“What happened with Lucy?” she asks him. “Did you abandon her?”
He looks at them wild-eyed. “Abandon her? I don’t know what you mean.”
“You and Lucy eloped together, did you not?” Edward says.
“Lucy? Elope with me?” He shakes his head, still distraught. “No! She wouldn’t have me.”
Hannah nods to Edward, who releases his hold on the boy and steps back. “Explain yourself,” she says.
“I loved her. I asked her to marry me. She turned me down.” He tries to collect himself, wiping at his face with his sleeve.
She and Edward look at each other, perplexed. “What happened?” Hannah presses.
“I told you, she wouldn’t have me. She laughed at me. Said she didn’t need my sort, that there was a gentleman in love with her, and she was going to be a lady.”
“A gentleman?” Hannah asks, even more mystified. “What was his name?”
“She refused to tell me. She disappeared after that, but I kept looking for her. I discovered her a week later on Foster Lane, near Cheapside. I told her that ladies weren’t kept by gentlemen in a few rooms over a tavern, but she said she was happy. I’d hang about sometimes and see him come and go. It wasn’t long before he was gone for good. The next time I went by, I found out that she’d snuck away in the middle of the night, for want of the money to pay her account. He’d left her with nothing. Next I heard,” he sniffles, “she was here.”
“Did you ever learn the gentleman’s name?” Edward asks.
He grimaces as he tries to recollect. “I heard a coachman address him once. It was strange-sounding, foreign-like…” His voice fades. “Montagu, that’s it. Mr. Montagu.”
Hannah feels the blood drain from her face. Hester gasps, her long, freckled fingers covering her mouth, her eyes round.
“Hester,” Hannah says, turning to the maid. “Tell me what you know.”
“Mr. Montagu kissed her at the dance,” she confesses as if she didn’t quite believe it herself. “I saw them. Lucy swore me to secrecy. I didn’t think it meant anything. He was a gentleman and Lucy was a maid! I never imagined a gentleman would do such a thing as ask her to run away with him. I thought…” She glances at Thomas, then quickly looks away. “I thought differently.”
“Not all men who are called gentlemen are truly so,” Edward says. He turns to Hannah. “What do you think of Mr. Montagu now?”
She wants to protest that one biased eyewitness should not be allowed to condemn him, that Thomas may have recalled the name incorrectly, that there may be more than one Mr. Montagu; but she does not have to protest aloud to know that these arguments ring hollow. She shakes her head and says, “I fear you have been right all along.”
If what Thomas says is true, her own complicity in Lucy’s death is even greater than she first thought. She brought Montagu to her home, took the girls to the king’s dance, allowed them to be in his company. All the while she believed that he intended to court her; instead he seduced her maid. Was that his design from the start, or merely a recent fancy?
“When did you last see Mr. Montagu?” Hannah asks Thomas.
“Over a fortnight ago.”
Montagu must have lied to her when he wrote that he was going abroad the next day. She couldn’t imagine what his aims were, but he could not have done Lucy any worse harm. He abandoned her to a fate of which he could not possibly be unaware.
“Hester, go with Mrs. Wills and my mother to the carriage,” she says. The girl reluctantly curtsies to Edward and offers a solemn farewell to Thomas before she walks away. “Dr. Strathern, we must be leaving. I cannot keep my mother out in this weather.”
“Wait,” he says. His hand clasps her arm. “What are you going to do?”
“I do not know.”
“Yes, you do. I can see that you do. Do not be so foolish as to imagine that you can confront him. Lord Arlington said that Montagu returned from Paris last week, which means he was here in London when my uncle was killed.”
“Yes, I understand that.” She pulls her arm away.
“Hannah, please. Do not be so hasty. At the very least, allow me to go with you.”
“I have little desire to be in the company of gentlemen just now.”
“We are not all so untrustworthy.” His eyes implore her. “I have much to say to you.”
“What could you possibly have to say that I don’t already know? That I behaved like a fool? That I should have known that a man could not possibly be interested in me when he might instead have the love of a fresh-faced young maid? Or, in another case, the devotion of a wealthy young lady? I know I have been an idiot. I know it more than anyone. And Lucy paid the price for it.” Hannah’s voice breaks as her throat tightens and tears threaten to overtake her. She gathers her resolve. “Do not imagine that I will allow his crime to go unpunished. But I do not need your help.”
“Hannah, please. I must speak to you—”
She tilts her head defiantly. “Well?”
“Not here,” Edward protests. “This isn’t the place—”
“Then you will have to find another place, Dr. Strathern, for I must be leaving.” She turns and walks to the hackney coach, where the others are waiting.
When they arrive home, Hannah goes at once to her desk. On a sheet of foolscap she draws the markings on the bodies from memory. On her father’s body were a dotted circle, a crescent moon, and the letter P. Roger Osborne had inscribed upon his skin a trident shape, rather like a curved Y with a line rising up from the center, another mark that Dr. Sydenham thought to be the astrological sign for Leo, and an O. On Sir Henry, the sign for Capricorn, the apothecary sign menses, and a T; on Sir Granville two interlocking triangles, a single triangle balanced on its point, and the letter I. It doesn’t make any immediate sense, but the longer Hannah studies it, the more she is convinced that these markings tell some kind of story. But who is telling this story, and why?
Could it be Ralph Montagu? Thomas Spratt’s revelations have forced Hannah to reconsider her opinion of him. If he could behave so unconscionably toward Lucy, she must concede that he may be capable of anything. Even so, it is hard for her to square her firsthand knowledge of Montagu—a man of wit, even temper, and gallant charm—with the secondhand reports of him. Was he truly capable of inflicting the terrible injuries she saw on Mr. Osborne’s body, wounds that she knew were also inflicted upon the others? No matter how hard she tries to imagine it, she cannot picture Montagu acting so violently. She could almost as easily believe that Edward did it. And though she doesn’t really think that these arcane symbols are going to indict Montagu or acquit him, they are all she has left to go on.
She draws the letters and signs in different combinations, clustering them in various groups. She annotates the known marks by type: astrological sign, Latin letter, apothecary symbol; all of which, it occurs to her, are used in the practice of physick. Although belief in astrological influence has waned in recent years and has few adherents among younger physicians, there were those, including the late, popular herbalist Nicholas Culpeper, who placed great stock in it. And the other symbols? Perhaps alchemy or chemistry.
She stands up and walks over to her sizable collection of books, the combined result of her father’s bibliophilism and her own. Her eyes scan their worn leather bindings. The answers must be here somewhere.
Chapter Forty-six
Fifth week of Michaelmas term
NO, THAT COULDN’T be the end. But it was, unfortunately, the end to what Claire had copied from the diary. After taking her morning shower and getting dressed, Claire looked over her notes and felt the same frustration she’d felt the night before, when she’d finally gone to bed after hours of transcribing.
True to his word, Andrew showed up at Claire’s set promptly at 9:00 a.m.
“So?” he asked eagerly. “What happened?”
Claire handed him the notebook. “Read it and weep.”
“It ends sadly?”
�
��No, it doesn’t end. That’s the end of my notes, but not the end of the diary or the story.”
She went to the gyp, the small communal kitchen next door, and brought back cups of hot tea. Andrew sat at her dining room table with the notebook open in front of him. He sipped his tea absently, engrossed in reading. At last, he closed the notebook and looked up at her.
“We’ve got to find that diary,” he announced.
“I agree. Take me back to Derek Goodman’s set and let me search for it again.”
“I don’t think that’s wise. The police brought in Ashley Templeton and her friend Clive for questioning yesterday after I made that call to Portia. Their story checks out for the night Derek died—the police can’t place either one of them at the scene. So they still don’t have a suspect, and I’d rather not give C.I.D. any other reasons to suspect you—like, for instance, having your fingerprints all over his set. In any case, Hoddy and I have already looked through everything. I don’t think the diary is there, unless it’s hidden under the floorboards, which doesn’t seem to be Derek’s style. I think we should look in the Wren Library again, and not just in R bay, but everywhere. Didn’t Mr. Pilford tell you that Derek often put books back in the wrong places? Perhaps he did it on purpose. Instead of taking the book from the library, he puts it in a place where no one else would think to look for it, which is tantamount to squirreling it away for himself.”
“Search the entire library? That could take days.”
Andrew arched a brow. “Do you have a better idea?”
“No.”
“Then meet me at the Wren in an hour. I promised I’d take some books from Derek’s set over to Fiona Flannigan. I’ll be there at eleven.”
Claire decided to spend her free hour in the Lower Library, researching Ralph Montagu. Hannah seemed convinced that he was the murderer, but according to Andrew, no historian had ever even hinted at such dark strands in Montagu’s soul. Blackmailer? Yes. Two-timing womanizer? Yes. Completely unscrupulous? Yes. But serial killer? If it was true, Claire realized, a career-making story had just fallen into her hands.
She walked into the library and turned right into the reading room, lost in her thoughts—so lost that she bumped into Rosamond Mercy, who was bent over a water fountain taking a drink. The collision knocked a plastic medicine bottle from her hand.
“Sorry,” Rosamond said.
“No, it’s my fault,” Claire replied, picking up the bottle that had landed near her feet. She read the prescription as she handed it to Rosamond: alprazolam, ten milligrams as needed.
“Sorry,” Rosamond said again, taking the bottle and scurrying away.
Claire sat down at a computer terminal and typed in Montagu’s name. It didn’t take long to discover that if any biographies of the man existed, they weren’t in the Trinity Library—or the University Library or the Seeley Historical Library, either. She tried searching under subject, then keyword. The only document relating to Montagu was a twenty-page letter published in 1679 regarding the Earl of Danby affair, which had nearly sent the lord treasurer to the Tower and sent Montagu running back to Paris, out of harm’s way.
But from what Andrew had said, Ralph Montagu had been written about in at least a few books, perhaps even his own. She looked up Charles II and the Rye House Plot, wrote down the call number, and located two other general histories of the period. Then she typed in “tachygraphy” to see what might come up—why not write a paper on codes and ciphers and then a second on a female physician and a murderous courtier in Restoration London? “Tachygraphy” didn’t yield any results, but after unsuccessfully trying a few words and phrases she hit pay dirt with “cryptography”: seventeen listings. One book looked particularly helpful: an annotated 1984 edition of John Wilkins’s circa 1694 Mercury, or, The secret and swift messenger: shewing how a man may with privacy and speed communicate his thoughts to a friend at a distance.
Claire gathered up Andrew’s book, along with the other Restoration histories, easily enough, but she couldn’t find the book on cryptography. She wondered if it would turn out to be another of Derek Goodman’s acquisitions. She took her books up to the front desk and inquired of the young librarian there, who typed the call number into the online catalogue.
“It’s listed as being on the shelf,” the librarian said.
“I’ve already looked. It’s not there.”
“Oh, hold on—I know where it is.” She turned around to scan the titles stacked on the book trolley behind her. “The bloke who’s had it checked out just brought it back,” she said as she handed the book to Claire. “I hadn’t gotten ’round to returning it to the shelves.”
“Who checked it out?” Claire asked. What if someone else was writing a paper on the same subject?
The librarian made a few quick strokes on the keyboard. “Here’s the record,” she said. She turned the monitor slightly so that Claire could read it. “Robert Macintosh.”
“For God’s sake, doesn’t the bedder ever come in here?” Andrew asked, looking around at the chaos of Robbie Macintosh’s set. Claire stood next to him and was equally amazed at what she saw. Empty pizza boxes and beer cans littered the tabletops. Books and clothes covered the floor. It looked like the aftermath of a party, but Claire suspected that it was a cumulative mess made by Robbie alone. The graduate student himself appeared as though he’d just gotten out of bed. He wore a pair of baggy jeans, a T-shirt with a large stain on the front, and a dazed expression. It was a bit like coming across a hibernating bear in his lair.
“Sorry ’bout the mess,” Robbie said. “The bedder refuses to come in here. I was going to complain, then I realized that she had a point—it didn’t really seem fair to expect someone else to clean up after me.”
Andrew flipped open the top of a pizza box. Inside was a half-eaten slice covered in green mold. “Good Lord, Robbie, if you can’t clean up after yourself, you might think of hiring someone.”
“That’s what my girlfriend says. She refuses to come in here, too. But I haven’t because, you know, this is a good way to keep my own space, right?”
“Sure, if you don’t mind sharing it with cockroaches. However, we didn’t come over here to discuss your extremely unhygienic lifestyle. Dr. Donovan found out that you checked out a few books on tachygraphy. The day we spoke to you in Dr. Goodman’s set you said you knew nothing about it. Why didn’t you tell us the truth?”
“It was the truth. I didn’t know anything about that note you showed me. As for the books, well, I was just curious.”
“You developed an interest in speedwriting right at the same time Derek Goodman did? Seems like an awfully big coincidence. Tell me, Robbie, where were you the night he died?”
“You don’t think I have something to do with that, do you?”
“I don’t know. You said you were with your father in the hospital. Will your father tell the same story?”
“What are you now, the police?”
“No, but I am the college’s liaison to C.I.D. If you don’t talk to me, you’ll have to talk to one of the detectives.”
“Shit.” Robbie sat down and raked his hand through his hair in the same anxious gesture Claire recalled from their first meeting. What was he hiding? “Look, I had nothing to do with Dr. Goodman’s death,” Robbie said. “Can’t we just leave it at that?”
“No.”
One glance at Andrew’s stern expression was enough to know he was serious. “Okay, here’s the deal. I spent that weekend with a girl who’s not my girlfriend. I told my girlfriend that I was with my dad. If she finds out that I wasn’t, she’s going to break up with me.”
“Perhaps you should have thought of that possibility before you kipped off for the weekend with another girl.”
“Thanks for the advice,” he said, then sighed and muttered another obscenity. “Before I tell you anything, you need to know that I didn’t do it.”
“Didn’t do what?”
“What I’m going to tell you.”
“All right. Just keep it in mind, okay?” Robbie took a deep breath. “I needed money and Dr. Goodman said he would pay me if I helped him.”
“Helped him what?”
“Write his paper.”
“His paper on codes and ciphers?” Claire asked.
“Yes. Except that as it turned out, he didn’t really expect me to help him so much as do all the research and write it myself. Then he would publish it under his own name.”
“He paid you to write his paper for him?” Andrew asked, incredulous.
“Look, I didn’t do it, okay? I didn’t even get started except for checking the books out. When I went over to his set that day, I was going to tell him that I wouldn’t do it. I didn’t want to risk getting kicked out of school.”
“But if you were the one who was going to do the research and the writing, how did Dr. Goodman know what was in the diary?” Claire asked. “How did he know about the murder of Roger Osborne?”
“He’d read it already. He was brilliant, you know.”
“That means he must have known something about tachygraphy when I showed him my notes,” Claire said to Andrew. “He flat-out lied to me—said he’d never seen anything like it before.”
“He’d had a close relationship with Nora Giles,” Andrew reminded her. “I think we can assume he knew something about it.”
“Do you know what he did with the diary once he’d read it?” Claire asked.
“He gave it to me,” Robbie replied.
“He gave it to you?” Andrew asked.
“Where is it?” Claire asked.
“It’s right here,” Robbie said, walking over to a pile of books on the floor. It was buried at the bottom. “I’m glad to be rid of it,” he said, handing it to Andrew. “I tried to put it back in the Wren, but I couldn’t get into R bay without Pilford’s help—and it didn’t seem a good idea to let anyone know I’d had it.” He paused while Claire and Andrew looked over the diary. “Dr. Kent, is this going to go on my record? I didn’t actually do anything wrong. I thought about doing something wrong, but then I realized it was wrong and I didn’t do it.”
The Devlin Diary Page 38