by C. S. Harris
Tom swallowed the argument he’d been about to make. The humiliation of yesterday’s failure to scout out anything of use at the Pavilion still burned within him. He was determined to wheedle the information Devlin needed from Lady Anglessey’s servants, and if that meant dressing up like some eighteenth-century fop—well, then, he’d do it.
Tom craned his neck to get a better look at the seam Miss Kat was taking in. “That’s crooked.”
“I’m an actress, not a seamstress.” She bit off her thread and sat back on her heels to survey her handiwork. “And this livery belongs to the theater. You tear it, or spill anything on it, and I’ll take the cost of it out of your hide.”
Tom stepped off the low box she’d had him standing on. “’Ow would I tear it?”
She laughed, an open, spontaneous laugh that made him grin. She was bang-up, for being such a famous actress and all. She was also the best pickpocket he’d ever seen, although he supposed most folks didn’t know that.
“Tell me about this man, the one who was following his lordship yesterday,” she said in an offhand kind of way as she bent to assemble her scattered pins and threads.
“I didn’t see ’im afore ’e come up with us. But then, no one’s got eyes and ears like his lordship’s.”
She nodded, not looking around. “Do you think he might have something to do with this murder his lordship is looking into?”
“Don’t know what else it could be about. I mean, it stands to reason, don’t it? You go pokin’ around in a murder, you’re liable to stir up some weery desperate people.”
Tom thought it was all pretty exciting, but then he got a look at Miss Kat’s face and he suddenly regretted having said so much. He snatched up the ridiculous scrap of satin and velvet that was supposed to serve him as a hat. “Well, I’m off, then.”
Her face cleared so suddenly he was left wondering if he’d simply imagined the troubled shadows he thought he’d seen there. “Remember,” she told him as he balanced the tricorne on his head and started to dash off. “No scuffling with the linkboys.” She raised her voice to shout after him. “And no eating or drinking.”
THE MARQUIS OF ANGLESSEY’S TOWN HOUSE was an enormous pile on Mount Street.
Tom stood on the flagged sidewalk, his neck aching as he tipped his head to look up four stories and more to the stately house’s pedimented gray slate roof. The Marquis himself was obviously still in Brighton, for the knocker was off the door. But his servants had already draped the house in mourning, festooning the tall, silent windows with crepe and hanging a black wreath on the entrance.
Adjusting his starched stock, Tom marched up the short flight of steps and used his fist to beat a lively tattoo on the shiny, black-painted panels of the front door.
When there was no answer, he pounded harder.
Beside him, an iron railing separated the main front door from the area steps that led down to the service entrance. When Tom knocked a third time, the service door jerked open and a middle-aged woman with a bulbous red nose, plump cheeks, and wiry gray hair covered by an old-fashioned mop cap stuck out her head and peered up at him. “What you doing there, lad? Can’t you see the knocker’s off the door?”
Tom held up the folded, sealed letter Miss Kat had prepared for him. The letter was empty, of course, but then he had no intention of giving it to anyone. “I got a message here, for Lord Anglessey from Sir James Aston. He says I’m to give it into Lord Anglessey’s hand and no one else’s. Only, ’ow’m I supposed to get anyone’s attention when there’s no knocker?”
The woman let out a snorting laugh. “You’re new to service, then, aren’t you? Don’t you know what it means when the knocker’s down? It means the family ain’t in residence. You’ll either have to leave your message or take it back to your Sir James and tell him the Marquis ain’t expected till nightfall.”
Tom blew out a long breath and lifted his page’s cap to swipe one forearm across his brow. He didn’t need to pretend to sweat: the velvet was fiendishly heavy and the sun was out in earnest now, blazing down unnaturally hot for a June day. “Oh, Lordy,” he said, making his voice pregnant with weariness. “I was hopin’ to be able to sit a spell and maybe get somethin’ to drink while his lordship was writin’ his answer.”
The woman’s pleasant face puckered with motherly concern. “Oh, poor ducky. It is mortal hot today, isn’t it?” She hesitated a moment, then said, “Why don’t you come down here and have yourself a nice glass of lemonade before going back?”
Tom made a show of hesitating. “Well, I don’t know….”
“Come on, then.” She swung the door in wide and beckoned him with one hand. “I got a son just about your age, in service with Lord McGowan. I’d hope if he were standing all hot and thirsty on some gentleman’s doorstep, that cook’d be kind enough to bring him in and give him somethin’ and let him sit a spell.”
Tom figured it wouldn’t do to give her a chance to change her mind, and clambered quickly down the steps.
He found himself in a white-tiled room with stone flagged floors and big old wooden dressers laden with massive copper pots. Mrs. Long—as she identified herself—led him to a bench beside the kitchen table and sent one of the scullery maids scurrying to bring him a tall, frosty glass of lemonade. Mindful of Miss Kat’s dire warning, Tom thrust his neck out and drank very, very carefully.
“You said the Marquis won’t be in till nightfall?” he said, eyeing her over the lip of his glass.
“That’s what we’re expecting.” She heaved a great sigh and swiped at one eye with the corner of her apron. “He’s coming to bury that beautiful young wife of his, poor man.”
Lined up along the stone windowsill to cool stood three freshly baked pies. Cherry, Tom figured, sniffing longingly at the afternoon breeze, and maybe apple. He jerked his attention back to Mrs. Long’s plump face. “She died, did she?”
“You mean to say you haven’t heard?” She came to slip onto the bench opposite him, her voice hushed as she leaned forward conspiratorially. “Murdered, she was.”
Tom led his mouth go slack with shock. “No!”
“That’s a fact. They found her all the way down in Brighton—in the Pavilion, no less—with a dagger sticking out her back. Although what she was doing there is more than I can understand.”
“But I thought you just said his lordship was in Brighton?”
“Aye, so he was. But she weren’t. Stayed here, she did, this last week and more. Why, she sat up there in the morning room the very day she was murdered, eating the salmon with dill mayonnaise I’d fixed for her nuncheon. Not that she’d had much of an appetite lately, poor thing.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
Mrs. Long propped her elbows on the table, her chin sinking onto her fists as she thought about it. “Why, must have been just an hour or two after that. One of the footmen called her a hackney and she went off.”
“A hackney?” Tom had to work excessively hard to keep the thrill of triumphant excitement off his face. Here was exactly the sort of information Devlin needed. “Just goes to show, don’t it?” Tom said, keeping his voice slow and casual. “I mean, who’d have thought a lady what lived in a swell establishment like this couldn’t afford to keep her own carriage?”
Mrs. Long let out a peel of laughter that rocked her back in her seat. “Get away with you. Lord Anglessey’s warm enough he could set up a hundred carriages, if’n he had a mind. Don’t you know nothing, lad?” She leaned forward suddenly and dropped her voice to a whisper, as if imparting a secret. “A lady takes a hackney when she don’t want her lord to know where she’s going.”
“Oh.” Tom nodded with wide-eyed comprehension, as if this were all new to him. “Did she do that often?”
“Often enough these last few months, that’s for sure.” Spreading her palms flat on the table, she pushed up from the bench as if she suddenly regretted having said so much. “Now, then, ducky, how about a piece of pie to go with your lemona
de?”
Tom wanted that pie so badly his mouth was watering. But he dutifully swallowed and shook his head. “Oh, no, thank you, ma’am.”
Reaching down, she patted his cheek with one plump hand. “Your mama taught you real good, ducky. But there’s no use you trying to pretend you don’t want it, because I seen you eyeing them pies, sure enough. Now, what kind you want? Apple or cherry?”
Chapter 16
Sebastian spent what was left of the afternoon at the Inns of Court and the seedy gambling establishments around Pickering Place.
It didn’t take him long to discover that Bevan Ellsworth had indeed put in a rare appearance in the legal district on Wednesday. But his activities that day had been erratic, culminating in an evening spent at a hell just off Pickering Place.
In the end Sebastian decided the man could, conceivably, have slipped away from Grey’s Court long enough to have killed Guinevere Anglessey somewhere in London. But there was no way he could have hauled her body down to Brighton and still made it back to Pickering Place by ten o’clock, at which time he was deep in a game of faro from which he had not arisen until four the next morning.
SEBASTIAN ARRIVED at his own neatly stuccoed town house at Number 41 Brook Street just as the last streaks of orange and pink were slowly leaching from the sky and the lamplighters were beginning to make their rounds. Changing into evening dress, he directed his carriage to an imposing mansion on Park Street that belonged to his only surviving aunt, the Dowager Duchess of Claiborne. Technically, the house was owned by the eldest of Aunt Henrietta’s three sons, the current Duke of Claiborne. But she had the poor sod so thoroughly terrified that he had meekly left her in possession of the place and moved his own growing family into a small house on Half Moon Street.
Sebastian found his aunt descending the house’s grand staircase, the famous Claiborne rubies at her throat, a massive lavender turban decorated with red feathers swaddling her gray head. She paused halfway down the steps, one white-gloved hand groping to raise the quizzing glass she always wore on a gold chain around her neck. “Good heavens, Devlin. What are you doing here?”
“Hello, Aunt Henrietta,” he said, running lightly up the steps to kiss her cheek with genuine affection. “What a shockingly extravagant hat.”
“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” she said gaily. “Claiborne would have loathed it.”
Hendon’s senior by five years, she had been married at the tender age of eighteen to the heir to the Duke of Claiborne. It was considered quite a feat of matrimonial maneuvering at the time, for the former Lady Henrietta St. Cyr had never been a particularly attractive female, even when young. She had Hendon’s broad, fleshy face and barrellike body, and the same belligerent habit of staring people out of countenance. She made a grand duchess.
“I was just on my way to the Setons’ dinner party,” she said, leaning her weight on the silver-headed cane she carried mainly for effect. “As of my last reckoning, Claiborne has been dead two years and six hours. I gave the man four children, fifty-one years of marriage, and two full years of mourning. And now I intend to enjoy myself.”
“I wasn’t aware of the fact you ever did anything else,” said Sebastian, following her into the drawing room.
She gave a delighted chuckle. “Pour me some wine. No, not that paltry stuff,” she directed when he reached for the ratafia. “The port.”
She took an enthusiastic sip of her wine and fixed him with a steady stare over the top of her glass. “Now, what’s this Hendon tells me about you involving yourself in the death of that poor, unfortunate woman down in Brighton?”
Sebastian nearly choked on his own wine. “When did you see my father?”
“Today, in Pall Mall. They’ve all come back to London—Perceval and Hendon, Prinny and Jarvis, even that ridiculous Comte de Lille, as he calls himself—although how he can expect anyone to consider him the rightful king of France when he hasn’t even got the gumption to call himself Louis XVIII is more than I can see. Anyway, it seems Prinny’s taken such a turn over what happened in the Pavilion that his doctors thought it best to remove him from Brighton for a time. Not that he’s likely to get much rest at Carlton House, what with all the preparations for this grand fete he’s giving next week. Imagine! Giving a grand dinner to celebrate your ascension to the Regency. Might as well celebrate the poor old King’s descent into madness. I’ve a good mind not to go.”
It was an idle threat, as Sebastian well knew. The Prince Regent’s grand fete was certain to be the most talked-about social event of the decade. Aunt Henrietta would never miss such a spectacle.
She paused to draw breath and take another sip of her wine, which gave Sebastian the opportunity to say, “Tell me, Aunt, what do you know of Lady Guinevere?”
She looked up, a sparkle in her vivid blue eyes. “So that’s why you’re here, is it? Interested in discovering if the poor child was hiding some nasty little secret?”
“Her or someone close to her.”
“Well, let me see…. ’’ His aunt went to settle herself in a comfortable chair beside the empty hearth. “She was wellborn on her father’s side. He was the Earl of Athelstone, you know. A LeCornu. The family goes back to the Conqueror.”
Sebastian smiled. Bright, caustic, and irrepressibly inquisitive, Aunt Henrietta was one of the grandes dames of society. She might have been in mourning for two years, but nothing short of her own death would interfere with her ability to keep abreast of the latest on-dits. “And her mother?”
Aunt Henrietta frowned. “I don’t know much about her. She was the Earl’s second wife, I believe. Or was it his third? At any rate, she didn’t survive long enough for him to bring her to London.”
“Good God. How many wives did he have?”
“Five. The man was a regular bluebeard. The first four all died in childbirth. Gave him nothing but girls, too, which is why, I suppose, he kept at it. Managed it in the end, though. The new Earl’s about ten, I believe.”
Sebastian thought about the vibrant, brilliant young woman he had met at Hendon’s dinner table. What must it have been like for her, he wondered, growing up with a succession of stepmothers and a father desperate for a son?
“Lady Guinevere came out the same year as Emily’s eldest, you know,” his aunt was saying. At the mention of her daughter Emily, Aunt Henrietta’s lips pursed into a frown. As far as Aunt Henrietta was concerned, Emily had not married well, an act of folly for which her mother had never forgiven her.
“She was quite the sensation of the Season—I mean Lady Guinevere, of course, not Emily’s eldest. I’m afraid that poor child takes after Emily far too much to ever have had much of a chance of going off well, even if she had been well dowered, which, of course, she was not. But Guinevere! She was quite the toast of the town. Not much of a fortune there, either, I must admit, but the girl was a regular diamond of the first water, with plenty of spirit. A bit too willful, perhaps, for some, but then I’m not one who’s partial to these mealymouthed misses one encounters far too often these days.”
“Any scandal attached to her name?”
“None that I ever heard of.”
“None? A beautiful, vivacious twenty-one-year-old woman, married to an unwell, sixty-seven-year-old man? No whispers of a young lover?”
The very suggestion seemed to affront his aunt. “I should think not. Headstrong and unorthodox Lady Guinevere might have been, but she was no shameless hussy, however I hear things looked on Wednesday last in the Pavilion. She knew what was expected of a woman of her station, and it’s a shabby creature indeed who indulges in that sort of thing before she has managed to present her lord with an heir.”
Sebastian took a slow sip of his wine. “You say she has sisters?”
“Two who survived, each from different mothers. The youngest must still be in the schoolroom in Wales. But you may know the eldest, Morgana. She was never the beauty Guinevere was, I’m afraid, and she has the disposition of a Rottweiler. It’s amazing she managed
to marry at all, let alone do it as well as she did.”
Sebastian smiled. “Who’d she catch?”
“Lord Quinlan. Of course, he’s a mere baron as opposed to a marquis, and his fortune can’t begin to compare to Anglessey’s, but still. Until Guinevere married so splendidly, Morgana was considered to have done quite well for herself. Athelstone’s estates were never particularly extensive, and he didn’t manage them as well as he might have. Neither of the girls had much in the way of a dowry. I believe Athelstone settled everything he could on the boy.”
Again, her words hinted at a less-than-idyllic childhood. What kind of animosities must have brewed in the schoolroom of that death-haunted estate on the coast of Wales, Sebastian wondered; three girls from three different mothers, the eldest plain and ill natured, the middle one beautiful and appealing? He suddenly wanted very much to hear what Morgana might have to say about her sister.
“Where would I be likely to find her tomorrow?” he asked. “Lady Quinlan, I mean.”
Aunt Henrietta drew her chin back against her fleshy neck in a way that made her look more like Hendon than ever. “Well, let’s see. Morgana considers herself something of a bluestocking—she’s forever attending lectures at the Royal Academy and prosing on about electrical currents and steam engines and such nonsense. I should think she’d be likely to attend this balloon ascension we’ve been hearing so much about.”
“Balloon ascension? Where?”
“Good heavens, as if I would know.” Draining her wine, she set the glass aside and pushed to her feet. “Now you must be off. I’ve a party to attend.”
SEBASTIAN STOOD IN THE SHADOWS of his empty box at Covent Garden Theater and watched as Kat, splendid in the regal diadem and filmy trappings of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, swept onto the stage below. He knew she couldn’t see him. Yet somehow she must have sensed he was there, because for a moment she paused, her head turning toward him, and a brilliant smile flashed across her face. A smile meant just for him.