Chronicles of Love and Devotion: A Historical Regency Romance Collection

by Abigail Agar

  ‘Now don’t cry too hard just yet, my dear. We’ve still got one great big bread crumb to follow up on.’

  Vera wiped a tear and blew her nose, painfully aware of how unladylike her actions had become.

  Fidel or Vera, Vera or Fidel who knows which is which anymore?

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘He owns that ridiculous carriage. And it turns out the horses weren’t his, they were post horses. That means there’s about three roads out of Bathcombe that he’s likely to have taken if he wants to refresh or replace his horses on the way, three roads all with turnpikes, post-stations, way-stations and public houses full of exactly the type of road-going people who are likely to remember a bit of unusual horse-flesh shackled up to a bizarre carriage like that. His old stagecoach and its dyed feather tackle tend to stick in the memory. I can ask about which way they went and follow the trail wherever it leads, but …’ He looked a little embarrassed. ‘… I’m not a man of means, Miss Ladislaw. And travel is not cheap in these times.’

  It felt good to be called Miss Ladislaw again, but how was she to cover the costs of Mr Fielding’s investigation now. She had no funds but her modest servant’s wages.

  She opened the small drawer in the stand beside her bed and took out a few notes and what silver she had. ‘Will that get you started? I will find more as soon as possible.’

  ‘Now dearie, I can’t be taking a servant’s wages. That would put me in a terrible moral bind. But your employer’s sat here on hidden gold they say, and I’m sure he wouldn’t miss some of the furnishings should that not be the case. There’s a whole wing of this house stopped-up ain’t there? Maybe some plate or silver in there. Might be no one would know it was gone, and I’d feel much more comfortable working for my salt on such a task than exploiting your desperation to graft your own fair pay from you.’

  A cold shiver of horror ran through her. He wants me to betray my lord, my beautiful lord!

  ‘I wouldn’t want you put in any danger for me.’ Nor to endanger my beloved. ‘Please let me …’ she pushed her cash towards him again, and he looked at it hungrily.

  ‘This won’t cover it, lass. Travel like that, bribes and protection, maybe hiring some toughs. That’s not servant’s money. I wouldn’t go on this without ten pounds in my pocket, and correct me if I’m wrong, but that is four month’s wages for a man-servant of your rank.’

  ‘I’m sure I could prevail upon my employer for a loan.’ Vera felt desperate; she couldn’t open up her suitor’s house to Mr Fielding and his reprobates.

  ‘That’s just expenses, the kind of men this fellow deals with, hires. They’re counterfeiters, agents for Swiss mercenaries, customs house workers, killers, terrorists, and men who should be walled up in Bedlam. This is the kind of work you send a younger man on, and you give him danger pay. If he killed your family himself, imagine what he’d have others do to mine. I need enough money to get gone if this side-burned fella turns around and starts hunting me right back.’

  Vera listened to this with her heart sinking. Perhaps this was too great a task. Perhaps she should simply sink back into this new life. Live in secret with Lord Stanley. But the thought felt worse than the fear of gaol and the noose. To be so close to true happiness and then be denied it? No. She would continue until this story led to a conclusion, be it bitter or sweet.

  She looked at Mr Fielding with renewed determination.

  ‘How much?’

  He smiled, relaxing into his new role as hardened thief catcher for hire. ‘One hundred pounds,’ he said. ‘One hundred pounds or the East Wing’s doors unlocked for the three nights of the next new moon.’

  ‘One hundred pounds,’ she said. ‘I’ll get it for you.’

  But how? whispered the voice in her head.

  Fielding got up. ‘I will see you soon, I hope my dear. My curiosity as to the full extent of this mystery is most great, but I can do nothing without the proper funds. Look to your purse, and then look for me at The Rose. I’ll be back at the new moon to give the doors a try just on the off-chance, eh?’

  He flung the door open smartly and startled Helen who appeared to have been just passing. In the look of horror on her face, Vera saw something else, though. A look of guilt.

  The thought flashed across Vera’s mind: Was she listening at the door? She tried to catch Helen’s eye or read anything on her face but the other servant just bowed quickly to Mr Fielding and moved down the corridor post-haste.

  With Fielding heading back to Bathcombe to sit on his hands and await his payment, Vera was in a high state of anxiety. Every minute she delayed would mean the perpetrators getting further and further away.

  She sat still in her room for a long time wondering how best to solve the problem. How she longed to tell Lord Stanley the whole truth, but without the evidence to the contrary, she would sound a mad and conniving woman with three corpses to her name and a noose waiting for her from the Bathcombe gibbet.

  So if the truth was out, could I perhaps beg him for a loan?

  That option seemed possible, but it would raise too many questions.

  The injustice of it burned, and she dearly wished, not for the first time, that Lord Stanley had not stepped in, and that she might have shot the man who had made a fugitive of her on the murderer’s behalf. With Fitzwilliam dead, the constables would have been in disarray, and the case might have fallen through the changeover.

  But that is all foolishness. You can neither change the past nor truly wish to have a man’s blood on your hands. You may be sorry that Lord Stanley was hurt but never that he saved you the horror of committing a true murder.

  The voice in her head was right, and now she would have to beg a favour of him again. Though to ask for an advance on her wages would mean very little to him, she was sure, it felt a sordid and meretricious sort of thing to crawl to a suitor and beg for coinage.

  She would have to try and beg as much as she could of Caruthers first, she decided. It would be less humiliating to ask it of an employer than a lover. There was no way he would advance her a full hundred against her wages, but every penny she could pocket would go some way to covering the full sum.

  And I can always look at the seams of the curtains in the East Wing if all else fails.

  No sooner had she settled on this course of action than she rose and went in search of Caruthers.

  She found him in a foul mood, crouched over the account books in the kitchen. Autumn was falling outside, but so far the weather was still hot and the kitchen fires had wrung a long line of tiny pearls of sweat from Caruthers’ brow.

  Occasionally, one of these pearls would gather momentum and begin an unstoppable slide down across the slope of his brows, rushing along his nose, snowballing up momentum and beading up on the bulbous tip before being snatched away by a brush of the handkerchief before it could fall and smudge his neatly jotted lines of inky digits.

  Each time it happened, his scowl seemed to deepen. Yes, thought Vera, something is badly up with Caruthers.

  He looked up from the accounts and scowled at Vera.

  That’s new, she thought. The slightly simpering smiles that he had thrown her way since their encounter at the ball had completely vanished. What is on his mind?

  Her own mind went back to Helen scuttling away from the door to Vera’s room with her head down. Could she have heard something? Could she have told Caruthers? If so what? Would Helen betray me like that?

  Resolving to be even more cautious than before, she led with a tactful: ‘You look worried, Sir. Anything I can assist you with?’

  ‘The accounts are a bloody headache, Fidel. And if you don’t happen to have a little knowledge of double entry keeping, then I doubt very much–’

  ‘I do,’ said Vera. Caruthers looked gobsmacked.

  Of course, what young manservant knows how to keep an estate’s books?

  ‘I was manservant to a lawyer in Bathcombe who had me assist with his books when he discovered my sch
ooling.’

  Caruthers looked unconvinced. ‘Very well. Look these over and try and make the columns match. There’s an error somewhere.’

  He tossed one of the closed books over to her. It was the accounts recorded by the manager of one of Lord Stanley’s coastal estates, a barren bit of land if the agricultural rents jotted down here on the pages were to be believed. The acreage was clearly huge, but the returns were tiny.

  Looks like someone is milking the estate at that end and failing to pass it up the line.

  As they worked in silence, Vera occasionally snatched a glance at Caruthers, seeing in his face that same look of irritability. I wonder what’s got his dander up? thought Vera as she corrected a rental amount that had been listed as a debit twice.

  After a little while, the heat of the kitchen was getting to her too; she longed to throw open the shutters and let some of the wind through, or to slip away to the cool dark of Lord Stanley’s chamber to read with him or to hear him joke with her. She worried about his shoulder injury although it seemed to have healed almost perfectly, leaving nothing but a neat round scar high up on his chest, and she wondered if there was anything else that she might be doing for him.

  She found herself drawn in by the accounts for a little while as she chased what seemed to be a thread of strange payments made to unnecessary suppliers of sheep feed, but it soon became clear this was in fact manure not feed and had simply been recorded incorrectly. With her hunt for corruption in Devon thwarted, she decided to broach her real concerns with Caruthers.

  No point in dragging this out.

  ‘Might I make a request, sir?’

  Caruthers looked up, and with exasperation that would have read in the cheap seats at the Bathcombe Hippodrome, he laid down his pen with a jolt that dropped a blot from the tip onto the table. ‘Very well, Fidel.’ He sounded weary in his voice, but his face showed a more aggressive exasperation.

  ‘Might I borrow some money against my future wages?’

  ‘That shouldn’t be a problem, Fidel. How much do you need?’

  A hundred pounds? Vera had carefully considered how much she might be able to wring from the situation. ‘Ten pounds.’

  Caruthers eyes squinted, and he reached into his coat. He pulled out the leather wallet stamped with the Stanley crest and opened the pouch. He took out a dented George II two guinea coin that had been clearly milled heavily around one edge.

  ‘Some sort of gambling trouble is it?’ snapped Caruthers, placing the coin on the table between them. ‘Take this; it’s as much as I can advance you on your wages right now.’

  Vera looked at the coin. It was a paltry portion of the paltry amount she had requested. Two guineas against one hundred pounds.

  She wanted to cry, and when she thanked him, she could hear the cracking of her voice.

  ‘I must go see to His Lordship,’ she mumbled and pushed the half-reviewed books across to Caruthers.

  She knew it was a kindness to have extended even that much, but the coin felt like a blow, the heft of it in her coat pocket seemed a physical rendering of her concerns and fears. The murderer was getting ever more distant from her and the trail ever colder. It hurt too that she had been forced to discover that Mr Fielding may have seen more of profit in helping her than of kindness.

  Her frustration strained at her chest almost enough to make her burst with pain and anger. At the door she turned to bid Caruthers, ‘Good day, Sir,’ but found herself, in a petulant voice she didn’t recognise, adding, ‘Those with secrets that might ruin them and the households they work for should be better at keeping friends like me.’

  The moment she had said it, she regretted it, that all her internal frustration should have come out in such an impotent threat – one she would never follow through on – to a man who had been nothing but kind to her. She blushed and in embarrassment ran from the room.

  It was a relief when she arrived in Lord Stanley’s chambers. She walked straight in and fell into his arms feeling the strength of his embrace wrap around her, pushing out all her embarrassment and petulance.

  She pressed her face against his chest and looked up into his eyes. Her concerns must have shown because his brow furrowed with concern, and he asked:

  ‘What’s wrong, my love?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  Nothing I can tell you, at least.

  She hated to hide anything from him, and yet she must hide so much. ‘Just a long day on little sleep; some time with you will put the colour back in my cheeks and the spring in my step.’

  She looked over at the bed, and her blood turned to ice, then it boiled.

  On the bed in delicate array, were a set of ladies undergarments, a pair of buckled boots, a decorated mask of a cuckoo bird’s face with a looped leather thong, and a heavy dress in red velvet and gold brocade.

  ‘You …’ Vera gritted her teeth, said no more. The venom in that single word was enough to voice her displeasure.

  So this was how he was able to happily respect her protection of her virtue, by having his fallen ladies up and about the Manse. Vera looked around the room but saw no sign of his conquest who had left her clothes strewn across his bed.

  She must be in the bathroom; that was the only place she could be. .

  ‘What?’ he said. The quizzical look on his face made it clear that he didn’t even understand her fury. ‘I have a surprise for you.’

  ‘I bet you do,’ she snarled. First Fielding had betrayed her, clawing after money. Then Caruthers had fallen short, angry and jealous. And now the man she loved, who she had served, who she had nursed, had betrayed her for lust!

  ‘You swine!’

  He looked hurt. ‘I was expecting a slightly different …’

  ‘Where is your lady friend?’ Vera snapped, hearing every shard of disappointment in the day echoing in her angry outburst.

  ‘Lady friend?’ now he looked totally lost.

  How can he play dumb with the evidence staring me right in the face?

  ‘You wanted to surprise me? Well you did! Though how I ever thought a leopard like you could change its spots I’ll never know.’

  ‘My spots?’

  She reached around for something else to say to him, but words failed her.’

  He looked at the dress and frowned, his face betrayed real hurt, ‘You– you don’t like the dress?’

  ‘The dress!’ Vera shouted, then stopped. A silence hung over the room for a few seconds as the realisation began to form that she may have jumped to conclusions: ‘The dress?’ she repeated, this time as a question.

  She looked at the clothes; they were not strewn as she had first thought. In fact, much the opposite, they looked like they had been laid out not as if someone had been stripped of them, but as if they had been put out for someone to put on.

  For me to put on.

  Lord Stanley was grinning at her, clearly he was enjoying her mild embarrassment and sudden turnaround from angry to confused to embarrassed.

  ‘I have told the staff that I will be dining with a lady of the European aristocracy tonight. That I shall need the table set and food served but beyond that only myself, the lady, and my faithful Fidel will be in attendance.’

  ‘Oh, I … you …’

  Dammit, Vera. You fool.

  ‘The dress is something I want to see you in, and the mask will hide your true identity. That is its purpose.’ Tonight, you are my mysterious lover, not my manservant. A different form of disguise, I think.