“Stanton. Be a good fellow and put away your sword… It has been a long night and I think we can all agree that this episode is best ended here.”
“I didn’t kill anyone!” Lord George whined again, and sheathed his sword as requested. “You believe me, Halsey, don’t you?”
“That is not important, George,” Lady Rutherglen said with satisfaction, shaking out her velvet and quilted cotton under petticoats. “What is important is taking Auntie upstairs to confront that whore once and for all time.”
Lord George stared at Lady Rutherglen and took a step away from her. “So you think me a murderer of children, Auntie? You think I could kill a cripple? Zounds, but the old man is right! You are a cold-hearted serpent!” He went for his sword again but before his hand as much as touched the jeweled hilt Alec said calmly,
“I do believe you, my lord. And I have every confidence that the truth of what happened to Billy Rumble will come out during Charles’s interrogation.” He glanced at Lady Rutherglen. “And just how the Cleveley jewelry happened to come into the possession of your aunt.”
George glared at his aunt. “I told you! I told you it was Charlie!”
“What I want to know is who thwacked me over the head and set thugs, dressed in the Cleveley livery, on poor Yarrborough?” Plantagenet Halsey demanded loudly, a significant glare at Lord George.
“And made sure to leave silver buttons as calling-cards?” added Alec, a smile at Lord George’s response, which was to let his mouth drop open with incredulity that accusations continued to be cast in his direction. “I am confidant further questioning of Charles will quickly reveal he used Cleveley livery and buttons to reinforce the notion it was the Duke or Lord George who wanted to get their hands on Blackwell’s will—”
“What would I want with a vicar’s—”
“—but in truth, it was Charles who wanted Blackwell’s will—” began Alec, cutting off Lord George’s bewildered outburst, only to be cut off himself.
“—because with Blackwell’s will destroyed nobody would know the truth contained within it and Stanton here could succeed to the dukedom, no one else the wiser?” Plantagenet Halsey stated and smiled with satisfaction at Alec’s nod. “The cunning fox!”
“Look here, old man!” Lord George demanded. “I don’t know what you’re on about but no one has ever asked me what I want! Ever. And what I want is to go to m’bed and sleep for a week! Tonight’s mish-mash has given me a damned headache.”
There was a general grumble of assent and movement of leave-taking in the drawing room, but Lord George Stanton, for all his bravado, did not move. He beckoned Alec over.
“Halsey. You’re a Trusty Trojan. Always said so,” he said in a low voice. “Tell me the truth. Is it Miriam or Miranda upstairs? I must know. I must.”
“It is your cousin Miranda, and that is the truth.”
“Come now, my lord!” Lady Rutherglen scoffed, taking her nephew’s arm. “You cannot produce compelling evidence to make me believe that the woman upstairs is my dead daughter Miranda. Mimi died five years ago of pneumonia after being led astray by her wicked cousin. It is Miriam upstairs. I have seen the portrait. I saw her in the Abbey. That was a shock I admit, but nonetheless, I would know my own daughter. You do not know her, nor have you ever seen her. George and I both know it is Miriam upstairs. The whore has hoodwinked you right royally.”
Lord George shrugged her off.
“If Miriam was a whore it was because I made her one! Just as I did Hatty. But Miriam and me… I-I… Just shut your mouth, Auntie!”
“She’s certainly not my whore,” Talgarth Vesey offered, as he languidly stretched himself out of the wingchair. “Mrs. Bourdon is as white as the day I met her.”
“Mrs. Bourdon indeed! She can’t wallpaper over her past! Whatever she calls herself, she is still Miriam, not Miranda.”
Lord George ignored her and stared at Alec.
“I must know, Halsey,” he pleaded, a pathetic catch to his voice. “She ran away from me. I didn’t know why. I think I do now. It was because I got her with child, isn’t it? Aye, Halsey, that’s the truth of it! But she didn’t tell me. I didn’t know! No one told me! Constant inebriation keeps her from my thoughts, but if I could just know the truth… I beg of you…”
Alec regarded the obese unkempt and thoroughly repugnant nobleman and wondered if there was any hope of rehabilitation for such an ugly specimen of humankind, one who was pathetically immature in thought and deed and, if Alec had his way, would be sent out to earn a living at some meaningful trade to know the value of honest work. But he begrudgingly had to admit that for all his social ineptitude and worthless preoccupations, Lord George was as much a victim of his milieu as anything else. His mother, his adoptive father and most certainly Lady Rutherglen had all pandered and catered to his lordship’s every whim. What stood before him was a bloodshot inebriated whining idler, but for all that, innocent of any crime save falling in love with his sister unknowingly. Perhaps Lord George Stanton’s life could be made to mean something; at the very least be steered away from the insidious influence of his aunt and people such as the self-serving Sir Charles Weir. The Duke had started him on some sort of path to rehabilitation by arranging an engagement to Lord Russell’s daughter. Perhaps if he could be kept on such a path there was hope for him yet. He knew just the person to aid in this endeavor.
“George! Dearest George, how I’ve missed you! Come in! Come in and meet your baby brother.”
Lord George Stanton continued to hover on the threshold of the bedchamber, all agog. Bear Brown shifted from foot to foot, holding the door wide. It was the Duke who stepped forward and beckoned his stepson into the room where Miranda sat propped up in the four-poster bed cradling her newborn son.
Alec nodded to the mountain-sized servant as he stepped back into the sitting room of the Arch apartment, smiling as the door closed over on the family reunion. He was not smiling when ten minutes later he encountered Selina on the arm of his uncle coming up the main stairs.
“My lord! Alec! I—we need to talk—I want to explain—”
“No! No,” he said softly, yet there was no disguising the aloofness in his tone. “Not yet.” From his frockcoat pocket he took out his godmother’s letter. “Tomorrow. Perhaps. I need some time—alone. Goodnight, Mrs. Jamison-Lewis. Uncle.”
Selina and the old man watched Alec ascend the stairs and disappear along the passageway to his suite of rooms.
Alone in the peace and quiet and sitting before a new fire, a silk banyan thrown over his nightshirt, Alec broke the seal and spread out the single sheet of parchment from his godmother and read.
Dearest Alec
You must come to London at once. I cannot stress enough the urgency of my need for you. Civil war has once again broken out in Midanich. The Margrave holds firm in the north, while his brother Prince Vicktor has, with the help of French troops, taken control of the south. No family has been spared bloodshed. There are reports of thousands dead and of thousands fleeing to the border. But all borders are closed. No one gets in or out of the principality.
Why am I writing about a minor European principality to you? I can see your frown! What does this old woman care how many Midnachians are killed in their beds? Now you are laughing at me! In truth, I am so distraught I am shaking all over and my hand can barely form the words on the page to tell you. Emily’s life is in peril. She is in Midanich. She and Cosmo are prisoners of this Viktor. There is a demand for money and jewels… A lock of my darling girl’s hair was sent me as proof. If we do not act on their demands I am told her finger will next be severed to prove their intent.
Dearest boy, come to London at once. I need you…
Alec Halsey’s adventure continues in Deadly Peril.
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The girl in the narrow wooden bed was in agony. Curled up in a ball, legs drawn up to her small breasts and thin arms wrappe
d tightly about her knees, her whole body shuddered with excruciating contractions. She had no idea if she had been in pain for five hours or twenty. Exhausted and bathed in sweat, her cotton nightshift with its little lace cuffs and pearl buttons had become twisted and tangled with the bed sheet. Both were soaked with blood.
In the small, brief moments of reprieve between each painful cramp, she whimpered for the hurt to go away, big blue eyes staring imploringly at her nurse, as if a simple kiss from this most treasured servant would make everything better again as it always had with a childhood bruise. But no matter how tenderly the girl’s feverish forehead was bathed or soothing words of comfort offered, the contractions continued unabated; the intervals becoming shorter and shorter until the girl lost all sense of time and space.
Tears coursed down the nurse’s sallow cheeks and she pressed the wet cloth to her own mouth; it was all she could do to stop herself sobbing uncontrollably at the sight of her beautiful, sweet-tempered child in such torment.
“Have the girl drink this and tomorrow she won’t be troubled,” she had been ordered.
Obediently Jane drank the bitter-tasting draught, on reassurance that the medicinal would ease the nausea and restore her appetite. She had then thrust the tumbler back at her nurse, laughingly accusing her of poisoning her.
Poison.
Yes, Nurse had poisoned her beautiful girl. She knew that now as she bathed Jane’s tortured forehead free of sweat. She would pray to God for forgiveness for the rest of her days for not better protecting her girl, for trusting her betters to do what was right and proper when all along they had planned for this to happen. But she had poisoned Jane unwittingly. The same could not be said of the other two occupants of the darkened and airless bedchamber; or the girl’s absent, unforgiving father, who had disowned his only child for losing her virginity to a noble seducer who lasciviously planted his seed then discarded her like a used, worthless thing.
Murderers all.
Nurse dared not look over her shoulder. But she knew the man and woman were there in the shadows, waiting. Jane’s cries and her ministrations to help ease the pain did not make her deaf or blind. She knew why they were there, why they suffered the stench and the ignoble sounds of suffering, why they could not avert their eyes from the offending sight of the waiflike creature with the translucent skin and distraught gaze who convulsed, sweated, and bled before them. They had to satisfy their own eyes that the murderous deed was done. How else could they inform her heartless father that his wishes had been satisfactorily fulfilled?
Nurse hated them. But she reserved her greatest hatred for the noble seducer. It gave her the strength and single-minded purpose to fight to keep alive her precious, illused girl. It did not stop her jumping with fright when a firm hand pressed her shoulder.
“The physician will be here soon,” Jacob Allenby assured her. “The recent snow fall must have delayed him.”
“Yes, sir,” Nurse replied docilely, continuing to rinse out the soiled sponge in the porcelain bowl on the side table.
“Physician? Good God, what use is a sawbones?” scoffed the female over Jacob Allenby’s shoulder. She came out of the shadows to warm herself by the fire in the grate, her carefully painted face devoid of emotion. “It is evident my medicinal is working to everyone’s satisfaction. A physician will only interfere.”
The merchant rounded on her. “Forgive me for not trusting the word of an angel of death!”
“Pon rep, Allenby, how dramatic you are,” she drawled, a soft white hand to the heat. “Anyone would think by the creature’s moans she is on death’s door. She isn’t. Syrup of Artemisia hasn’t killed anyone of my acquaintance—yet.” She glanced at the bed in thought. “Of course my apothecary on the Strand advises that the required dose be taken immediately a female suspects she is with child, usually the first month her courses are overdue,” she mused matter-of-factly. “That this dolt waited four months before confessing to the fruits of her wickedness necessitated I increase the dosage to compensate for her sly stupidity. After all, one must be absolutely certain the monster is expelled.”
Jacob Allenby ground his teeth. “You’re a cold-blooded feline, my lady.”
“No. I am a pragmatist, true to the patrician blood that flows in my veins,” she said conversationally, preening at her upswept hair adorned with pearls and ribbons in the dim light cast on the oval looking glass above the mantle. “Blood connection is prized above all else. Bastard offspring of indeterminate lineage have no place amongst our kind.” She glanced at the middle-aged merchant’s reflection whose frowning gaze remained fixed on the suffering girl in the narrow bed. “Nor does mawkish sentimentality. Why you agreed to take her off Sir Felix’s hands, I shall never fathom.”
“Sir Felix Despard is a spineless drunkard who should have kept a better eye on his only child or she would not now be suffering. As for my actions, they’re not for you to fathom.”
“Indeed? A Bristol Blue Glass manufacturer could do worse than take as mistress a nobleman’s quick tawdry rut. She is the offspring of a baronet, when all is said and done. Used. Discarded. But still very beautiful.”
“You’d know all about quick tawdry ruts, my lady.”
“You rival Mr. Garrick, to be sure. This unholy alliance we’ve formed is so diverting. La! I do believe it’s the best night’s entertainment I’ve had since—”
“—you went down on all fours at one of his lordship’s orgies?”
“Shall I show you my technique?” she teased, tickling the end of Jacob Allenby’s snub nose with the pleated tip of her delicate gouache fan. She pouted. “Tiresome little merchant moralists must dream of rutting titled ladies. In your dreams is the only place you’re accorded the opportunity of entering society.”
“I pity your offspring, my lady,” the merchant stated with undisguised loathing and put space between them.
The lady’s hazel eyes went dead. She stared coolly over nurse’s shoulder at the girl in the bed, who continued to hug her knees tightly and whimper in pain. Just turned eighteen and with no prospect of future happiness. Good, her ladyship gloated, and recalled how the squire’s beautiful daughter had captivated society on her first public engagement.
It had been at the Salt Hunt Ball, and the girl’s extraordinary beauty coupled with a refreshing natural modesty had caused a sensation amongst lords and ladies alike. Unsullied and brimming with naïve optimism, charming to all and sickeningly self-effacing, by the end of the evening she had received three proposals of marriage and two declarations of undying love. Embraced by Society, it was expected she would marry title and wealth.
That very night her ladyship had found them together in the summerhouse down by the lake: the handsome nobleman in all his splendid, wide-backed nakedness and this beautiful eager virgin with her tumble of waist-length hair the color of midnight. They were blissfully riding to heaven together, as if they were the only two in the Garden of Eden. It had enraged her, but what had crushed her dreams and broken her heart was spying the ancestral betrothal necklace of the Earls of Salt Hendon around the girl’s white throat.
The tragic consequences of the lovers’ unbridled lust could not have made her happier. But when she least expected it, in those rare moments when she permitted herself to smugly believe she had regained absolute control of the future, the image of those two heavenly lovers joined as one haunted her waking hours and turned her dreams to nightmares.
“You, sir, have no idea to what lengths this mother has gone to secure her son’s future,” she stated dully and retreated into the shadows just as the girl let out one last guttural moan that filled the quiet of the airless bedchamber. “For God’s sake! How much more pathetic whining must I endure?” she growled, and threw her fan at the wallpaper in a temper. She slumped down on the horsehair sofa in a billow of blue velvet petticoats. “Allenby, have the wench examine her. She must’ve expelled the brat by now.”
Nurse began to sob openly.
“I wi
sh there’d been another way, my dear,” Jacob Allenby apologized with real remorse. “You must understand that this is the best outcome for her, with the least pain.”
He patted Nurse’s shoulder and then he, too, retreated into the shadows.
Understand? Least pain? Nurse wanted to scream. How did any female recover from the loss of a child, be it from miscarriage, stillbirth, or taken away at birth? And Sir Felix would have had every right to take it away. Sent to an orphanage, it would never know its mother, never have a father. Best if the child was taken now, barely formed and unknowing, because giving birth to a bastard child was a sin, a stain for life. Her poor suffering darling Jane didn’t deserve such ignominy.
“Please. Please, please, God. Please let my darling live,” Nurse whispered and buried her face in the bedclothes, squeezing the sponge so tightly that her fingernails dug into the flesh of her palm and drew blood. “Please, no more pain. No more suffering.”
And as if in answer to her prays, an eerie stillness descended upon the bedchamber as the girl ceased to move and finally lay quiet amongst the down pillows in the middle of the narrow bed, the agony of the contractions abating and giving way to relief, emptiness and loss.
Jane blinked at the guttering candle on the side table, tears staining her cheeks knowing that it was not just sweat from her painful exertions that bathed her exhausted body in cool wetness but blood, her blood, and the blood of her unborn child; life extinguished. Quiet sobbing made her turn her head. She touched Nurse’s lace cap, which instantly brought the woman’s tear stained face up with a jerk. Her voice was barely a whisper.
“Silly. Don’t cry. There’s nothing to cry for now.”
“Tom, do I have a dowry?” Jane asked her stepbrother, turning away from a window being hit hard with rain.
Deadly Affair: A Georgian Historical Mystery (Alec Halsey Crimance) Page 35