by Louise Allen
‘I visited all Arabella’s closest friends and I am convinced none of them knows where she is.’
Oh yes? I wondered just how good a gentleman would be at seeing through the mask of sweet innocence these unmarried girls would have been drilled into adopting. ‘Do you have any sisters yourself, Sir Clement?’
He got my point immediately and nodded. ‘I have three. And I know all about the wide-eyed, butter-would-not-melt looks. I am as sure as I can be that they know nothing, except for my cousin, Lady Henrietta Fanshawe. And she, if I am not mistaken, is frightened of something. Or someone.’
‘Doesn’t she realise how important it is to find Arabella? Couldn’t you push her harder to say what she knows?’
‘It might be something Lady Henrietta feels unable to discuss with a man,’ James said carefully. ‘Out of, er, ladylike reticence.’
‘Then she can discuss it with me,’ I said and put down my cup with some force. I’d give her ladylike reticence when her friend might be in danger. ‘Can you get her somewhere I can talk to her alone? No chaperones, no friends to hide behind.’
Sir Clement looked doubtful.
‘Kidnap her if necessary,’ I snapped. ‘No, I’ve got a better idea.’ They let out a collective sigh of relief, even Garrick, who had come in to listen. ‘Take her for a drive in the park and put her down in some secluded spot where I can take a walk with her. Say Lucian is taking me for a drive in the park too, as part of showing me London. Tell her you want her to come along because I am shy – ’ James made a sound suspiciously like a snort, ‘ – or he wants me to meet some nice English girls. Have your groom up behind, whatever it takes to make her relax. Then as soon as we arrive at this spot we will get down to talk and you men can drive off out of earshot and I’ll get the truth out of her. Somehow.’
The men chose Green Park as the quietest location and we trooped out an hour later to call on Lady Henrietta. I sat beside Sir Clement in his curricle. James rode a horse and Lucian drove his high-perch phaeton.
Sir Clement got into a muddle helping me into my seat and began to apologise profusely for his stubborn left-handedness. ‘My father and tutors used to try and beat it out of me, but it did no good.’
I bit down on the comment that such behaviour was barbaric and managed a ladylike murmur of sympathy, then settled back for the ride. He might be clumsy, but there was nothing wrong with Sir Clement’s driving and it was exhilarating, despite the crowded streets.
‘Is it not rather early to be calling?’ I ventured, hoping my supposed foreign origins would explain my ignorance.
‘Not for a ride in the park on such a lovely morning. It is not the fashionable hour, of course, but it is quite suitable for a young lady only just out to be driving with a small party.’
His tiger jumped down to take the reins while he ran up the steps, rapped the knocker and was received inside. Lucian drew in behind the curricle and James reined in alongside me. ‘You seemed exceedingly unsympathetic about Lady Henrietta.’
‘I have no patience with her. This is no time to be keeping quiet when her friend may be in danger.’
‘It might be that she is compromised herself by what she is keeping secret,’ he suggested. ‘Stand, you idiotic animal,’ he added to his big bay hack which was sidling and snorting at a coal cart.
‘Then she is a disloyal ninny and I shall tell her so.’
‘I think things are very different when you come from,’ James said. ‘Girls simply do not have the freedom that you seem to take for granted.’
‘Women don’t have the freedom here, let alone girls.’ I was in no mood to be understanding.
He was saved from replying by Sir Clement appearing at the door with a pretty brunette in a green outfit and an exceptionally flattering bonnet. She bobbed a respectful curtsey to me, which made me feel about a hundred and ten, and gazed round with big brown pansy eyes before being helped into Lucian’s phaeton with a lot of breathy squeaks about how high it was and how big the horses were and how clever Lord Radcliffe was to drive it.
I rolled my eyes at James, the only male present unlikely to be impressed by the show, and he grinned.
‘Like a lamb to the slaughter,’ he said before taking the lead of our little procession. Behind us I could hear Lucian talking to Lady Henrietta, although I could not make out the words. His voice was deep and amused and mildly flirtatious and sent interesting little shivers down my spine.
I turned my attention firmly on the man beside me. I might be pretending to the exotic American visitor, but he would begin to smell a rat if I didn’t appear to have some social graces. ‘I had no idea what to expect of London. Boston is so different – and yet so much the same,’ I prattled. ‘Smaller of course, and we are virtually on the ocean. And we have Harvard University so close, whereas your Oxford and Cambridge are further away, are they not? Which did you attend?’
I managed to get Sir Clement talking about himself, which took the strain off me and, although he seemed to accept my fascination in him and all his works as his masculine due, he still seemed a likeable man.
Green Park had a few strollers, including many nursemaids and children, a few riders and a smattering of carriages. James led the way diagonally across the park and I tried to picture it with the Tube station in the north-east corner and Buckingham Palace in the south west. But that wasn’t called a palace yet, was it? The Queen’s House, I remembered. It would have to wait for another of George IV’s building extravaganzas for its glory days.
James reined in where a gravel path wound into a small grove of bushes. ‘Shall we walk?’ he suggested, dismounting before anyone could reply.
‘Yes, I would like that.’ I remembered to wait for Sir Clement to hand over the reins to the tiger, then help me down. Lucian was doing the same thing. ‘Do let me take your arm, Lady Henrietta.’
Confronted by a request from an older woman, and one who was in some sense her cousin’s guest, she politely obliged and I walked into the thicket with her hand firmly trapped against my side. It was not until we were inside and heading for a bench that she turned her head and saw the two carriages and the horse heading off.
‘What… Where are they going, Miss Lawrence?’
‘Away, because I need to talk with you, Henrietta. Very seriously.’ I sat on the bench, pulling her down so she had no option but to land with a bump beside me. ‘About Arabella Trenton.’
‘No! I cannot… I mean, I have no idea…’
‘You have no idea how much trouble you will be in if you do not tell me,’ I promised her. ‘She may well be in danger – don’t you care?’
‘I… yes, of course I care, but she made me promise. And anyway, I cannot tell anyone without explaining about the masquerade and Papa will kill me.’ The big brown eyes filled with tears and she scrabbled one-handed in her reticule for her handkerchief.
‘You know perfectly well he will not, whereas someone might kill Arabella, if they haven’t already.’
She gave a small scream and stared at me.
‘Or rape her, or both.’ That did it. She burst into tears, more out of shock at my explicitness than anything, I suspected. ‘Now, tell me and I will do my best to keep you out of it. But if you don’t tell me everything, then I will take you back home and speak to your parents myself.’
It took another five minutes before the weeping and wailing subsided enough for her to make sense. Two weeks before she and Arabella had crept out to a masquerade ball, masked and wearing dominos. ‘Lucy Fanshawe told us about it, and she could take us up in her carriage because her cousin Harry escorted her. It was a great lark, and really so fortunate that he could come with us. He had been sent down from Oxford that week, you see. He is so handsome and such good fun.’
I could just picture Cousin Harry. ‘I presume that you are not supposed to attend masquerade balls?’
‘Oh, no and I can quite understand why,’ she confided, wide-eyed. ‘It was a sad romp and there are all kinds of people one d
oes not normally meet. I mean, cits and tradespeople and women of ill-repute, I dare say. But we were masked, so it was quite safe, you see.’
I imagined that pretty face and nubile figure thinly disguised by a mask and domino and wondered how she had managed to get home in one piece.
‘But it did become rather… wild as the evening went on, but it was all right because just when two dreadful bucks started ogling us and tried to get into our box, Lord Welney appeared and rescued us. He was masked, but he is so good looking that we knew him at once. And he is very tall and dresses so well and he has wonderful shoulders…’
‘Henrietta! Pull yourself together. What did Lord Welney do? Hit them?’
‘Oh no. He just looked at those awful men through his quizzing glass and they went,’ she said simply.
‘I see. Looked at them through his glass, you say? Terrifying for them.’
‘It was. I would have been in an absolute quake.’ Obviously sarcasm made no impression on her. ‘And, of course, we invited him into our box to thank him and he ordered champagne. It felt so grown up, because Mama does not allow me to drink wine in company, only a small glass when we dine en famille.
‘And then?’ There had to be a then.
‘He invited us to a reception at his house. He said it would be quite informal, with some dancing and cards – just a romp, really.’
I bet, I thought grimly. ‘Did you go?’
She bit her lip and blushed. ‘No, I could not because Mama caught me kissing Frederick Gorridge behind the potted palms at Lady Hestercote’s ball the next night and now she will not let me go to any evening entertainments for a whole month and she makes Potter – that is her maid – sleep in my room every night. So I could not go.’
‘Did Arabella go? When was it?’
‘It was the night she disappeared,’ Henrietta confessed with a gulp.
Chapter Eleven
I released Henrietta’s arm, stood up and walked away from her because I was within an inch of boxing the little idiot’s ears. ‘And it did not occur to you that something happened to her at this reception?’ I said when I had calmed down enough to turn back. ‘That you should tell someone where she might have gone?’
‘But then I would have had to say how I knew.’
‘And you are so disloyal to your friend that you would put getting into trouble with your parents over her safety?’
‘But she would not be unsafe, not with Lord Welney. He wants to marry her, I think. He is courting her.’
I sat down and contemplated tearing off my bonnet and stamping on it. I couldn’t blame the girl, she had been brought up to be an ignorant innocent and she probably had not the slightest idea how dangerous a man like Welney might be. ‘How do you know he is courting her?’ I managed when I had got my impulse to explode into basic Anglo-Saxon under control.
‘Because he bribes the footmen to tell him about her. And they tell her about it, of course.’
‘But I thought Arabella favours Sir Clement.’
‘Oh, she does. But it is terribly flattering when someone like Lord Welney takes an interest, is it not? He is so good looking, far more handsome than Cousin Clement. And he has a title and – ’
‘Where was this reception?’ I interrupted.
‘At Lord Welney’s Town house. But I am not certain that Arabella did go – Mama says she is a bad influence on me because she wagered I could not get Freddie to kiss me and it was part of my punishment not to talk to her.’
‘Very well.’ I got up and marched her back to where the gentlemen were waiting, telling myself that it was not her fault that she had the common sense of a lamb peeping out through the fence at a world full of handsome wolves and foxes. They all had glossy coats and bushy tails and wonderful eyes – and she could not see the big, white, sharp teeth.
‘I think it would be a good idea if you took Lady Henrietta home, Sir Clement,’ I said when we reached them. ‘And then if you were to come to Albany so we can discuss what I have learned? If that is all right, Cousin Lucian?’
I must have looked grim because the polite social smiles they were all wearing vanished. Lucian helped me up into his phaeton and we made for home.
By the time Sir Clement had joined us Garrick and I had rigged up an approximation of an incident board by setting an old unpanelled door on its side on top of a dresser and dividing it with lengths of ribbon into sections headed Arabella, Lord Welney, Sir Clement, Lord Cottingham and The Household. I fixed a timeline on another piece of wood and we were all writing things down on squares of paper and pinning them up in the appropriate sections.
I can’t say it was making any sense, but it gave me the reassurance that the information was under control and the illusion that we were at least doing something.
Sir Clement came in, stared, then pointed at his section of the board. ‘I am a suspect? Damn it, Radcliffe, you said you believed me! My apologies for my language, Miss Lawrence,’ he added, apparently just seeing me.
‘No problem,’ I mumbled through a mouthful of thumb tacks.
‘We do believe you,’ Lucian said. ‘But it helps us organise the information. This is Bow Street’s latest method for collating intelligence.’ We had agreed that it was not wise to let Sir Clement in on my secret and I did not think that he would believe I had come visiting armed with the most up to date methods for criminal investigation as practiced in Boston, Massachusetts.
‘Now we are all here I will tell you what Henrietta said.’ I had jotted facts down on pieces of paper and now I pinned them to the board and updated the timeline as we discussed each one.
‘That bas– swine Welney.’ Clement was on his feet, hands clenched. ‘He has got her. I will go and tear out his throat.’
‘We would come and help – but we do not have any evidence that he does have her, and if he has, for what purpose?’ Lucian said as he stood up and pressed his friend back down onto his chair.
‘Purpose? That is obvious, he has…’ He remembered my presence again and took a deep breath. ‘He has taken her for his own depraved purposes.’
‘He would have to be utterly reckless to kidnap and ravish a well-born innocent like Arabella, surely?’ I said. ‘I can well believe that London has many depraved men who would want to do such a thing – but it is also full of young women with no protection who would be much easier prey, surely? If he was tempted to capture her, how could he be certain that she had told no-one where she was going? He would assume that Lady Henrietta knows.’
‘True.’ Clement slumped back in his chair and mopped his brow with his handkerchief. ‘Then he is holding her to force Cottingham to agree to a marriage.’
‘But why for so long? Unless Cottingham is lying to us, he has no idea where she is. If Welney wanted to force a marriage then one night is quite enough to ruin the girl,’ Lucian pointed out.
‘Cottingham might be frightened for her safety and so is pretending he doesn’t know where she is,’ I suggested. ‘But I agree, one night is surely enough to achieve a forced marriage.’
‘There was no clue in Cottingham’s correspondence,’ James said. ‘But there might be hidden cupboards, I suppose. Have we got to break in again?’
‘No,’ Lucian said firmly. ‘We need to find out whether she was at Welney’s party that night. If she was, then we tackle Cottingham.’
‘But…’ Four heads turned towards me. ‘But if she went to Welney’s party, then her maid must have known – she says nothing has gone except a walking outfit, and she could hardly fail to notice a missing evening gown. And who drugged the maid? Arabella?’
‘Miss Trenton drugs the maid, simply in order to attend the forbidden party,’ Garrick said slowly, working it out as he went along. ‘She dresses up and goes to Lord Welney’s house and there meets someone who persuades her to leave with him. She returns home, changes into a walking dress… But that does not explain the locked door.’
‘Or the party was a blind all along,’ Lucian said. ‘She lets La
dy Henrietta believe they will be going, then she ensures that her friend is caught doing something mildly scandalous by making a wager with her to kiss that youth – ’
‘And Henrietta is grounded by her mother and Arabella makes her escape to whoever she has run away with, believing that Henrietta will tell everyone that she went to Lord Welney’s house,’ I finished. Then I saw Sir Clement’s expression. ‘Oh, I am sorry to be so tactless. But are you certain that she is as attached to you as you are to her?’
‘If she is not,’ he said, sounding choked, ‘then she is not only a liar but a consummate actress.’
The rest of us shot into distraction mode. Garrick got up and said he would make tea, I went to the timeline and frowned at it, Lucian and James began an earnest conversation about the weather on the night of the disappearance. After a bit Garrick came back with the tea tray, Sir Clement blew his nose loudly and we carried on as though there had been no interruption.
‘This is all speculation,’ Lucian said, staring into the depths of his cup as though expecting to read the tea leaves. ‘What do we know for certain? It does not seem much.’
‘Arabella has not been seen in public since Friday the twenty seventh, ten days ago. Her brother refused to allow Sir Clement to propose and he has not discouraged Lord de Forrest’s courtship – if that is what it is. But we must be wrong about that, it seems so improbable,’ I said slowly. ‘And Lord Cottingham seems exceedingly agitated, but not deluded.’
James got up and studied the board. ‘Arabella has flirted with Welney and he is attracted enough to bribe the footmen for information about her movements. We have her maid’s account of what happened, but that is not supported by any other witnesses.’
‘Arabella appears to have left willingly,’ Lucian observed. ‘She may, or may not, have been tricked, but I cannot see how any outsider can have got into the house and removed her without being detected. We got in and out easily enough, but we were not attempting to smuggle out an unwilling adult woman.’