Peril by Post

by Sheri Cobb South

  Having reached the end of the letter, he laid the quill aside and looked down at the paper on the table before him:

  MJILYFWIMTACSANLCISTPGLWTCFIIGHESBFTNISGEJPRENIBNDMWEGPMBARFPCOSDNGLBENSHMMMFOTEECGLIWFIBFDIEPFSIIFPSMWBESJLUFIDLBSEMPMWIPUCNLAIHFNRHTPIPBFRABDFBICMIEAYSEEEWAEAIAIENSIPGLBLIKUIHHGLISWTMUIORELPEGIIREYOSEGB

  Pickett slumped back in his chair. “Well, that’s informative,” he said in a voice that communicated quite the opposite.

  Julia tilted her head as if studying the string of letters from a different angle might shed some light on the puzzle. “Perhaps the words are scrambled.”

  “In that case, the possibilities are practically endless. I can already see ‘My cat eats friendly mice’ and ‘Scant figs grow west of Hampshire,’ and that’s just off the top of my head. You could sit here for hours and find a hundred different messages. If someone were sending a coded letter, it stands to reason that he would want to make sure it couldn’t be misinterpreted.”

  “No, I daresay one wouldn’t want to inadvertently set off a run on figs,” Julia acknowledged with a sigh. “I suppose it must be exactly what it appears: a chatty letter which, for whatever reason, Ned Hawkins wanted to be sure reached its destination—Mr. Sullivan, did you say?”

  “Mr. James Sullivan of Dublin,” said Pickett, consulting the opposite side of the letter, the side which, when folded, would have been to the outside. “Mountjoy Square, to be exact.”

  “Will you go to the receiving office, then?”

  He gazed thoughtfully at the paper in his hand. “No,” he said at last. “That is, I suppose I’ll have to go to the receiving office and post a letter to Mr. Colquhoun back at Bow Street, letting him know what’s happened and asking for more time to investigate. But I’m afraid Mr. James Sullivan of Dublin won’t be getting this, at least not yet. I’m not quite ready to give up on the code theory.”

  Half an hour was enough to change his mind. He tossed the letter down on the desk and leaned back in his chair with a heavy sigh, raking his fingers through his recently cropped brown curls.

  “If it’s any sort of hidden message, it’s beyond my ability to decipher. I’ve looked at every other letter—reading backward as well as forward—every third letter, every fourth letter—need I go on? There are other, more complicated codes, but they require a key, which I haven’t got.”

  “What sort of key?”

  “It depends on the code. Usually it’s based on a book, or some such—” He broke off abruptly, seeing again the worn Bible on Robert Hetherington’s desk.

  “You’ve thought of something,” she said.

  “No, not really.” He shrugged dismissively. “I just remembered that Bible of Mr. Hetherington’s.”

  “You don’t suppose it was he who sent to Bow Street, and not Ned Hawkins after all?”

  He shook his head. “I think it very unlikely. If he needed a Runner, he need not have written to Bow Street at all. He could have sent a letter directly to Mr. Colquhoun and asked as a favor to an old friend. Then, too, he surely would have mentioned it this morning, when I called on him. No one else was present, so there was nothing to prevent his confiding in me. In any case, he’ll have another opportunity in a few days. We’ve been invited to dine with him and his wife.” He hesitated over a question of protocol. “I don’t suppose that will have to be canceled once Hawkins’s body is discovered?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Julia said thoughtfully. “It’s not as if Mr. Hawkins were a relation, or even moved in the same social circles. And speaking of dinner,” she added, “are you ready to go down? I’m hungry.”

  He smiled at that. “You’re always hungry.”

  It was true. Now that the nausea of the first few weeks had passed, her appetite had returned with a vengeance, apparently determined to make up for lost time. She was not yet noticeably pregnant, but her trim waist was not quite so well-defined as it had been. As they changed for dinner, Julia studied with disfavor her uncorseted reflection in the mirror.

  “I don’t look like I’m in the family way; I just look like I’m growing fat,” she complained. “What do you think?”

  Pickett subjected her to a long, appraising look. “You want the truth?”

  “Please,” she said, bracing herself for the worst.

  He drew a deep breath, and slowly let it out. “Sometimes I look at you, and I can hardly believe you’re mine.”

  Julia turned quite pink with pleasure. “You mean it?”

  “Shall I prove it to you?” he offered, taking her into his arms and drawing her close.

  “Yes, please. But”—she splayed her hands against his chest—“not until after dinner.”

  They came down to dinner (roast mutton, as promised) to find Mrs. Hawkins alternately furious with her husband for his defection and frantic with thoughts of what might have happened to him.

  “He’s never been gone this long before,” she grumbled, setting plates of mutton and potatoes before them. “Can’t think what’s got into him, but when he gets home, I’ll be giving him a piece of my mind!”

  Julia, who knew better than anyone that the innkeeper’s wife had cause for concern, looked pityingly up at her. Across the table, Pickett frowned warningly at her, to no avail.

  “Is it possible that he went down to the river and—and fell in?” she suggested.

  Pickett gave her a pained look.

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing myself.” Mrs. Hawkins propped her empty tray on one ample hip, apparently prepared to expound upon this theory. “I’m wondering if we should organize a search.”

  “It’ll soon be nightfall, and there’s not much of a moon,” protested a man at the next table who had the look of a solicitor, or perhaps a bank clerk, on holiday. “Too dangerous to attempt that cliff path in the dark.”

  “Give him ’til morning,” recommended another man, this one most likely a farmer. “If he still hasn’t made it home, we’ll go out at dawn looking for him, every able-bodied man among us.”

  A chorus of wagging heads confirmed this pronouncement, Pickett’s among them. Julia’s eyebrows rose, but she did not address the issue until after dinner, when they were alone in their room.

  “You’ll go out with the search party?” she asked, reaching behind her back to untie the tapes of her stays.

  Pickett moved behind her to assist in a task at which he had grown quite accomplished over the past three months. “It’s the least I can do—especially since you might say it was my wife who raised the suggestion.”

  “And now you’re angry with me,” she observed contritely.

  He sighed. “I’m not angry with you. I could wish you hadn’t mentioned the river, though.”

  She removed her loosened stays, and turned to face him. “I know, and that’s why I suggested that he’d gone down to the water on his own, rather than falling or being pushed. But I can’t let the poor woman wonder and worry for days on end. I know what it’s like, waiting for one’s husband to come home, not knowing if he’s dead or alive—”

  Her voice broke, and he took her in his arms. Not for the first time, he wondered exactly what she knew, or had guessed, about just how far he had fallen during those two days they had been estranged.

  “I know, sweetheart, and I’ll never put you through that again, at least not if I can help it,” he promised. “But it’s important that no one suspect you actually saw the murder, or that I’ve seen the body. I don’t want to put ideas into the heads of anyone who might happen to be listening.”

  “All you have to do is act sufficiently shocked when you come across him in the morning.”

  Pickett shook his head. “I don’t plan to be anywhere near when the body is found. I intend to attach myself to a group going in the opposite direction. But that’s for tomorrow morning. Tonight, there’s something else I want to do.”

  “Oh?” Julia asked, smiling coyly at him.

  “I want to have a look at the inn register, and see if any of the signatur
es in it match the handwriting in either of the letters—the one to Bow Street, or the one in Hawkins’s pocket.”

  “Oh,” said Julia, in quite another tone.

  “Sweetheart, it has to be done tonight. Once the body is found tomorrow, the public room downstairs will be filled with people come for the wake, and I won’t have another chance. Still, I dare not make the attempt until the inn is quiet and everyone has settled down for the night. In the meantime,” he added, regarding her speculatively, “have you any suggestions as to how I might pass the time until then?”

  “Hmm.” She made thoughtful noises, but came willingly into his arms. “Let me think . . .”

  SOME TIME LATER, PICKETT donned his shirt and breeches (eschewing any footwear lest the soles of his shoes make too much noise on the stairs), then secreted the two letters up the cuff of his shirtsleeve and picked up the brass candlestick beside the bed.

  “Shall I come with you?” purred Julia, pleasantly sleepy.

  “Thank you, but no. You’ll be more useful as my excuse.”

  “Oh? In what way?”

  “If Mrs. Hawkins or Lizzie should happen to catch me, I’ll tell them I came down to fetch you a drink of water.”

  “Just so long as you won’t expect me to drink it.” Julia grimaced. “I have to get up in the night often enough as it is.”

  Pickett assured her no drinking would be necessary, then kissed her and adjured her not to wait up for him. A moment later, he closed the door softly on his drowsy wife and made his way quietly down the stairs with candle in hand. Having reached the ground floor without mishap, he set his candle on the counter, positioning it so that its feeble flame cast a yellow circle of light onto the page of the open register. His own name was the last on the list, written in Julia’s flowing script—he’d learned to recognize her handwriting even before they married, having kept and treasured every note she’d ever written to him, no matter how brief or businesslike the message it contained—so apparently no new guests had arrived since yesterday.

  Pickett, however, was less interested in the inn’s guests than he was in its proprietor. He looked at the carefully printed headings over each column: Name, Place of Residence, Date of Arrival, Date of Departure, all written in the painstaking hand of the semi-literate. He unfolded the short Bow Street missive and laid it on the counter alongside the inn register. He might have wished for a rather longer sample for comparison, but as far as he could tell, the two looked identical. It appeared, then, that Mr. Hawkins was the one who had sent the anonymous request to Bow Street. Which meant Pickett was on his own in finding out why, for he would get no further information from that source.

  Nor, for that matter, would he be reimbursed for his expenses, to say nothing of being paid any kind of reward if he should succeed in resolving the case, whatever it proved to be. He remembered he’d promised Julia that reward, and only hoped she wouldn’t feel betrayed when it never materialized.

  Having identified the author of one letter, Pickett spread out the other, the one the innkeeper had carried in his pocket. He didn’t really expect to find a match—surely someone staying at an inn in the Lake District would be more inclined to describe the beauty of the fells than an attack of catarrh—but as he’d told Julia, he was unlikely to have another chance.

  He turned back page after page, all the way back to the beginning of January (strange to think that the Drury Lane Theatre fire and the aftermath that had changed his life so drastically had not even been dreamt of at that time), but there was no match for the bold scrawl addressed to Mr. James Sullivan of Dublin. Nor was there any guest with the initials E.G.B., although hope had flared briefly when he’d come across the name of one Edward Gape, who had arrived a fortnight earlier from Norfolk. But there was no name to correspond with the “B.,” so Pickett was forced to concede that there was probably no connection between this guest and Mr. James Sullivan’s correspondent.

  Having learned all he could from the hotel register, Pickett tucked the letters back into the cuff of his sleeve, picked up the candlestick, and climbed the stairs, determined to get what sleep he could before dawn and the grim business of searching for the body he could envision in his mind’s eye, lying at the bottom of the cliff in the dark with the black water of the river rushing past.

  MORE THAN TWENTY MEN assembled in the public room of the inn at dawn the next morning, their faces gleaming in the yellow pools of lamplight as they prepared to carry out the somber task of searching for the man who had, his wife tearfully informed them, never come home. Pickett was not the only one of the inn’s guests to take part in the search; Lizzie Hawkins’s poet was there, as was the artist Pickett had noticed in the public room on the day he and Julia had first arrived from London. Among the locals were Hawkins’s son, Jem (the same one who had delivered Pickett’s message to Mr. Hetherington on that first day); Jedidiah Tyson, owner of the rival inn across the street; and the young farmer who was the poet’s chief rival for Lizzie’s affections.

  By unspoken agreement, Mr. Hetherington was placed in charge of the proceedings. “We’ll let the younger men navigate the path down to the river, while we older fellows keep to easier ground. Ben,” he said, turning to Lizzie’s rustic admirer, “you, Mr. Pickett, and Mr. Hartsong take the river path as far as the falls.”

  Somehow Pickett was not surprised to discover that “Mr. Hartsong” was none other than Lizzie’s poet. As for himself, it was not the assignment Pickett could have wished—in fact, he would have preferred to have been sent to search almost anywhere else in the village or its environs—but to raise any objection could only attract the sort of attention he most wanted to avoid.

  “The vicar and I will hike up to the fell,” continued Mr. Hetherington, “while Mr. Tyson and Mr. Armstrong follow the main road that leads out of town. If you should happen to meet any wagons coming in, Tyson, be sure and ask the drivers if they’ve seen anything.”

  Tyson agreed to this plan with a curt nod, but his eyes gleamed with excitement, and Pickett found himself wondering if the man was thinking of the search they were about to undertake, or of what the absence of his rival might mean for his own establishment.

  Soon every man present had been paired off with another and assigned an area to search. Pickett’s was the only group of three; he suspected his primary task would be to keep the other two from trying to shove one another off the cliff.

  By the time all the arrangements were in place, the sky had lightened enough that most of the men chose to leave their lanterns behind. Ben Wilson proved to be the exception.

  “Sun won’t reach the foot of the cliff for some time,” he noted, glancing toward the east where the rising sun just peeked over the horizon. “Best take a light.”

  Lizzie’s poet agreed rather grudgingly, as if reluctant to concede his rival even this small point. Was his name really Hartsong? Pickett wondered. It seemed too absurd—and too apt, given the man’s occupation—to be real, and Pickett could not recall seeing the name recorded in the inn’s registry.

  Mr. Hetherington looked about the solemn little group. “Are we ready, then? Let’s go.” He turned to clasp the woman’s hand in both of his own. “Never fear, Mrs. Hawkins. We’ll bring your man home.”

  Dead or alive. He hadn’t said the words, but they hung in the air, unspoken but understood all the same.

  The search party shuffled out of the inn and split into groups. Pickett and his two companions rounded the corner of the inn and set off down the same path he’d traversed with Julia less than twenty-four hours earlier. Alas, it soon became apparent that he would derive very little pleasure from the trek, even quite apart from the grisly discovery awaiting them at the bottom of the cliff, as the poet lost no opportunity to score an easy point or two on his rival. However dreadful his poetry might be, Percival Hartsong had a clear advantage in any verbal exchange with his inarticulate foe, and he fully intended to make the most of it.

  “I’m surprised to see you here, Wilkins
—”

  “Wilson,” the young farmer corrected him.

  “Yes, of course.” The poet waved one white hand, clearly considering the name of a farmer—or perhaps only the name of this particular farmer—a matter of no importance. “But as I say, I’m surprised to see you here. I thought you would have cows to milk or sheep to shear, or some other such occupation.”

  “Shearing was two months ago,” Ben Wilson said, declining to take the bait.

  “But the cows!” protested Percival with exaggerated concern. “I have always thought there is no sound more plaintive than the lowing of a cow.”

  “Mayhap you’ll want to go milk ’em yourself, then, while I help search for Lizzie’s da.”

  “Faugh! Depend upon it, we’ll find the fellow in bed with some doxy—a fitting subject for a comic ballad, perhaps, but—”

  He got no further, for Ben Wilson dropped his lantern and seized his rival by the knot of his flowing cravat, twisting it until the poet’s face turned red. “Get a little respect in your voice when you speak of Lizzie’s father, or I’ll give you a taste of the home-brewed!”

  As he showed every intention of making good on this threat, Pickett judged it time to intervene. “Stop it, both of you! If either one of you cares for Miss Hawkins at all, you’ll not want to have to tell her you wasted all your time in squabbling with each other when you should have been searching.”

  Perhaps Pickett’s marriage had given him some measure of confidence which he had been lacking before, or perhaps it was simply due to the fact that he found himself in the unusual position of being some two or three years older than either of his companions; whatever the reason, Ben rather shamefacedly released his hold on the poet’s cravat, and Percival muttered something that might have been an apology. Still, he positioned himself between the two young men as they began their descent along the cliff’s edge, lest the temptation to eliminate his rival should prove more than either one could resist.