Secret Letters

by Leah Scheier

  The writing did not match.

  I NEEDED ONE TINY CLUE, one shred of evidence, something solid that didn’t fall to pieces at my touch. And I needed it soon, before my meeting with Cartwright the next day. I couldn’t show up with nothing, not after I had boasted about my fantastic progress on the case. There was no time left now, no chance to wait for something grand to tell him. I would have to ignore all of his advice and disregard his rules. I needed to break into James’s room that night.

  What else could I do? Even if James wasn’t involved in Lady Rose’s case, even if he was as loving as Agatha seemed to think he was, wasn’t it possible that he was still behind Adelaide’s blackmailing? I had at least his initials to go on, didn’t I? And what if my cousin’s letters were hidden in his room and I uncovered them? I would be no closer to helping the earl’s missing daughter, but at least I would have the satisfaction of saving my cousin’s marriage. I really had no other choice.

  And I realized that now would be the perfect time, before the guests retired to their rooms. James would be busy fetching and carrying all evening for Lord Victor, so I would have a few clear minutes to search the place.

  Agatha had pointed out James’s chamber to me earlier that morning. I waited until the coast was clear, then slipped down the hallway and into his room. My first action was to locate a hiding place, in case I was interrupted. I had no desire to fall out of a window again and even less desire to try to explain to James what I was doing snooping under his bed. I made a mental note of the spacious wardrobe in the corner and then began the process of snooping under his bed and everywhere else.

  Unfortunately for me, within five minutes I was able to confirm only one of my suspicions: that James was too smart to leave anything incriminating lying about. Every unlocked drawer was empty, no scrap of paper, no photograph, no loose telegram was anywhere to be found. Even his hairbrush was clean.

  And, as luck would have it, less than ten minutes after I had entered, I was interrupted by the occupant of the room. This time, at least, I had a plan, and I had climbed into his wardrobe and was crouching behind his shirts before the door had opened. It was a good hiding place; peeking between the wardrobe doors, I had a perfect view of the entire room while still being hidden in the shadows. The only danger, of course, was if the valet needed an article of clothing. It would be over for me then, I knew, for James was suspicious of me as it was.

  The valet entered the room, and I held my breath. He never turned toward me, however, but headed straight ahead to the opposite corner, to the chest of drawers beside his bed. Quickly, he drew out a set of keys and unlocked the middle drawer, slid it open, and slipped something into his trouser pocket. From my vantage point I could not see what he had taken out, for his back was turned to me, but when he rose again, I caught a passing glimpse of his expression. It was not one that I would ever have expected to see on him—or on any criminal. He actually looked frightened at that moment. There was a grim tension in his jaw, but his eyes were widened in a fixed stare, as if he had just thought of something that had alarmed him. Then he was gone, and I fell back against the wardrobe in limp relief. After his footsteps had died away I stole out into the hallway and scurried to my bedroom.

  I slept rather poorly that night, for my disappointment weighed on me like a cold stone upon my chest. I would have nothing to tell Cartwright tomorrow, and I knew that he would make me feel my failure. Or worse, he would want to know why James had written such a note to me, what it meant and what I’d done to bring it all about. It was one thing to admit to a flirtation if I had a result to show him, a little hurrah for me. But now, with this dead end in my hand, how was I to justify my actions to him?

  I buried my head under my pillow and tried to fall asleep. The damp and pungent servants’ chamber was not helping much. It was difficult to breathe at night, for I shared the windowless room with three extremely dirty maidservants. The girls were allowed one bath a week, but rising before dawn was quite a trial, so that chore was often skipped. I still had not gotten used to the unpleasant odors in my room.

  I awoke a few hours later from my troubled slumber with the vague feeling that I was being watched. As my eyes focused slowly in the darkness, I could just make out the trembling figure of Agatha sitting at the corner of my bed. I could not be certain how long she had sat there, but the gutted candle on the night table told of a long, cold vigil. I offered her my blanket, and she wrapped it around her shoulders gratefully. Several minutes passed in silence, the girl sitting there on the bed and studying me while I wondered sleepily what she could possibly want in the middle of the night. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw that her face was swollen and her eyes were bloodshot and weak. She sniffed, wiped the blanket across her cheek, and gave a hiccupping sigh.

  I suddenly remembered my recent flirtation with the valet and I sat up, awakened by a panicked guilt. With a shock of paranoid alarm, I realized that James’s note was still beneath my mattress. Had she somehow found it?

  “I want to thank you for taking my part with the girls below,” Agatha whispered finally. “It was very good of you. Most people wouldn’t have done it, not for someone like me.”

  I breathed an internal sigh of relief and settled back against my pillow. “It weren’t nothing—” I began, but she interrupted me with a wave.

  “I need to talk to you about something,” she said urgently.

  At three in the morning? I wondered, but I nodded and murmured, “Of course.”

  “There’s something very wrong with James,” she whispered, glancing over her shoulder as if she expected to find him listening at her back.

  “What do you mean?” I asked her.

  “Something’s been bothering him for weeks now, Dora. One moment he’s as sweet as honey to me—and the next he’s sneaking about like someone is after him. He’s in some trouble, I just know it.”

  “But what’s he done?”

  She sighed and rubbed her forehead. “Oh, I’ve seen him do any number of odd things. A fortnight ago I caught a peek at a note that he was reading, but when I looked at it, there wasn’t no meaning to it. It was just letters with no meaning.”

  “What sort of letters?”

  “Just X ’s and V ’s and lines. No words at all. I asked him what it was, but he told me to mind my own business. And not to sneak up behind him.”

  “Well, perhaps he was doin’ research on Egyptians,” I suggested brightly. “They wrote in strange symbols, I heard. Did he have a book open next to the letter?”

  I wasn’t thinking about Egyptian hieroglyphics, of course. I was hoping she would mention the Bible on Lord Victor’s desk, which I suspected was linked to the strange symbols that I’d just seen scrawled over the fireplace.

  “Yes, actually—he had a set of Dickens next to him and was glancing back and forth between his letter and the book. But that didn’t make no sense to me, neither.”

  Not the Bible, then, I thought. Why were all of my theories wrong?

  “But, Agatha, I still don’t understand,” I protested after a pause. “Those letters that you saw—that doesn’t mean he’s guilty of anything.”

  “Where did he go tonight, then, answer me that!” she demanded, her voice rising. One of my roommates groaned and cursed irritably in her sleep. Agatha bent down to me. “It’s what I wanted to talk to you about, actually,” she continued in a lower tone. “Earlier this afternoon—he was so kind to me. I met him in Lord Victor’s room just before dinner and we talked for a little while. Ah, Dora, if you had only seen him then you would have understood why I love him so. He was so tender and honest. But then, after we had parted, something happened and he became distant again. He’d warned me that he would be. He told me to be patient with him. But I knew something was wrong. So after the dinner party was over I was watching him. He was carrying some towels up to his master’s room and then I saw him stop, look out of the window, duck into his room, and then take off out the door, like his life depended on
it. He weren’t gone but an hour, but when he came back”—she sank her voice to a tremulous hiss—“he had dirt on his trouser knees—and—I saw—I saw a revolver bulging from his pocket.”

  I stared at her in alarm. I realized suddenly that I had seen him do what she’d just described; it was a weapon that he must have taken from his drawer while I watched him from the wardrobe. Was it possible that while I was “rummaging through coal dust,” as Cartwright had said, Lady Rose had met her end? Had I really been so close to her killer and yet had failed to stop him? Real tears bit my eyes, and when I reached out to grab Agatha’s hands, my own were shaking. I was not acting anymore, and the memory of my little performances in front of Lord Victor and James filled me with disgust. What had I been proud of, after all?

  “Where could he have gone?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady and failing. “I don’t know the area so well as you.”

  She seemed to draw strength from my agitation, as if upsetting her emotional friend had somehow eased her mind. My reaction had at least justified her concern, and she was encouraged by it. She patted me on the back in a kind maternal gesture. “I didn’t mean to scare you, Dora, I forgot how young you are. I just needed to talk to somebody so badly. I didn’t know what to make of what I saw, and I just couldn’t hold it in no longer. But maybe we shouldn’t talk of it anymore.”

  “I’m all right, you just gave me a turn, that’s all.”

  My heart had slowed a little now and I was breathing normally. My theory did not make sense, I realized. Agatha had said that James had only been gone an hour. But why had his pants been covered in dirt? He couldn’t have murdered Rose and then buried her on the Hartfield grounds as I had first imagined; he wouldn’t have gotten back that quickly. “Where could he have gone?” I repeated.

  She shrugged. “In that direction is Sheffield Green, the tenant village. It’s about a twenty-minute walk from here. It’s the nearest village to the estate; the others are miles off.” I recognized the area; I had been to their bakery earlier that day. Somewhere in that village lay the key to the mystery, then, and Lady Rose was there, praying for us to find it.

  Agatha was plucking at my sleeve, waiting for my attention. I put my new theory away and focused on my friend, who had drifted back into her own thoughts.

  “Oh, Dora, I never expected it to come to this,” she sighed. “My mother didn’t raise me so. She was a good woman, went to church regular, taught me to read and write. She was so proud that a daughter of hers would get such a noble position in a grand estate, and me only seventeen. She said I had quite a career in front of me, that I could work my way up to lady’s maid one day, even though I was only from a poor family, and she herself only a cook’s assistant. ’Course I didn’t pay her any mind, for whoever heard of such a thing? I had my future all planned out, though, from the moment I got here. And then I met him, and Dora, he was like no one I’d ever seen before. And I couldn’t help it; I believed everything he told me. He promised to marry me; we were planning to open a small shop together. But it’s all coming apart in front of me now. I realize now that I can’t trust him to take care of me—or anybody else.”

  She wrapped the blanket tighter around her shoulders and sighed.

  “I was hoping that perhaps you could help me think of some explanation for his behavior, something that I hadn’t thought of,” she continued sadly. “But now that I’ve told you everything, I can hear the truth myself. I can see how blind I’ve been about him.”

  She paused here for a moment; a fading hope flickered briefly in her eyes, as if she was still waiting for me to reassure her, to tell her that I had found some magical solution for her, and a happy ending to her story. But I couldn’t think of a reasonable lie to tell her.

  “Thank you for listening to me,” she murmured when I didn’t speak. “I have no one to confide in now, except for you. My mother’s dead, you see, she died last year. It’s better so, or she would have died if she had found out that I had—you understand.”

  “But, Agatha, he’s the guilty one, not you,” I told her.

  She hesitated for a moment and then glanced over her shoulder again. “There’s something else I wanted to tell you,” she whispered. “It’s why I woke you, partly. I don’t have much time left, possibly. I’m going to be showing soon. And I can’t stay here much longer, Dora. You saw how the other girls were mocking me; they all know about me, and I can’t bear it anymore. So I’ve found another position. I just heard this morning from a gentleman in Hampstead. It’s an upper housemaid post, not as good as this one, to be sure. But I can’t be too choosy now, not in my—condition.”

  I nodded, and squeezed her hand in sympathy.

  “But how—will you work—if—” I glanced significantly at her still-slim figure. She colored and looked away.

  “I—have a—friend. She knows of a place—of a man—who helps girls who are—in trouble. I am going to see him in two days—”

  I sat quietly, regarding her. What could I say to her? I had heard the whispered horrors of her choice before, but I had never really thought about it at any length. Our minister had ranted about this once, in euphemism, as “immorality and murder” and I had nodded with the congregation. But I couldn’t imagine that he was speaking about this girl. And what choice would he have offered her? She was facing a lifetime of shame ending in the workhouse. I could not see any evil in the pathetic form before me. There was no defiance in her features, her head was bowed, her red-rimmed eyes looked meekly to me for forgiveness.

  “If anything happens to me—I just wanted someone to know,” she continued. “I wanted to tell someone before I went. I thought that maybe you would understand. Afterward, if I am ill, you will stop them gossiping won’t you? When I am better I will hand in my notice. If you’re ever in London, you can look me up—the Appledore Towers, Hampstead—that’s where I’ll be. You don’t have to, of course. I’ll understand if you’d rather not.”

  “I won’t forget you.”

  Her tired face lit up, and she embraced me, tearfully.

  As I put my arms around her, she began to sob in muffled, ragged gasps against my neck, and I held her as she cried, and listened to her pleading murmur, “I’m sorry, oh, my poor mother, I’m so, so sorry,” until it died in sleep. Then I laid her head down on my pillow and sat huddled in my blanket, watching her as she dreamed. She had begged for forgiveness for something she could not change, from a mother who could no longer comfort her. That misery, at least, I could understand.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING I found Perkins at our meeting rock by the toolshed and delivered the rest of my message.

  Mr. Cartwright—

  Meet me at Mulligan’s Tavern in Sheffield Green at four this afternoon. Bring a dog with a good sense of smell. Also a Bible.

  Dora

  P.S. I am no longer writing you long letters. From now on you will only get instructions. Nothing to mock in this one, is there?

  Perkins took my note, and in turn handed me a letter from Adelaide, which she had sent through Cartwright. It was a long, sweet message, and it made me feel guiltier than ever. There was a good deal of worrying in it, and tearful questions, and pleas for news from me. Please let me know that I was right to send you with that woman. Did Miss Prim give you my last letter? Dora, I will not sleep until I hear from you, she’d written. She did not mention the reason for my situation, however; her blackmail case was not anywhere in the message. Perhaps she was afraid that her letter to me would miscarry as the others had and end up in the wrong hands, or perhaps she was so scared for me that her own concerns had faded into the background. Either way, I had to ease her mind, and soon. I would write to her the next opportunity, I vowed. But I’d have to think of something innocent to say before I did. Dear Adelaide, I’m about to meet a young man in a tavern did not seem appropriate for the occasion.

  I tucked her letter in my pocket and rushed off to complete my chores before my appointment with Cartwright.

  Our
assigned meeting place was located on the north side of the tenant farmers’ village, about a mile from the country estate. Mulligan’s Tavern was hardly the sort of place that any respectable young woman would enter, and therefore seemed to be the best choice. It was also ideal because the staff of Hartfield never frequented it, preferring establishments that catered to servants of nobility. I had briefly considered the sitting room at the village inn, but dismissed it when I learned that the innkeeper’s wife was Mrs. Bentney’s cousin, and that she spent her idle hours ferreting out tidy bits of gossip about everyone she met.

  The tavern was a garishly painted hovel wedged between two other seedy establishments. The entire row of shops sagged in the middle and appeared to be supported by a single moldy beam and by the men who gathered there during their lunch hour to sponge away their boredom with beer and bawdy humor. Several workmen tottered about declaring their affection for absent women. At the far end of the room a little girl pushed her unconscious father off his stool and screamed at the barkeep in a shrill voice. A party of stable hands sat in an exclusive, tight circle in the center, smoking and debating the relative merits of various oats. I chose a corner table and ordered a cup of cider, which was delivered to me in a filmy glass by a very friendly ex-mariner with no teeth.

  I settled back in my chair and tried to appear at home, and even to enjoy myself a little. After all, young girls from good families did not normally enter taverns; my aunt would have disowned me for even considering such a thing. So perhaps I should have relished the dense smoke and the plaintive tunes from the fiddler in the opposite corner. A bold detective’s apprentice would have inhaled the atmosphere, I suppose, and been proud of her new liberty. But, for all my boldness, I could not wait to leave.