Too Hot to Handel

by Sheri Cobb South

  He shook his head. “Nay, ma’am, that I won’t do, for there’s no love lost between me and Bow Street, if you take my meaning. Still, a message left at the Cock and Magpie will find me.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Bartlesby,” Julia said again, moving toward the door to indicate that the interview was at an end. She was thankful she had not been so indiscreet as to mention Mr. Pickett’s occupation, as the revelation might have sealed Mr. Bartlesby’s lips. “If you should think of anything else, I hope you will inform me.”

  “Aye, for a price,” he assured her, biting each of the two coins in turn before slipping them into the pocket of his coat.

  He tugged his forelock and took his leave, and she had hardly shut the door when Mr. Colquhoun arrived with a folded newspaper under his arm, his face dark with wrath.

  “Do you mind telling me what this is all about?” He opened the newspaper with a snap of his wrists and jabbed a finger at the offending advertisement.

  “I am seeking information from anyone who might be able to identify Jo—Mr. Pickett’s attacker,” she said defensively. “And I’m getting it, too. A man just left—you might have met him on the stairs—who was most obliging.”

  “Aye, I’ll warrant he was—for a price,” Mr. Colquhoun growled.

  “Well, yes,” confessed Lady Fieldhurst. “Two shillings, in fact, but it was money well spent.”

  “And how do you know he wasn’t telling you a Banbury tale just to collect the proffered reward?”

  “I see your point, Mr. Colquhoun, and perhaps I should have worded my advertisement differently—offering payment only if the information should lead to an arrest, perhaps. But I am persuaded Mr. Bartlesby’s contribution was worth every farthing. You see, I believe I know the man he described.”

  The magistrate’s eyebrows rose in skeptical surprise. “Indeed?”

  “Well, I don’t know him, precisely—that is, we have never been formally introduced. But I am quite certain I know who he is.”

  “Then who, pray, is he?”

  “I do not know his name, but he was seated in the royal box, in the back row just beside Princess Olga. A large man with black hair and a thick black beard.”

  “Good God!” exclaimed Mr. Colquhoun in failing accents. “You’ve just described His Excellency, Vladimir Gregorovich. And this Bartlesby saw him attack Mr. Pickett? Small wonder His Excellency was so impatient to know how the investigation was progressing!”

  “You have met him, then?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. He came to Bow Street the day after the fire, the blackguard, demanding to know what I was doing about the theft of Princess Olga’s diamonds. I’ll wager I can guess who’s got them now!”

  And I’ll wager you can’t, thought Lady Fieldhurst. Aloud, she merely said, “But I don’t understand why he should attack Mr. Pickett.”

  “Perhaps he thought Mr. Pickett might have seen him do the deed from his vantage point across the theatre,” suggested the magistrate. “If so, he must have a very high estimation of Mr. Pickett’s eyesight.”

  “Oh, but I had brought my opera glasses and let Mr. Pickett use them!” Julia exclaimed. “So it is quite possible he might have seen something that His Excellency found threatening. In fact, now that I think of it, I am almost certain he did. To be sure, he saw something that struck him as odd—I cannot remember his exact words—but then he realized the theatre was on fire, and I fear the matter, whatever it was, was forgotten in the more immediate crisis.”

  “A pity, that,” remarked Mr. Colquhoun. “We can only hope he will remember it when next he awakens.”

  Julia sighed. “As to that, I am afraid I have bad news to report. He began running a fever last night. The doctor has seen him this morning, and he says the wound has apparently become infected.”

  “I see.” Mr. Colquhoun scowled, needing no further explanation to know that this diagnosis was not encouraging. “May I sit with him?”

  “Of course. I am merely keeping the door closed to preserve the heat.” She opened the door to the bedroom and preceded the magistrate inside. “In fact, I would be grateful if you could stay with him this afternoon while I pay a call upon Her Royal Highness, the Princess Olga Fyodorovna.”

  The magistrate’s scowl grew fiercer. “Just what plan are you hatching, my lady?”

  “I intend to find out all I can about His Excellency, Vladimir Gregorovich.”

  Mr. Colquhoun could not agree to this. “Don’t think I’m not grateful to you for providing Bow Street with so promising a lead, my lady, but I believe you have done quite enough. It is time you left the investigation in the hands of those who have been professionally trained for it.”

  “This all sounds very well, Mr. Colquhoun, but can you name one person on your force who would have the entrée to the Russian court as well as I?”

  “As soon as my Runner states his business, he will not be turned away,” predicted the magistrate.

  “I daresay he will not. But I flatter myself the Princess Olga would be much more forthcoming to a lady of the British aristocracy come to offer her sympathy on the loss of the diamonds—a lady, moreover, who is intimately acquainted”—she felt herself blushing at the unfortunate choice of words—“with a member of the Bow Street force, and can reassure her as to its competence. And if I should ask her, as one woman to another, to recount her experiences on the night of the fire, who knows what she might confide?”

  “I see your point, my lady, but have you considered that His Excellency might learn of your visit, and connect you with Mr. Pickett? After all, you were sharing the same box. No, I cannot ask such a thing of you.”

  “You didn’t ask,” she pointed out. “I offered.”

  “Then I fear I must decline your very generous offer.”

  “But Mr. Colquhoun—”

  “To be blunt, my lady, I am not thinking of your welfare, but of Mr. Pickett’s. If any harm should come to you, and he should learn of it—”

  “I do see your point, Mr. Colquhoun, and I must say your scruples are admirable. But I can’t—” She glanced at the still figure in the bed. “I can’t sit here day after day, seeing him like this, and do nothing!”

  “On the contrary,” the magistrate said, his tone surprisingly gentle, “I believe you have done a great deal already, probably more than you know. But—if you will forgive my asking—in two weeks’ time, when the petition for annulment comes before the ecclesiastical court?”

  She took a deep, steadying breath. “As far as I am concerned, there isn’t going to be any annulment,” she said. “If he wants one, of course, I will yield to his wishes in the matter, but I have already written to my solicitor instructing him to suspend his efforts on my behalf, and to surrender to me any relevant documents—including a certain physician’s letter that Mr. Pickett will no doubt wish to place on the fire, where I suspect it belongs.”

  The magistrate was silent for a long moment as he pondered this revelation, which, if the truth were known, did not shock him nearly as much as Julia thought it might. “I see,” he said at last. “I suppose that changes things. Very well, my la—er, Mrs. Pickett, if you wish to call upon the Princess Olga at her hotel, I will not stand in your way. But you are to report any findings directly to me, do you understand, and under no circumstances are you to even hint that His Excellency is under suspicion! Do I make myself clear?”

  “Very clear,” she said, smiling broadly at him, now that she had won.

  “As for my sitting with him, however, I wish I could, but I fear I have been absent from Bow Street too much already. Is there no one else who might oblige?”

  She paused to consider the question. Her own staff was already being put to considerable inconvenience, but more to the purpose, she did not want Mr. Pickett waking up to a stranger, and her servants were unknown to him except for Rogers the butler, who had his own duties to attend to, and Thomas the footman, who was at that moment scouring the streets of Covent Garden in search of Lucy.


  Lucy . . . As little as she liked the idea, she had to admit that Lucy would do nothing to harm him, at least not intentionally.

  “There is a girl,” she said without enthusiasm, “a prostitute, actually, who I suppose I can trust to look after him.”

  “Lucy Higgins,” said the magistrate, nodding in understanding.

  “You know her?” she asked, surprised.

  “As you might guess, given her profession, she appears rather frequently before the bench. But if she is our only alternative, I think I had best stay with him after all, for my opinion of Miss Higgins is not high.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “He once entertained the idea of marrying her, you know.”

  “He—he would have married—Lucy?” She sat down abruptly on the edge of the bed, her hand pressed to her abdomen as if she had just received a blow to that area.

  “He did not love her, he was quite clear on that point,” Mr. Colquhoun assured her. “In fact, he was convinced that, since he could not have the woman he wanted—I trust I need make no explanations on that head—he could give meaning to his blighted existence by rescuing Miss Higgins from the gutter. You will have noticed that our Mr. Pickett is a rare one for the grand romantic gesture,” he added with a twinkle in his eye.

  “I have indeed,” she said, smiling wistfully down at Pickett and running her fingers through his disheveled curls. She had been the object of one of those grand gestures herself, for he had been willing to allow a doctor to falsely declare him impotent in order to release her from an accidental marriage he was sure she could not want. In fact, as much as she regretted what had befallen him at the theatre, she shuddered to think that the annulment would have been granted and they would have gone their separate ways, had the fire and its aftermath not forced her to recognize her own heart.

  “In fact, it was to remove him from Lucy and try to talk some sense into him that I dragged him off to Scotland,” the magistrate continued.

  “Was it?” asked Julia in some surprise. “I confess, I thought you had taken him to Scotland to get him away from me.”

  “It is true that I was not best pleased to find you there,” admitted Mr. Colquhoun. “Still, your presence did more to dissuade him from marrying Lucy than anything I might have said. And, given the way things have turned out, I cannot be sorry. I wonder, though, if you are aware of what you are letting yourself in for. His prospects, you must know, are no more than what he makes them. Mind you, if he were a decade older, I would not hesitate to put his name forward for a magistracy, but a lad not yet five-and-twenty? Any such suggestion would be laughed to scorn, and rightfully so.”

  “I am well aware of how Society must view such a match, and I assure you, it does not matter to me one whit. Any true friend will stand with me, and as for the others, they may think what they like. If it is a matter of money that concerns you, I must tell you that my widow’s jointure was established in such a way that it will not end with my remarriage. In fact, Mr. Colquhoun,” she concluded, lifting her chin and giving the magistrate a rather smug smile, “your protégé has married a fortune, albeit a modest one by Society’s standards.”

  “Hmmm,” was Mr. Colquhoun’s only comment. He suspected Lady Fieldhurst’s fortune would be anything but modest in John Pickett’s eyes. He further suspected his youngest Runner was not the sort of man who would be content to live on his wife’s largesse.

  But surely the most urgent matter at present was to get the boy well. Anything else could wait for another day.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE FURTHER MISADVENTURES OF THE PRINCESS OLGA’S DIAMONDS

  The disadvantages of placing such an advertisement as hers soon became all too apparent to Lady Fieldhurst. Scarcely a quarter-hour after Mr. Colquhoun had departed, there came another knock on the door. Opening it, Julia found a mousy-looking young woman clutching a squirming infant.

  “Mrs. P.?” the visitor asked timidly.

  “Yes. What can I do for you?” asked Julia, fairly certain she already knew.

  “I come about the advertisement in the newspaper.”

  “Excellent! Do come in,” urged Julia, harboring none of the misgivings she’d suffered upon inviting Mr. Bartlesby into the flat.

  “Thankee, ma’am,” murmured the woman, shuffling into the room.

  “Am I to understand you have some information regarding the—the incident described in the advertisement?”

  “Aye, ma’am, that I do.”

  She hitched the child higher on her hip, and Julia felt compelled to offer a hospitality that had been denied Mr. Bartlesby.

  “Won’t you sit down?” Julia gestured toward the only chair remaining beneath the table, the other two having been removed to the bedroom.

  “Thankee, ma’am,” the young mother said again, then sat down, settled the infant on her lap, and picked up her tale. “My man is a stagehand at the theatre, see, and when I heard it was on fire, I came running to make sure he was all right. I’d just got there and was searching for my Davy in the crowd when I heard this loud noise—it was the roof crashing in, but I didn’t know that at the time, did I?—and I turned ’round to have a look-see when I seen this fellow up and cosh another fellow in the head with a sort of cudgel, and the second fellow go down like a load of bricks and land right on top of a lady—I suppose that would be you, wouldn’t it, ma’am?”

  “Yes, it would. But this first man, the one who struck the other—I should like to know more about him, if you please.”

  “Well, that’s just what I can’t tell you, more’s the pity, for it was that dark, excepting for the fire, and that made it hard to see.”

  “But you must have noticed something,” urged Julia.

  “From what I could tell, he weren’t the sort of fellow you’d be likely to notice,” the woman insisted. “Neither short nor tall, neither young nor old, neither lean nor fat.”

  “What of his coloring?” asked Julia, thinking of the Russian. Surely a bushy black beard would have been hard to miss, even under the conditions the woman described.

  The woman scrunched her face up, trying to remember. “Like I said, it was hard to tell what with the fire behind him, but I had the impression of light hair, worn long.”

  “I see,” said Julia in a flat voice. This was what Mr. Colquhoun had tried to warn her about: persons coming and offering her a Banbury story in exchange for coin. Fortunately, there was one way to determine whether the woman was intentionally lying, or whether her memory—or her vision—was merely playing tricks on her. “What of facial hair? Did he have any?”

  Her would-be informant shook her head. “No, ma’am, of that I’m certain. Leastways, if he had a beard, it weren’t much of one.” She brightened suddenly. “Wait a minute, ma’am, I’ve just remembered something else! I did get a side view of him, and he had a sort of pointy nose. I noticed that in particular, because it stood out so bold and black against the orange light from the fire.”

  “Yes, well, thank you for your assistance,” Julia said with considerably less warmth. “Your story has been most—enlightening.”

  “I thought—it said in the advertisement that you would pay,” the woman said hopefully.

  Julia sighed. Yes, she had promised payment, no matter how useless the information. She reminded herself that the woman’s husband—no, she’d never claimed to be married to her Davy—her man would be out of work for some time to come, and in the meantime there was a child to support by whatever limited means were available to her. Julia thought of Lucy and her sisterhood, and supposed this young mother thought lying to a woman for money less objectionable than lying with a man for the same reason. Telling herself she was doing it for the sake of the baby, Julia picked up her reticule from where it lay on the table and offered the woman a shilling.

  “Thankee, ma’am.” The woman bobbed a curtsey and scooted out of the room as if fearful Julia would change her mind and demand the return of her coin.

  Alas, this call was the first of many. A ste
ady stream of hopeful informants climbed the stairs to number eighty-four Drury Lane, each with a different story to tell. Some insisted Pickett’s attacker was tall, others swore he was short. Some recalled his light hair, others claimed he was dark. Some described him as solid and muscular, while others maintained that his figure was willowy. Interestingly, not one had noticed the thick black beard so vividly described by Mr. Bartlesby. Julia was obliged to dole out coins, since her advertisement had promised she would do so, but she was forced to admit that she had never realized London was such a haven for liars.

  During a lull in the steady parade of false informants, Julia decided a cup of tea would not go amiss. She put water over the fire to boil, priding herself on this newly acquired skill, and had hardly risen to her feet when there was yet another knock upon the door. Heaving a sigh at her own stupidity in placing such an unintentionally generous advertisement, she went to the door and jerked it open—and found herself confronting the larcenous Lucy Higgins, escorted by Thomas, Julia’s own footman.

  “Lucy!” she exclaimed in honeyed tones belied by the kindling expression in her eye. “Do come in. Thank you, Thomas, you have done very well. That will be all,” she added to the young man who entered the room in Lucy’s wake.

  “I thought perhaps I might escort Miss Higgins back home,” Thomas said hopefully, regarding his fair charge with ill-concealed admiration.

  “Miss Higgins is more familiar with Drury Lane and its environs than you are,” pointed out his mistress. “I’m sure she can manage to find her way home with no difficulty.”

  “Yes, my lady,” Thomas conceded, crestfallen. He sketched a bow in her direction, then made another for Lucy’s benefit, and reluctantly took his leave.

  “How is he?” asked Lucy, and her glance toward the closed bedroom door gave Julia to understand that Thomas was not the subject of her inquiry.

  “Never mind that.” Julia was perversely reluctant to share any part of John Pickett, even a report as to his health, with the young woman who, but for the intervention of the magistrate, might have been his wife. “I have a more urgent matter to discuss with you. The last time you were here, you took something from this flat. I should like it returned, if you please.”