After the interview, Arabella told her, “I shall engage you, Mrs. Janks, on the sole condition that you leave your husband for good and promise neither to send him money nor to see him when he calls for you.”
“Oh, but, madam! You don’t know him! He’s a monster when he’s been drinking!”
“On the contrary, I know all I need to know of him. You needn’t fear, Mrs. Janks; if your husband dares show his face here, my coachmen and gardeners will give him such a drubbing that it will permanently affect his memory.”
“Ma’am?”
“I mean that he will forget entirely where you are living, and probably find himself some other poor woman to torture.”
Arabella had first encountered her parlor maid, Marianne Fielding, whilst the latter was on trial for stealing a silver teaspoon, and facing deportation to Australia. Our heroine had been sitting in on the trial as a lark, watching her lawyer lover do what he did best. She had been touched by the girl’s plight and volunteered to take charge of her after learning that Marianne had been desperate to raise money for her sister’s abortion. People said she was mad to hire a maid who had already proven her untrustworthiness, but Arabella silenced the critics by asking, “What better punishment, then, than to be obliged to polish my silver teaspoons once a week for the rest of her life?”
“You are too good,” the Reverend Kendrick had murmured. “If circumstances were different, you would be hailed as one of the greatest Christian philanthropists of the age.”
Arabella had laughed. “Even though I never go to church?”
“Well, that’s why I specified different circumstances.”
“Oh! I thought you meant, if I weren’t a wh—”
“Miss Beaumont, your carriage has arrived. Allow me to hand you in.”
She had never had cause to regret her impulsive act. For Fielding, tall, serious, and all of nineteen years old, had proven herself to be a devoted and hardworking employee, and Arabella would have trusted her with the Star of India.
Little Sheila Doyle, Lustings’s red-haired chambermaid, had been rescued by her mistress from Dublin’s infamous Magdalene Laundry. Arabella had offered a certain sum to the mother superior, who, after praying about it, had happily informed Arabella that God had instructed her to take the money and release the girl. As mistress and servant were preparing to embark for London, however, word reached them that this same mother superior, Sheila’s chief torturer whilst she was there, had died. Whereupon the girl had fallen to her knees and wept!
“Oh, madam! ’Tis my fault! Didn’t I pray for the auld biddy to drop dead, and here she has! ’Tis a terrible sin I’m having on me soul now, for I’ve killed a bride of Christ!”
“Nonsense,” Arabella had said, in her practical way. “You didn’t kill that nun, Doyle; God killed her for you. Now get up, please, or we’ll miss the boat.”
Louisa Molyneux, or “Mrs. Molyneux,” or “Cook,” or “Mrs. Moly,” was a refugee from the French Revolution. Arabella had played no part in her rescue; had, in fact, literally stolen her from the employ of Lady Ribbonhat. For on one occasion, when that august personage was vacationing in Biarritz, the duke had taken Arabella to the ancestral pile, and she had been so enchanted by the meals served to her there that she’d slipped into the kitchen and engaged this dark-haired, merry-eyed sylph on the spot.
Last, and, some might say least, was fourteen-year-old Tilda Crouch, who now helped Mrs. Moly in the kitchen. Crouch was illiterate and simple but good-hearted and anxious to please. The Misses Beaumont had found her one day, unconscious and starving on the streets, and had simply taken her home in their carriage.
In the beginning, Arabella’s admirers, who were mostly men, with mostly ulterior motives, had occasionally tried to praise her for her Christian charity. But Arabella soon put a stop to that.
“Sow your field with wretches whom you’ve plucked from the depths,” said she, “and reap a lifetime of faithful service for extremely low wages.”
Of course, the wages she paid weren’t really low. Quite the opposite, in fact, but her admirers weren’t to know that. And when Arabella’s servants had looked upon the rooms and beds that were to be theirs while they remained in her service, they were overcome with a gratitude so profound they could not speak.
She kept only women servants inside her house, but Arabella also employed male grooms and a coachman, who doubled as liveried butler and footmen; two gardeners; and a gardener’s boy. These were all fine, lusty fellows—so Arabella made sure that they ate and slept in their own quarters, over the stables.
“Is that a horse I hear in the drive?” she asked, looking up from the menu. “Mrs. Moly, can you see who it is from over there?”
The cook stretched her torso out from under one of the loggia arches.
“Eet ees ze Reevrond Kendrick, madam,” said she, nearly toppling down into the garden as she tried to retract herself.
“Excellent! Does he look pleased or perturbed?”
“I am sorry, madam; all I could see was hees-a horse’s ass.”
“Who’s a horse’s ass?” asked Belinda, emerging from the library.
“The Reverend Kendrick,” said Arabella, absently scanning the menu once again.
“We could also ’ave ortolan,” suggested the cook.
“What are those?” Belinda asked.
“Tiny songbirds, fattened on figs,” Arabella replied. “No, I’m sorry, Mrs. Moly; there won’t be time. We would have to special order them from France—there aren’t any suppliers in Britain.”
“Oh, but zere are, madame! An’ we could easily catch zem ourselves! Zee birds in your aviatory are half-tame already! And zhust theenk of the wonderful feathers you would ’ave left over for trimming your ’ats!”
Arabella regarded her with horror. “Are you suggesting we should eat my Figpeckers?!”
“But av course! Not zhust ze Pigfuggers—all of your small bairds ’ave grown fat on a diet of fruit and delicacies. Zey would make delicious ortolan!”
“Mrs. Molyneux, you are not to consider such a thing! All sentiment aside, the aviatory’s least expensive inhabitant cost me upward of ten pounds!”
“But ’ow can zat be?” cried the cook. “Whenever I go to feed zem, zey cry, ‘Cheap! Cheap!’ and I feel zat I am not making zee best use of your kitchen budget.”
At this point, Arabella realized that the cook was cracking one of those monstrous Gallic jokes of hers. All the same . . .
“Mrs. Moly,” she said, “I hereby absolve you from your bird-feeding duties. In future I shall assign that task to Tilda, exclusively.” She suddenly noticed Belinda’s presence. “Don’t come out here, Bunny! You mustn’t see what we’re going to have until it’s actually on the table!”
“But—”
“Go! Go!”
“All right, but do you really think that Reverend Kendrick is a horse’s ass?”
“Belinda! How can you say such a thing? When he has always been so kind and considerate toward you!”
“But I didn’t say that! You did!”
“Now you are not making sense! You aren’t having a stroke, are you?”
Belinda began to cry.
Arabella was flabbergasted. “What in the world—What do you make of this, Mrs. Moly?”
“Eef she was having a stroke, I don’ theenk she could cry.”
Arabella rose and embraced her sister, patting her shoulder.
“All right. All right. There, there now, darling. I expect you’re just suffering from pre-party excitement. Now you go inside where it’s cool and have a little lie down. Ask Fielding to bring you a wet cloth for your brow.”
“Good heavens! Whatever can be ailing Miss Belinda?” asked Kendrick in alarm, coming out onto the loggia. At sight of him, Belinda burst into a fresh spasm of weeping and hurried off to find solace elsewhere. Mrs. Molyneux went after her.
“It’s the excitement,” Arabella explained. “We are all on edge just now. Were you able to track
down the sailor?”
“Yes and no. His name is Jack Furrow, but I am afraid you won’t be able to talk to him; he sailed for Borneo shortly before the murder. In fact, that’s probably why he was chosen to steal your knife, because his departure for foreign lands was imminent, and his likelihood of survival small.”
“Mmm, yes,” said Arabella reflectively. “He’ll likely end up a titbit for cannibals. Well, at least we know that the murderer was a man, according to the sailor’s testimony, someone who planned to implicate me before he killed Euphemia. That may or may not be significant.”
She made a note in the blue notebook, which she had lately begun to keep with her when she went out and even when she stayed in, taking it along from room to room. Observing this, her thoughtful sister had netted her a bag for it. After a bit, Belinda reappeared, looking somewhat more composed.
“. . . So the murderer definitely wasn’t Belinda,” said Arabella, without looking up. A close observer might have seen a wicked little smile appear at one corner of her mouth.
“What?!” shrieked the poor child, hovering once again on the brink of hysteria.
“Oh, hush, darling; it was just in fun. I don’t seem to be making much headway with this investigation, Mr. Kendrick.”
“We mustn’t give up hope, whatever happens.”
“Why ever not?”
“Well . . . they taught us that in theological school,” he explained uncomfortably. “But now I come to think of it, they never told us why we shouldn’t. It is stupid, isn’t it? Of course it must be all right to give up hope, once there can no longer be any point in clinging to it!”
Reverend Kendrick had never had any real affinity for the church. His family had thoughtfully arranged this career for him so that, as a third son, he mightn’t starve to death. His one act of defiance had been in choosing the living at Effing, just so that he could make references, when he came into London, to “that Effing church! Those Effing choirboys!” He had also stubbornly refused to rise in the ranks. His grandmother had wanted him to become an archbishop, but she had died unfulfilled. In that respect, anyway.
“I mean, I’m not saying you should give up now, you know,” he went on, wishing he could stop talking. “You haven’t hit that brick wall yet. I’m sure there are still people you could talk to . . . or have me talk to. I should love to do something . . . anything I can! What are you . . . that is, how . . . do you know . . . ?”
“I have made an appointment to see an attorney,” said Arabella, “and then we shall see what we shall see. Will you stay to dinner, Mr. Kendrick?”
“Nothing would give me greater pleasure,” he said. “But, as I am dining here tomorrow night, perhaps it would be better if I didn’t.”
He took courteous leave of both ladies and left them.
“It’s just as well,” muttered Belinda, on the point of blowing her nose. “He is rather a horse’s ass, after all.”
They were still laughing as Kendrick rode down the drive, and his heart warmed within his breast to think of the girlish merriment with which Arabella faced her uncertain future: Here was true courage, and unassailable nobility!
That night, over a game of whist with Constance, Belinda, and Mrs. Janks, Arabella, who couldn’t keep her mind on the game, suddenly said, “The murderer paid a man to steal my paper knife. Then he used it to kill Euphemia. So he planned the whole thing out in advance. I think it is logical to assume that the murderer is someone known both to me and to Euphemia.”
“Yes,” murmured Belinda wearily. “So you’ve said.”
“Arabella,” said Constance slowly, and with the infinite patience of a madhouse attendant, “how can he possibly be known to Euphemia? She’s dead.”
“It might have been Puddles,” said Arabella suddenly, turning from Constance and addressing herself exclusively to Belinda and Mrs. Janks. “With me out of the way, he could get his mother off his back, and reassure his fiancée. And there’s that naval connection: The sailor might have been someone he knew from a previous voyage.”
“But why should the duke want to murder Euphemia?” asked Mrs. Janks.
“Why should anyone? Maybe it was just so that he could frame me for it.”
“No, Bell,” said Belinda. “It cannot be the duke. He interceded to keep you out of gaol, after all.”
“Well, that wasn’t difficult to do; maybe it eased his conscience, which never pricks him very deeply in any case.”
“But why should he hire someone to steal your paper knife,” asked Constance, in a rare fit of common sense, “when he could have taken it himself during the party, or any time he was over here?”
“She’s right, y’know,” said Mrs. Janks. “It wouldn’t make sense, involvin’ a third party when he didn’t have to. Besides, he was here with you on the night of the murder.”
“If he paid someone to steal a knife, he might just as easily pay someone to do the killing.”
“But why should he even want to?” Constance asked.
“Perhaps . . . his mother put him up to it.”
“And why should she do that?” asked Belinda.
“This is what I have to find out.”
Arabella got up from the table, picked up her volume of Lucretius, and settled herself in the window seat. “Just now,” she added, “I am afraid that my own darling duke is the principal suspect.”
Arabella’s library was widely reputed to be one of the finest private collections of printed matter in the English-speaking world, but it certainly was not one of the largest. At a mere three thousand volumes or thereabouts, the books scarcely filled the room designated for the purpose of displaying and housing them. But each one had been especially chosen for its superior content, and each was an undisputed masterpiece of important ideas, of brilliant wit, of exceptional artwork, or of various combinations of these qualities.
She went through fads with her books. Just now, her favorite was On the Nature of Things, a poem in six volumes by Titus Lucretius Carus, a third-century Roman, whose work was widely credited with having inspired the Renaissance. Arabella had recently decided that Lucretius’s philosophy was the one she herself had been living for most of her life, i.e., that existence is transitory and therefore the only course that makes sense is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This wasn’t as selfish as it sounded, she argued, for it is not possible to live pleasurably without also being honorable, generous, kind, and courageous and without a genuine love for the other creatures that inhabit the earth. She thought it would be nice if everybody in the world read this poem or had it read to them. Failing that, she felt it her bounden duty to enlighten everyone whom she knew personally.
Nevertheless, when Arabella suddenly broke up the whist game in order to read Lucretius (to herself) yet again, Belinda was heard to remark that when the pursuit of one’s own pleasure resulted in the termination of pleasure for others it was time to find a new book.
Belinda never was much of a scholar.
Chapter 9
THE DEVIL COMES TO LUSTINGS
In which Mr. Wedge insults Lady Ribbonhat, Arabella
tells her story and attempts to play matchmaker, Neddy
brings his turtles, Mephistopheles arrives in time for
Belinda’s birthday, and Euphemia gets laid . . . to rest.
When Arabella arrived at the agreed-upon rendezvous point in the formerly elegant section of Hyde Park known as Vauxhall Gardens, she found Oliver Wedge there, waiting for her. Of course she did; Arabella had arrived a full quarter of an hour later than the time she herself had specified, for she intended to be the controlling force in this unacknowledged struggle that now existed between them. Wedge wanted things from her, including information, and yet he had printed an insulting, if not libelous, personal attack in his newspaper, which more than hinted at her guilt. It seemed to Arabella a most peculiar start to his promised assistance, and she was angry . . . but also curious.
Wedge sat with one elegant leg throw
n carelessly over the other, his hat resting on his knee, with his gloves inside it, and for a moment she imagined that he was not going to bother standing up at all. He did, though, and made her a courtly bow, which she returned with a cold nod.
“Miss Beaumont!” cried he, presumptuously taking her hand and kissing it. “I was beginning to despair of you! I am most awfully glad that you came!”
“I nearly didn’t, you know,” she replied icily. “After all your flattery and promises, to write such a thing in your paper . . . I must confess, I fail to understand your design.”
“I am sincerely sorry, if I have given you pain—”
“If!”
“Yes, you see, the inspiration came to me in the wee hours, and there was no time to notify you of my idea before the morning edition. Not without sending an express post and waking you from your slumbers, which are surely of the utmost importance to your fresh-looking complexion and ethereal beauty.”
“Enough of that, if you please. I find you both despicable and undeserving, Mr. Wedge, but should you care to oblige me with a recitation of this plan, I should be willing to listen to you for exactly five minutes.”
“Shall we walk?”
He offered his arm, and Arabella hesitated a moment but took it.
“I think,” said he, “that I shall begin my campaign—the newspaper campaign, that is—by vilifying you, and then gradually shift over to championing your cause. In that way, the reading public will think that they, too, have slowly come to realize how innocent you are, and how corrupt and incompetent the constabulary is.”
“Really? Do you think it will work?”
“Madam, I know that it will. I have made it my life’s employment to study the tastes and attitudes of London’s citizens, and on your behalf I propose to cook up the public such a feast as it has never dreamt of. Am I forgiven?”
Death and the Courtesan Page 9