Deadly Affair: A Georgian Historical Mystery (Alec Halsey Crimance)

by Lucinda Brant

  “Many a nobleman has loved his mistress more than his wife.”

  Alec sighed his exasperation. “Selina, I love you. I want you to be my wife, not my whore or my beloved mistress,” he said patiently, again taking hold of her hands. “You mean so much more to me. I couldn’t conceive of you in such an undignified role. I want to wake up each morning with my wife, not catch a few hours of temporary satisfaction whenever the urge strikes. I want you as my life’s companion, for you to take your rightful place beside me as Marchioness Halsey; for us to share our lives as one, for us to have children—”

  “No! Please—Please don’t ask that of me,” she pleaded croakily and snatched back her hands. “I must answer the door. It could be Tal…”

  Alec roughly caught her to him.

  “Up until a month ago, until I came to you in Paris, you gave no indication that you’d had a change of heart—”

  “Not of heart. Never of heart.” She struggled against his arms encircling her waist. “I must answer the door. Please. You know—I can’t—I can’t bear to be—to be trapped.”

  Her plea of desperation brought him to his senses and he released her, instantly ashamed of having caused her a moment’s distress. For all her outward serenity, the emotional scars of an abusive marriage had yet to fully heal. He had hoped their marriage would help that healing process, indeed, bring closure to that abhorrent chapter in her life, but marriage did not now seem probable. Why had she suddenly decided against marrying him? Why had she turned to Cleveley for support? Why did he feel as if she was withholding something fundamental to their happiness? Why couldn’t she confide in him? Bewildered and feeling as if their future was out of his control, he wrenched open the door.

  Selina’s maid fell into the dressing room and dropped a curtsy, saying without preamble, eyes lowered to the floorboards, “My lady, it’s Mr. Vesey. He’s waiting you in the carriage.”

  Evans was ignored as Selina pursued Alec into the passageway. He bowed to her in farewell, saying with a coolness that was much more hurtful than any angry outburst,

  “I need you in my life. Wife or mistress, you decide. But in either rôle, I enter by the front door or not at all. Good day, Madam.”

  When Alec returned to St. James’s Place his butler greeted him in the hall, eager with the news Plantagenet Halsey had come downstairs and was partaking of a very late breakfast in the dining room. In fact the old man was sharing his kippers with an absurd looking gentleman with overlarge teeth and dressed in a canary yellow frockcoat that had seen better days. But Alec was so grim-faced and preoccupied that Wantage kept his mouth shut. He watched two footmen divest Lord Halsey of greatcoat and sword, before his lordship took himself and his black mood off to the billiard room.

  Alec hoped that by knocking a few billiard balls about before nuncheon his anger and frustration with Selina would burn itself out before he went up to see how his uncle was faring. His grim solitude lasted all of ten minutes.

  There was a perfunctory knock on the door which he ignored but Tam bounded into the room anyway, carrot hair falling into his green eyes and hugging a leather bound text to his chest. The heavy curtains had been pulled back to allow light to stream across the green baize surface of the billiard table where the three balls had been scattered. The rest of the paneled room was in shadow and it was in the shadows that Alec stood chalking the tip of his cue while absent-mindedly pondering his next shot. Tam saw him nonetheless and went straight up to him, and such was his anxiety that he spoke without first being addressed.

  “Mr. Wantage said I’d find you here, sir. Sir, the rumor circulating town is that because I dispense medicines to the poor and because you were at the dinner party at which Mr. Blackwell died, that you—that we had a hand—Sir, just because you were falsely accused of mur-murder once don’t mean—Well, it ain’t fair!”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that rumor, too. I hope you didn’t give the doubters the benefit of argument?”

  “I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of speech!”

  “After all, Blackwell may indeed have had a heart attack. He wasn’t exactly the picture of health,” Alec answered in a clipped voice, and more for the benefit of relieving the boy’s anxiety than his belief in such a statement. He went to the table and sized up his shot. “You have more important matters with which to concern yourself. Tomorrow is your exam—”

  “But, sir, the more I think on it the more I’m convinced Mr. Blackwell could’ve been poisoned. I didn’t get the opportunity to tell you earlier, on account of Mr. Halsey’s injury, but while I was at the Stock and Buckle I had a most interesting conversation with Mr. Molyneux and he said—”

  “Mr.—er—Molyneux?”

  Tam dropped the heavy leather-bound text on the sideboard and returned to the table, absently scraping back the mop of hair falling into his eyes.

  “Mr. Molyneux is the Duke of Cleveley’s valet. He doesn’t usually speak to us—the other valets and upper footmen—just sits in his corner and reads the newssheets. He thinks we’re beneath his touch on account of his grand position with such an important nobleman. We all refer to him as the Duke and that’s the way he likes it too, sir.”

  “This conversation?” Alec prompted and racked his cue after a particularly dismal attempt at potting the red.

  “He only spoke to me because he owed me a favor. He suffers with an arthritic knee and I supply him with an oil preparation that helps relieve the pain. The thing is, sir,” Tam continued as he followed Alec around the table, completely oblivious to his master’s brooding preoccupation, “I managed to turn the conversation to Mr. Blackwell. Mr. Molyneux was reluctant to speak about Mr. Blackwell’s stay at St. James’s Square. All he would say was that Mr. Blackwell was not all he seemed and that some wrongs just can’t be undone. But what wrongs could Mr. Blackwell cause a Duke? It just don’t seem possible.”

  “Do you believe Mr. Molyneux spoke with sincerity?”

  Tam nodded. “Yes, sir. He was quite upset about it. It was as if he had been illused by Mr. Blackwell.”

  Alec leaned against the table and crossed his arms, the boy’s enthusiastic questioning bringing him sufficiently out of his angry abstraction to ask, “Mr. Molyneux’s feelings aside for the moment, why do you now suspect Mr. Blackwell may have been poisoned?”

  Tam took a moment to collect his thoughts.

  “You asked me if poisoning was a possibility and I’ve thought about it. To begin with I tried to rule it out, that it was an impossibility for Mr. Blackwell to have been poisoned at dinner, or just before, so that the effects of whatever substance was administered took effect while he was at the dinner party. The more I tried to rule out poisoning the more possible it became, until I was forced to admit that he could’ve been poisoned so that it appeared as if he had suffered a heart attack.”

  “Poison administered before or during dinner?”

  “The fact he was ill so soon after eating would suggest the poison was administered during the meal.”

  “I see. As I recall, you said that it was an easy thing to poison a man at a dinner party but what we need to be looking for is a poison which reproduces the symptoms of a heart attack, and the form of that poison to know how it was administered…?”

  “That’s right, sir! And in this instance we need to establish how such a poison could have been given to one man without his fellows being poisoned into the bargain.”

  “A very deliberate and premeditated action with no room for error… And do you know of a poison which can reproduce the symptoms of a heart attack?”

  Tam could not control his enthusiasm. His freckled face broke into a grin. “Yes, sir. It came to me while I was reading up on the preparation of abortifacients.” His smile dropped into an embarrassed frown and he looked uncomfortable. “Not that I’m in the habit of making up such preparations, sir. I just thought the examiners might ask, if—”

  “It is quite unnecessary for you to offer me an explanation,” Alec said plac
idly. “I have every confidence in your judgment. The poison…?”

  “Thank you, sir. I have two in mind: Taxus baccata and Aconitum napellus. That’s Yew and Monkshood, sir,” Tam explained. “I can’t decide which was used. Both are equally toxic and readily available. Both produce symptoms experienced by a victim of a heart attack. Yew leaves can be made into a tea which, when swallowed by a female, will bring on her infant before its time. More often than not both mother and infant die in the attempt. Monkshood, or more correctly, aconite, is used in tinctures and as an ingredient of liniment, which, if applied externally, is not fatal. However, if ingested, and often this is in a powdered form added to other ingredients, then death can occur within minutes.”

  “Powder?” Alec enunciated, blue-eyed gaze fixed on Tam. “Blended powder? Snuff. The poison could’ve been mixed into Blackwell’s snuff. Is that possible?”

  “Certainly, sir. As I said, aconite is readily available as a powder. In fact, to blend a lethal dose of poison into a man’s snuff would be a simple and effective way of committing murder with least suspicion.”

  “Precisely! Especially if the victim appears to all the world as if he’s had a heart attack,” Alec said as he took another turn around the table. “A man’s snuff is his personal domain, especially to a man such as Blackwell who was not used to the etiquette of communal dipping. He mentioned that snuff taking was new to him; that he had recently been given a superior blend. He showed me an ornate gold snuffbox. A gift he said…” Alec stopped his pacing and leaned his palms on the billiard table’s polished mahogany frame and looked at his valet. “Blackwell’s snuffbox was an identical twin to that carried by the Duke of Cleveley.”

  Tam’s eyes widened and he let out a low whistle. “Perhaps the snuff Mr. Blackwell snorted was intended for the Duke? Perhaps, in the course of the evening, their boxes got switched and Mr. Blackwell dipped into the Duke’s snuffbox by mistake? Seems likely, don’t it, sir? After all, Mr. Blackwell had no enemies, well not the Blackwell we knew, whereas the Duke must have plenty. Stands to reason someone might want to do away with him.”

  “I don’t doubt the great man’s political actions have made him enemies over the years, but to want him dead because of them? That’s the wish of a madman.”

  “Poisoning is the act of a madman, sir.”

  “Poisoning,” said Alec as he thrust Tam’s leather-bound textbook back at him when the butler trod into the room to announce nuncheon, “is the act of a coward.”

  When Alec entered the dining room he was pleasantly surprised to discover his uncle partaking of a hearty late breakfast, grizzled head still swathed in bandages, a little lopsided from a restless night’s sleep, and a richly embroidered banyan thrown negligently over his crumpled nightshirt. Yet it was the visitor sitting across from the old man that brought Alec up short. A fresh-faced young man with a receding chin and overlarge front teeth was enjoying a plate of egg and kippers and a tankard of ale. He was wearing a frockcoat of canary yellow damask. This garment of dandified fashion was so ill-fittingly tight that it rounded the young man’s shoulders; excessive and ill-advised movement having split the seams of the watered damask in several places along both arms where the sleeves were attached.

  Plantagenet Halsey hailed his nephew with a friendly wave of his fork and mischievously announced him to the visitor as the Marquess Halsey, whereupon the young man dropped his knife and fork onto his plate with a clatter and shot up off his chair. He swallowed whole a mouth full of egg as he hastily doubled over in a bow befitting a foreign potentate, the dirty lace ruffles at his wrists trailing in coddled egg.

  “Thaddeus Fanshawe Esquire, attorney at law and your most obedient, my lord,” the young man announced grand-eloquently, and when politely asked to resume his seat, did so with another series of small bows that threatened to overset his wig a la pigeon. “I’m most grateful to Mr. Halsey for obligingly offering to share his breakfast, my lord,” he said by way of an apology for picking up his knife and fork and savagely splicing a kipper in two. “And I beg your lordship’s understanding when I tell you I’ve not eaten since breakfast yesterday. I must own that there is nothing more soothing to troubled nerves than a large plate of warm egg.”

  “Sharing his breakfast is the least my uncle could do given, and correct me if I am wrong, he took a direct hit to the head in your defense, Mr. Fanshawe?”

  “I offer my humble apologies to your lordship, as I have to Mr. Halsey, for causing him to suffer at the hands of those two brutes who accosted me in the laneway,” the lawyer replied seriously, oblivious to Alec’s heavy irony. “I would not for the world have followed Mr. Halsey from the anti-slavery meeting had I realized I myself was being followed, and by two such fiends. I feared for my life, I may tell you, my lord, and still do!” He licked his rabbit-like front teeth, dropped his voice to a whisper and lifted his gaze from Alec’s elaborately tied linen cravat to his unblinking blue eyes. “I have not dared to venture home for fear of those thugs doing violence to my family and thus you find me at your table in such a deplorably bad-mannered state of dress.”

  “You don’t suppose the men who followed you know your name and your direction and may go to your home in spite of your absence from it?” Alec asked lightly, spreading a linen napkin across his lap.

  “I did have such a wild thought, my lord,” Thaddeus Fanshawe agreed earnestly, eyes very round, “and so I sent a link boy with a message for my father to keep the front door bolted and on no account open the door to strangers—”

  “—particularly strangers dressed in the Cleveley livery?” prompted Alec.

  Thaddeus Fanshawe blinked and looked to the old man for confirmation. “My lord? Cleveley livery? Indeed! Those fiends were in the pay of the Duke of Cleveley? I did not know.” He smiled deprecatingly. “It is my great misfortune to be blind to many colors, my lord, and so one Duke’s livery is as much the shade of another’s.”

  Hence the canary-yellow frockcoat, thought Alec, smiling to himself and exchanging a glance and the same thought with his uncle as he picked up his wine glass. No doubt an underpaid tailor’s prank, or a gift from a prankster brother. “And has the beneficial effects of warm egg reduced the bump and pain to your head, Uncle?”

  “Egg and Fanshawe’s company have done me wonders,” Plantagenet Halsey replied briskly, though he did not in the least feel hearty. He should’ve had a breakfast tray sent up to his room, the thump to his head was still that bad, but the opportunity to interrogate the buck-toothed lawyer was not to be missed. Thus, he ignored his nephew’s note of censure and smiled encouragingly at the visitor. “Fanshawe, be good enough to explain to his lordship what you were doin’ followin’ me from me meetin’.”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir,” said Thaddeus Fanshawe and addressed himself exclusively to Alec. “Mr. Blackwell asked that I seek out Mr. Halsey at a meeting of the anti-slavery league because, he said, it was the only place Mr. Halsey and myself could converse without the circumstance being reported to certain persons within the Cleveley House, by which I took him to mean he did not wish His Grace to know of my mission on Mr. Blackwell’s behalf. And now I discover that the thugs who accosted me were in the Duke’s employ!” He licked his wet lips free of ale. “I may tell your lordship I was never more terrified for my life than when those fiends loomed large over me demanding that I hand over Mr. Blackwell’s will. Had it not been for Mr. Halsey’s timely intervention I shudder to think of the consequences to my person of such an encounter!”

  Alec glanced at his uncle’s bandaged head but refrained from commenting.

  “Do you have any idea why the Duke’s liveried servants would demand Blackwell’s will when surely, as signatory, the Duke of Cleveley was well aware of the vicars wishes?”

  “I wish I knew, my lord. For it makes no sense. As you say, His Grace knew only too well the contents of Mr. Blackwell’s will. Indeed, if he feared I was in possession of a copy of the earlier will then I understand his wish to retrie
ve it. For he made me assure him on no less than two occasions that there was but one copy of Mr. Blackwell’s original will and this I had placed in his hands under Mr. Blackwell’s instruction. As we all then witnessed the burning of that particular document in the grate of his fireplace, His Grace must surely have been satisfied as to its destruction. Indeed, he was most insistent that we all remain in the room until the parchment had turned to ash.”

  “What was in Blackwell’s original will that Cleveley would want it turned to ash?” asked Plantagenet Halsey. “Can you tell us that, Fanshawe?”

  “Most certainly, sir, for the second will was just like the first. All beneficiaries and their legacies remained unchanged. Reference to certain inconsequential particulars regarding the beneficiaries were removed, as was reference to the main beneficiary’s mother. I can only say that the removal of such wordage made the second will a much more succinct and unsentimental document and perhaps that was His Grace’s object? There was one other change, and one that was insisted upon by His Grace to which Blackwell most reluctantly acquiesced. That was the removal of one of the two executors, leaving the Duke as sole executor of Blackwell’s estate.”

  “As my uncle and I have read the will you placed in my uncle’s pocket during the scuffle there can be little harm in you elaborating on the contents of the original.”

  Alec said this with such a nice smile as he put down his knife and fork to take up his wine glass that the lawyer smiled back, thinking he had been asked rather than told and so did not hesitate, saying in a confidential tone, as two soft-footed footmen removed and replaced dishes from the table,

  “Not at all, my lord, for Mr. Blackwell requested of me most strongly that his last will and testament be given to his good friend Mr. Plantagenet Halsey, for it was he who had been named one of the executors of the first will and whom His Grace was most insistent must be removed—”