of the door. Then he took the end of his walking stick and gave a single sharp tap. The glass shattered, but silently, and the glue ensured that the pieces came away in one tidy sheet. I stared in admiration as he reached in and turned the lock from the inside. We moved into the house, our feet soundless on the thick carpets. The crescent moon provided illumination, and a moment after we entered we were at the tea caddy.

  Just as Brisbane reached for his lockpicks to work the little lock, there was a hiss from the corner. I peered into the gloom to see Nin advancing slowly, whipping her tail back and forth like a cobra.

  “This could be very bad,” I muttered to Brisbane. “Siamese can be very loud if the mood strikes them.”

  “Well, you are her favourite, according to Morgan. Attend to her,” he ordered, applying himself to the lock. I suppressed a sigh and reached to my reticule to rip a peacock feather free.

  I dandled it in front of her, and just as the little lock sprang open, I dropped the feather. Nin pounced upon it, snatching it up in her jaws and trotting off as contentedly as any retriever with her prize.

  I turned my attention to Brisbane and the tea caddy that he had opened. Inside was a packet of tea, and below that a false bottom that he pried loose. Underneath lay another packet, this one flat and bound with tape.

  Brisbane replaced the caddy and gestured for us to leave. We retraced our steps through the rooms, Brisbane shutting the door carefully behind us. He did not bother to lock it, for the missing pane would reveal soon enough that the residence had been breached. We moved through the garden and back to the carriage, and once there, Brisbane rapped sharply for the driver to move on. It was several minutes before he turned up the lamp and handed me the packet.

  “Bellmont’s letters,” I breathed. “Sir Morgan had them the whole time.”

  “Very likely,” Brisbane said. “I suspect he took them the very night Madame died. Everything else was so much smoke and mirrors.”

  “Then why not tell you?” I demanded. “Why let you continue to chase down that monstrous woman?”

  “Because Morgan needed to flush her like a pheasant and he was using me as his beater,” he said, his face expressionless.

  “That is a vile thing to do! You might have been killed! How dare he show such a lack of respect for an innocent citizen,” I raged. “What gives him the right to treat you so?”

  “He is my employer,” Brisbane said softly.

  There was silence between us, and in that silence a world of things unsaid. I clutched the letters. “Sir Morgan is your employer? That would make you…”

  “Upon occasion.”

  “How long?”

  “Since I was eighteen. It was during my involvement with Fleur. She was suspected of being an agent of Napoléon III. They recruited me to discover what I could about her.”

  I shook my head. “No, it is too much. Not you. Not Fleur. Tell me she was not a spy.”

  “Only of the most innocuous variety and quite accidentally,” he said by way of consolation.

  “But you have not known Fleur intimately in over twenty years,” I said, trying to make sense of it all. “Why are you still working for Sir Morgan?”

  “Because I am rather good at it,” he said simply. “My detective business gives me ample opportunity to poke into the affairs of others, and anything I find out of note, I pass to Morgan. I am not so active as I once was,” he promised. “More often now, I simply relay information he might require.”

  It was a clever version of the truth, I knew instantly, a
nd had been heavily edited to allay my fears. But I was not to be put off. “It is not always so simple, is it?”

  He opened his mouth to give me an easy answer, then snapped his teeth together. “No,” he said finally. “Sometimes it is considerably more.”

  I said nothing for a long moment, realising that Brisbane had just done the unthinkable: he had trusted me enough to tell me that which he ought never to have revealed. He had, quite literally, trusted me with his life.

  “You work for Sir Morgan,” I began slowly. “For whom does he work?”

  “The Prime Minister’s office. He reports directly to the sitting Prime Minister, and he has a weekly, highly secret meeting with Her Majesty. I believe he is smuggled in and out of the palace in a laundry hamper.”

  The thought of the dapper and elegant Morgan Fielding stowed away in a basket of laundry boggled the mind, perhaps more than anything else about this entire matter.

  “I cannot believe it,” I murmured. “It never occurred to me that there might be clandestine agencies of which the average British citizen has no inkling.”

  “It is better that way,” Brisbane said flatly. “And it will be better still when a proper bureau is established and Morgan can see to it that he has the manpower he needs.”

  “He doesn’t now?”

  “Do you really think he would have set up that elaborate farce at the Spirit Club if he had alternatives? He is given a handful of men and a budget that would scarcely keep you in slippers and fans. What he accomplishes is largely due to the force of his own personality and the loyalty of his friends.”

  “He will know the letters are gone,” I pointed out.

  “And he will know I took them. I rather think he intended I should,” he said. “Otherwise he would not have left them in the tea caddy. He mentioned once that it was a useful piece, and he would know I remembered it.”

  “Intended? If he wanted you to have them, why not just give them to you?”