An Earl Out of Time: Time After Time Book One (Time Out of Time 1)

by Louise Allen

Lucian scooped me up and strode out of the morgue door, up the steps, his beautifully-clad shoulders bumping against the foul walls, my feet knocking against the bricks.

  When we got to the top, the other two panting after us, Lucian snapped, ‘A chair and hot water and a clean towel.’

  I found myself sitting in a leather armchair in what must have been a senior officer’s room. The constable brought a steaming basin of water and some coarse yellow soap and I washed and washed my hands, trying not to behave like Lady Macbeth.

  ‘Here.’ James pressed a flask into my hands as soon as I had dried them on the rough towel. I gasped at the kick of brandy but the fumes cleared the stench from my nostrils.

  Lucian hunkered down in front of me. ‘Can you talk, Cassie? How did you know it is not her?’

  ‘Her feet. That poor soul has been walking barefoot for years. And her nails, finger and toe, were ragged and uncared for.’ I didn’t mention the scars on her legs, the flea bites. The mark of human teeth on her thighs. ‘No-one will find out who murdered her, will they? No-one is going to be punished for this.’

  ‘Well, no, Miss,’ the constable said as though I ought not to expect anything else. ‘Not unless someone saw it and speaks up. Or he does it again and gets caught red-handed.’ I saw James shudder at the choice of words. ‘Sometimes they goes mad and confesses,’ the constable added helpfully.

  I don’t really remember getting back to the carriage, or anything much until we were passing St Paul’s again. When it came into view I dropped the window glass down and took a deep breath of coal smoke, horse droppings and drains. It smelled wonderful.

  ‘No forensics, no post-mortem, no detection. And no-one cares about women like her,’ I muttered and then got a grip on my temper and on reality, or what was passing for it those days. Ranting at Lucian and James about the absence of modern policing methods was not going to help, nor was a tirade about the treatment of women, the poor, sex workers…

  ‘It is another negative that does not give us any positives,’ I said and both men relaxed infinitesimally. I suppose they thought they would have a fainting, hysterical woman on their hands. ‘If Arabella went in the river she hasn’t been found, but it doesn’t prove that she did not end up there.’

  ‘We have not spoken to de Forrest,’ Lucian said, apparently determined to change the subject. He was staring out of the window as though the bustle of Fleet Street was absolutely riveting.

  ‘Why should he know anything?’ James objected. ‘We have no evidence that he was actively courting her, although he needs to make a good match and those notes prove that he is on friendly terms with Cottingham.’

  ‘Even if he were courting her, there is no reason to think she would agree to go along with it,’ I pointed out.

  ‘True. But he would expect her to obey her brother in this.’

  ‘Then why isn’t he making anxious enquiries about her?’ I asked. ‘If de Forrest is so enamoured of Arabella, he will be frantic and even if he merely likes her, surely he will be deeply anxious. I mean, we are and you two don’t want to marry her and I don’t know her.’

  ‘That is a good point.’ Lucian took the pair of pistols out of the pockets of his greatcoat and began to unload them. ‘Either he knows where she is or what has happened to her or he has no interest in her, not even as the sister of a friend.’

  ‘Which would mean he was not courting her,’ James countered as he dealt with the other pair of Manton’s.

  ‘Or he is merely indifferent.’ Lucian put the pistols away and shook his head. ‘We are going in circles. This is all guesswork.’

  ‘Perhaps he was courting her but only because of the rumours about his impotence,’ I speculated. ‘It might be a logical reaction to all the gossip about him. Even if he does not believe that she would be attracted to a man his age, it could be a smokescreen to stop the talk about his potency.’

  ‘If he knows where she is or what has happened to her, then why has he not told Cottingham? He would have no motive to keep quiet, would he?’ Lucian asked. ‘The more I think about it, the more I am certain that the odd pieces of gossip I picked up about his interest in her are just that. Gossip. And the correspondence with Cottingham merely coincidental friendship and business dealings.’

  ‘Even so, we ought to talk to de Forrest. I don’t like leaving any stone unturned.’

  ‘That’s easy enough. He will be at Lady Maxton’s monthly musicale this evening, he never misses them. We can all attend, Madge Maxton is as easy-going as they come and will be happy for me to bring my new-found cousin.’

  James shifted on the seat opposite me and a waft of the charnel house stink rose from his clothing.

  ‘When I have had a long, long, hot bath,’ I said, conscious that I must smell as bad as the men did. ‘I wonder if any of our clothes can be salvaged.’

  ‘Garrick will work wonders,’ Lucian promised.

  We dropped James off at his lodgings. ‘My landlord will evict me if he gets within smelling distance,’ he grumbled as he stood on the pavement. ‘I will have to bribe the maids to bring me hot water.’ He looked up. ‘May I bring my clothes for you to work magic on, Garrick? Thank you!’

  ‘Is Garrick a most unusual servant?’ I asked as we drove on. ‘He seems to act as valet, coachman, butler and confidential assistant.’

  ‘I do not see the need to keep any other live-in staff. The apartment would be cramped for two menservants and he maintains he enjoys cooking. We have a daily housemaid, although you have not encountered her yet. As for the driving, Garrick does it when it involves matters that require discretion. He has been with me a long time, since I was a boy, almost.’

  ‘The matters that involve discretion are to do with women?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Lucian said coolly. ‘One’s friends need assistance from time to time.’

  Sir Clement had come to him for help. Had other men turned to Lucian for his air of calm competence – to deal with what, exactly? ‘Perhaps the attack in the alleyway when I arrived was connected to one of those other friends’ problems? After all, you hadn’t got anywhere with finding Arabella at that point.’

  ‘I have not now either,’ he said grimly. ‘But I was asking around and I was making no secret that I supported Selbourne against Cottingham’s accusations. The true culprit, if there is one, might have decided I was better removed before I got any further.’

  ‘Which implies that this is more serious than an elopement. Those men were out to kill you, Lucian. That wasn’t just a rough warning.’

  He didn’t answer me directly. ‘The longer this goes on and the more we discover – or fail to – the more I am convinced of foul play.’ Lucian was massaging his chin between thumb and forefinger, probably without knowing he was doing it. I watched the long fingers and the movement of the firm lower lip and managed somehow not to lean forward and nip it between my teeth.

  ‘If Arabella had eloped then she would, surely, have told Cottingham by now,’ he mused, apparently unaware of me watching his mouth, biting my own lip… ‘She, and her new husband, would need to discover what her brother’s reaction is going to be and either receive her inheritance, or settle down to fight for it. She will want to come back to Town, re-establish herself in Society, I would have thought.’ He was absent-mindedly biting one knuckle now, more distracted than I had seen him.

  ‘We are home,’ I said as the carriage stopped.

  ‘Hmm?’ He looked up and smiled, suddenly all his focus on me. ‘So we are,’ he said slowly, his gaze dark, intent.

  I scrabbled for my reticule and my breath. Home and that smile. This was dangerous. Albany felt right, felt like home. And the man who lived there was beginning to feel like mine too. And he could not be. He is dead, I reminded myself as I stood to get out. Dead for two hundred years. He does not exist any longer.

  ‘What is wrong?’ asked the dead man, reaching out a very alive, warm, strong hand to help me down. ‘You have gone very pale.’

 
‘It is just that moving has stirred up that awful smell again,’ I said, grasping for an excuse. I was falling for a ghost and the frightening, worrying, utterly fascinating world that I had stumbled into was suddenly a bad dream.

  Garrick leant down from the box of the carriage. ‘Leave your boots and anything else you can outside the front door, my lord. I’ll be in directly and the girl will be there.’

  The girl proved to be a bright, wide-eyed, scrap of about fifteen. She opened the door when she heard the scrape of Lucian’s key and bobbed a curtsey. ‘My lord. The water’s hot and everything’s laid out in the bedchambers. Mr Garrick said as how you and the lady would be needing baths right away.’ Her snub nose wrinkled as we stood there wafting Thames water, mud and much worse in her direction. ‘I’ll just take his lordship’s water in and then I can help you, Miss.’

  ‘I will get my own water, Peggy,’ Lucian said as he levered off his boots. ‘You look after Miss Lawrence.’

  An hour later I was clean, fragrant and in full possession of Peggy’s life story, family details and ambitions for the future – ‘To be a proper lady’s maid, Miss Lawrence.’ I tried to imagine her in my time and what her future might have held and then gave myself another talking-to. This was now and there was nothing I could do to change it, not safely. And yet I was changing things, simply by helping the search for Arabella. It made my head hurt and that spot between my shoulder blades itch.

  ‘Are you well?’ Lucian, also clean and rather temptingly fragrant with a subtle musky cologne, handed me a glass when I joined him. ‘Brandy. It might help.’

  ‘My head hurts,’ I complained. ‘Or, rather, my brain does.’

  ‘We will have some luncheon shortly, that will make you feel better.’ He flipped back the cloth covering the incident boards and stared at them. ‘There is nothing to add.’

  ‘Peggy,’ I began as I came to stand at his shoulder and study the notes. ‘Talking to her made me think about Arabella’s maid. There was something that has been teasing me about her and I can’t put my finger on it.’

  ‘Something she said? Something about her manner?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know enough about the lives of women in service, I suppose. It is frustrating.’

  ‘It must be,’ Lucian hitched one hip onto the corner of the table. ‘I imagine finding myself in your time and trying to function.’

  The idea made me smile. Lucian in modern clothes, Lucian behind the wheel of a fast sports car, Lucian…

  ‘That is better. Would talking about your problem with Arabella’s maid help?’

  ‘No, I suspect it will come to me at three in the morning.’ I turned my back on the boards. ‘Tell me about this evening. Who will I meet? What kind of entertainment is it?’

  ‘Lady Maxton is a widow with a lot of money and a firm determination to spend it before her stepchildren can get their hands on it. She holds what she likes to call musicales because that sounds vaguely cultured, but actually the musical element is a string quartet in one room with a lot of other rooms laid out for eating, card playing and gossiping.’

  ‘Loose behaviour?’

  ‘No. Madge is hospitable but tough. You can meet anyone and everyone at her house and she likes to keep it that way. She says that immoral behaviour makes everyone else uncomfortable, that arguing is unpleasant and that drunkenness is unappealing, so she employs large, polite footmen and a gimlet-eyed butler and everything goes smoothly.’

  I liked the sound of Lady Maxton.

  I liked her even more when I met her that evening. She was plump, dyed her hair, rouged her cheeks, had diamonds that made Lucian’s family gems that I was wearing again seem modest and, despite her beaming smile, looked as though she was quite firmly in control.

  ‘America? My dear Miss Lawrence, I could not be more thrilled! Of course you had to bring her, Radcliffe. Go along and enjoy yourself, my dear. Oh, and James Franklin, it is an age since I saw you. Now, what have you been up to?’ She tucked a hand under James’s arm and led him off, her rich laugh audible over the buzz of conversation and the strains of the string quartet.

  After the atmosphere of Lord Welney’s party where everyone seemed to be on edge, anxious to prove what little devils they were, this was much more enjoyable. Not that keeping a watch on my tongue and trying to hide my gaping areas of ignorance of just about everything in this world was exactly relaxing. I thought I knew quite a lot from my reading, but I seemed to know nothing that helped with this intimate immersion in real life.

  The men were easiest – they mostly wanted to flirt in a mild sort of way, and talk about themselves. They asked about Boston too and I was dredging into my memory of my short holiday there two years before to try and answer them.

  The ladies, when they weren’t interrogating me about America, were more of a problem. Who was my modiste? I knew that, at least. My coiffeur? My maid, I told them with a mental apology to Garrick. Was I being presented at Court? No, I assured them with total confidence. Then they settled down to ask me about my family. I killed off most of my relatives without a qualm, looked as embarrassed and mysterious as I could when they probed my exact relationship to Lucian and invented a great aunt with whom I would be staying in Washington on my return.

  I also had to invent a maiden aunt as chaperone in London and then was thrown completely when they asked where I was living.

  ‘Oh, I am such a goose! I have a memory like a sieve for all these street names – you must ask my cousin Lord Radcliffe. It is, er, that way though.’ I waved a vague hand northwards and managed to step on my own hem and tear it a little so I could make my escape to the ladies’ retiring room.

  On the way I passed Lucian and hissed in his ear, ‘Where am I living? People keep asking and I don’t know what to tell them!’

  ‘Say Wimpole Street and that it is inordinately dowdy and you will be moving very soon and cannot receive callers until you do,’ he said. ‘Sorry, should have thought of that.’

  The maid in the ladies’ room dealt competently with the little tear. She looked tired, I thought and hoped that Lady Maxton’s kindliness extended to allowing her maidservants a cup of hot milk at night.

  ‘That’s it,’ I said out loud. ‘The milk, of course.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Miss?’ The maid was kneeling at my feet, whipping tiny stitches along the rip, but she looked up, startled. No wonder, she must have thought I was an idiot, prattling about milk.

  ‘Nothing, I was merely thinking aloud,’ I assured her and dug in my reticule for some of the coins that Lucian had given me. How much was a half crown worth? Two shillings and sixpence. I did some rapid mental arithmetic. Just about thirteen pence in modern money, but what was it then? I found a second one and, when she got to her feet, pressed them into her hand. ‘For you, thank you.’

  ‘Oh, Miss. Thank you.’ I had obviously overdone it for hem-mending but she had helped me catch the trailing thread of thought and that was priceless.

  I shot out of the door with more haste than care and bumped into a man walking past. ‘I am so sorry, sir.’

  ‘My fault,’ he lied politely, steadying me with his left hand under my elbow. ‘I should have taken more care going past a door. May I escort you to the refreshment room?’ He laid the other hand over the first which brought him rather closer than I was comfortable with. I gave a bit of a wriggle and he lifted the hand abruptly, knocking my gloved knuckles with his ring as he did so and not appearing to realise. I hated the men I kept observing who were so free with their hands that they never noticed the signs of discomfort from whoever it was they were fondling.

  I bit back the impulse to say Ouch loudly. ‘Thank you, sir. That would be delightful.’ A glass of champagne would be perfect. Essential, in fact, if I had to talk to him for long.

  He was utterly unremarkable. Early middle age, I guessed, a stomach just beginning to test his tailor’s efforts a little, medium brown hair in a Regency comb-over, a face that was probably
pleasant enough when he was not worrying about something. As it was there were lines between his brows and bracketing his mouth and he looked as though a weekend in Brighton would do him the world of good.

  And he made me think of my great-grandmother who had died three years ago, aged ninety seven. Anyone less like tiny, white-haired, sharp-nosed Gramma Lawrence was hard to imagine, but something was bringing back memories of Christmas. Christmas? And the crackle of wrapping paper and the smell of sherry and mince pies and fir tree and the kiss of thin old lips on my cheek. Thank you, Cassie darling. My favourite. How clever of you to remember…

  That was it. The soap and talcum powder I used to give Gramma because it was her favourite and Great-Grandpapa had always bought it for her. Fougère des Bois, woodland fern. French Fern, the letter in Lord Cottingham’s desk from de Forrest had said. This wasn’t quite the same as Gramma’s favourite, but it was close.

  ‘We have not been introduced,’ I said, suddenly sure whose arm I was attached to. ‘I am Cassandra Lawrence, from Boston. In America, not Lincolnshire,’ I added with a little laugh, sounding, to my own ears, like a complete ditz. ‘Now, was it terribly forward of me to introduce myself?’

  ‘Not at all, my dear Miss Lawrence.’ He patted my hand in a manner that I hoped was supposed to be avuncular. ‘I am Lord de Forrest. Can I assume you are newly arrived in London?’

  ‘Yes, we have been here a few days now. I took lodgings in Upper Wimpole Street with my chaperone companion, but I have never been more deceived in a recommendation! The rooms are so dowdy and I gather it is not at all a fashionable address. Goodness knows what dear Papa would say if he knew, especially when he gave me a free hand to pay whatever was needful. Never mind, I will be moving just as soon as the agent finds me something with considerably more tone to it.’

  ‘Your father is most generous,’ he said politely, guiding me across a crowded salon towards the sound of clinking porcelain and cutlery. He seemed pleasant enough, if very ordinary, and rather careless of my personal space.