by Joan Smith
She could hardly claim otherwise as she was playing the piano loudly enough to be heard in the hallway. Nor did her delighted smile when she rushed forward to greet them suggest for a moment that she was anything but thrilled to see them.
“Lord Byron! And Lady deCoventry — do come in, all of you. So charming of you to call. Sir Reginald, and Lord Luten,” she continued, smiling and shaking hands. “Go fetch Sir William, Harkins,” she said to her butler as she helped Corinne from her pelisse and led them to the drawing room, where the fire in the grate took the worst chill from the air.
The room, like the exterior, was more than genteel, less than elegant. No delicate Adam fireplaces or plasterwork on walls or ceilings lightened the severe geometry of the paneled room. Heavy furnishings, the work of Kent, warred with a few lighter touches Lady Richardson had instituted. Prance felt the window hangings ought to have been an aged, dark velvet, but they were actually gold brocade, with heavy pelmets above. One graceful Regency chaise longue in striped satin stood out like a brooch on a shroud, to emphasize the heaviness of the rest.
“I do hope this is a friendly visit, and not some more horrid news of mayhem or murder?” she said. “I heard about Vulch, of course. I wonder who he was fleecing at cards. A pity his body was dumped on you, Lord Byron. Newstead is becoming quite a necropolis.”
Corinne thought she seemed a trifle nervous, but the unexpected arrival of so many prestigious visitors might account for it. She had slid in that hint that Vulch was killed as a result of his cards tricks rather neatly.
“No murder today. If you’ve heard of Vulch’s murder, then we have no new horrors to report,” Byron said, taking a seat by the hostess. “I was showing my guests about the neighborhood and took advantage of your kind offer to drop in, any time. I hope we haven’t come at an inopportune moment?”
“No indeed. I was just practicing my scales. It’s quite shocking how I’ve let my music go since leaving Jamaica. Pray don’t ask me to play for you. Poor William is the only one I subject to my wretched performance.”
She called for tea, which soon arrived. After a little conversation, Sir William was heard coming in the front door. A young, piping voice suggested that Willie was with him. “But I am old enough, Papa,” it said. “I can ride the donkey, and Jennie is bigger than a pony.”
“In here, William,” Lady Richardson called. “We have company. Bring Willie in to say hello.”
Willie bolted in in front of his father. His cheeks were red from the cold and his golden curls were tousled from the hasty pulling off of his hat. He was a handsome boy and wore all the hallmarks of being not only well looked after but pampered. His suit was of fine wool, with a sparkling white shirt peeping out at the top.
“Can’t I please have a pony, Mama?” he begged. “Papa says it’s all right if you agree.”
“Later, dear. We have company.”
“I know,” Willie said, examining each of the guests in turn. “I’m William Richardson,” he said, his gaze lingering on Corinne. “Who are you?”
“These are our friends, Willie,” his mama said, glancing fondly at the boy. “Remember your manners and bow properly. And remember what Nanny told you. Children don’t speak until spoken to.”
“You’re speaking to me, so can I talk? I would like some cocoa. I’m perishing cold.”
The visitors smiled and expressed their admiration of Willie, who was indeed a handsome boy.
“Run along now,” his mama said. “Tell Nanny I said you may have some cocoa. But no buns. They’ll spoil your appetite.”
Sir William also smiled fondly on his son. Once Willie was out of the room, he resumed his usual sad and worried expression, but trying to put a polite face on to greet the callers.
“I didn’t know you had taken Willie out,” Lady Richardson said to her husband. “I thought you were doing the monthly accounts.”
“I was, but Willie wanted to show me how he could ride the donkey.”
“It must be the accounts that explain your moroseness,” she said. “Not that we are in dun territory!” she added hastily.
“I’m just a little worried about getting Willie a pony,” he explained. “He wants it so badly I hate to deny him, but if he fell off and hurt himself...”
“This after you convinced me the boy must learn to ride? Get him the pony. Don’t you agree, Lord Byron?”
“If he’s old enough to want to ride, then I would let him, but he’s your son, Sir William. The decision must be yours.”
To lead the conversation to art, Prance began praising the room. “Is that a Titian on the far wall?” he said, rising to examine what his knowing eye recognized as a quite inferior Italian painting.
“Alas, no,” she said. “But we have some rather fine portraits in the gallery. My grandfather was painted by Gainsborough. Would you care to see it, Sir Reginald?”
“Lead on! I’m a positive glutton when it comes to art.” This was true, but he did not share the English passion for Gainsborough, whom he called an illustrator, not an artist. His models looked as if they had been treated by a taxidermist and propped up under a tree. Van Dyke made the rest of them look like amateurs.
Lady Richardson rose and looked around. “Would any of you care to join us? Lady deCoventry?”
Byron and Corinne went with her. Luten remained behind to see what he could discover from Sir William.
Lady Richardson seemed to know what she was talking about. She could ream off the names of the various gentlemen and their ladies and give some details of their background. She knew the names of the artists as well, and spoke of the family history as she led the tour.
“This is old Jeremiah Redley,” she said, stopping at one portrait of a gentleman in a military uniform from the period of Queen Anne. “He could have won the family a title if he had played his cards right. He was a close friend of Marlborough, but he left the army and married a widow lady from the provinces, so we remained mere commoners.
“And here are my papa and mama, done just before they left for Jamaica. Only an inferior local artist, as he was a younger son,” she said, as they neared the end of the long gallery. The mama was a fairly nondescript lady who more closely resembled Sir William than Lady Richardson. But when Prance looked at the portrait of her papa, his heart sank. Remove that idiotic tricorne hat, set a blond wig on the man, and he could pass for Lady Richardson. The same blue eyes, the same strong, arched nose that recurred in the paintings through the centuries. Lady Richardson had quite obviously been born a Redley. And if she wasn’t an impostor, why the devil would she have murdered anyone? The whole case against her rested on her being an impostor.
“Quite a noticeable resemblance to your papa,” he said weakly.
“Ah, the Redley nose!” she laughed. “I fear it is one of those characteristics that endures, like the Hapsburg jaw. No doubt Willie will have it when he’s a little older. It suits the males better, I think.”
After assuring Lady Richardson that her nose was unexceptionable and praising a few more portraits, they returned to the salon, where Luten was having uphill work getting anything useful out of Sir William, who preferred to speak of his son. The man was well informed on local matters. He volunteered that he had attended a meeting of the parish council two evenings before to discuss the rates for the next year, which did not constitute an alibi. He might have killed Vulch after the meeting. He expressed little interest in politics and none in becoming an MP.
Luten was relieved when Coffen straggled in, his buckskin trousers and topboots somewhat the worse for mud. “Took a tumble,” he explained. “I had to give Jessie Belle a good going over in the stable before coming in. Bad enough to lame your own nag, but when you’re riding someone else’s, you feel like a Johnnie Raw.”
“How is Jessie Belle?” Sir William asked.
“Not lame. She was startled by a hare is what happened, but her ankles are all right.” He looked around the room and said, “Where’s the others?”
&
nbsp; “Lady Richardson is showing them the gallery,” Luten replied.
“That’d be Prance’s doing. Nothing he likes better than a picture. Unless it’s a new jacket.” He accepted a glass of wine, took a gulp and turned to his host. “I daresay you heard about Vulch sticking his fork in the wall?”
“Yes, I heard it in town yesterday. I stopped in for a pint.”
“Did the lads there have any idea who had done him in?”
If the question upset Sir William, you would never guess it from his face. “The consensus is that he tried his card tricks with the wrong fellow.”
The others soon returned from the gallery. Lady Richardson made a minor fuss over Mr. Pattle when she heard his tale of taking a tumble, and while she talked, he examined her slippers. Looked about the right size to him. This was only confirmation, for he had meanwhile found an actual shoe to measure.
They parted on perfectly amiable terms.
“I hate to give up my pet theory,” Prance said as they drove home, “but if she’s not a Redley born and bred, I’m a Frenchman. She’s the image of her papa, and knows all the family history the way only family members do. She knows something about art. Nessie wouldn’t be so well informed. And she plays the piano too, after a fashion.”
“Perhaps she’s just learning to play,” Corinne suggested. “She sounded pretty shaky on those scales, and it was only the C scale. That’s the first one I was taught.”
“No, we’ve been barking up the wrong tree,” he insisted. “And all because she wore her skirts unstylishly short when she arrived from Jamaica, and didn’t want Corinne to know she frequented a local modiste. We’re back to the beginning.”
“Coffen may have discovered something,” Corinne said.
“What is there to have discovered at Richardsons’ stable?”
“He mentioned looking for blood stains.”
“He’ll not find them. They’re innocent.”
Coffen beat them home and was waiting for them in the salon. “She’s the one was in your library right enough, Byron,” he announced, flourishing the footprint on the back of Cromwell’s letter, now sadly crumpled. “And plus she was out in some muddy place lately. She had a pair of riding boots at the back door of the house, waiting to be cleaned off. They matched the print I got in your library.”
“We now believe Lady Richardson is who she claims,” Byron said, and explained about the family resemblance.
“Then what was she doing going through your letters on the sly? There’s something havey-cavey afoot here. There might have been some other reason for her to kill Nessie. P’raps Nessie had something on her, some other murder or what have you. Would she have been playing around on Sir William, I wonder? Her son, might he be a by-blow, and Nessie aware of it.”
“I can’t see old William cutting up too stiff over that,” Prance said. “He seems so lethargic.”
“The only thing that puts any spark in him is his son, though,” Luten said. “He’s extremely fond of Willie. That’s the reason they came back to England, to give Willie an English upbringing. If he thought Willie wasn’t his child ...”
“I didn’t see any indication on the boy of that Redley nose,” Byron said. “And in any case, that would only prove Lady Richardson is his mama. It says nothing of his papa.”
Coffen considered all this a moment, then said, “I don’t see how Vulch could have twigged to it if Willie was a byblow. And anyhow I thought we were agreed that a woman couldn’t have handled Vulch’s murder by herself. If she’s in it, so is Sir William.”
“Or some male accomplice, at least,” Byron said. “If Vulch weren’t the victim, he’s the one would spring to mind. And as we’re now considering adultery on the lady’s part, I’m glad she was already enceinte when she arrived, or my name would arise again.”
Coffen narrowed his eyes. “You wasn’t out the night Vulch was killed,” he said. “Not that I’m saying you’d any reason to shoot Vulch. Nothing of the sort. Why should you?” He directed a penetrating stare at Byron as he spoke.
They all smiled at Byron to disassociate themselves from Coffen’s hint. Luten said, “We don’t actually know that Vulch’s murder and the gold he amassed have anything to do with the body on the island. He seems pretty universally unloved.”
“I don’t believe the Richardsons had anything to do with either murder,” Prance said. “Vulch was probably killed by someone he was playing cards with.”
“If that’s the case, we’ve got to find out who he was playing with,” Coffen said. “I’ll have a word with Tess. The Green Man’s the likeliest place he would have picked up someone. The locals won’t sit down with him, so it must be a stranger.”
As he arose, Mrs. Ballard tugged at Corinne’s elbow and held a whispering session with her. When she had finished, Corinne said, “Have you considered the possibility that Vulch is Willie’s father? Lady Richardson could have had an affair with him in London.”
Prance stared as if she’d claimed the boy’s papa a devil. “That passes the bounds of possibility,” he said. “Let us not sink into utter foolishness. She’s very aware of her social position. She might have an affair with a duke or earl, but surely not with a Vulch..”
“We didn’t really know him. What do you think, Coffen?” Corinne said, turning to Coffen.
Prance frowned at Mrs. Ballard. He knew where the idea had come from. The lady was revealing a side of her character unsuspected in the past, due, no doubt, to her reading all those marble-covered gothics. He must make sure his novel was not submitted to the Minerva Press.
Coffen replied bluntly that, “She wouldn’t touch Vulch with a pair of tongs.”
This seemed to settle the question. He was so eager to be off that he decided to take his luncheon at the inn, where he had to wait until the lunch crowd dispersed before he had any privacy with Tess.
“Don’t they feed you up at the Abbey then, Mr. Pattle?” she said with a saucy smile as she took away his plate.
“Not as well as you feed me here. I do like a good bubble and squeak. You heard about Vulch, I expect?”
“That I did. There won’t be many tears shed for the likes of him. An ill wind that blows no good, as they say. Since I can’t give him back his shawl, I’ll keep it.”
“Why not? It looked dandy on you. Was he in here the night he was killed?”
“He dropped in around three that afternoon, not at night.”
“Did he meet anyone, any traveler?”
“No, we didn’t have no strangers in that day. He set by himself, looking out the window with a smirk on his ugly face, like he’d won the lottery. Whatever scheme he was hatching, it was the death of him.”
“So it seems,” Coffen said. “I wonder now, who will come into Vulch’s house and his mount, what they call his estate? He had no family, I understand.”
“Not since Minnie was killed. Nor he had no friends either. The crown’ll grab it, mark my words, unless it’s seized to pay up any bills he owes.”
A pair of farmers came in and settled themselves by the grate. She snapped up the generous tip Coffen placed on the table and left to serve the newcomers.
He rode home, deep in thought. At three o’clock Vulch was alive and well and smirking at some plan. What happened between three and whenever he was killed? That probably happened after dark. The remains of gammon and egg in the kitchen suggested he had gone home and made himself a supper. A supper for one, there was only one plate. Someone had called on him after supper, posing as a friend, shared an ale, and shot him. And likely made off with the gold in the chest. That suggested that his caller knew about the gold. Coffen couldn’t believe Vulch had broadcast it, so whoever it was had probably given it to him. Vulch’s smirk might have been caused by thinking he was going to wring more money out of his victim. The victim couldn’t or wouldn’t pay, and killed him.
And despite what Luten said, Coffen still thought it had to have to do with the body in the grave. That’s when it all started
, when he found that body. If it wasn’t Lady Richardson, who was it? Was it Nessie? He felt in his bones that it was, but he was damned if he could think why she had been murdered. Well, he’d just have to wait and hear what Black had to say. A good man, Black. Sharp as a needle and thorough. He’d pick Minnie Vulch’s brain clean. She’d end up telling him things she didn’t even know she knew.
* * *
Chapter 23
Black, deprived of his beloved mistress in London, was sunk deep in gloom. He couldn’t be rushing to open doors for her, to stoke up the fire of whatever room she wished to use, to fetch her a shawl or a glass of wine. He couldn’t even keep an eye on the other members of the Berkeley Brigade for her, as he usually did, since the whole lot of them were gone.
The days dragged by. He scanned each morning’s post with the eagerness of a lover to see if she had written making any small request of him. His spirits soared when he saw his name written in her dainty script. It would alleviate his grief to be able to perform some duty for her during her absence.
He knew before he opened the letter that it was more than one page, and his heart throbbed. Could it possibly be she wanted him to join the party at Newstead? He opened the letter with trembling fingers, and when he saw the two closely written sheets, he called a footman to replace him at the door and went into the drawing room to read it undisturbed.
He felt closer to her in her room than in his own little chamber near the front door. Black was no scholar, his writing was a trifle uncertain, but his reading was excellent. He had no difficulty understanding her hastily written letter. Before he reached the bottom of the first page, he decided that, whatever he discovered, he would take the news to her ladyship in person. It was hard enough to have her so far away, but to know a murderer stalked the grounds where she walked!
He clamped his black hat on his black head, drew on his black greatcoat and whistled from the doorstep for a hackney coach to drive him to Wild Street. He re-read the letter to familiarize himself with the details while he was trundled through the busy London streets, mindless of the noise and traffic beyond the window. By the time the carriage pulled up at the fading façade of a rooming house in the theater district, he knew what he had to find out. He was familiar with all the shabbier areas of London from the checkered past of his pre-butler days. He knew when he saw the list of female names posted inside the door that the women within would call themselves actresses but their stage was likely to be their bed, where they performed for an audience of one, poor creatures. There would also be wardrobe workers and theatre cleaners.