by Issy Brooke
“They are not expecting me yet, but I have information that they need.” She glared at him. “Any of them will do.”
“I don’t think—”
“No. You do not think. Which is why you are a mere constable. I do not think I shall be recommending promotion for you to the superintendent, you know. I am Cordelia, Lady Cornbrook. You will have no idea as to the stretch of my influence.” Mostly because it does not stretch very far, she thought.
“The superintendent?”
She glared even more.
“Very well. Wait here, madam.”
He backed away, watching her, and disappeared into a small room. The door closed but swung itself open again, very slightly, leaving a crack due to the warping of the wood. She moved towards it. An odour of pipe tobacco wafted out.
“Some woman is out there,” she heard the policeman say, “reckons on as she is a lady but she looks nothing like, to my mind. Asking for to speak to the detectives, as in, you two sirs, she don’t mind which.”
“What does she want to talk about?” another voice said.
“I ain’t got a clue. The price of bonnets and lace, maybe.”
“Oh, send in her. There’s precious little else happening so we may as well have some sport.”
As the policeman came out of the room, she was already at the door, and she swept past him before he could speak.
The two detectives wore normal clothes. She had discussed this strange phenomenon with Ivy; there was a great deal of bad feeling amongst the public for a man in authority being disguised as a ‘normal’ person. Who could you trust if they were there, in the crowd, listening? It unsettled people. And yet, Cordelia could see Ivy’s argument that it was necessary to help to fight crime. “Criminals must be prevented from committing their atrocities, not simply caught and punished after the fact,” Ivy had said. “And to prevent those things, it is necessary for the policeman to move in the same circles as the criminal.”
The two men were dressed in sober and unremarkable ways. Both of them got to their feet and performed small, jerky bows before one of them pulled out a chair and offered her a seat.
She introduced herself. They raised their eyebrows and she knew, immediately, that they didn’t believe that she was who she said she was. Her ‘middling merchant’ dress did not match her name and professed rank. How could she prove it? She could not. She forged ahead, anyway.
“I am here on the matter of the murder of Louis Bonneville,” she informed them.
Both men were now sitting again. One swung back on his chair, impudently. “We have the culprit in our cells,” he said. “What is that to you? Oh … John, do you remember what Hood was saying about that pestilent woman who forced her way into here, with that clergyman who is always buzzing around like a fly?”
“I do, indeed. She claimed to be a lady then, too.” He curled his lip, making the sandy edges of his moustaches bristle outwards like a cat that had been startled. He stared at each part of her body in slow succession. She wanted to throw something at him.
“I do not claim. I am.”
“Quite so,” the moustachioed-man, John, said blandly. “I am sure that you are. Oh, go on, then. So what frightfully important news do you have for us?”
“You have the wrong person in your cells.”
Both of them burst out laughing. “We have the woman who was caught red-handed, right there, in his bed! There was an empty bottle of wine with traces of poison within, a general scene of disarray, and who was she? Some loose woman that is passed from man to man! She does not even charge for it,” the man said, slapping his thigh with the sheer hilarity of the whole situation. “Frank, Frank, do you hear? We have the wrong one! Oh, what a day this is. Go on, then. So who ought we to have there in her stead?”
“I am not entirely sure yet,” Cordelia said stiffly. “But the suspects that you should look to would start with Mr Albert Socks. Have you spoken with the Lord Brookfield? And the enemies of Bonneville?”
“There is none so vindictive and likely to seek revenge as a woman,” one man said. “In fact, your actions in coming here raise my suspicions. An accomplice, are you? Some manner of accessory? Oh, that would explain your presence…”
“No!” she said. “Why would you think that?”
“We are men chosen for this role because we think what others do not,” the second, Frank, said. “We look for patterns and where the pattern breaks down, there is the crime! And you, madam, are outside of the usual pattern.”
“So you see that we must arrest you,” the first man said.
Cordelia shot to her feet and clutched the basket in front of her, wishing that she had more hatpins in her hat. But what could she do against two men, in the middle of a station house full of similar men?
She stood, as straight and tall as she could, and weighed up the distance to the door behind her. She would have to turn, and would lose vital seconds in her flight…
Frank and John laughed even harder. “Oh, your face!”
“Ha! She does believe it, Frank, she does! She thinks that we will arrest her!”
“Perhaps, then, there is some guilt in her?”
“Perhaps, indeed! Ha! Ha!”
They were mocking her. She narrowed her eyes but no clever retort came to her. Feeling hot, sweaty and deeply humiliated, she whirled around and stormed out of the room. She pushed past a policeman who was standing in the lobby, elbowing him aside with a quite unnecessary jab to his waist.
She had clear vision. She would not let her eyes brim with tears, and nor would she make any kind of scene. She would not stoop to display all those weaknesses that she knew they expected to see in her.
She heard a cry behind her, a small boy’s voice, and instinct made her turn her head back even as she pushed through the heavy wooden exit doors. The cry was cut off, and a door slammed somewhere.
It was nothing to do with her. She was moving forward through the door without looking where she was going, and she slammed with great force into a broad-shouldered man who was coming into the police station house.
“Madam,” he said, gripping both of her elbows to steady her.
She was glad that she had the basket jutting between them. She saw his face, and she pushed the basket hard into his solar plexus, breaking his hold on her arms.
“Hugo Hawke! You unhand me this instant.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Lady Cornbrook!” Hugo Hawke sounded as surprised as she was. Her old nemesis took a step back, and stared.
He had not changed since she had last seen him, the previous summer, when she had been a guest at his Cambridgeshire estate. She had rejected his proposal of marriage, and won her own house from him. As the trustee to her late husband’s will, he could have sold Clarfields and left her homeless.
But she had fought him, and she had been triumphant, and she had snubbed him publically, and such things did not sit well with the otherwise jovial and rather good-looking man. He was of the hunting, shooting, fishing set and intended to drink and party his way through life. Cordelia had been the first thing in his life that had not gone his way.
But other things must be going awry now, she thought. “Why are you here, at a police station house?”
“Oh, and it is delightful to see you, too,” he said sarcastically. “And I could ask you the same thing.”
“You could ask. I would not answer.”
“You are the rudest woman I have ever met.”
“And you are—”
The door behind Cordelia opened suddenly and caught up in her dresses. The policeman stammered out some apologies and then realised he had walked into an argument. He held the door open as more curious onlookers came out to watch the fuss.
“And you are a cad and a snake, and I assume you are here to hand yourself in for something,” Cordelia said haughtily.
“You have no call to say such things, a cheater such as yourself! I thought time might have mellowed you, but you are still a harri
dan and a—”
“How dare you!” she spat.
Hugo’s face was darkening and his fists clenched when something beige and soft hit the side of his head and rebounded to tumble back down the steps. He turned with a cry to face the new onslaught.
Geoffrey was standing at the bottom of the steps, at the head of an amused crowd. He began to walk up the steps towards them. “My lady!” he called stridently. “Have no fear. I am armed.”
Hugo put his hand up to his face and wiped at his cheek, then sniffed his hand. “With a pie? You threw a pie at me?”
The said object had rolled down the steps and been scooped up into the hands of a passing urchin who ate it hastily.
“I wouldn’t waste a real weapon on you,” Geoffrey said as he reached out his hand to Cordelia and placed his bulk between her and Hugo. He led her back down the steps.
Hugo shook his fist after them, but then realised that the police were now crowding in from behind. He looked startled, and hurried down the steps, but at an angle so that he came out onto the street about ten feet away from Cordelia and Geoffrey.
“I have powerful friends!” Hugo yelled as Geoffrey lunged into the road and began to wave at passing cabs. “With rather more clout than a coachman and a pie!”
They ignored him. “I was rather enjoying that pie, too,” was Geoffrey’s only comment as he helped her into a small cab that he flagged down by standing in front of the horse and growling. It was a single-horse fly and left her upper body exposed. She nestled back into the murky-smelling depths. Geoffrey slammed the half-door closed in front of her knees, before climbing up to sit next to the cab’s driver at the back, whether the driver wanted him there or not. There was not enough room. Geoffrey sat there anyway.
***
Around two streets from the lodging house, Cordelia banged sharply on the roof of the cab until they stopped. “I fancy walking the final way, to clear my head,” she explained as she paid the now-quivering driver. He was keen to be away and she had barely pressed an extra coin into his hands before he had slapped the reins on the horse’s back and cried “On!”
“What on earth did you say to him?” she asked Geoffrey. “I heard you talking but I could not make out the words.”
“I am a coachman, my lady. I offered him some helpful hints as to his handling and driving.”
“Oh dear. Well, thank you for rescuing me from that dreadful Hawke.”
“I wish I’d had more than one pie to throw at him, that’s all.”
She smiled. It had been strange to see the man; once she’d even thought of marrying him. He was good company but their disagreement had soured things irreversibly between them. And she had seen the worst of him, and hadn’t liked it.
She supposed that he had also seen the worst of her, too.
She scuffed her feet along the walkway that had been separated from the main part of the road by bollards, in a local experiment to try to cut down on the cases of pedestrians stumbling into horses, and vice versa. “Oh, Geoffrey, I don’t think I’ve really thanked you enough for being so loyal to me over the years.”
He grunted and increased his pace, immediately unwilling to engage in any potentially emotional conversation.
“Since he … Maxwell … died in that awful way, you have stuck with me. In fact, even before, when he was … acting as he acted … you were there, protecting me, and you need to know that I am grateful.”
He half-shrugged. “My lady, it’s my job.”
“Don’t belittle it like that. You go beyond your job and your role. You know what is right and what is wrong, and you act accordingly.” It might not be right or wrong according to society, but that is another matter, she thought. “I still think about that night, you know. When he died. My lord husband. I knew he was in no fit state to drive his carriage but I could never tell him so … and anyway, I wanted him out of the house, away from me. When he was so drunk, it was better that he was nowhere near me, or any person. So perhaps I am to blame. I didn’t stop him. I encouraged him. Maybe I even…”
“My lady!” Geoffrey said sharply. “It was an accident and nothing more. You must not talk this way. It was none of your doing and you have no cause to feel guilt, none at all.”
She found his paternal care comforting. “And once again you rescue me,” she said.
He chose to ignore her meaning — that he had rescued her from herself and her negative emotions — and instead he said, “From Hawke or from the police?” He barked out a laugh though she couldn’t see what was funny.
“Of all the places that I ought to feel safe, surely a police station house is one of the best,” she said, ruefully, as they reached the lodgings and she drew out her key.
“On the contrary,” Geoffrey replied. “Where else will you find such a collection of crime and criminals and ne’er-do-wells?”
“You don’t mean down in the cells, either, do you?”
“I do not.”
They entered the place which had already become her sanctuary, and she began to relax.
Chapter Fifteen
Two days later, and Cordelia found herself once again abandoning a horrific mess in the kitchen so that she could get ready to go out.
“Not one of these doughs held a good shape after being baked,” she complained. She tried to wipe down a floury surface but she used a wet cloth and Mrs Unsworth snatched it from her hands.
“My lady, no! You will make twice as much work for me. Go, go now. I shall see to this. Without help, as well. Alone, mark you, all my girls back at Clarfields…”
“Thank you.”
She heard a stifled curse aimed in her direction as she left the kitchen but she decided not to turn and challenge Mrs Unsworth on it. Anyway, the cook had a point. She was the mistress of her own domain and Cordelia was only admitted on sufferance. And Mrs Unsworth usually had a bevy of pale young women to do the rougher work.
Cordelia called Ruby to help her to prepare for the evening’s entertainment.
For Septimus Gibbs had been successful on her behalf. She was to be a guest at a ball that night, and he assured her that the Lord Brookfield would also be there.
“And more friends besides,” Gibbs said as he led her into the grand assembly rooms just three hours later. “For look, there is Mr Delaney and his wife Ivy.”
She scanned the room. It had been decked out with a peach-and-pink theme, and there were great tumbling displays of flowers that were artfully made to seem as if they were in a rococo jungle. The pillars and the pots, all covered in trailing tendrils and cascading flowers, made the large space more intimate as it was divided into nooks and crannies. She caught a few more familiar faces, and most of them were welcome ones. But not all. Her stomach clenched when she caught sight of Hugo Hawke. It was only to be expected that he would be present, but she was glad that he was in animated conversation with a highly decorated army-type man with a curious headdress, and he had not seen her.
“Might you introduce me to the Lord Brookfield?” she said to Gibbs.
“I shall do my very best, dear Cordelia. But he is most lofty, and I have to work for a living, you know.”
“But you yourself are the son of a nobleman!”
“The seventh, alas. They had quite run out of titles and positions by the time my mother had me. I suppose nobody expected that we all should live and reach adulthood.”
“How … interesting,” she said, as she realised that “how unfortunate” and “how fortunate” were both equally inappropriate comments.
“Ah, we might have a chance with the Lord B himself,” Gibbs said suddenly, and surged forward with Cordelia on his arm. “He is momentarily alone. If we can catch his eye, then … ah, yes.”
Lord Brookfield was a tall and elegant man, with good breeding oozing from every pore, along with the odour of cologne and very aged wine. They went through the typical ritual of greeting. Cordelia knew that she had a limited amount of time to engage him in conversation; courtesy would dic
tate that they conversed for a while, but also meant that after a minimum period, he would be free to go and speak to his closer friends, and she would have to let him go. Propriety worked both ways. You knew you had an exit and people would be too polite to hold you back.
And it was generally felt that it was crass to speak of politics, women or religion in general conversation. It didn’t stop the gossips, but Cordelia didn’t want to start out being seen in the wrong light.
Luckily, Lord Brookfield opened up the conversation first. As if reading from a manual of etiquette, he smiled and said, “What a charming bloom you have about your cheeks, my dear. You attend with the esteemed and respectable Mr Gibbs … forgive me, as I am not up to date with many things. Lord Cornbrook … I do not know of him. Does he travel abroad?”
“Mr Gibbs is ever my protector and chaperone, and has long been a friend to my family. Sadly my Lord Cornbrook passed away a few years ago and I have been re-entering the world by slow degrees. He is … was not of your station and did not move in London circles.”
“Please accept my condolences, and also my shame that I did not know.”
Why would he know? Though the exalted ranks of the aristocracy were small and insular, the country families like the Cornbrooks were scattered and varied. There was spreading nobility and titled persons of lesser rank everywhere, two-a-penny at every Hunt Ball and County Show.
“Indeed,” he went on, “you and I have something in common, for I too lost my very dear spouse, the incomparable Rebecca, although many years past now. We have been blessed with a daughter who is married and has, herself, been blessed in her turn by many children of her own. I keep a small house, now, but it is periodically invaded by those laughing terrors.” He chuckled amiably. “I am lucky. I get to enjoy their youth and frivolity, and I also get to hand them back as I tire of them, and reclaim my sanctuary once more.”
“Sadly I have not been in such a privileged position,” she said, and he immediately changed the subject so as not to cause her distress.
“Do you commonly reside in London?”