by Caro Peacock
‘What?’
‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head. ‘What you’ve told me is so new to me, I can’t make sense of it.’
‘What about this woman who needed help? How does she come into it? Blackstone says he doesn’t know who she is, but I think he has some idea.’
‘She’s as mysterious to me as she is to you. Your father and I were in Paris together and he said nothing about a …’
He stopped suddenly.
‘You’ve remembered something?’
‘No. Nothing to the purpose.’
We were near a stone water trough. He let go of my arm, sat down on the edge of it, and put his head in his hands.
‘Child, if I had the slightest idea, I’d have dragged your father back to England, bound hand and foot if necessary. But how could any of us tell? It seemed no more than a joke.’
‘He talked about a joke in his letter, then the quote from Shelley about princes. I couldn’t understand it, for a long time. Only I think I do now. There was somebody in Paris, wasn’t there? Somebody you were laughing at?’
‘Yes.’ He said it reluctantly, head bowed.
‘That person, I think he’s here now, in this house.’
‘What?’ His head came up.
‘He’s the reason Mr Blackstone wants me to spy. I think I know now why my father was killed. I knew yesterday.’
When I’d seen Mr Brighton in the orchard, the look on his face, his whole posture, had gathered so many threads together. Daniel’s large dark eyes were fixed on mine. There was so much sadness in them that it scared me. He took my right hand between both of his.
‘Child, you are coming with me now.’
‘Where?’
‘Back to London. Don’t even go in to collect your bonnet. We shall go to the stables and steal a horse if necessary.’
‘I already have a horse and I am not going anywhere.’
‘Then I shall carry you.’
He shifted as if he intended to make good his threat. The thought of neat, ironic Daniel carrying a struggling woman over his shoulder was too much for me and I laughed out loud.
‘Oh my dear, I have already been carried off by my father’s enemies. Spare me the same treatment from his friends.’
He didn’t laugh. ‘So I failed to protect your father and I’m to fail again with his daughter?’
‘If you owe him anything, isn’t it justice at least?’
‘I owe it to him to keep you alive.’
‘I don’t believe I’m in danger. Another person may be.’
‘Why did you want to find me, if you won’t let me care for you?’
‘I wanted to know what happened when you were with my father in Paris. But I believe I’ve guessed most of it now. There are two other things I need you to do for me.’
‘What?’
‘Look at a picture and look at a person.’
His eyebrows went up to his hair-line.
‘The picture is to the left of the big drawing-room door,’ I said. ‘The person is an honoured guest and will probably be sitting close to Sir Herbert at dinner. If I am right, you’ll have seen him at least once before.’
‘We are to play quartets to them after dinner. If I do this, will you come back to London with me?’
‘After the weekend, yes.’
‘Tonight.’
‘No. Carry out your engagement, play their Welcome Home nonsense, then we’ll go.’
Whatever happened, I could not desert Celia until either I’d talked her out of elopement or she was safely in the arms of her Philip.
‘I’d rather play his funeral march,’ he said.
I knew then that I’d won my point and gave his hand a squeeze.
‘I’ll leave first. We should not be seen together any more. Will you meet me here tonight, after you’ve played your quartets?’
For reply, he hummed a few bars from Figaro about meeting in the garden, but his dark eyes were miserable. I left him sitting on the water trough.
*
Back in the schoolroom, Betty was mending a pinafore.
‘Where did you get to? Miss Mandeville came looking for you. She wants some more help with her sketching. She said to tell you she’d be on the terrace.’
I found her sitting alone on a bench by a statue of Diana the Huntress, sketchpad on her lap, face shaded by a lavender parasol wedged between the slats of the bench. The sketch consisted of a few vague lines that might have been ploughland or seashore.
‘Where’s Mr Brighton?’ I said.
‘Playing billiards with Stephen.’ She stuck out her lower lip, moistened her finger on it and dabbed at an imaginary billiard cue. ‘How could anybody think I’d marry such a ragdoll of a man? I shouldn’t do it if he were Czar of all the Russias.’
She scored a line across her sketch, so savagely that the point of her pencil broke.
‘Your brother spoke to me about you,’ I said.
She gripped my arm.
‘What did he say?’
‘He thinks you might be on the point of doing something unwise.’
‘You didn’t tell him? Surely you didn’t.’
Her fingers dug into my arm.
‘No, I didn’t.’
She let go of my arm.
‘He said you were close,’ I said.
‘We were. Until this.’
It was no more than a murmur. I thought of Tom and how he’d feel if I were to elope without telling him.
‘I do believe he cares about you,’ I said. ‘Perhaps if you were to make him understand how totally opposed you are to Mr Brighton …’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Stephen does care for me, but he doesn’t understand. And I think he’s scared of my stepfather.’
‘He did not strike me as a person easily scared.’
‘Sir Herbert bought off his IOUs to get him out of prison. He could use them to put him back, if he wanted.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Stephen told me that himself. You mustn’t tell him, Elizabeth. I forbid you to even think about telling him.’
She scored another line across the page, splintering wood from the broken pencil.
‘Why did you want to see me?’ I asked.
‘Philip is coming for me on Saturday night, at nine o’clock. He’ll have a carriage waiting on the back road. I want you to come with me.’
‘Elope with you?’
‘Of course not. Just as far as the carriage. I don’t know my way down the back road and I’ll have things to carry. And we must be so much more careful now, if Stephen suspects.’
Her fingers picked nervously at the pencil.
‘It’s a serious decision to make, leaving your family,’ I said.
‘Do you think I don’t know that? I’ll probably never see my mother again, or Stephen, or Betty.’
Tears ran down her cheeks.
‘Perhaps if you were to speak to your mother …’
‘What good would that do? She’s terrified of my stepfather too, surely you’ve seen that. I dread to think what he’ll do to her after I’ve gone.’
‘He could hardly blame her.’
‘He will. I suppose you think badly of me, leaving my mother in danger.’
‘I hope she will not be in danger.’
‘I hope so too, with all my heart. But she chose to marry him and she’ll always be unhappy now, whatever happens. Does that mean I must waste my life too?’
‘So you won’t speak to either of them?’
‘No. If I spoke to anybody it might be my grandmother, but …’
‘Perhaps you should.’
I was on the edge of telling her about Mrs Beedle’s behaviour but stopped myself. It wasn’t my secret.
‘No, I’ve made my choice and I choose Philip, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘This Philip, do you know him well?’
I cared enough for her to hope she wasn’t throwing herself away on some worth
less man just to escape.
‘Of course I do. A year ago, we were practically engaged to be married.’
‘But your stepfather disapproved?’
‘No, that’s the cruel part of it.’
‘What happened?’
She paused for breath.
‘Philip and I met at Weymouth last summer. Sir Herbert was prescribed sea bathing for pain in his joints, so of course we all had to pack up and go. Philip’s father was there for the bathing too. I think my stepfather approved, as far as he cared at all. It would get me off his hands without having to pay a settlement because Philip’s family are very comfortably situated. They have an estate in Buckinghamshire and Philip will inherit a baronetcy if his uncle dies before he has any children, and the uncle’s sixty-three and a bachelor, so …’
‘So altogether a most suitable match,’ I said.
She looked sharply at me.
‘I wonder why you have such a low opinion of me. The fact is, I love Philip, he adores me and I’d marry him even if he were a pauper.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Only I’m glad he isn’t, of course.’
I believed her, both about that and loving him, which was a relief in its way.
‘When did your stepfather change his mind?’
‘Only in the last month or so.’
‘When Mr Brighton came on the scene?’
She nodded.
‘It would be treason, wouldn’t it?’
She asked the question very softly, looking down at the sketchpad. The paper was damp from her tears.
‘I think so, yes.’
‘And my stepfather’s trying to drag me into it, for his own ambition. So I’ve no choice, you see, no choice at all.’
‘Yes, I see.’
She dried her eyes with her handkerchief and took a deep breath.
‘So now there are just two days and seven hours to live through and I’ll be away with Philip and it will be all over. Only there’s that terrible dinner to get through first. I know they’ll make me sit next to him. I’m glad you’ll be there, at least. I shall be able to look down the table at you and know somebody understands what I’m suffering.’
‘I? At the dinner?’
‘Didn’t Mrs Quivering tell you? You’re to fill a gap in the table. Lady Arlen is enceinte again so has cried off the dinner, and that put out the whole table plan because they were a woman short. So my grandmother said you were perfectly ladylike and they could move somebody else up and put you down at the far end. Why are you looking so scared?’
‘He’ll recognise me. He can’t fail to if we’re sitting at the same dinner table.’
My panic was about Lord Kilkeel, but she naturally thought it applied to Mr Brighton.
‘How can he? There are forty people, remember, and you’ll be at the very far end of the table, and by candlelight. The people at the other end won’t even see you.’
I hoped she was right. Mrs Beedle had been clever, seizing the chance to provide her spy with a seat at the dinner. I might have tried again to persuade Celia to confide in her, but two of the house guests, a gentleman and a lady with a little dog, were approaching from the far side of the terrace.
‘Botheration,’ Celia said. ‘I suppose they’re coming to talk to me.’
She crumpled her damp apology for a sketch and rose from the bench to face them while I slipped away, down the side steps of the terrace and into the back entrance.
Mrs Quivering’s assistant was in the housekeeper’s room, drinking sage tea for her sore throat.
‘There’s a letter come for you, Miss Lock.’
She handed over a coarse grey envelope.
‘When did it arrive?’
‘I don’t know. Somebody delivered it to the stables and a boy brought it over.’
The writing was Amos Legge’s. I went into the corridor and opened the envelope.
Miss Lane,
Ther is a thing I heard about the two gentlemen in the travling coach. I will come when I can and ask for you at the back door.
Yours ruspectfully,
A. Legge
If I could, I’d have gone straight to the livery stables to find him, but I was needed back in the schoolroom to superintend the children’s dinner and afternoon walk in the grounds. With so many visitors in residence, ladies and gentlemen kept stopping us, talking to the children and petting them. It made them over-excited and above themselves, but at least we were spared the ceremony of taking them down before dinner.
‘Lady Mandeville has one of her headaches,’ Betty said.
That saved me from having to invent a headache of my own as an excuse. We took off their best clothes, supervised their washing and tooth brushing and got them into their beds by half past eight. When we’d set the schoolroom straight, I said I needed a walk to clear my head. It was time to keep the appointment with Daniel. The light was fading, the brick walls of the vegetable garden radiating back the heat of the day. The gardeners had gone by then, but they must have watered the plants last thing because warm, damp earth scented the dusk, along with lingering whiffs of carrot, spring onions, bruised tarragon. Pale moths wafted around the bean flowers like flakes of ash blown up from a bonfire and a hedgehog rooted and grunted under the rhubarb leaves. I sat on the edge of the water trough and waited.
‘Liberty.’
Daniel Suter’s voice, from the door in the wall.
‘I’m here.’
He came over to me, practically running, tripping on the gravel path.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘You were right, child. Ye gods, what a situation.’
He sat down beside me, breathing hard. I’d known him all my life, but had never seen him discomposed before.
‘You recognised somebody here who was in Paris?’
‘As you thought, the man they call Mr Brighton.’
My heart jolted, like a salmon trying to leap out of water and flopping back.
‘And you saw the portrait?’ I said.
‘Yes. You’re right. There is a very strong resemblance. But you’d expect that, of course.’
‘My father saw it. The dregs of their dull race – I should have guessed.’
‘It wasn’t only your father who saw. They were flaunting it. They were a laughing-stock among the Parisians. The very waiters would bow to him in jest, only he took it in deadly earnest.’
‘Tell me, please, everything that happened in Paris.’
‘There’s not so very much to tell. It all happened over just two days and nights.’
‘Everything you can remember.’
He took a deep breath.
‘It was pure good luck meeting your father in Paris. He inquired at a few hotels where he knew I’d stayed in the past and found me. And, as chance would have it, half a dozen of our mutual friends were there, musicians mostly and …’
‘And?’
‘Lodge brothers. We spent the afternoon in each other’s company, talking about all the things you talk about when you haven’t seen your friends for months. Your father was in excellent spirits, money in his pocket, looking forward to reaching home and being with you.’
‘He said so?’
‘He certainly did. We talked a lot about you. We all had dinner together and your father asked if there was anywhere we might have a hand or two of cards, simply for amusement.’
‘I know. Money never stayed in his pockets for very long.’
‘This time he was determined it should. We went to a place I knew, off the Champs Élysées. He did not intend to play for high stakes, but …’
‘He won a horse.’
‘Indeed he did, from some old marquis who’d won her off somebody else and didn’t know what to do with her. But how did you know that?’
‘From the same person who told me you were together in Paris. So how does Mr Brighton come into the story?’
‘The table next to ours were playing high. There were about half a dozen of them, all English. They
were already there when our party arrived and they’d been drinking heavily. Mr Brighton was totally drunk and kept yelling out remarks in that terrible high bray of his. It was a small place and the tables were too close together. At one point, Mr Brighton pushed his chair back suddenly and sent your father’s tokens scattering all over the floor.’
‘Did my father resent it?’
‘No. He had too much good sense to quarrel with a man in drink. We all picked the tokens up and went on playing. It happened a second time and we did the same thing. By the third time, it was obvious that the fool was doing it deliberately. I said something, fairly mild in the circumstances, about taking more care. Mr Brighton went as red as a turkey cock’s wattles. He pulled himself as near upright as he could get and said, “Do you know whom you’re speaking to, sir?” Spraying spittle all over me in the process. So, “A clumsy buffoon, so it would appear, sir,” I said. I will admit it was not the most politic speech, but I was annoyed by then. A man they called Trumper …’
‘A fair-haired country squire kind of man?’
‘Yes, the very same oaf who tried to carry you off. Anyway, he seemed to realise that his friend was making an ass of himself and took him into a side room, where I assume they continued to play. By then the evening had been spoiled for us, so we finished our hand and left.’
‘And nothing was said about a duel?’
‘Good heavens, no. It had been an unpleasant few minutes, that’s all. Nobody thought of duelling. We went to supper and stayed up late over our pipes and our punch talking of this and that. And there it might have ended if we hadn’t been joined by some Frenchmen your father knew. My French is nowhere near as good as his and they were talking away nineteen to the dozen. Something they said seemed to amuse your father mightily so we asked him to translate so that we could all share the joke …’
He hesitated. A barn owl flew over the garden, just a few feet higher than the walls. From further off, a fox barked.
‘I can remember all of it,’ Daniel said. ‘All of the words, that is. Only the tune of it will be wrong, if you understand me. It was still a joke to us then, you see.’
‘Please, every word.’