Peril by Post

by Sheri Cobb South

  She returned to the withdrawing room to find the gentlemen there before her, just as she had predicted, and gave Pickett a small smile and the slightest of nods to reassure him, then cast about in her mind to find some unobjectionable topic of conversation.

  “What a handsome instrument,” she said, spying a pianoforte of carved rosewood in the corner. “Do you play?”

  “Alas, no, not for many years,” Mrs. Hetherington said with a sigh, lifting the gloved hands in her lap and letting them fall. “It has been very difficult, giving up activities in which I once took such pleasure. If you would like to play it, do pray indulge us, Mrs. Pickett. I fear my poor instrument has been far too long silent.”

  Julia needed no urging. She leafed through the music stacked on top of the pianoforte, made her selection, then seated herself at one end of the bench and patted the other invitingly. “Will you turn the pages for me, John?”

  Pickett was more than eager to oblige, as this freed him from the obligation of exchanging polite nothings with his host and hostess. The next few minutes were spent quite pleasurably, with Julia focused on her music and Pickett focused on her, lest he miss his cue to turn the page. And then, in the middle of “Did You Not Hear My Lady,” Julia, having noticed for the last few minutes a faint sound near her ear, abruptly lifted her fingers from the keys.

  “John!” she exclaimed, half accusingly, half delightedly. “You can sing!”

  “I—I—I can’t!” he protested, finding three pairs of eyes fixed upon him. “I don’t know one note from another!”

  “You have never studied music, perhaps, but you have a very pleasant singing voice,” she insisted. “Do not try to deny it, for I’ve been listening to you.”

  “Pray do not be so modest, Mr. Pickett,” Mrs. Hetherington urged. “Sing loudly enough that we may hear, too.”

  Pickett threw Julia a look that somehow combined Help me with Just wait until we get back to the inn. “I can’t, really,” he said again. “I used to live near the theatre, and anything I know—which is not much—I learned from listening to the performers on stage.”

  Mr. Hetherington inclined his head. “Very well, then, we shan’t expect a professional performance.” Seeing Pickett was unconvinced, he added, “Come, Mr. Pickett, surely you would not deny my wife this small favor.”

  One need not have grown up amongst polite society to know that there was no way to deny such a request without appearing boorish in the extreme. Pickett stood up (albeit not without some reluctance) and cleared his throat while Julia played the introduction. After a bit of a shaky start, he found his voice by the time they reached the lines that had inspired him to sing under his breath: “Though I am nothing to her / Though she must rarely look at me / And though I could never woo her / I love her till I die.”

  He glanced down at his accompanist, and found Julia looking up at him with misty eyes. Emboldened, he continued, and soon reached the final lines: “But surely you see My Lady / Out in the garden there / Rivaling the glittering sunshine / With a glory of golden hair.”

  When he finished, there followed an eternity of such total silence (although it could not have been more than two seconds) that he feared he had utterly disgraced himself. Then Mrs. Hetherington, beaming at him, began to clap her gloved hands.

  “Bravo, Mr. Pickett!” her husband said, joining his wife in applause. “Bravo!”

  At the pianoforte, Julia wiped a tear from her eye.

  “I CAN’T RECALL WHEN I’ve enjoyed an evening more,” Mrs. Hetherington said some time later, as she and her husband accompanied their guests as far as the door. “How I wish you might stay longer!”

  For his part, Pickett was only too relieved to escape, having been kept at the pianoforte by his hostess’s insistence until the tea tray arrived, by which time he had been obliged to sing two more songs and to join his wife in an impromptu duet.

  “Aye, it’s a pity you must leave so soon,” Mr. Hetherington concurred. “Still and all, I don’t blame you for wanting to get back to the inn. Smuggler’s moon and all that, you know,” he added, casting a glance up at the moonless sky.

  “Smuggling?” Julia said in some surprise, recalling the kegs that had occasionally appeared outside the kitchen door of her childhood home, and her father’s surprisingly vehement reaction when she, at the age of nine, had innocently inquired about them. “I should have thought we were too far inland for smuggling.”

  “Wherever there is taxation, there will be smuggling,” was her host’s practical observation. “But you haven’t far to travel, so I don’t doubt you’ll reach the Hart and Hound without mishap.”

  With these assurances, goodbyes were said all around, and Pickett handed Julia into the Hetherington carriage.

  “ ‘Smuggler’s moon,’ ” Julia remarked, once the coach-man had shut the door, enclosing them in darkness. “Is that why Ned Hawkins sent for you, do you suppose? Because he had discovered a smuggling ring?”

  “No,” Pickett said without hesitation.

  “You seem very certain.”

  “I am. Bow Street isn’t responsible for policing potential smuggling operations. That falls to the customs office—or, once the goods have been landed, the riding officers.”

  “Oh,” Julia said, somewhat disappointed at the loss of what she had thought might be a promising lead.

  “Mind you, I’m not sorry to be excluded. It’s a thankless task—and a dangerous one. They haven’t enough men or funding to do the job effectively, and most of the locals are sympathetic to the smugglers, if not actively aiding and abetting them. If Ned Hawkins was aware of a smuggling ring, it’s doubtful he would have lifted a finger to stop it. In fact the inn, public as it is, might well have served as a meeting place.”

  “And so we’re right back where we started,” Julia said with a sigh.

  Pickett saw nothing to debate in this observation, and so the rest of the short drive was accomplished in silence. They entered the inn to find the public room empty and dark; apparently whatever crowd might have been there had dispersed early in deference to Mrs. Hawkins, whose husband was to be buried the next morning.

  Upon reaching their room, Pickett opened the wardrobe and removed the black tailcoat he usually reserved for court appearances. “What do you think?” he asked Julia. “Will it pass, or should I send it downstairs for ironing?”

  “You brought your black coat?” She knew, of course, that it had been the best he owned at one time, but she’d done her best to correct that, purchasing for him a completely new wardrobe—a gesture that had not been received with unadulterated joy. “But why?”

  “None of the new ones seemed quite sober enough for a funeral.”

  She regarded him quizzically. “And how, pray, did you know you would need to attend a funeral?”

  He had been occupied in laying out suitable clothes for the solemn occasion, but looked up at her question. “I’m a Bow Street Runner,” he pointed out. “I attract funerals.”

  “Oh,” she said, rather daunted. “Just so long as they’re not your own . . .” Her voice trailed off on the thought, and when she spoke again, it was on another subject entirely. “John, about the singing—I didn’t mean to embarrass you. It just—it surprised me, you singing under your breath, and so well, at that. I’d never heard you sing before. I didn’t know you could.”

  He gave her a reproachful look, but said nothing.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “it might make for a pleasant way to pass the time when my condition requires me to stay at home. Tell me, do you know MacHeath and Polly’s duet from The Beggar’s Opera?”

  Pickett grimaced. “Oh, I know it. Everyone at Bow Street knows it—and we all hate that thing.”

  “The duet?” she asked, surprised.

  He shook his head. “The whole blasted opera.”

  “Do you? But why?”

  “Because it presents highwaymen and pickpockets in so romantic a light that crime always goes up during its run.”
/>   Julia gave a delighted crow of laughter. “Are you serious?”

  “I’m quite serious. Fifty years ago, the magistrate at Bow Street tried to have it banned.”

  “Oh, I’m very glad he didn’t succeed. If it had never been performed, certain young men of my acquaintance might never have taken up the profession.”

  “It wasn’t by choice, believe me,” he said emphatically.

  “And fifty years ago would have been rather before your time, would it not?” she conceded. “Let us say, then, that your father might not have been inspired to take up the profession, nor to establish his son in the family business. Then you never would have been discovered and rescued by Mr. Colquhoun, nor ever have crossed my path. And the worst part would be that I would never even know what I had missed.”

  Leaving the mirror over the washstand for her husband’s use in untying his cravat, Julia set her jewel case on the writing table in order to remove her pearl and amethyst earrings with the assistance of the small glass affixed to the inside of its hinged lid. Or such, at least, was her intention. But when she reached behind her to pull up the chair so that she might sit down, her fingers closed, not over the top rung of the ladder-backed chair as she had intended, but over the fall of her husband’s breeches, as evidenced by the sharp intake of his breath.

  Startled and a bit embarrassed (for she had supposed him to be still occupied in laying out clothes for the funeral, or else untying his cravat before the washstand mirror), she turned to apologize for this quite unintentional intimacy, and suffered a still greater shock. Pickett’s face had gone white to the lips, his expression stricken.

  Julia’s apology died a-borning. Granted, Mama’s gently-bred daughter had never been so audacious as to grab her husband by his privates, but surely there was no call for so excessive a reaction to this purely accidental contact.

  “John?” she asked, regarding him uncertainly. “Darling, what is the matter?”

  “I—I—I’m sorry,” he stammered as the blood rushed back into his face, turning it as crimson as it had been white. “I just—I wasn’t prepared for—I wasn’t expecting you to—to—”

  “I wasn’t expecting it either, but surely if one of us should be blushing and stammering, it ought to be me! But it cannot be so very bad, can it? After all, we are married.”

  “Of course it isn’t. In fact—but never mind that. Did you want the chair? Here, I’ll get it.”

  Julia watched in dawning suspicion as he turned away with an alacrity suggesting relief. Although he had certainly been inexperienced when they had married, he had never been prudish. She could think of only one possible explanation for such a reaction.

  “John, does this have anything to do with the annulment?” Whatever humiliation the annulment process had demanded of him, she had assumed he’d got the last laugh, if not when they had abandoned the proceedings in favor of remaining married, then surely when she was found to be increasing after only three months, following six childless years of marriage to her first husband. But it appeared she had been mistaken in this assumption. “It’s all over now,” she said reassuringly. “It was nothing but a piece of paper—a piece of paper that has long since been burned to ash.”

  “Is that what you were told?” he asked, and something about the tone of his voice lent credence to her worst fears. “That it was nothing but a piece of paper?”

  “My solicitor told me that a physician would supply falsified documents stating that you had been examined and found to be impotent—both of which claims, as we very well know, are not true.”

  “The part about the impotence wasn’t true. The other—” He broke off, shaking his head.

  “Did you really have to see a physician, then?” she asked in some bewilderment. “You said something yesterday about the lengths to which the Bertrams would go in order to—John, what did they do to you?”

  “I—I went to the physician’s office in Harley Street, and he had two—two women waiting for me. Prostitutes, in fact. Named Electra and Persephone.”

  Julia’s eyes grew round with dismay. “They—you—you didn’t—” But even as she struggled to frame the question, she knew the answer. His rather endearing clumsiness on their wedding night had been no sham; of that much she was certain.

  “No, no,” he assured her hastily. “Nothing like that.”

  “Then what—?”

  “Don’t ask, sweetheart. Please,” he begged. “It was necessary at the time, in order to annul the marriage, but it’s all in the past now, so let’s just leave it there.”

  “Yes, it’s all in the past—and yet more than six months later, an accidental touch has the power to turn you white as a ghost.” He had nothing to say to this, and so she added, more gently, “If you suffered some indignity on my behalf—some further indignity, that is, even worse than I knew—then I was the unwitting cause of your distress. Does that not give me a right—an obligation, even—to know, so that I might make amends?”

  “No amends are needed,” he insisted. Still, her argument carried some weight, and so at last he told her, haltingly, of his experiences that day in Harley Street at the hands (quite literally) of Electra and Persephone, experiences all the more humiliating because he’d been aware the entire time that under different circumstances—and with a different woman —such an encounter might have been quite enjoyable.

  Julia listened in growing indignation. Her unsophisticated young husband might have been told it was necessary, but he was not so familiar as she with her first husband’s family. She suspected the solicitor who made the arrangements had been acting under instructions to ensure the annulment procedure was so degrading that the presumptuous Bow Street Runner would want nothing more to do with her. Good heavens! Had everyone but herself known, or at least suspected, that she was falling in love with him?

  Any consternation she felt on her own behalf, however, paled beside the outrage she felt on his. As he concluded his narrative, she pointed imperatively toward the bed behind him.

  “Sit!” she commanded.

  Miserably, Pickett sat.

  “I took no active part in the proceedings at all,” he assured her hastily, having observed the dangerous glitter in her eyes and reached an entirely erroneous conclusion as to its cause. “At least, no active part except what was—what was completely involuntary.”

  If Julia heard this speech at all, she gave no sign. “If anyone is going to do such things to you, it’s going to be me,” she said, advancing purposefully upon him.

  “My lady!” Much shocked, Pickett instinctively reverted to her former title. “You—you shouldn’t—it wouldn’t be—”

  Julia paid not the slightest heed to his protests, but subjected him to so thorough and so passionate an assault upon his person that he had no choice but to submit—and, eventually, to reciprocate. By the time they lay bonelessly entwined in the middle of the bed an hour later, that afternoon in Harley Street had become nothing more than a distant memory, having lost forever its power to shame and humiliate.

  “Julia?” Pickett said, when he could rouse sufficient energy to speak.

  “Mmm?” Julia asked, finding the formation of actual words too much of an effort.

  “I’m glad you’re not too much of a lady,” he said, and drifted into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  8

  In Which May Be Seen

  a Poet’s Delicate Sensibilities

  MUCH AS SHE LOVED HIM, Julia was not sorry to see Pickett depart for the funeral the following day; she had an errand of her own for which his presence was neither needed nor desired. She kissed her soberly clad husband and bade him a fond farewell (coloring a little at the memory of her own boldness the previous night), then waited only long enough to assure herself that he was well and truly gone before fetching her portable writing desk. As this necessitated passing in front of the washstand, she paused before it long enough to deliver a stern admonition to her reflection in the mirror hanging above it.

>   “What a brazen creature you are!”

  The image in the mirror smiled smugly back at her. It was heady stuff, possessing this power over her husband, and she wondered fleetingly if her first marriage might have been more successful had she discovered it sooner. But no. To the late Lord Fieldhurst, conjugal relations existed solely for the purpose of begetting an heir; pleasure was to be found in other beds than his wife’s. An empowered viscountess was the last thing he would have wanted. Even her second husband, she acknowledged, had his limits—and the letter secreted away in the bottom of her writing desk might well put them to the test.

  She retrieved the letter, then lit the candle that stood on the table. As it warmed sufficiently to melt the wax, she searched first her bags and then Pickett’s for a shilling to place beneath the seal, thus freeing her sister from the cost of paying for receipt of the missive. Should the worst come to pass and she not survive the birth, Julia reasoned, she would be asking Claudia and Jamie for funds enough; let her spare her sister and brother-in-law what expenses she could.

  Alas, there was no shilling, nor any other coin, to be found anywhere in the room: Apparently it all resided in her husband’s coin purse, which resided in his coat pocket, which was even now en route, along with its wearer, to Ned Hawkins’s funeral. With a little huff of annoyance, Julia unfolded her letter, dipped a quill into the inkpot, and added a post scriptum at the bottom.