Secret Admirer

by Michele Jaffe

  “Madam I never intended—” Lawrence began stiffly, but Mrs. Slipson’s gleeful laughter interrupted him.

  She leaned toward Tuesday. “Them serious ones never can tell when a body is jesting, can they?” Then she sat back, wiping the merry tears from her eyes and said, “He ’splained it clear as day. I’m to sit here, hidden like, and give a cough when I hear him.”

  “Exactly,” Tuesday confirmed.

  “Then hide me up. I’m ready.”

  “He changes his appearances as easily as we change clothes,” Tuesday had said the night before to Lawrence, keeping her voice low so no one would hear. “Which means, we will never be able to find him if we are looking for him.”

  Lawrence had regarded her as if she had sprung a leak. “Are you proposing that we just stop the investigation and—”

  “What we need,” she interrupted, “is someone who won’t be fooled. Someone who has never seen him before.”

  “Shall I just go drag someone off the street or do you have an individual in mind?”

  She held out the paper she had extracted from the stack of witness interviews. “Mrs. Slipson.”

  Lawrence had frowned at her. “The blind woman?” he had begun to ask. And then, as understanding came, repeated in an entirely different tone, “the blind woman.”

  “Exactly. If we are right and the Lion wants to stay close to the investigation, then the chances are good that he has let himself be questioned by your operatives—maybe even begged to be questioned. He can do that safely because he is a master of disguise, changing his appearance whenever he has to. But I bet, despite how meticulous he is, he has not bothered with his voice or his scent or any of the hundred things someone without sight would recognize. And she lived in the same house with him for over a year.”

  “The blind woman,” Lawrence was still murmuring with awe.

  Once Mrs. Slipson was hidden, each of the people interviewed by Lawrence’s men were escorted into the room, introduced by a guard, and offered a seat. That way they were able to parade everyone close to the case—including the men working on it—by Mrs. Slipson’s waiting ear without any of them realizing it.

  Lawrence asked most of the questions, but occasionally Tuesday would suggest one. The idea was ostensibly to see if, probed and prodded anew, anyone could remember anything about the Lion, they had not remembered earlier. Mrs. Slipson was silent through the questioning of the women from Helen’s Harem, snored during the fruit-seller’s detailed description of how to choose a melon, and let loose audible giggles when her former landlord, Mr. Carter, went into a long rant about his property.

  “Ought to put me up in the queen’s own palace, losing my house in service to my nation like I did,” he told Lawrence.

  “Queen’s palace indeed,” Mrs. Slipson commented after he’d left. “Place was lousy with mites. Did everyone a service knocking it down, I’d say. Queen’s palace, ha.”

  She had barely mastered her indignation when Albert Marston was brought in after that, his posture as he perched at the edge of the seat suggesting that of a bird ready to take flight at the first opportunity.

  “He didn’t want to come,” Tom explained, adding that he had found Mr. Marston barricaded in his apartment and had been able to get him out only by threatening to break the door down. “He’s refusing to speak, sir. He seems to think his life is in danger.”

  “There are three men guarding you, Mr. Marston,” Lawrence explained patiently.

  “I don’t like them and I don’t want them,” Albert Marston complained. His chest puffed and he sat up straighten “I can guard myself. And I’m not saying anything to you.”

  That was the only information they could extract from him, except, finally, that he wished them a good day and hoped never to see them again.

  The next witness was Can Can Kyle, the owner of the Dancing Fawn. They had found Joey Blacktooth as well, but he had growled that he refused to leave the dice tables “while on a winning streak”—which looked to Grub to mean he’d only lost half his reward money—and would kill any man who made him.

  Kyle seemed to have invested his money in new clothes, and was only too happy to have an opportunity to show them off. “Man o’ our builds,” he said, leaning forward to take Lawrence into his confidence, “G-g-got to be fitted by an expert.”

  Lawrence deftly steered the conversation onto the topic of the Lion without losing Kyle’s interest by asking, “Do you know where he got his clothes made?”

  “Never confided in me, he didn’t,” Kyle said sadly. “Fine work thou—”

  Mrs. Slipson erupted into a coughing fit then, which only stopped when she began hollering, “It’s him, it’s him, it’s him!”

  “W-w-w-w-w-w—” was all Kyle managed to get out before Lawrence’s sword was at his throat. At a sign, six men advanced into the room, lifted Kyle from the chair, and dragged him away to manacle him.

  When the door was closed, Lawrence crossed to where Mrs. Slipson was still seated behind a screen in Tuesday’s favorite chair, and kneeled next to her. “Are you certain, ma’am?” he asked. “Positive that he is the man?”

  The woman turned toward Lawrence and looked confused. “Not that stuttering one. The one before. The one who talked about not wanting to come and talk. That one.”

  “Albert Marston,” Lawrence and Tuesday pronounced in unison.

  “I don’t remember his name, but it was that one. Soon as I heard him my heart gave out and I fainted dead away. I’m sorry if I let you down, dear,” she apologized, addressing the place where Lawrence had been standing.

  She was speaking now to empty air. Lawrence was already across the room issuing commands and sending out messengers to the men trailing Marston with orders to drag him back as quickly and discreetly as possible. “Tell them not to hurt him,” Lawrence added, almost as an afterthought. He did not add that he wanted that pleasure all for himself.

  It was only a half hour later, when he shouted for someone to help him, that anyone remembered to unshackle Kyle.

  “Albert Marston is dead,” Grub reported three hours later. “Has been for fifteen years.”

  Albert Marston, it seemed, was just one of many other names—including Bob Fish, Lad Carlton, Derrick Egret, Noddy White, Ebenezer Ripple, and Ugly Sluice—all to be found on the grave markers behind the debtor’s wing at Bridewell, and all adopted in the course of his career by the man they now pursued.

  He had, it seemed, led a very colorful life. Once a bit player in the duke of Norfolk’s company, he’d thrown off the yoke of the theater to freelance. He had not given up acting, though, and despite being barely past thirty had managed to act the part of husband to six elderly women who passed away shortly after marrying him, leaving him the bulk of their properties and a handful of mortal enemies in the form of their heirs.

  His method seemed to be to earn the affection of these women by taking on their favorite hobby. He had been, at various times, a great admirer of ferns, an aficionado of wooden toys hand painted by orphans, a student of German literature, and a fan of a certain one-armed juggler. His most recent conquest, Dorthea Burthen, was dearly attached to sparrows and other “sweet singing birds.”

  “Which is why he had all them in his house,” Grub explained. “And they was making a racket to raise all hell when we got there.”

  This was just one of the many interesting facts they collected about Albert Marston in the course of the day. But what they did not manage to collect, from any part of London, was the man himself.

  None of the guards Lawrence had following Albert Marston could give a very good explanation of how he had eluded their grasp. Lawrence knew from personal experience that it was not hard to lose a man following you in London, or even two. But it should have been hard to lose three men, and he had assigned four. Which, along with the objects discovered in his house, seemed to confirm that the man they knew as Albert Marston was a professional criminal of some skill.r />
  Arrayed on the table in front of them now were a half dozen pieces of blood caked clothing, a dirty knife, and two pieces of paper. One of them had the names of each of the victims so far written on it. The other showed several attempts to sketch a man. The face of the best one was crossed out in what looked like blood.

  “Looks a bit like Your Lordship,” Grub observed, pointing to it.

  “Looks a bit like your work,” Lawrence said to Tuesday.

  “It is,” she admitted grudgingly. “Part of it. I—I tried to sketch you the first night we met. To figure you out. Don’t get the idea that I—”

  “I won’t.” Lawrence could barely conceal his smile. He remembered standing outside her window that night, watching her work, not knowing she was drawing him. “Was the blood part of your original design?”

  “Of course,” she agreed. “I could sense even then how taxing you could be.”

  Lawrence’s face became serious suddenly. “I had my men search for that paper the next day and they could not find it. And that was the night Tom was knocked out in the alley. The Lion must have paid you a visit while you slept.” He saw Tuesday shiver and changed the subject. “It certainly looks like we have found the right man.”

  “I suppose,” Tuesday admitted, but not enthusiastically.

  “Are you still annoyed that I wouldn’t let you go and look at the rooms yourself, or is something else bothering you about this?”

  “I’m definitely still annoyed,” she assured him heartily. “But that’s not it. All of this—it just doesn’t feel right. He staged his other lodgings, the one he had booby-trapped, so carefully. But his place this time was a mess.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t expecting us this time,” Grub put in.

  “But there are things missing. Things that should be there.”

  “Like what?”

  “Books. Everyone always talked about him reading all the time. And fancy clothes. And—”

  “Got something else,” Tom announced, rushing into the room. “Found it under the rocks in one of the bird’s cages.”

  “Better man than me,” Grub said, shaking his head. “I’d not have touched those scrawny things for gold.”

  “I had one of the Special Commissioner’s men do it,” Tom said with a wink. “Anyway, look. I think this clinches it.” He held out a scrap of paper.

  “ ‘Nose: 12; Lips: 31; Forehead: 46; Chin: 5’,” Lawrence read aloud. He looked up at Tuesday and saw that her eyes were blazing.

  “He used me. He used my book. That must have been what he was doing in my studio that night. Looking up the numbers.” She swallowed hard. “Then he faked that shooting to make sure we would believe him. And I fell for it. He tricked me.”

  “He tricked all of us,” Lawrence said, to make her feel better, but it didn’t work.

  It was horrible enough that he was in her head, that he had invaded her house, stolen things from her room. But somehow even worse was knowing he had used her own work, her own book of faces, to fool her.

  “There is nothing we can do right now.” Lawrence tried to make his voice soothing. He could imagine what she was feeling—self rebuke, failure—and he racked his mind for some way to ease it. “Every available man in London is searching for him.”

  “I want to search, too.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Bianca says you cannot do anything strenuous.”

  “Come on,” Tuesday said, making for the door.

  “Because if anything happened to you, the investigation would go nowhere—none of my men are as good as you are at figuring out the killer’s mind.”

  She snorted. “Are you coming?”

  “And finally,” Lawrence said, getting the idea on the spur of the moment, “because you have an appointment.”

  “I do not.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “What are you talking about.”

  “Yesterday you said you wanted to know where I lived.”

  “I do, but not right no—” She broke off. “Where are you going?”

  “To bark a few orders at unsuspecting men. Be ready in half an hour.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, but he was gone.

  Chapter 27

  As they wandered in just after nightfall, what amazed Tuesday most about Pickering Hall was not the fact that it was the largest house in London. Or that it had the most spacious grounds. Or was widely judged to be a modern architectural masterpiece.

  What amazed her was that it was empty.

  “Not entirely,” Lawrence corrected, leading her past suite after suite of empty chambers. “The cook and a few footmen have furniture.”

  There were lines where chairs had once scuffed paneling, and rectangles and ovals and squares of dark fabric marking the walls where paintings had hung. Eerie shadows seemed to flit across the walls like ghosts of a past life, of past parties, dancing over the rugless floors and through the chairless rooms as they stood together in silence. Tuesday could imagine the house lit with thousands of candles, imagine the balls and the fine furniture and the stupid jokes and unsubtle, unsuitable, flirtations. The duke and the chambermaid sequestered behind one set of curtains, the duchess and another chambermaid tucked more comfortably—why did men always choose such uncomfortable venues for their affairs?—into one of the dozens of spare bedrooms. And she could also hear the whispered comments behind people’s hands about how exactly Lawrence Pickering got his wealth, about his low breeding, about his prowess in bed. She could almost feel the jealous looks and the condescending looks and the admiring looks, and knew that Lawrence had to see them all to see any of them.

  She was already well aware of his generosity, but standing in the deserted, dead corridor of his house, she understood his courage better than at any other moment. Not every man could lead sailors against an enemy or mastermind an escape from a foreign prison or do any of the dozens of glorious acts the news sheets rang on about. But compared to the effort of being honorable around men and women ready to condemn you because you had the audacity to have once been poorer than them and now were richer, compared with the effort of not succumbing to their vision of you but remembering, every day, to be proud and not embarrassed by what you achieved, compared to that the Spanish were a mediocre enemy.

  “I used to like to throw parties,” he said as if reading her thoughts. “I loved to see everyone wondering how much a chair or a plate of oysters cost. Men leaning across their wives to inform one another that the wine came from the king of France’s own cellar. ‘Yes but did the king know about it,’ one of them would inevitably ask, laughing at the scandalous implication that I had stolen it. Which just showed that they had never been there, because Henri has his cellar locked up tighter than any of their jewel casks. I used to like it when their laughter or whispering stopped abruptly when I sauntered over because they had been speculating about what sorts of illegal acts I had been involved in to purchase that chandelier or that inlaid table. Their imagination of my business was so much more interesting than what I actually did to make money.”

  “What happened to everything?” Tuesday asked, skirting around the outline of a long-forgotten rug.

  “I sold it all when I went to Spain.”

  “Everything?”

  “I was not planning to come back.”

  “You wanted to settle in Spain?”

  “I wanted to die in Spain.”

  Tuesday pulled Lawrence to a stop in the middle of a dark corridor. “You were ready to die?”

  Her question took him completely by surprise. No one had ever asked him that before. “What do you mean?”

  “Weren’t there things you still wanted to do? Experiences you still wanted to have?”

  He really did not know how to answer. “I guess I was not thinking about that. I was thinking about what I had done. What I never wanted to do again.”

  She was silent for a
moment, then asked, “Is that what the nightmare was about?”

  She felt him tense. “What nightmare?”

  “The one you woke me up with the other night. You were shouting and I went to see what was wrong and—that is why I was not in my bed when the Lion attacked it.”

  “What did I shout?”

  “Mostly ‘Don’t let go’ and ‘Ever.’ Or ‘Never.’ I couldn’t tell.”

  “Everly.”

  “Is that a name?”

  Lawrence nodded and got a very faraway look. “He was one of my men.” Tuesday stood next to him, silent, in the dark, empty corridor. She listened to the leaves on the large tree in the back scrape against the window panes, heard an owl’s call echoing through the vacant rooms. She knew why her house was empty, but Lawrence did not need money. The emptiness here was both a sort of purity, and a sort of punishment, she felt. Penetence for something? Or an unwillingness to be too attached to life?

  Lawrence’s voice cut through the darkness, making her jump.

  “He died,” he said simply. “Everly. He died in Spain.” It was the first time he had spoken the words. He’d lived with the memory long enough.

  “Did he fall?”

  He looked at her closely. “How did you know that?”

  “From your dream. The way you acted.”

  He nodded. His eyes moved beyond her again. “Down a cliff. He let go. I was there and I could have pulled him up but he let go.”

  Lawrence could still remember the darkness, thick and heavy and freezing. Each gust of wind was a biting slap in the face, making his eyes tear, making it impossible to see what was happening. The raw howling lashed at his ears, obliterating the sound of the waves pounding the edge of the cliff below.

  “I don’t have any choice, Lawrence.”

  “No, Everly! Don’t.”

  “Heads or tails?”

  “Don’t do this.”

  “You always choose heads, don’t you. Look. It’s your lucky day!”