The Willing Game

by Issy Brooke

  Russell had already warned anyone who’d listen that the silent Charlie should not be sent away to school too early. He knew a man who’d lost an eye at Westminster School, and had nothing good to say about it.

  Luckily, Marianne’s father, Russell, was not well, and so he didn’t share his unwelcome views in public, nor even in private family dinners. His illness ebbed and flowed, much like malaria but it was a far less socially acceptable malady. The once-great scientist and esteemed Fellow of the Royal Society now kept to himself in the suite of rooms set aside for them in the garden wing of Woodfurlong. He had a nurse from the town, Mrs Olive Crouch, but there were no servants dedicated to the ease of Marianne and Russell. He had scared everyone away, except Mrs Crouch, who claimed to have nursed in the Crimea. That would have made her either a childhood prodigy or about sixty years old; but such was her demeanour that Marianne didn’t challenge her. One might as well have an argument with a plank of wood. She had probably survived the Crimea out of sheer traditional British bloody-mindedness.

  Russell was having a bad day, so Marianne assisted Mrs Crouch to calm him and force some laudanum into him, and then she went to the kitchens in the main part of the house to hunt for some food. She had missed breakfast, but she often did. It was generally the most silent and painful meal of the day. Price read his correspondence and the papers, and conversation was frowned upon. If anyone began it, it would be Phoebe, and Price would indulge her a little, but it was rare. He would eat rapidly in a flurry of crumbs and spills, and the servants at the edges would look over everyone’s heads and stare at the opposite walls. The click of knives on crockery would seem to grow steadily louder until Marianne would want to stuff a napkin in her ears to blot it out.

  She found the kitchen to be a warm place of sanctuary, and Mrs Cogwell, the cook, welcomed her in. She welcomed anyone in. She would feed sparrows, and stray cats, and Marianne, and waifs from the street with equal generosity. The butcher’s boy from town would have fought anyone off to retain the privilege of delivering to Mrs Cogwell. As soon as Marianne stepped into the kitchen, she was hustled to a chair at the table and presented with new fresh bread and a selection of offcuts of ham.

  In return, Marianne promised to fetch some fresh fruit from the markets on her errands that morning.

  Such was daily life, Marianne reflected. She walked briskly to the railway station and rode in the second class carriage to London. Her income was small, although she was proud to say that it was all earned by herself alone. It did not quite run to travelling first-class, unless she was with Phoebe, who would have been horrified to learn that Marianne went in the lower coaches. And a dent had been made in it from the previous night’s unnecessary cab ride all the way home.

  She would have to address the Mrs Silver issue. She’d write to her, Marianne decided, and no doubt the letter would do nothing, but it would be the polite thing to do. She’d ignore The Great Italiano’s inevitable crying about the incident. To be fair, the medium and her girl had every right to be affronted, so Marianne could hardly argue back. Marianne had stabbed her, albeit lightly.

  Marianne sorted all her duties in her head as she worked her way through the markets. She visited greengrocers’ stalls and a chemist, and paid a bill at another shop. As the sun hit midday, and the streets teemed with food-sellers and office clerks snatching a break, she paused.

  Her basket was full and her purse empty. It was time to go home.

  But her feet took her another way entirely.

  THIS PART OF TOWN WAS a vibrant and exciting one. Which also meant that it was a pit of iniquity teeming with pickpockets, ladies with painted faces, rakish gentlemen, and frowning policemen. Depending on the time of day – or night – all social classes could be seen here, though when the moon rose, the posh ones were male and if you saw a woman alone, you could make a very good guess as to her occupation.

  In daylight hours, though, it was merely a rough, loud thoroughfare on the edges of the theatre district. Phoebe would not come here, not alone like Marianne did, but Marianne had very little reputation to be lost. She walked briskly, partly to dislodge the hopes of any chancers hanging around, but mostly because she knew exactly where she was going.

  She kept her eyes open and she nearly stumbled when she caught sight of a dark mop of hair under a midnight-blue top hat. The man was tall and had large curling sideburns, and when he turned his face to look into a shop window, she knew it was Jack Monahan.

  It was a coincidence.

  Except that it wasn’t, because he clearly had no interest in a display of ladies’ ribbons, and was instead looking straight at her through the reflection in the glass.

  She jutted her chin in the opposite direction and walked away as if she had not seen him, and when she chanced to look behind at a street corner, she could not see him at all.

  By the time she reached Simeon Stainwright’s workshops, up above a tailor’s rooms down a narrow side street, she was feeling flustered and a little anxious.

  She ran up the rickety wooden steps and hammered on his door. From here she could see the whole street, though it was dark and gloomy. There were a few dozen people moving through it, but none were in blue top hats.

  Even so, she breathed a sigh of relief when she fell through the opened door and into the comforting and familiar rooms belonging to the earnest and currently very annoyed stage magician.

  “What?” he blurted out. “Kick down my door, will you?”

  “I am being followed.”

  His eyes widened and he slammed the door closed. “Here? To me? They know?”

  “Who knows?”

  “The thieves! Oh, they must know where I live already.”

  “Have you been burgled?” she asked. “It is hard to tell, to be fair. Anyway if you have, they will already know where you live, and do not need to follow me. Do think, Simeon. Have you not eaten today?” She gestured at the mess and disorder. He had two rooms, both large, and both full of tools and wood and glass and metal. Furniture was not what it seemed here. You might think that you were sitting upon a perfectly ordinary chair, but if you accidentally twisted a dowel or pressed your heel against a spar, you would find yourself folded into it, or ejected from it, or possibly covered in doves.

  Simeon pressed himself against the door. He had a pink face with red blotches; he was dreadfully allergic to the make-up he needed to apply for his act. He looked somewhat panicked.

  “Oh, Simeon, come away from there. The man was following me, and it is nothing to do with you at all. What has made you so afraid today?” Last week she remembered he had been quite worried about oysters. She couldn’t recall exactly why.

  “They have stolen one of my designs,” he told her. “Again. They watched my show, and stole it.”

  She persuaded him to give up his post at the door, and they moved through into the middle of the first workshop. He told her about his latest upset.

  The problem was that Simeon was an excellent, indeed a gifted, inventor of machinery and tricks for stage magicians. His designs could conjure butterflies out of handkerchiefs and women out of rocks. He was in high demand, and could have made his fortune without leaving his rooms.

  Unfortunately, his desires did not match his talents. He longed for fame and success as a stage performer himself. Every night, he was either giving a show at a tin-pot theatre or low dive, or he was watching someone else’s. And while his shows were brilliant in their complexity, his utter lack of showmanship made them dry and dull.

  A good performer could make a crowd gasp with nothing more than a bunch of flowers.

  Simeon could send them to sleep with a herd of elephants dancing through a ring of fire.

  And no amount of greasepaint could make him into a more charismatic presence on the stage.

  He was currently convinced that his latest development, a travelling chest with a set of hidden slatted rollers or “scruto” in the base, had been copied by a far more flamboyantly successful double act ca
lled Ali Rey and the Blind Boy. Ali Rey was a copper-coloured man from Paris and the boy was not remotely blind.

  It happened all the time. She thought that they probably knew exactly where he lived, but she didn’t mention that. She talked Simeon down from his pinnacle of paranoid fury, and then asked him if he had heard of a man called Jack Monahan.

  “No, not at all,” he said. “Should I? Will I?” He looked at her with sudden curiosity. “Are you planning on leaving your bluestocking life at last? Marriage, is it? Do not make me attend. I cannot stand the speeches.”

  “Good heavens, no. This is the name of the man that has been following me. He has made threats.”

  “What manner of threats?”

  “He said we were to talk together and become friends.”

  “Well, that is a threat indeed, but I think it is more to his detriment. Poor man. So he really does not know you. What has led him into this delusion?”

  “I don’t know,” she snapped at him. “And who are you to talk of other people’s delusions? I see that I shall have no sense from you.”

  “No, wait, don’t go,” Simeon said as she got to her feet. “I need your help. I intend to expose these two fraudsters, these thieves, and this is very much your area of expertise.”

  “Lately I find my expertise is lacking,” she said.

  “Stay. I need to tell you all about them.”

  “I cannot. Phoebe is inflicting a dinner party on us tonight, and there are preparations to be made.”

  “It is barely past lunch! How much time does one need to put a dress on?”

  “And there speaks a very bachelor man,” she retorted. But she softened as she reached the door. “Simeon, don’t worry about those so-called thieves.”

  “Actual thieves.”

  “Well, actual thieves. You know you are safe here; no one could come in without your knowledge.”

  “They might, at night, while I am out.”

  “Then get a dog. Or a servant. A boy with a stout stick would do it.”

  “He would be a thief too, and the dog would chew all my work. I am working on some traps,” he added.

  She rolled her eyes. Simeon was a man utterly lacking in trust. “I will help you,” she said, stalling for time, “but I really must go now.” She would not help him. He would have forgotten this and be on with a new obsession within the week.

  He huffed, and turned away, and she left him, feeling ill at ease.

  Four

  She kept her senses alert as she made her way back to Woodfurlong but there was no sign of the strange man, this Jack Monahan. She couldn’t imagine what he might really want with her. He had claimed he wanted to simply talk: it seemed unlikely. No one was without motive. And his actions were not without precedent; her previous obsessives had proposed marriage, or simple devotion. Nevertheless, he was clearly unhinged. She thought that she ought to alert the household staff to be aware of him – after all, he said he’d call on her, and she wanted to be absolutely sure that he did not find her “at home.”

  Although if she did not receive him, she’d never discover what he wanted.

  What did it matter what he wanted? He was a lunatic, she reminded herself. If he needed her opinion on something – yet why would he? – he could write to her.

  Perhaps she ought to receive him, if he called, she thought, but only in the hallway, and with Mr Barrington to hand close by, armed with something sharp.

  She shook her head. Her own curiosity would be the death of her, she knew.

  As soon as she got home, she was swallowed up by the flurry and fluster of the household’s preparation for the dinner party. Everyone was having some sort of minor crisis of one kind or another, and the servants tended to come to Marianne with their woes as much as they approached Phoebe or the housekeeper, Mrs Kenwigs. Marianne, they knew, would set things right without judgment or fuss.

  The problem with being such a reliable safe pair of hands, Marianne reflected as she helped the nurse to dose one of the children with chocolate worm cakes, was that everyone grew to rely on you rather than tend to things themselves.

  Still, at least if Marianne did things herself, she knew they were being done right.

  And soon it was time for the dinner party.

  SHE HAD THE STRANGE and illogical fear that Jack Monahan would reveal himself as one of the guests.

  She was relieved to find that this was not the case, and then felt faintly embarrassed that she’d even worried about it. She was going to end up as bad as Simeon at that rate, worrying about someone who might, or might not, have looked at her strangely and building some huge paranoid story as to why that might be.

  Instead there was only one person there that was unfamiliar to her, and he was a business associate of Price Claverdon. He was a hearty man of early middle age called George Bartholomew. Though his face was gaining lines and his rich dark hair was flecked with early grey, his manner was youthful and loud, making him seem like a much younger man.

  She guessed, from his enthusiasm for life, that he was not yet married.

  As he was a solitary man, and her father had cried off from the dinner – to everyone’s relief – it was Mr Bartholomew who escorted her into the dining room. Russell had been invited out of politeness. It was expected that he would refuse but there was always the fear that the mercurial man might one day turn up, and then there would be awkwardness. Price and Phoebe took the lead into the dining room, of course, Phoebe hanging on her husband’s arm with a proud and proprietary air.

  Also present were another local couple, of the minor gentry, called Mr and Mrs Jenkins. Both were pale grey sorts of people that were the very thing if you were struggling to get to sleep. A short conversation with Mrs Jenkins was much the same as reading Pilgrim’s Progress, to Marianne’s mind. But Phoebe liked Mrs Jenkins, because she hung on Phoebe’s declarations about fashion and agreed with everything that she said, and Price went hunting with Mr Jenkins, and therefore the dinner table was complete. And the good thing about Mrs Jenkins was that she did not gossip, so Marianne was not going to have to listen to the latest scandals. She appreciated that in a person.

  Phoebe unfortunately didn’t feel the same about gossip, and they had barely started upon the second course when Marianne was informed by her cousin, in great detail, what was being said about her antics at Mrs Silver’s séance. Phoebe was full of glee.

  Price was unamused. He would not ever criticise her in front of guests, but he harrumphed and coughed and tried to talk, instead, about Portugal and Mozambique and Angola. Eventually his wife took the hint, and asked Mr Jenkins politely about his new dog.

  Phoebe could get away with far too much due to her age and beauty, Marianne thought.

  All throughout the meal, George Bartholomew was an attentive and respectful partner to Marianne. He spoke equally to everyone around the table, and did not mention business. Marianne asked him if he had been abroad for some time, due to his demeanour and faint accent, and he smiled.

  “They warned me that you were an observant and uncanny woman.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Oh – a few fellows in my club.”

  “Why am I the topic of conversation in your club?”

  Phoebe overheard Marianne’s rising voice. She interrupted. “Come now, Marianne, don’t be spiky. They may as well discuss you as horseflesh.”

  “That is most rude. I am on a level with horses now?”

  “Oh, you know what I meant to say.”

  Marianne did know, and would not have tolerated the slur from anyone but her cousin.

  Mr Bartholomew coughed awkwardly. “Well, I can assure you that it was all in perfect innocence. Indeed we were admiring your talents. You have a reputation as an astute scientist and a great scourge of fakes and frauds, and we were speaking of you with much warmth.”

  He seemed genuine. So she thanked him.

  Conversation moved on, and he told her a little of his travels. He had been working across
Europe and spent much time in Prussia, which sounded fascinating. There was great upheaval in the region, he told her, and many opportunities for a hard-working man of trade. She would have asked him more about the trade and the politics now that Bismarck had gone, and who had filled that man’s void, but Price coughed again and the subject was changed. Then the ladies withdrew, and the men took just enough time to smoke one cigar and down a large amount of alcohol before joining them in the drawing room for cards, a warm fire, and merriment. Price had just had a pianola installed, and was keen to show off the automatic music.

  “None of us have any skill at playing,” Phoebe confessed to Mr Bartholomew, who was admiring it. “So it seemed better to have this sort of machine. It can be played normally, too, if you would like...?”

  Mr Bartholomew backed away, his hands upraised. “Oh, not I! They call the county police on me if I step near any instrument. I shall be content to listen.” He caught Marianne’s eye as he moved. He dropped his voice. “And you, Miss Starr? Do you play?”

  “Good heavens, no. I understand your own reluctance; it is the same for me. I do not play music; I slaughter it.”

  “That is somewhat strong!” he said with a smile.

  “It is the only adequate way to describe what remains after I have wrought myself upon a piano.”