Chasing the Heiress

by Rachael Miles

  “So? I don’t remark on your habits.” Flute picked up the young sailor’s pocket watch and wallet and put them both in the deep pockets sewn into the lining of his jacket. He would send out a message on the wharfs for the sailor to retrieve his belongings.

  “Not a doxy. Marner’s cousin. We caught her this afternoon.”

  “What’s you going to do with her? Kill her?”

  “No. Hide her until we get our money. Perhaps now that we have her, we’ll find out what his game is. We meet with him tomorrow, show him the woman. If his answers don’t satisfy me, tomorrow you will take her to this address.” Charters held out a piece of paper.

  Flute looked at the address and scowled. “There?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wouldn’t it be kinder to kill her outright? A nice drowning perhaps? Send her there, and she’s good as dead anyways.”

  “Perhaps, but I need time. She’s given us some information we need to pursue. And we can’t keep her here.”

  “You know best.” Flute shrugged. “I’m thinking of taking the apple girl to a play.”

  * * *

  Marner was angry. Charters could tell by the way his jaw twitched as he stood there silent. But the man had learned that Charters preferred civil discourse in his business dealings, and he was attempting to control his rage.

  “How am I to believe you’ve found her?”

  Charters swirled the whiskey in his glass, then sniffed, filling his nostrils with the aroma. “I have alliances, connections, and—unlike you—I pay those who help me promptly. I find it makes my affiliates willing to preference my requests over those of others. If you wish to take the woman with you, you know my fee.”

  Marner stiffened and clenched one of his hands into a fist. “That’s a bloody lot for a fortnight’s work. I don’t have that much on hand.”

  “I’m happy to give you whatever time you need to raise the funds. Until then, however, your cousin remains with me.”

  “With you?” Marner stepped forward, threateningly. Flute raised his eyes from his woodcarving and met Marner’s. Marner stepped back. Without the protection of his men, he was more manageable. “But I have plans. Plans that require her to be at my home.”

  “I’m certain I could help you effect those plans.” Charters traced the thick raised scar on the back of his hand.

  “No, I’ll not be paying more to you than what you already claim.”

  “It is no more than the price we indicated when you called on us before. Georges had you sign a contract I believe.” Charters pulled a page from the top of his desk. “Ah, yes, here it is.”

  Marner ignored the exchange. “I want to see her . . . alone. I have questions only she can answer.”

  “She’s asleep, drugged.”

  “I still want to see her.”

  Charters nodded to Flute. Flute rose, slipping the carving he was working on into his pocket. “This way.”

  “Five minutes, Flute, no more,” Charters directed, then turned back to the pile of correspondence on his desk.

  Flute led Marner down the hall and opened the door to a large bedroom kept by Charters. The room was well appointed but understated, the pieces all good, but not fine. A low couch fronted a dressing table and wardrobe at the front of the room, and at the back a tester bed stood next to a washstand and pot cabinet. On the washstand, on top of an embroidered piece of linen, stood a pitcher of fresh water in a basin. In front of it stood a jar of laudanum and an empty glass. A low fire burned in the grate, keeping the chill from the room.

  Flute let Marner proceed him, then stepped into the room behind him. The woman lay on the bed, on her back, arms by her sides, legs extended straight. Her fashionable grey walking dress was smoothed out around her. To the side of the bed, on a table, sat her bonnet, its ribbons carefully extended over the edge. It was as if she had lain down for a short nap, smoothing her skirts to avoid wrinkles. Her only movement was the shallow rise and fall of her chest.

  “I said alone,” Marner sneered.

  “She’s too far down. She won’t answer, and if she does, she won’t make no sense.” Flute stood in the narrow doorway, easily filling it with his height and girth.

  “I make that determination.” Marner glared again. “Out.” He pointed toward the door; then, he pulled a chair to the side of the bed and sat.

  Flute stepped outside the room, shutting the door behind him. He knew five minutes: it was enough time to smooth out the neck of his most recent carving, a giraffe. He’d based it on a print hung in the window of the bookseller’s shop below. The apple girl had told him how much she liked the engraving, and he was going to surprise her with the carving when he visited her stall in the morning. He leaned into the door, hoping to hear what Marner asked the woman, but he couldn’t hear any words. No surprise. The girl had been carefully drugged, enough to keep her asleep, not enough to kill her.

  He’d finished the first smoothing stroke when he grew uneasy. He slipped the giraffe in his pocket and quietly opened the door enough to see in.

  Flute took in the details in an instant. Marner had moved the washing basin to the chair. The woman’s right arm was extended off the side of the bed, her wrist and arm below her elbow in the washing basin, the water red with her blood. Marner himself had moved to the opposite side of the bed, followed by a trail of blood. He had just cut open the woman’s sleeve. In his hand a knife dripping blood. He picked up the woman’s arm and moved to make a cut.

  Howling for Charters, Flute ran at Marner, knocking him into the wall beside the bed. Marner let go of the knife and Flute kicked it aside as he lifted the smaller man off his feet. His first hit left Marner dazed, the second unconscious. Flute threw him to the side and turned to the woman.

  Charters was already there, lifting her arm from the water. “Fool. He cut down her arm, not across it. Good to kill her, but it looks like murder, not suicide.” Charters lost his working-class accent, slipping into the educated tones of his youth. He pulled the embroidered cloth off the washstand and pressed it against the wound, drying the back of the arm with the ends.

  Blood dripped onto the floor. Bertie, having followed Charters, stood in the doorway, watching, waiting.

  “He missed the artery, but the cut is deep. And from the looks of his knife”—he nodded to the blade on the floor—“it may well fester.”

  Charters ripped the wide ribbons from her bonnet. “Lift the linen, and hold the wound closed.”

  Flute put his hands on either side of the long cut and, pressing his fingers in, pushed the skin together. Blood oozed from the length of the wound.

  “I can sew it. Used to help the ship’s physician sew up the men who were wounded or lost limbs.” Flute turned to Bertie. “Some silk thread from the milliner’s, Bertie, and call for the men as you go.”

  Bertie ran from the room, and Flute heard the door slam behind him.

  “Think she’ll die?” Flute looked at the blood in the basin and on the floor, so much blood.

  “Not if we can help it. Any magistrate who views the body will know it was not suicide. At least you stopped him before he cut the other arm.”

  Charters pressed his hand over the wound, trying to reduce the flow of blood. But blood seeped through between his fingers. “The blood’s not easing. We’ll need to burn it.”

  “I know. Be ready to hold her still.” Charters picked up the knife and walked to the fire, leaving Flute to open up the bandage. He held the knife in the fire, turning the blade from one side to the next, until it glowed red. He walked quickly back. Flute pressed his hand against her chest, holding her against the bed.

  Charters pressed the hot blade against the cut, searing the flesh. Still unconscious, Lucy cried out, throwing her head back with the pain, then she fell back against the pillow. The smell of burnt flesh and blood filled the room.

  Bertie stood quietly in the doorway, holding thread and a needle, looking sick. Behind him, two of the men Charters hired to manage unruly gamblers w
aited for instruction.

  Flute held out his hand, and the boy approached. “Don’t worry, Bertie. She won’t remember feeling it.” Flute ruffled the boy’s hair, then took the needle and thread. “She’ll only think it was a bad dream.”

  As Flute threaded the needle, Charters motioned for the men to carry Marner away. “Lock him in the empty storage room, until our employers decide what to do with him. Then bring us some of those new linen cloths from the dining room and a bottle of whiskey.” The men nodded and dragged Marner by his arms out of the room. Charters moved the basin back to the washstand, allowing Flute to sit before the woman’s arm.

  Charters pulled another chair from the wall and held the arm steady for Flute to work.

  Flute began to make small stitches, working his way slowly down the long cut.

  Charters occasionally wiped away the blood oozing from the stitches. “That’s fine work, Flute, as good as any lady’s embroidery.”

  “The Doc was a tidy man, insistent on keeping a clean line. He liked to show off his best ones. The less visible the scar was in the end, the happier he was.”

  The woman began to moan and pull against her arm. Charters poured a trickle of laudanum into her mouth, then covered her mouth and nose, forcing her to swallow.

  When Flute was done, Charters folded a cloth into a bandage and pressed it against the wound, and reused the bonnet ribbons to tie it to the arm.

  They stood back and watched her sleep fitfully.

  “Do you think he thought she’d bleed to death before we noticed?”

  “I don’t know. By cutting her here, he may be trying to implicate us in her death. Then he gets what he wants: her dead, and our bill unpaid.” Charters moved the chair back to the wall. “But I look forward to asking him what he thought he was doing. Bring his knife. Wrap your knuckles while I change my clothes.”

  * * *

  Marner returned to his estate by night, wanting no one to see his face. A bruise grew along his chin and brow where Flute had struck him. His side hurt, inhalation painful where the big man had hit him over and over. One hand was throbbing where his two outside fingers were surely broken. His plan—imagined in the spur of the moment—hadn’t accounted for the cold anger he had seen in Charters’s face.

  After the initial beating, Charters had left him lying on the floor, his head and belly aching from where the old sailor Flute had struck and kicked him. When he’d heard the door unlock, he had feared that Charters would be the one to let him out, and he’d been pleased to see that the aging fop Georges had come to free him.

  But then the fop had stepped aside to allow two large men to enter the room. The men had pulled him from the floor and seated him in a chair that the aging fop had pulled into the room behind them. Then, taking another chair and turning it round, the fop had seated himself, letting the silence draw out between them.

  After a long silence, Marner had thought Georges was going to question him. But instead, he’d pulled that blasted piece of pumice from his pocket and begun to sharpen and smooth his nails. After the fourth nail, Georges spoke, never looking up from the pumice.

  “My employer is nat pleased that you thought to injure your cousin while she was under his protection.”

  “Protection?” Marner started to rise, but the two men pulled him back. “I hired you to find her. You had no right to keep her from me. You. Work. For. Me,” he spat. He was a lord. They wouldn’t dare push him too far.

  “Ah, but that is where you have it wrong. We work for those who pay us. Had you paid your bill, then chosen to slice her ladyship up, we would have provided you with a comfortable arena to do so. We might have even provided you with better tools. But you haven’t. So until that time that your account is paid, we are our own agents, free to work as we please, for whom we please. At this moment, it pleases us to help you understand the limits of our relationship.” The fop nodded to Flute, and the pain had begun. Searing pain that had made him more than once lose consciousness.

  Each time he’d awoken, they’d begun again.

  By the end he would have answered any question, but they didn’t ask any. Only made him hurt. Then made him hurt some more.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Lucy promised to meet me today at noon at the British Museum. But she wasn’t there.” Colin felt frantic and was doing a terrible job of hiding it.

  “From the first, she said she would leave when William was safe. He’s safe. She’s gone. Perhaps it’s for the best.” Aidan spoke the words gently.

  “I went to her boardinghouse to see if I could find her there. The landlady remembered me. Lucy’s rent is paid through the end of the month, but she hasn’t been to her rooms for several days. The landlady let me into her room, and everything was there. Her dresses, her valise, everything.” Colin paced to the other side of the room. “Something’s wrong. I know it.”

  “How do you know it? Has she not merely done what she said she would do?” Aidan insisted. “When I spoke with her at the inn, she suggested that she intended only to have an affair.”

  “That was at the inn.” Colin remembered the unspoken promise in her eyes, the touch of her hand on his cheek. But she hadn’t said anything. Aidan would say her gestures only signaled goodbye. He rubbed behind his ear, trying to come up with an argument Aidan would entertain. “The puppy. She might have decided she didn’t want me, but she wouldn’t abandon Boatswain.”

  “Well, that’s an unexpected argument.” Aidan shook his head in disbelief. “Are you certain?”

  “I’m certain.”

  “Colin, you are my brother.” Aidan placed his hand on Colin’s shoulder. “I would move heaven and earth to find Lucy, if doing so would make you happy. But we have nowhere to start. Not even her real name. Do you know anything that would help us?”

  Colin shook his head ruefully.

  Fletcher coughed for attention. “If I may offer, Your Grace. We do know something.”

  “What?” both brothers asked in unison.

  “I’ve never known a woman who could shoot as she did,” the old sergeant said firmly.

  “Yes, Aidan!” Colin grasped the detail like a drowning man would a piece of driftwood. “You were at Badajoz. Did you ever hear of an officer’s daughter who served in the hospitals and was a sharpshooter? She would have been seventeen or eighteen.”

  Aidan scratched his forehead. “The hospitals were at Llerena, about forty-five miles away, but there was constant movement between the two. She could well have been at Badajoz for some of the siege. But the Allies were twenty-seven thousand strong there. Was her father with the Ninety-fifth?”

  “No, her fiancé was. Her father was in the light cavalry.” Colin rubbed the inside of one hand with his opposite thumb. “See, we aren’t completely without information.”

  “Badajoz.” Aidan shook his head. “I still have nightmares about it sometimes. So many lives were lost, and then the Allied troops pillaged the city. For three days, it was a rout, shameful, inhumane. No one could control the men. A seventeen-year-old English girl at Badajoz. Her father must have been mad.”

  “She dressed as a boy,” Colin added helpfully.

  “So, we could be looking for a boy or a girl.” Aidan brushed his hair back in frustration. “Do you at least know where her father died?”

  “Waterloo, as did her fiancée.”

  “Over fifty thousand men were killed, wounded or lost in action at Waterloo.” Aidan walked to the window and looked into the garden, where Sophia and her children were playing croquet. “You do realize that none of this is terribly helpful.”

  “I know. But she didn’t leave me. I know it was her plan. I know it looks like she changed her mind, but I can’t believe she left me, at least not of her own free will.” Colin threw himself into a chair and buried his face in his hands.

  Seth and Aidan watched him silently, then, meeting each other’s eyes, raised their hands in helplessness.

  Seth said quietly, “When I was firs
t trying to discover who our mystery nurse might be, I heard about a missing heiress in the next county over. She’d been missing for several weeks—from the description, it sounded like our scullery maid. Apparently the heiress was found wandering the countryside out of her wits. The family was reportedly grief-stricken and put her into an asylum, hoping she’d recover.”

  “So it could be Lucy?” Colin raised his head from his hands.

  “Probably not,” Seth replied.

  “Why not?”

  “Because Lucy was with you at Em’s when I heard the reports that the heiress had been found,” Seth countered gently.

  “But something about it felt right?” Aidan interpreted.

  “Yes,” Seth pushed his thumbs into his waistband. “Your run-of-the-mill heiress wouldn’t hide in the kitchen of an inn, but one who grew up in the camps wouldn’t have been afraid of work or dishes.”

  “And you can’t shake the feeling that the heiress might have been Lucy.” Colin leaned forward, hopefully.

  “I couldn’t at the time—and I still can’t.”

  “Then perhaps you should investigate,” Aidan directed. “Ride back to the Newfords’. Find out who the heiress’s family was. Then track down anything you can about their mad relative. And see if Nell will give you any more information now that Lucy has disappeared. As for me, I think I know whom I might ask about the sharpshooting.”

  * * *

  The banquet hall was full, a dinner for Prinny about to commence. Colin and Aidan found General Hampton in the corner regaling a group of MPs with stories of his latest fox hunt. The general had enjoyed his years since Waterloo, growing happy and fat.

  “My boy, glad to see you!” He slapped Aidan’s back firmly. “I haven’t seen you since that night when . . .” His voice trailed off as he saw Lady Wilmot.

  “My brother Colin Somerville; and my fiancée, Sophia, Lady Wilmot.”

  “Welcome, welcome! I’m happy you could accept the invitation.”

  “We have a question about one of the officers under your command, or who we believe might have been under your command.”