An Unseen Attraction

by KJ Charles

  “What?” Clem yelped.

  “Edmund Taillefer to Emmeline Godfrey,” Rowley read. “By special licence on the nineteenth of January 1850.” That wasn’t how Clem spelled his name, but the expression on his face could not be mistaken. “Is that your brother?”

  Clem nodded. “It’s pronounced without the L, a bit French-sounding. ‘Tai-yeh-fer.’ Talleyfer is a variation the family uses for bastards, there are a few families around Crowmarsh— This can’t be right, Rowley. Edmund’s wife is, was, Lady Lucinda Brereton. They married in sixty-three or so.”

  “I don’t dispute that, but it says here that an Edmund Taillefer, aged twenty-five, married Emmeline Godfrey of the parish of Penn, aged sixteen, in the year 1850.”

  “I don’t remember anything like this. I was, what, five? But I’m sure I would remember. He wasn’t living at home then, of course. He’d moved out a couple of years before because he was so angry with Father.”

  “Where to?”

  “A family property. In, uh, High Wycombe.” Clem stared at the paper. “I don’t think I understand this. I mean, it’s his name, but it’s, it’s, this can’t be right.”

  “What about the age?”

  “Yes. And it says his father is Hugo Taillefer too. It must be right. But what does it mean? Why would a thug from Golden Lane be looking for Edmund’s marriage certificate for a wedding I didn’t even know about?”

  “That’s a very good question,” Rowley said. “I think I’d like to talk to Mark again.”

  Mark lived and worked in Robin Hood Yard, by Furnival’s Inn. It was lawyer territory, Rowley knew; presumably they were his employers, though he seemed a rather tough specimen to do legal work. There was a discreet brass plaque with M. G. BRAGLEWICZ—ENQUIRIES on the doorpost, and the man himself opened the door, with a look of slight surprise on his solid features.

  “Morning— Is that what I think it is?”

  He let them into a tidy, rather plain room, evidently used for meeting clients. Rowley spread out the paper on the table and weighted the corners to stop it rolling up, and the three of them stood round it.

  “Well, now,” Mark said after a silent moment. “That is interesting.”

  “I really don’t understand,” Clem said. “So Edmund married this Emmeline Godfrey, that’s not a bad thing. Is it? Obviously the family didn’t know, or maybe they did except me. But even so, what of it? People marry, and remarry. Why would Lugtrout keep Edmund’s marriage certificate?”

  “This isn’t a marriage certificate,” Mark said. “It’s a page from a parish register, that’s why the other entries. Someone cut it out.” He peered at the edge of the paper. “It’s torn, see? Someone, presumably Lugtrout, took the page—”

  “Why?”

  “The obvious answer is, to hide the marriage.” Mark frowned. “Which…All right, so when you get married, the parson fills in the parish register and does a copy in a second register as well, and gives you a certificate, right? And then the copy register gets sent up to the bishop when it’s full, and I think the details from that go on to Somerset House, the General Register Office.”

  “My cousin Tim works there,” Clem said.

  “You can ask him, then. Point is, you can’t simply take the page out of the register and pretend it never happened. There’s the other copy and the counterchecks and the record keeping at Somerset House. There’s no way to hide a church marriage unless the minister’s in on it from the start.”

  They all looked at the name William Lugtrout.

  “Of course, plenty of people have no idea Somerset House even exists,” Mark went on. “I read of a case where some hayseed set fire to the parish register because he wanted rid of his wife. He got ten years, if I recall. So, if someone cut the page out of the register, maybe they were just pig-ignorant. Still, though…Clem, could you get your cousin to look this marriage up?”

  Clem’s face was tight and tense. “Edmund is my brother, Mark.”

  “And if his marriage is recorded at Somerset House, then that goes to show he’s done nothing wrong and not tried to hide it,” Rowley said. “For all we know it’s one of the other couples that was trying to hide their marriage. Maybe you should ask your cousin to check on all six?”

  Clem shot him a glare. “You don’t think that, though. You think Edmund’s done something wrong. Don’t you?”

  “None of the other spouses were giving Lugtrout free board and lodgings,” Mark pointed out, unhelpfully in Rowley’s opinion.

  “I have no idea what your brother could have done wrong, Clem. But Lugtrout was murdered and Spim burned my shop to get hold of this page, and I’d like to know why.”

  “I don’t understand how that could be anything to do with this. Edmund married this Miss Godfrey in a church, legally.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” Mark agreed. “You didn’t know about the marriage, but you were five, and he wasn’t on terms with the family, very understandable. And now he’s married again to a high-up lady, yes?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Fair enough. What happened to Mrs. Taillefer the first?”

  “She must have died,” Clem said. “People do.”

  “Don’t they just,” Mark muttered. “Look, Nathaniel’s round the corner, would you mind if we pay him a visit? I want a bit of legal know-how.”

  A five-minute walk brought them to Baldwin’s Gardens, where Nathaniel lived in a very comfortable, book-lined set of rooms. He was wearing a gorgeous silk dressing gown that set off his rather dramatic looks extremely well, although they would have been better suited by a pleasanter expression. He looked exhausted and unhappy, but he let the party in and listened to Rowley and Mark’s swift recounting of the tale. Clem stood, silent and miserable.

  “So here’s the thing,” Mark said. “The first Mrs. Taillefer. What are the options, legally speaking?”

  “Well, there are four,” Nathaniel said. “She died. He divorced her, or, after the Act of ’57 came in, she divorced him. Either way, an earl’s heir in a divorce petition…one would have expected that to come up in his recent court case. Or, failing those, she’s still his wife.”

  “How could that be?” Clem said blankly. “He’s married.”

  “Yes, he definitely is that,” Nathaniel agreed. “One way or the other. She’s dead, they’re divorced, or they’re still married. Pick one.”

  “What about desertion?” Rowley said. “If it was seven years—”

  “A common fallacy,” Nathaniel interrupted. “If Mrs. Taillefer deserted her husband and was not heard from for seven years, he would be entitled to assume her dead, but he would not be entitled to remarry. If he did and then she turned up again, he wouldn’t be prosecuted for bigamy, but the second marriage wouldn’t be legally valid.”

  “But lots of people—”

  “Yes, and they’re wrong. It doesn’t often matter, of course. If a carpenter’s wife goes off and he contracts another union, who’s to know or care that he leaves his tool kit to his son by the new lady? But an earldom is a different kettle of fish. If there was no divorce and Emmeline Godfrey is still alive, she’d be the Countess of Moreton in law.”

  “What about Peter?” Clem asked. He sounded strained.

  “Who’s Peter?”

  “Edmund’s son by Lady Moreton. His heir.”

  “Not if the first marriage was in force at the time of the second marriage, he isn’t.”

  “This isn’t funny,” Clem said. “There’s nothing funny about being an earl’s bastard, believe me. This is Peter’s life.”

  “Nobody thinks it’s funny,” Rowley said.

  “Neither funny nor plausible,” Nathaniel added. “We’re just chasing hares, Clem. It’s far more likely that Mrs. Emmeline Taillefer is long dead and your brother, as both a gentleman and an heir to an earldom, knew himself free to remarry. Although then we’d have to wonder why Lugtrout was hiding this paper, of course.”

  Rowley looked at the table to avoid Clem’s face as
he said, “The earl has been paying Lugtrout’s rent for years. Insisted Clem should give him house room and indulge his behaviour.”

  “Insisted I take care of him!” Clem said heatedly. “Edmund wanted him looked after, with care!”

  “Which might suggest friendship, or it might suggest blackmail,” Nathaniel said. “Clem, if your brother’s marriage did turn out to be invalid, just for the sake of argument, who would inherit the earldom?”

  “Desmond, my father’s brother, and then his son, Phineas. Why?”

  “I’m wondering who benefits from this paper being hidden, or coming to light. If Edmund’s marriage isn’t lawful, he would want to hide that for his son’s sake. But this Desmond would want to make it known, because it would make him the heir to the earldom. You see?”

  “No,” Clem said. “Or, yes, but what has that to do with it? Desmond lives at Crowmarsh and he’s seventy-three.”

  “So he’d need to hire someone to find the paper for him,” Nathaniel agreed. “Someone like Jim Spim.”

  Clem felt his mouth drop open at the sheer implausibility of his fussy, withered uncle Desmond doing any such thing. “But how would Desmond find such a man? You can’t advertise in the newspaper for a torturer!”

  “Your cousin Phineas is in town,” Rowley said neutrally. “Desmond’s son. You met him two nights ago.”

  “Yes, but he’s a stockbroker. He wouldn’t be any better at hiring a Golden Lane murderer than I would.”

  “There’s ways and means,” Mark said. “But the last thing the next heir would want is the page burned.” He had his notebook out. It lay obediently flat, Rowley noticed, evidently carefully chosen not to require two hands. “Let’s get to brass tacks. We need to know if this marriage is registered at Somerset House, whether there’s a divorce recorded, and if there’s a death certificate for Mrs. Taillefer the first.”

  “And if so, its date,” Nathaniel added. “Although if she was safely dead at your brother’s second marriage, I do wonder what importance this paper could hold.”

  “Be interesting to learn how she died, then,” Mark said.

  “Sorry?” Clem said. “What did you mean by that?”

  “Mate, someone’s hiding something. People want this paper. Evidence of bigamy, a motive for someone to get the first Mrs. Taillefer out of the way—”

  “Don’t you dare!”

  “Ignore him, Clem. Mark is prone to flights of fancy,” Nathaniel said, which was among the more unlikely claims Rowley had ever heard made. “Although it does seem that Lugtrout’s death and subsequent events are…let’s say unlikely to be unrelated to the Taillefer family.”

  Clem was breathing hard. “You can’t say that.”

  “I’m not saying anything until we hear from Somerset House. But you will have to face the possibility that your brother is implicated in a serious crime. Tampering with the parish register is a felony, and it’s hard to see how that can have happened without his knowledge and intent. You can’t wish this away.”

  Aggressive bastard. Rowley had never liked lawyers. “Look, Clem, even if this is a red herring, it needs to be cleared out of the way.”

  “We know someone wants that page from the ledger badly enough to kill for it,” Mark said. “Maybe Jim Spim, maybe someone paying him. Maybe someone wants to blackmail your brother. Maybe your uncle wants to get young Peter out of the succession. Maybe Mrs. Emmeline Taillefer’s come back, wants to claim her place as Countess of Moreton, and needs the page for proof. It would explain why she had to hire the muscle.”

  “Good Lord,” Nathaniel said. “There’s an interesting thought.”

  “Maybe your brother did away with his first wife. Maybe she’s long dead of natural causes and this ledger proves something completely different. I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s your family business, Clem,” Mark concluded. “And there’s a man dead and Rowley’s shop burned for it.”

  “There are going to be consequences, inescapably,” Nathaniel said. “And you need to be aware that they will be unpleasant, and public.”

  “Public,” Clem said. “What does that mean? That you’ll be taking this to the police? Writing articles accusing my brother of bigamy and murder?”

  “If it looks as though he committed them?” Nathaniel said. “Yes.”

  —

  By evening, Rowley was wholly unsure what to do.

  Clem and Nathaniel had had—well, Rowley wasn’t sure if you could call it a row, with Nathaniel staying so calm and logical it had put Rowley in a temper just to see it, but Clem had been as angry as Rowley had ever seen him. He was tolerant to a fault, to Rowley’s mind, and loathed confrontation, but he’d been shouting at the top of his voice, and not a million miles from tears.

  Rowley was of the opinion that Nathaniel was a prick. An unhappy prick, one with his own problems, but a prick nevertheless, because Rowley didn’t care about his problems. He cared about Clem. And Clem cared about his brother, who Rowley didn’t trust as far as he could throw him.

  Clem had gone to visit his cousin Tim to talk to him about the business. Rowley spent the afternoon engaged in the dirty, miserable task of cleaning his shop, throwing away soaked, scorched, and spoiled mounts, resenting every lost bird, twitching at every footstep that disturbed the quiet of Wilderness Row and made him wonder if it was Spim coming back with vengeance on his ripped face.

  He didn’t want to move from here, from Clem. But he was afraid.

  Clem hadn’t come back by the time Rowley wanted dinner, so he ate alone at a Lyons Chop House. He could easily have gone back to the shop and worked by gaslight; there was plenty to do there. It was not flattering to consider that he didn’t do so because he didn’t want to be alone in dim light, with shadows jumping around him.

  He went home instead. He rarely sat in the lodgers’ parlour, but he did this night, in case Clem should come back and want to talk, hiding in a copy of Charles Waterton’s collected essays. Waterton was one of Rowley’s heroes in the art of preservation, and he managed to lose his attention almost completely in the book, ignoring Mr. Rillington’s sporadic grumbles, until at last Clem put his head round the door, face drawn and unhappy. “Cup of tea, Mr. Green?”

  “I’d love one, Mr. Talleyfer.”

  Clem was in a terrible state. “I can’t bear this,” he said without preamble as soon as Rowley shut the door. “I’ve been thinking about it all day. Everyone talking as though my brother’s a criminal. You think he’s done something, don’t you?”

  “I think it looks bad,” Rowley said. “I’m sorry, but I do. Just sit down. Take a minute.”

  Clem didn’t sit. His shoulders were rigid. “I know you think I’m being absurd. But it’s just, it, it, this—” He thumped the wall with startling force. “I don’t know how to think about the idea that my brother might be a bigamist or killed his first wife, or my uncle Desmond hired people to torture Lugtrout, or any of it. That’s not just a thing to discuss, that’s— I don’t believe it, I don’t. None of this is anything like Edmund. None of this is right.” He rubbed his hands in his thick hair, dishevelling it. “It’s not just hypothetical, and it’s not just about me. What about Peter? He’s eight years old and his parents are already a scandal because they’ve separated. What happens to him if people start talking about his legitimacy? It matters in that world, Rowley. It really does. So many people, at school—if it wasn’t that I was Indian or stupid or clumsy, it was being a bastard. Or all of it together.”

  Rowley felt as though his heart had been fleshed out from his chest. “Sweetheart—”

  “It’ll ruin Peter’s life,” Clem said. “I won’t have it. It’s not fair.”

  Rowley took off his spectacles to massage his nose. His head ached and he could still smell wet smoke after the afternoon in the shop. “Maybe not. But there’s not a lot fair about any of this, and nothing you can do about it.”

  “I could stop asking questions,” Clem said. “I trotted off to ask Tim to look up this ma
rriage without even thinking because you all told me to, but what good will it do? Suppose we find out that Peter’s illegitimate, destroy his life, for what?”

  “To find out what’s going on, that’s what!”

  “If Edmund’s marriage, or marriages, has anything to do with the murder or arson,” Clem struck back. “Because if he doesn’t, if this is all a red herring, we’ll make Peter’s life hell for nothing.”

  “Nothing,” Rowley repeated. He could feel the quiver in his hands, the sensation of his throat closing over his words. “Yes, well, it depends how you define nothing, I suppose. To be honest, I don’t care if your brother has a dozen bigamous marriages, or about his son or Emmeline Whatsit, or any of it, and I’d be very happy to let him carry on his own sweet way. What matters to me, and I’m sorry to harp on about this, is that someone tried to kill me. And I’d like to know why, so I could ask them not to!” He hadn’t quite meant it to come out like that, but he was suddenly, overwhelmingly sick of the Taillefer family’s travails. “Because I definitely had nothing to do with this, and it’s me who’s had my livelihood destroyed and a murderer in my face, and if we’re going to talk about fair—”

  “Rowley—”

  “I don’t give a monkey’s nuts who’s the heir to a sodding earldom. I’m not a sideshow to your family melodrama. And if that’s the important part of this to you, I don’t even know what to say.”

  Chapter 9

  Clem felt thoroughly wretched all Monday. It was bad enough he’d fought with Nathaniel, who had only been trying to help, but he’d had that awful evening with Rowley too. Rowley had sounded as if he really thought Clem didn’t care, and that was so far from the truth it hurt. He was terrified for Rowley, and sick at heart thinking of him next door, alone. But the things Nathaniel and Mark had said were so big, so overwhelming, that he couldn’t seem to reshape his mind around them. It was like looking at an elephant close up, through a magnifying glass; he could see what was in front of him but it didn’t form a meaningful shape.

  It needed to. Clem took a long time to settle to change, he knew; he’d barely slept for a month when he’d taken on the lodging house. The flurry of events now was immediate and deadly and he had to make himself understand it, but he kept sticking in the mire of his own inability to believe it.