by Joan Smith
Of course it was a thrill to be seated on the grand tier, the butt of much curiosity from the bejeweled ladies and dashing gentlemen inhabiting the other boxes. Rose played her role of Emily in The Deuce Is in Him with verve and style, but throughout the first act Pamela kept waiting for it to be over, so that she might go backstage with Breslau.
Her hopes were dashed entirely. At the intermission, Breslau leaned across to his Aunt Agatha and explained that he must leave for a moment, but would have wine sent in. When Pamela rose to join him, Agatha put a bony hand on her arm and said, “There is no need to disturb yourself, Miss Comstock. You would not want to meet the rakes and rattles who prowl the corridors at intermission. You will be better off here, with us.”
Pamela cast a demanding eye on Breslau, and discovered a smile lurking on his lips. “Quite right,” he agreed.
“Beast!” she hissed as he took his leave.
“I’ll give you all the details after the play.”
She had no opportunity to revile him till the next intermission, when she claimed her legs were cramped and, despite the low company prowling the corridors, she really must have a little stroll.
“Try if you can find a quiet hallway, Breslau,” Miss Agatha advised with a sorry shake of her head.
As soon as they were out of the box, Pamela turned a wrathful eye on him. “You did it on purpose! Don’t bother denying it. In fact, you invited your aunts to join us. Why did you tell them we were coming to Drury Lane?”
“I had to. They had the tickets.”
“You could have told them you’d given the extra seats in the box to someone else.”
“You would urge me to lie, Miss Comstock?” he tsk’d. “What next?”
“You lie as quick as a dog would trot. You’ve told a dozen plumpers since we got to London. Did you not instruct me to let on my gown was ripped, so you could read Fleur’s private correspondence?”
“Now do you feel better?” he asked with a show of solicitude. “Aunt Agatha was quite right, for once. My destination was the greenroom, you see.”
“But I should love to visit a greenroom, of all things!”
“Like is drawn to like, greenhead to greenroom. I made sure you’d employ these few moments to ask what I learned.”
“Did you hear something?” she asked eagerly.
“Spiedel’s there, tearing his hair and buttonholing everyone, including the handymen, to ask what they’ve done with the marquise. If the lad is acting, I mean to hand him the lead in the next play whether Fleur likes it or not. Actually it may be too late for that now. Rose tells me he’s been offered a minor role at Covent Garden. She thinks that is what his argument with Fleur was about.”
“That hardly sounds fatal. And he doesn’t know where she is?”
“I’m convinced of it. He was close to tears. ‘She was an angel, and I was constantly displeasing her. She didn’t ask much of me, and she was so generous. I should have done what she wanted.’ That sort of carry on.”
“What did she want him to do?”
“Refuse the role at Convent Garden, I expect. Rose and the others are becoming mighty curious. We can’t keep Fleur’s disappearance a secret much longer. We have either to find her or call in the police.”
“Why do you say disappearance, Breslau? Would murder not be the more appropriate word?”
“We shan’t know that till we find her, or her body.”
“I assume Henry Halton wasn’t there, or you would have told me.”
“No. His lady, Meg Crispin, had a letter delivered by a messenger claiming he’d been delayed a few days in Kent. It didn’t come by post, if that means anything.”
Pamela considered this. “He went to Hatfield, not Kent. Why is he lying if he’s not up to something?”
“He’d have no reason to lie to Meg. Perhaps he is in Kent. The flaw in choosing Halton for the villain is that he has no money, and he’s too young to have a history worthy of blackmail. Of course he could be acting for someone else.”
“You always keep harping on blackmail.”
“How else can we account for her having Lady Raleigh’s diamond bracelet?”
They discussed this for a few moments. When the warning bell rang, they turned back toward their box. “I wonder when we can expect to see General Max,” Pamela said.
“If he’s not here by morning, I’ll return to Belmont. Will you come with me, or shall I take you to your Aunt Foster’s? Tomorrow is the day you were supposed to join her.”
Neither destination pleased Miss Comstock. She wanted to remain exactly where she was. She wanted the crime to come to her, but as this was impossible, she asked, “When do you expect to come back to London?”
Breslau’s eyebrow lifted in a question. “As soon as possible, ça va sans dire. Do I detect a note of eagerness for my return?”
“Of course. If you knew how dull it is at Fosters’, you’d understand my reluctance to go there. But I may as well stay in London. It will look odd if I return to Belmont uninvited.”
The eyebrow settled down to its usual ennui. During the remainder of the performance, Breslau pondered whether Miss Comstock didn’t know how to flirt, or was purposely refusing to oblige him. Or was she more subtle than he supposed? Was her ignoring of all his leading sallies itself not a sort of inverse flirtation? It certainly piqued his interest. While he considered this matter, his eyes often turned to examine her for clues. She had a charming profile, but not once during the last act did she turn to face him head on. That was carrying inverse flirtation too far to please him.
Breslau’s offer to take the ladies to the Pulteney for dinner after the play was brushed aside by his aunts before Pamela could express her delight. “It is pretty late already, Breslau. I haven’t been up so late since the last time you lured me into visiting Drury Lane. Meat sits like lead on the stomach in the evening and agitates the bile. We would all be better satisfied with a nice cup of hot gruel at home before bed. Your cook makes an excellent gruel.”
The making of an excellent gruel was the subject during the drive home. Miss Agatha was in favor of a lemon rind to flavor the groats. Miss Anscombe would hear of nothing but nutmeg. Breslau was called on to settle the matter, and confounded them both by insisting that sherry was the only additive allowed.
“We always use port at home,” Pamela said.
“Port!” Three outraged voices came at her in the carriage.
“Port,” she insisted, for she was feeling cross after her frustrating evening.
As soon as her gruel was drunk, Pamela made her curtsies and left. There had been no further opportunity for private conversation with Breslau. Miss Agatha and Miss Anscombe admitted, after they had retired, that they were not unhappy to learn Miss Comstock was only a friend of Breslau’s. A little forthcoming, leaving the box at the second intermission. One of those clamorous ladies who must always be doing. The greater crime was adding port to the gruel, though it had not destroyed their snack as utterly as they had feared.
Breslau went to his study and sat on alone at his desk, sipping sherry while his gruel turned cold in the cup. He took up a pen and began toying with it. Fleur had been gone for twenty-four hours. Disappeared bag and baggage from a thoroughly respectable house to which she had gone with the intention of showing General Max she was socially acceptable. Was she really naive enough to think one visit at a decent home would do it?
She had gone without her maid, who, if she had ever been ill, had recovered with suspicious celerity. Of course the presence of a second party would have made kidnapping a trifle awkward. There had been no ransom note. Fleur, with her love of costumes, had only taken two gowns with her, one for day wear and one for evening.
Another question rose up to bother him. Where was Fleur’s butler during all this? He hadn’t gone to Belmont, and there was no sign of him at the apartment. Of course Fleur might have given him a few days off. When a man hired a carriage and team of four, he required a driver, unless he was accomplished enough with t
he reins to handle four horses himself. Halton had not hired a driver. The rig had been delivered to his apartment and the driver returned to Newman’s. Fleur’s butler acted as John Groom on those occasions when she bothered to hire job horses for her rig.
He had seen enough of the memoirs to know they were innocent to the point of dullness. Her erstwhile lovers had nothing to fear on that score. Unless she was writing to them, hinting that the book could be altered… If that was what she was up to, she’d chosen a deuced bad time for it, just when she was trying to rope Maxwell into a proposal. Even without those large, irregular deposits, Fleur was by no means poor. Few men made thirty guineas a day, and outside of her toilette, she wasn’t a big spender.
Spiedel couldn’t say enough good of her. “So generous,” he said more than once, but the generosity seemed to amount to an occasional dinner and a jacket. What the lad really wanted was a role in one of her plays. That would have cost her nothing and ensured Spiedel’s society, but she adamantly refused to help? So far from helping, she had bluntly told him not to hire Spiedel. Was she afraid Rose or one of the younger girls would steal him? He’d be snapped up in two minutes by one of the Covent Garden belles. But if she was planning to marry Maxwell, she wouldn’t expect to keep Spiedel on the string.
“If you want to help the boy, get him a position at Whitehall. You must know some cabinet minister who needs a secretary. I don’t want Spiedel on the stage with me. He’s too young and too pretty. He would make me look a hag,” she had said.
How old was Fleur? She’d been acting at the Comedie Française at the time of the Revolution. She must have been at least—say, sixteen, seventeen?—at the time. He began jotting down dates and ciphering. That would put her in the upper thirty’s now. Well preserved, of course—from the stage she looked at least a decade younger. The memoirs hinted at an unlikely thirteen or fourteen at the time of her arrival at Brighton in 1790, twenty-two years ago. The marriage to the Marquis de Chamaude was called an arranged marriage. Breslau considered it an imaginary marriage. There was no longer a noble Chamaude family in the French book of peerages.
Why bother claiming a husband? Was it a hankering for a title? Did she come encumbered with a child, perhaps… His pen hovered over what he had written. Twenty-two years ago. Any child she’d had would be grown up now. A young man, or woman. The words your son echoed in his head. Fleur had said them in a loud, angry voice at Belmont. Nigel was the right age, but that was mere meandering. Lady Raleigh had given birth to Nigel herself. Anyone who was interested might hear the story of her confinement, with the heedless Aubrey off at Brighton amusing himself at the Prince’s pavilion. The hairs on the back of Breslau’s neck began to lift in inspiration.
He sipped the sherry slowly, his eyes narrowed in thought. Yes, that would account for wanting money she didn’t need for herself. It would account for those unexplained deposits in her bank, and for Sir Aubrey giving her the bracelet. It wasn’t perfectly clear why she had played dead for Nigel, but no doubt his interruption was extremely untimely. Her disappearance had brought Maxwell and Spiedel to heel very nicely. Was it possible he, himself, was also expected to accede to her ridiculous demands?
If he guessed aright, it would account for Halton’s hiring the carriage, for the maid’s convenient cold, and for Fleur’s disappearance from Belmont. It would even account for Halton’s being in Kent. A sardonic grin tugged at his lips. Oh, yes, and for General Max’s glove and her own new “old favorite” shawl. Fleur was really up to all the rigs. Turning the badger sett into her grave was a master stroke. One such clever stroke deserved another.
He drew out four sheets of paper and wrote up notices for all the morning papers, called a footman, and had them delivered that night, with a special request that they should appear in the morning’s paper in a prominent position.
* * * *
In the morning, Pamela went to her room to repack her bags for the remove to Fosters’ after breakfast. She had scarcely spoken to Breslau. He had his head buried in the papers. He would want an early start to Belmont, and she had no wish to spend the day with Miss Anscombe and Miss Agatha. When she came downstairs to say her farewells, she discovered company had arrived.
“Some gentlemen called for Breslau,” Miss Agatha said. “He’s in the study with them now. I believe you are acquainted with the callers, Miss Comstock. He mentioned a Mr. Raleigh.”
“Nigel?”
“Mr. Raleigh was the name,” Miss Agatha informed her with a supercilious lift of her brow.
“Excellent!” Pamela exclaimed, and darted off without so much as a by your leave.
Miss Agatha’s cocked ear heard perfectly well that the chit didn’t even knock on the door, but just barged into Breslau’s study unannounced. Country manners!
It was General Maxwell who held the floor when Pamela arrived on the scene. His blustering voice told her he had learned something, and Nigel’s scowl informed her that whatever it was, he didn’t like it.
“I shall go directly to Bow Street and inform the authorities,” Maxwell announced.
“Let us go through it once more before you do anything rash, General,” Breslau said calmly.
Pamela edged closer to Nigel and demanded an explanation. While Maxwell blustered and Breslau tried to calm him, Nigel told the story.
“The foolishest thing you ever heard. Maxwell has taken the absurd idea that Papa had something to do with it. Just because he found his raincoat hidden in the bushes, and a pair of galoshes all covered in mud. He says it’s the same sort of mud we have at the badger sett. Mud is mud, if you want my opinion. Anyone might have worn them for that matter. They were always left in the vestibule at the back door.”
“But he found them in the bushes? Which bushes?”
“That hedge around the garden outside Fleur’s apartment. As if Papa would be fool enough to leave them there if he had worn them, which he didn’t. We know pretty well whose glove was found in the grave.”
General Maxwell overheard this charge, stated in a loud voice for that purpose.
“I can only think of one person who might have stolen my glove!” Maxwell retorted. “You were always hanging around me and Fleur. You took it to cast suspicion on me. If it wasn’t your father, it was you who did it, jackanapes. You’ve been dangling at her skirt tails the past month, casting your puppy eyes on her.”
“That’s better than old goat’s eyes!” Nigel shouted.
Breslau let them go to it. He wanted a minute to collect his thoughts. He had seen Sir Aubrey slipping away from Fleur’s room the night of her disappearance, but he hadn’t been carrying her clothes away to dispose of them. Neither did he show any signs of having been outdoors. Breslau thought his errand there had to do with the bracelet, perhaps wanting it back in exchange for a promissory note.
“What does Sir Aubrey say?” he asked during the first lull in the argument.
“Naturally he claims to know nothing about it,” General Maxwell replied. His tone showed his opinion of this.
“Did you discover anything about the carriage and team of four you were supposed to look into?” Breslau asked.
“It stopped at the George, as you told us. There was only one groom.”
“Did you get a description of him?”
“He never opened his mouth. A silent, surly brute.”
“But his size, his age?”
“Raleigh wouldn’t use his own groom,” General Maxwell pointed out, which brought Nigel’s clenched fists up, and caused him to hop around in a bad imitation of a bruiser.
The general ignored this blustering charade. “Mrs. Bell and a few other old cats from Hatfield saw it heading toward Belmont around midnight,” he continued.
“It wasn’t, by any chance, seen headed south toward Kent at a later hour?” Breslau asked hopefully.
“No one saw it again after that. It disappeared. Did it ever reach London, I wonder?”
“It didn’t,” Breslau said. “I had my groom run ov
er to Newman’s Stables and enquire. It isn’t slated to return for a few days.” He explained who had hired the carriage. The name of Henry Halton wasn’t familiar to Maxwell, though he repeated recognizing that sly face at the assembly. Nigel thought he’d heard the name somewhere or other.
“I daresay Sir Aubrey would recognize the name!” General Maxwell said with another fuming look at Nigel.
“If you’re looking for a duel, old man, you need look no further.”
“That is an honor reserved for equals, not puppies.”
Nigel rose like a fish to the fly.
“Cut line,” Breslau said curtly. “We’re getting nowhere with this bickering. A few new points have come up here in London.”
“Who are you calling a puppy?” Nigel demanded.
“Whelp!”
Breslau looked at Pamela, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Lead the pup away, if you can. I want a word with the old goat.”
She put her hand on Nigel’s elbow and spoke quietly. “You must be fatigued and famished after the trip. Let us go into the morning room for some tea. I’ll tell you what we’ve been doing here.”
This struck him as a good idea. The general’s carriage was as hard sprung as a hay wagon, and the old fool pushed his prads along at a merciless pace. “I’ll be back, sir,” he told Maxwell, then he left at a stiff-legged gait. Maxwell reached for the sword that used to hang at his side in the good old days. Finding only his pocket, he pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose instead.
“The nerve of that old bleater, trying to blame it on Papa!” Nigel complained when they were out of the room.
To calm him, Pamela said, “Anyone could have worn the raincoat and galoshes. For that matter, Fleur could have worn them herself. To protect her sable and slippers, you know.” The teapot was still on the table and she poured two cups.
“Yes, but as she never came back, she couldn’t be the one who hid them in the bushes. How did Maxwell happen to find them if he didn’t know they were there?” he asked sagely. “He slipped in that open door and killed her, Pam. Poor Fleur, she must have left the door open for him. She was already dead the first time I went to her room.”