A Purely Private Matter

by Darcie Wilde

  “What could it be?” Alice peered at her friend. “Rosalind, you’ve got that look in your eye. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m wondering how a starving young actor and the daughter of a woman who keeps a boardinghouse get ten pounds to leave her mother and still have enough money left to successfully vanish,” she said slowly. “I’m thinking about scandal, Alice, and how it can affect low as well as high.”

  Alice considered this. “Except when scandal affects the middling classes,” she said slowly, “sometimes it’s not called a scandal, is it?”

  “No,” said Rosalind. “It’s called a crime.”

  CHAPTER 38

  As We Shall All Be Reunited

  Servants of other families ought not to be told the peculiar habits and conduct of your own.

  —Samuel and Sarah Adams, The Complete Servant

  Naturally, Alice wanted to proceed at once to Bow Street.

  “It’s Sunday,” Rosalind reminded her. “None of the principal officers will be there.”

  “Tomorrow morning then. The major wants me in the office but he will excuse me for—”

  “I can’t,” said Rosalind. “I have . . . an appointment.”

  Alice narrowed her too shrewd eyes. “What could possibly be more important than this?”

  “I . . . I’ll tell you afterwards,” said Rosalind. She had to repeat variations of this several times before Alice finally accepted it.

  “If you hear the trial is happening, send word,” Rosalind told her friend as they parted on the doorstep of Little Russell Street. “I will come at once.”

  Alice frowned, and promised, and frowned again.

  Now Rosalind stood in front of a new residence in a quiet neighborhood, with the pink letter in her hand. The house was terraced brick and very fine. The square in which it was situated was neat and respectable. Rosalind would not have blushed to be seen there at any time of day.

  I don’t need to do this, she said to herself. I can turn and go. I can come again. What if the trial is being held today? What if it is happening this moment? A man could die because . . . because . . .

  Because I want to see my sister. Because I want to know why she left me. Because, may God help me, I want to know that she’s all right.

  She just had to hope the world was kind enough not to hang a man because of it.

  Rosalind rang the house bell and was admitted by a plain-faced, plain-dressed maid, who took her up the stairs and let her into a parlor and asked her to please wait.

  Rosalind stood in the middle of the room and tried to breathe calmly. She tried to tell herself that she was wrong in her assumptions about Charlotte’s mode of living. Surely, she had been mistaken somehow, somewhere.

  But the room around her told the tale, with its stylized French furniture and its silks and gilding. It was too rich, and too luxurious. In fact, what it reminded Rosalind of most was Mr. Fullerton’s apartments at Graham’s.

  The door opened behind her. Rosalind drew in one more breath.

  “Hello, Rosalind.”

  Rosalind turned. “Hello, Charlotte. Or do you prefer Cynthia?”

  Her sister smiled. “From you, I think I’d rather Charlotte. I don’t get to hear my name much these days.”

  She hasn’t changed all that much, Rosalind realized. Charlotte still carried herself with her confident, sophisticated air. Her face still held the beauty that had marked her out when they were young—clear and fair, yet with something of an edge to her, a hint that this was not simply another pretty girl to be taken for granted. Or perhaps that was just the memory of all her tart teasing from the days they’d shared a bedroom. And a home. And . . . and . . . and . . .

  “Would you care to sit down?” Charlotte gestured her toward a pair of round-backed, gold silk chairs.

  “Thank you.”

  Charlotte settled herself on the sofa, lounging against its curved arm, the skirts of her peony pink dress spreading around her.

  “You look well,” said Rosalind.

  “I am well,” replied Charlotte. “How are you?”

  Rosalind found she had no answer. “Where . . . How is our father?”

  Charlotte sighed, clearly just a little disappointed. Rosalind felt a ridiculous pinprick of irritation.

  “Father is in his rooms,” her sister answered. “I kept him with me for a while, but after a certain point, that proved . . . awkward. I pay for a couple of manservants to wait on him and keep him out of the worst of trouble.”

  “And he is well?”

  “I will not insult you by saying I am surprised that you care. Yes, he is relatively well. I cannot always be there, but I receive regular reports.”

  Silence fell again. The Baroque clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly. Rosalind glanced toward it and saw how the mantel was crowded with china figurines, mostly cavorting shepherds and shepherdesses, in, she noticed, various states of decorous dishabille.

  “Why, Charlotte?” she asked the clock, and the figurines.

  “That is a question that covers a lot of ground, Rosalind.”

  She made herself turn her gaze back toward her sister. I will look at her, she told herself. I will see who she was and who she is and who I am as I stand near her. I am her sister. She is mine.

  “Why did you leave with him? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Charlotte looked down at her perfectly kept hands. “You were seventeen, Rosalind. And a very silly seventeen, may I add. Soppy in love with Devon Winterbourne and thinking no one had noticed. I didn’t believe you knew what a state our mother was in, or our father. And when he told me . . . he spun such a beautiful story. You know how he could do that.”

  Rosalind nodded.

  “I wanted very badly to believe the things he told me about how he had been cheated by false friends, and about how desperately he needed me. When I compared a life of being father’s helpmeet, and staying in our mother’s house with her constant hectoring and nervous spasms and criticism . . . I didn’t see it as any kind of choice at all really.” Charlotte paused. “It was less than a year before I found out I had been the silly one.”

  “You could have come back,” said Rosalind. “You could have written.”

  “No,” her sister replied. “I couldn’t. Not by then.”

  “Was it father’s idea that you join the demimonde?”

  “No,” Charlotte said again, just as flatly and just as firmly. “That is one sin you cannot lay at his door. I set my own feet on this particular road. He did take the money, though.”

  Old anger surged up in Rosalind’s veins. “You don’t have to do this, Charlotte,” she said earnestly.

  “What else am I to do?”

  “I have a house. You could come live with me.”

  But Charlotte only spread her pretty hands. “And then what would I be? Your housekeeper? Or just the fallen woman you so charitably took in because she now repents her sins and learns to make lace and knit caps for poor orphans?”

  The retort stung, but Rosalind did not let it stop her. “We’d work something out. I’ve made my own life now and—”

  “Yes, I’ve heard something about that.” Rosalind looked up sharply and Charlotte smiled archly. “You’re surprised? It’s a small world, Rosalind, and society is far more permeable than it likes to believe. I’ve kept an ear out for word of you, and I’ve heard how you’ve made yourself into a useful woman. Working for your living. Mother would have fallen into despair at the two of us.”

  “Yes,” Rosalind admitted. “She would.” Because Mother would have seen little difference between what Rosalind did and what Charlotte did.

  Charlotte’s expression softened, and when she spoke again, she at least tried to be gentle. “If I came to stay with you, word of who I am and what I have been would get out soon enough, and there would go your reputat
ion among the ladies you depend on.”

  “Perhaps I would not care.”

  “Perhaps I would.” Charlotte smoothed down her pink skirts and rubbed her white hands together. For the first time since she’d entered the room, she seemed ill at ease.

  “It is not so very bad, Rosalind,” she said. “I am not romantic about any of it. I have money in the bank. In fact, there were times I was considering sending you some. I have a steady protector now, and he is very romantic. He has said he wants to marry me. I think I will turn him down. He’d have to divorce his wife to do it, and what a man will do to one, he will soon do to another.”

  Rosalind knew she should be appalled. Horrified, even. She should flee from this fallen woman and forget she ever existed. Charlotte Thorne should be thought dead.

  And yet, when Rosalind thought of Captain Seymore in prison and his brother and sister-in-law so busy with their ambitions that they were willing to see him falsely condemned, the level of outrage she was meant to show simply would not come to her heart, or her tongue.

  “You should probably go now,” Charlotte said softly. “I expect my gentleman soon.”

  “Of course.” Rosalind got to her feet. “I . . .” She stopped and swallowed and started again. “Thank you for agreeing to see me.”

  “I am glad you came, Rosalind.”

  Rosalind reached out. She grabbed her sister’s hand and felt how it was slender and delicate and warm. And familiar. So very wonderfully, sadly familiar. “I’m glad I came, too,” she said, and she looked directly into Charlotte’s eyes. They were bright with the tears she was holding back.

  “May I . . . write to you?” her sister asked.

  “I’d like that,” said Rosalind.

  Charlotte’s eyes slipped sideways to the clock. She pulled away, smoothing her skirts and running a palm across her brow. “You have to go, Rosalind. But I am truly glad you came. You will take care?”

  “I will. Will you?”

  Charlotte smiled, and Rosalind again saw that sharp edge that had always belonged to her sister. “I have been for ten years.”

  The maid showed Rosalind out. She walked across the cobbled square, passing the perfectly respectable tradesmen and the perfectly respectable matrons. A few men who might have been anything from clerks to shop owners stood talking on the corner. It was as normal a day as when Rosalind had mounted the stairs. Nothing had changed in the world at all.

  On the far side of the square Rosalind stopped, and she turned. A well-dressed gentleman in buff and blue came sauntering down the walk, swinging his stick and whistling. He tipped his hat to a pair of women walking past and trotted up the steps to the house and let himself in.

  She did not know him.

  Rosalind turned and walked away.

  CHAPTER 39

  The Memory of Samuel Tauton

  Encouraged by hopes of discovery . . . officers, newspaper men, and ingenious speculators all work together, and pursue a common track.

  —Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald,

  Chronicles of the Bow Street Police-Office

  In the normal course of events, Bow Street’s principal officers were discouraged from working on Sundays. As good, upstanding family men, they should be spending that day at church and at rest. This particular Sunday, Harkness found himself not only working, but thrown out of his own home.

  “You get those things out of here, Adam Harkness!” His mother waved her dishrag at the piles of Cavendish’s letters. “I’ll not have my Sunday kitchen smelling like a bawdy house!”

  Saturday had been spent entirely in the warren of the Theatre Royal, talking to everyone and anyone he could get to stand still long enough—from the tired and brassy young women of the chorus; to the old sailors who took the skills they gained working in the rigging and turned them to working the ropes that flew the scenery in and out; to the seamstresses and the mantua makers. No one could remember any untoward person coming or going from the principal dressing room. No one could remember any disturbance at any time that night, except when Captain Seymore had tried to get past “Old Knobby” Ulbrecht.

  “Now, sir,” they all said, “can I get on with my work?” That is, when they weren’t damning his eyes and other portions of his anatomy, and ordering him out of the way.

  From the theater, Adam had gone to the home of Sir and Lady Bertram, only to be turned away before he could even set foot in the door.

  “My master says the matter is closed,” the footman told him. “He says he will not have the peace of his home interfered with by Bow Street or the papers or any others.”

  “May I speak with Mrs. Cecil Seymore then?” Adam tried.

  “My orders are to refuse all callers,” said the footman. “So take yourself off, right?”

  “Do you have any orders about taking a note?”

  He didn’t, and Harkness scribbled a few lines on a leaf from his notebook and gave it to the man along with a half crown, and took himself off, sour and discouraged.

  “It’s enough to make a man turn republican,” he said to Sam Tauton as they took a meal together at Regent’s Oyster House. “Sir Bertram’s so set on finding a way to that title, he’s willing to hang his brother.”

  “I don’t suppose it could be he knows his brother’s guilty?” suggested Tauton.

  “No,” replied Harkness firmly. “I’ll grant that somebody in that family may have stabbed Cavendish, but it wasn’t the man I saw in Newgate.” Something haunted Seymore. Harkness was sure of it. But he was equally sure it was not a guilty conscience. With enough time, he might have been able to find the answer, but nothing like that much time remained.

  “Well, if not Captain Seymore, then who?” asked Tauton.

  But Harkness shook his head and drank his beer, and went back out. There was an answer, and if it would not come to him, he would go and get it. So Sunday found him not at church, nor enjoying the roast at his family table, but in the patrol room with Mr. Cavendish’s collection of love letters spread out in front of him. With them, he had another note, this one from Mr. Fetch.

  Docket’s moving fast. Several matters dropped. Our man could come up before the judge Monday.

  Adam could hear the clock tick in Townsend’s private office. He could hear the bells ringing out from the churches. Every sound of the passage of time reminded him that the day was waning. The trial would come up, whether or not he or Seymore’s attorney was prepared. He would be called to give testimony and explain his evidence, and he had none. So the judge and the jury would look to the obvious suspect, the jealous husband.

  “There is an answer,” Adam growled. “Where is it?” he demanded of the useless flowery pages of his notebook, his worn patience, and his taxed memory. “Where is it?”

  He was still asking himself that question when he woke late on Monday and, cursing himself for a sluggard and a fool, raced back to the station, to find Stafford had a note for him. He tore it open, and sagged against the wall in relief.

  Not today, Mr. Fetch had written.

  “One more day,” muttered Harkness. “One more day and I’ve still not a clue in the world.”

  And so he went to the prison to try once more to talk to Seymore, who shut his mouth and turned his face to the wall.

  And he went to Soho Square, and was once more turned away from the door. He stood beside the square’s famous fountain of Charles II and stared at the windows like a frustrated suitor, but the drapes remained closed, and if Mrs. Cecil Seymore even knew that he was there, she was not coming out.

  And he went back to the theater and questioned Dr. Arnold again, and Mr. Kean again, and Mrs. West again.

  “I’m sorry,” they told him. “Truly. I wish there was more.”

  And here he sat again, with the afternoon turning to evening outside, and the clock in Tauton’s office making its damned incessant ticking, and
he could not do the one thing he wanted so much to do.

  He could not go find Rosalind.

  It was ridiculous. He should not be afraid, but since he’d left the letter he’d gotten from her sister, he could not make himself return to her house, or write her, or make any other approach, because he could not stand the possibility that she might turn him away.

  She never would. She wanted this. She wanted to know.

  Except when people got what they wanted, sometimes they found it was more than they could stand. Harkness stared at the scented letters, all from women who had gotten what they wanted of Mr. Cavendish, and found it had done them no good at all.

  “Mr. Harkness?” called Tommy from the doorway. “Mr. Harkness, there’s a couple of ladies here . . .”

  Harkness spun about to see Miss Thorne and Alice Littlefield.

  “I am beginning, sir, to believe you have fabricated your mother and family,” said Rosalind. “I think you live here.”

  Adam rose to his feet and bowed. “There are days my mother would agree with you.”

  “We’ve news for you, Mr. Harkness.” Alice wrinkled her nose. “Good lord, what is that smell?”

  “That is the scent of infatuation.” Harkness grimaced. “And not a certain amount of disappointment.”

  Rosalind touched the piles of letters. “Oh, dear. From Mr. Cavendish’s admirers, I assume?”

  Alice lifted two of the pink letters and scanned them, and set them down immediately. “If I die suddenly, I am ordering George to burn all my correspondence.”

  “Which is what the captain says he did with those letters defaming Mrs. Seymore that he was sent,” Harkness told them. “And so we’re left with this.” He waved his hand over the scented piles. “I can only hope, Miss Thorne, Miss Littlefield, you have found something more useful.”

  “Have we!” cried Alice. “George is pea green with envy!”