by Kate Moore
“Sell the . . . inn?” Lucy had almost said sell my home, but she could see that her friends would be deaf to the claims of such a home with its noise and bustle, its rustic furnishings and humble hospitality.
“Once you’ve sold, you may convert the profits of the sale into the funds,” Cassandra continued.
Lucy looked at the three solemn faces, alike in their expressions of certainty. Behind them the forsythia branch hid the wallpaper. They, too, had a plan for hiding any flaws Lucy might possess as she entered their world, such as being the daughter of a former pugilist who kept an inn.
At school, a girl named Amelia Fox had been the self-proclaimed expert on origins. “Your origins are your destiny,” she would say, as she rated each girl’s family ties. In Lucy’s case Amelia had proclaimed that nothing could be done about her father, and it was just as well that nothing was known about Lucy’s mother, because surely nothing good could be known. Now Lucy’s friends invited her to shed her questionable birth forever with a simple economic transaction. As an heiress with her money in the funds, Lucy could slip into their world as if there’d never been a Papa, a Tom Holbrook, who’d once been Iron Tom in a bout against the champion. It was a tidy plan.
“Lucy, dear,” Cordelia urged, “do open our gift. We found it in our pew, just where you usually sit and knew at once that it was a sign.” Cordelia gave the package a shove across the table toward Lucy.
“Not yet, Cordelia,” Cassandra admonished. “Everyone should eat. I recommend this pudding. You may compliment your cook, Lucy.”
* * * *
Captain Harry Clare, late of the First Royal Dragoons, opened the door of the Tooth and Nail, a south London inn from which coaches and travelers set out for Dover and the continent. He let in a gust of cold March air that caused the men on two long benches to glance his way and holler greetings. He had not encouraged the familiarity, but they greeted him as if he were one of their own.
He slipped out of his wet coat and hat and tossed them on a hook by the door. He had been lodging at the inn since the debacle that closed the Pantheon Club. The club, a front for a group of handpicked spies in England’s great game against her former ally, Russia, had been Harry’s home for nearly a year as he and his fellow spies had tracked down enemy agents operating in London.
The club’s unexpected closing had come just as Harry was about to complete his final assignment and receive the promised reward for his year and a day of service. Instead, he’d been cast out to shift for himself. He was an old hand at such shifts, having joined the army at seventeen and seen action from Spain to Waterloo. He could make a billet anywhere from a muddy mountainside to the ruins of a shelled castle. And he was a man who never failed to complete an assignment, even one as puzzling as the one he’d been assigned—to find a blind man who was the only witness to a murder.
He’d found his unlikely murder witness at the Tooth and Nail, where the old man sat on a bench near the kitchen door, doing odd bits of handwork. The man, Adam Pickersgill, was simple-minded and easily agitated. A stray bit of conversation from the bench sitters could rouse Adam to a frenzy of waving fists and shouted words until his voice failed. Harry had seen similar cases of sudden starts in men who’d been subjected to the shock of war. Getting information out of him to solve a crime would not be easy.
The old man’s daily pattern revolved around Lucy Holbrook, the innkeeper’s daughter. She was a distracting female. The eye wanted to follow her, all golden hair and fair skin, but Harry was generally good at ignoring distractions when he had a job to do.
Then Tom Holbrook, the innkeeper, had died. “Iron Tom” as he’d been known in his youthful days in the ring, had been buried the previous Sunday, and his golden-haired daughter had become a woman of property. The Tooth and Nail looked just as it had the week before, but its usual customers had taken to combing their hair and replacing stained waistcoats and worn jackets with Sunday finery. It was plain that, as the inn’s new owner, Lucy Holbrook had become a sought-after prize. Harry was not a betting man, but he’d wager that the girl had other plans than marrying one of her neighbors.
From the entry Harry stepped down the three wide steps that led to the common room. The inn’s oak wainscoting was as brown as beef and ale. Its walls were gold as mustard or onions. Its hearths were black with a century’s worth of soot.
Under the old mullioned windows facing the yard were the long tables where coach passengers could get a quick meal. A slate menu read Lamb. Pork. Beef. A great stone inglenook fireplace divided the room between the front tables for travelers and the lowly benches where the inn’s daily customers had their pints and smoked their pipes, dipping the stems in their ale.
The place was a bit of England for which the long war with France had been fought, but the men who sat on its benches knew war only as plunging or rising prices, changing governments, and distant battles that faded into history faster than the local champion’s fame in the ring. They were civilians, and even after ten years of peace Harry did not know how to be one of them.
A thin layer of bluish smoke hung in the taproom air. The long-case clock ticked, the fire crackled, and outside rain clattered in the drainpipes. The regular bench-sitters slumped over their pint pots. Harry guessed the reason for their dejection—the innkeeper’s golden-haired daughter was nowhere to be seen.
Will Wittering, a blacksmith with a nearby forge, called out, “Captain, come wet yer throat w’ us this sad day.”
Harry strolled their way, and the group shifted to make room for him on the bench.
“A bit of news for you, Captain,” Will offered.
“What’s that?” asked Harry. He nodded at Frank Blodget, the tapman, to draw him a pint. With the spy club closed, Harry no longer had to stick by its rule of no spirits.
“One of Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe’s Rockets was stopped by a gang of highwaymen last night.”
Harry took his first swallow of ale and listened as the tale poured out from several tellers. He took a moment to glance at the blind man, alone on his bench without his usual work. Queenie, the inn’s orange and white cat, lay curled in Adam’s lap between the big man’s slack hands.
“Did the robbers get much?” he asked the bench sitters. He wondered whether he could get some sense out of the old fellow while Lucy Holbrook was away.
“That’s the puzzle,” said Will, shaking his head. “They only took the horses.”
“Not Radcliffe’s gold?” Harry knew the animals on one of Radcliffe’s Rockets would hardly be prize horseflesh. Radcliffe ran the kind of coaching enterprise where profits were lean, and his drivers were the kind who drove their beasts until they died in the traces somewhere between London and Dover.
The bench sitters chuckled. Geoffrey Radcliffe had been knighted for loaning staggering sums to King George when the latter was a mere prince.
The bench sitters shook their heads. “A gang, they were,” Will added. “Spoke some gibberish.”
“Coulda been gypsies,” suggested another bench sitter.
Harry ventured a glance at the blind man. It was a rare moment when Lucy Holbrook left the old man alone. Adam Pickersgill had been Harry’s objective for weeks, but finding him had only deepened the mystery. Adam was tall and gaunt with a shock of white hair above a linen band that circled his head covering his sightless eyes. Harry guessed his age to be near eighty and credited Lucy with keeping the old man clean and combed and neatly dressed.
Most days Adam sat on his bench with his brushes and blacking or a pile of silver and a pot of polish. The bench sitters knew little about him and cared less. Most of them simply considered the old man a fixture at the inn. He’d been there next to Lucy Holbrook as long as anyone remembered. Sheepishly, John Simkins, a merchant who sold water flasks, had confessed that as boys they had teased Adam and tried to provoke him whenever Lucy had led him out of the inn for a bit of sun and air. How
the girl had come to be responsible for the old man no one knew.
Harry turned back to the bench sitters who were talking about roads and robberies and boasting that any one of them would have been a better match for the highwaymen than the coachman had been. It was pot valiant talk, the kind Harry had heard from raw recruits on the night before battle. As the talk grew louder and bolder, the bench sitters glanced often at the door of the inn’s private dining room. Harry suspected that at least three of them were working up the courage to solicit Lucy’s hand in marriage.
“Where’s Lucy?” he asked when talk of the robbery lapsed.
All the heads nodded at the door on the other side of the entry, and Will spoke for the group. “Preparing a luncheon for her lady friends.”
Will wiped the foam from his lip. “Here’s a puzzle for you, Captain,” he said. “Why did Sir Geoffrey send his gold to Hell?”
Will, a fair-haired giant of man, was the wit of the group, and his companions waited for the punch line.
Harry shrugged.
“So he’ll have some when he gets there,” Will said. The bench sitters laughed and slapped their thighs.
“Geoffrey ran away.” Adam Pickersgill’s deep voice boomed out from his corner, stilling the laughter. The men drew on their pipes. Harry nodded to them and turned to the old man.
“Geoffrey ran away,” the old man repeated. His body shook the bench under him.
Harry crossed the room and put a steadying hand on the old man’s shoulder, motioning Frank at the tap for a pint of small beer. When it arrived, Harry lifted the old man’s big square hand and closed it around the pewter cup as he’d seen Lucy do.
Adam drank his beer in long drafts that left a foam moustache above his upper lip. He banged his cup down on the table, spilling ale. “Adam must not go. Adam must stay.”
Queenie shifted her position in the old man’s lap and jumped down to arch against Harry’s booted calf. He leaned down to stroke the creature’s head.
Adam stilled and cocked his head to the side. “You like cats very much.”
“I do,” Harry agreed. The old man might be blind, but he was good at detecting a person’s presence and recognizing people even without their speaking. If Harry could get Adam talking, he might eventually say something useful about the case. Harry suspected that Adam’s odd declarations were part of a coherent story, fragments of a narrative in which one man ran away while another stood his ground, perhaps in the face of murder.
“Geoffrey ran away,” Adam repeated, this time in the volume of ordinary conversation.
Harry gave Adam’s shoulder a friendly squeeze. “How’s the ale today, Adam?”
Adam’s face crinkled into dozens of lines around the strip of unbleached linen. He reached out his hand for Harry’s and gave it two long energetic pumps, like a man working a tap handle. “Tooth and Nail ale very good. You like yer ale very dark, like coffee.”
“That I do, Adam.”
From the benches came another mention of the robbery of Sir Geoffrey’s Rocket passenger coach. Adam stirred, his gnarled hands pulling at the cloth over his knees. Harry sat down beside him, and Queenie leapt up into Harry’s lap. He stroked the cat’s fur and considered how to get the truth out of the old man’s muddled brain.
* * * *
The scrape of spoons against dishes sounded loud in Lucy’s ears, and she realized that the conversation had died. She had no idea what her friends had been talking about the past half hour.
“Lucy, child,” Margaret broke the silence. “We really can’t bear to think of you here alone, so far from friends.”
Lucy held her tongue. Alone? She wanted to laugh at the notion. When was an innkeeper ever alone?
“A suitable place must be found to be sure, and we will help you.” Cassandra spoke as if the matter had been decided over plates of pudding. “But you must quit the inn as soon as possible. Within a fortnight, at the latest.”
“Sell within a fortnight? Is it possible?” She was not ready. Her future as a lady had seemed quite distant only a few weeks ago.
“Of course you will not handle the sale yourself,” said Cassandra. “We will recommend a solicitor to make sure the inn’s assets are properly valued. With the right help, you’ll be ready to begin your London Season in days.”
Her friends had worked out a solution to her situation. But a dead father was not a situation. The Tooth and Nail was not a situation. And Adam was not a situation. She did not know how she could begin to explain Adam to her friends, but there were things that could not be sold with tables and chairs, plate and silver, and stables and outbuildings. Even if one could sell everything one owned, one could not really sell one’s past.
Margaret rose and came around the table to take Lucy by the hands, pull her from her chair, and fold her in another embrace. “Dear child, your future has arrived in a way none of us expected. Nevertheless, it has arrived, and your father, himself, would want you to seek the best position for yourself in the world.”
Lucy let herself be held. There was no denying that her father had wanted her to be a lady. When she was twelve, he had given her a painting of just the sort of lady she was meant to be. It hung in her room above the small hearth. Then he had sent her to Mrs. Thwaytes’ school, and when she had finished there, he had insisted that she spend Sundays with these very friends to grow accustomed to talk and manners quite different from those of the inn. Now, unexpectedly, the moment had arrived for her to step into the life for which he had prepared her, she simply had never imagined that she would step into that life without him.
Cordelia stood and once more offered Lucy the brown paper package. “Do open it, dear.”
Lucy stepped back from Margaret’s hold and tugged loose the string, unfolding the brown paper. A small blue book with gold lettering appeared—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London. She looked up into three bright smiles of encouragement. A hiccup of laughter caught her by surprise. A month ago, two weeks ago, she would have devoured the little book eagerly, ready to learn its lessons. Now she understood that its lessons would be lessons in detaching herself from home. She wanted to toss the little book out the window and let the rain wash it away.
“You’ll be brilliant, dear. We can’t wait to help you enjoy a wonderful Season and a triumphant one,” said Cassandra.
Lucy clasped the book hard lest she act on her first impulse. Her friends wanted the best for her even if they did not know what they asked in return—to detach herself from all that was known and loved. To adopt the ways she’d been learning in South Audley Street and to leave the ways of home behind.
A startling crash from the taproom interrupted her thoughts, followed by a man’s anguished voice crying, “No, No, No.”
The ladies started and looked confused. “What is that dreadful noise?” asked Cassandra.
The pained cry sounded again, louder still, full of terrible distress.
“Adam,” Lucy cried. “I must go to him.” She thrust the little book into Cordelia’s hands and dashed for the door.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kate Moore is a former English teacher and three time RITA finalist, Golden Heart, and Book Buyers Best Award winner. She writes Austen inspired fiction set in nineteenth-century England or contemporary California. Her heroes are men of courage, competence, and unmistakable virility, with determination so strong it keeps their sensuality in check until they meet the right woman. Her heroines take on the world with practical good sense and kindness to bring those heroes into a circle of love and family. Sometimes there’s even a dog. Kate lives north of San Francisco with her surfer husband, their yellow Lab, a Pack ‘n Play for visiting grandbabies, and miles of crowded bookshelves. Kate’s family and friends offer endless support and humor. Her children are her best works, and her husband is her favorite hero. Visit Kate at Facebook.com/KateMooreAuthor or contact her at kate@ka
temoore.com.