“Lovely,” murmured Belinda. “A battleship! Full of men! And ourselves the only women for leagues and leagues in any direction!”
Belinda was unabashed in her admiration of the male animal, and especially partial to groups of men, preferably young ones, mutually engaging in manly activities. She liked uniforms, too. But only the officers wore those.
“Then,” Arabella continued, “our ship, the Perseverance—aptly named, don’t you agree?—will pass through the Strait of Gibraltar, sail on to the Mediterranean, and so come at last into the Bay of Naples.”
“Will it be safe, do you suppose?” Belinda asked. “Shall we be allowed to dock there, despite the fact that the queen is Napoleon’s sister?”
Arabella looked up sharply. “I hope you are not having second thoughts at this stage,” she said, tapping, with her finger, the Isle of Ischia. “I provided you with numerous chances to decline to accompany me when you were first informed of my intentions. I should not be going at all, if I did not suppose you were coming, as well.”
“I have not changed my mind,” said Belinda hastily. “I was just curious.”
“We shall be perfectly safe. Mr. Soane says that the king of Naples is very cozy with Britain, just at present.”
“And how long are we to stay there?”
“Well, I shall probably find my bronze at once, you know, and then . . .”
“How?” asked Charles, entering the room. “When you don’t even speak the language?”
“Through an interpreter, if need be, although it will probably do to merely ask, ‘where . . . ?’ and then make two horns behind my head with my index fingers, and execute a couple of eloquent pelvic thrusts . . .”
Arabella demonstrated how she proposed to do this, eliciting peals of laughter from Charles and Belinda. She was being perfectly serious, however, and did not appreciate their reaction.
“I shouldn’t advise you to use those gestures,” said Belinda, wiping her eyes. “I’m fairly certain they’ll be taken as insults.”
“Well, anyway, once they understand what I am after, they will bring the statue to me, and I shall pay for it—again—and take it home.”
“But who is this ‘they’ who are going to return your statue?” Charles persisted. “Whom are you going to ask?”
“I don’t know,” she grumbled, annoyed. “Anyone, I suppose.”
It was beginning to dawn upon Arabella that her “caprice,” as she called it, might turn out to be a dangerous waste of time and a stupid waste of her money. But she disliked looking ridiculous almost as much as she hated giving up. And so the poor creature was in a quandary, indeed. The only thing she could do now was to forge ahead, regardless.
“You will need to find an eyewitness, won’t you?” Charles asked. “And there probably aren’t any.”
“Then,” said Arabella, addressing Belinda as though Charles were not in the room, “it will only remain for us to wait there until Toby’s scandal is forgotten. Fortunately, winters in Italy tend towards the mild and pleasant, so we may be prolonging our visit until the spring. But for heaven’s sake, don’t let on to Mrs. Janks, whatever you do! You know how she worries, and I have told the dear soul that we shall only be gone a few weeks.”
If Charles and Belinda were not so accustomed to relying upon Arabella for everything from fashion advice to food on the table, they might have had some serious misgivings about this journey. But Arabella was in charge of it, so there was really nothing to worry about.
“For the number of trunks she’s packed, you’d think she was planning on staying over there permanentlike,” observed Mrs. Janks as the servants sat around the big kitchen fireplace with their evening cocoa. “I don’t understand it: After what nearly happened to ’er last year, you’d think she’d want to keep away from crimes and criminals, rather’n go barging in after ’em!”
But not only did Arabella not wish to avoid the criminal ranks—she was practically determined on joining them, herself. The concept of the glass cutter had fetched her exceedingly, and also served as the springboard for another idea.
“Do you know what I have been thinking, Bunny?” she asked as the three siblings dawdled over dinner. “A professional detective really needs a kit full of tools: steel and flint, candles, string, a pocketknife with multiple attachments, a glass cutter, and so on, just like a thief does!”
“How will those actually help get your statue back, though?” asked Charles, pushing his food about with his fork and making little decorative piles at the edge of his plate. “And won’t the tool bag be rather heavy to carry?”
“Probably,” Arabella admitted. “But there is no telling what type of situations I am likely to encounter, and it is better to have a housebreaking kit without requiring one, than to desperately need such a thing and not possess it.”
“You know,” said Charles. “I, too, have been thinking. If the removal of a window pane is as easy as all that, Lady Ribbonhat’s men may also have taken out a larger window, which has not yet been discovered. Perhaps they intend to return later, and come right inside the house.”
Belinda laughed nervously. “Whatever makes you say that?”
“I don’t know; I was recalling the tale of Lankyn, for some reason. You remember, Arabella; Molly used to tell it us, when we were children. Lankyn was a workman of some kind,” he explained to Belinda, who was too young to remember their nursemaid, Molly. “He revenged himself on a welshing nob by creeping through a window whilst the fellow was away, and murdering the nob’s wife, his baby, and all of the servants, besides. Do you suppose he had a glass cutter, too?”
Arabella looked at Belinda.
“He must have done,” Charles continued, building a tumulus, strand by strand, out of spaghetti, “because Nurse told us that the man had impressed upon his wife the importance of locking up the place as tight as could be. And any woman left alone in a house on the edge of a moor, especially one with a baby, is going to follow that particular directive to the letter. I think he must have had a glass cutter.”
“Stop it, Charles,” said Arabella. “You’re upsetting Belinda.” She poured herself another glass of wine and called over her shoulder, “Fielding! Could we have the pasta con funghi again, please?”
There was no reply.
She rang the bell.
“Fielding . . . ? Mrs. Janks . . . ?”
“I don’t believe there is anyone in the butler’s pantry,” said Belinda quietly.
“Or at least,” said Charles, “none of the servants. But there could be . . . someone else . . . couldn’t there? Someone who is standing in there, waiting until . . .”
“They’ve probably all gone down to the kitchen,” said Arabella swiftly.
“But why should they do that,” asked Belinda, “before we have finished our meal?”
Charles wore an odd sort of puckered expression, and Belinda goggled at him in mute terror.
“Of all the infernal . . . !” Arabella flung down her napkin, as though it were a gauntlet, and rose from the table. “Hellooo!” she called down the passage. “Is anyone there?” When no one answered, she went to the pantry herself, retrieved the pasta bowl, and plumped it onto the table.
“The butler’s pantry,” she announced, “is vacant.”
“D’you know,” said Charles, who had made a funereal pile of his mushrooms, “I am not really partial to Italian food. I think I shall get dinner at my club.”
So saying, he got up from the table and quitted the house. It was true enough that he had scarcely touched his pasta, but the timing of his departure reminded his sisters, who were in no real danger of forgetting, that Charles was not a source of strength in a crisis.
Arabella had therefore to go downstairs alone. And her pace slowed as she neared the kitchen, for she half-expected to find her staff strewn about the room with their throats cut. Well, she told herself, if they are all busy in the kitchen, they won’t have heard me ring. For there were no bells in that room, ow
ing to her own insistence that the preparation of food was too important to interrupt with mundane requests from upstairs. Still, if the servants were in there, she would be able to hear their voices from where she now stood. And Arabella could hear nothing. All was as quiet as a graveyard after curfew.
Pausing at the threshold, she sucked in her breath and pushed the door open.
There was no blood on the floor, but what she found instead was almost as upsetting. Every member of her staff was gathered round the ginger tom. They were feeding it cream and stroking its fur, and they all looked up at the same instant to see their mistress regarding them from the doorway with extreme irritation. She had gone all white round the nostrils, which was always a bad sign.
“I want,” said Arabella, massaging her temples, “I want that animal out of here by the time I return from Italy.”
Chapter 9
A DOUBLE-CROSSING
The sea was not so rough as to debilitate the voyagers, and Arabella was by all accounts only slightly bilious. She was just sick enough to be rendered peevish, in fact, and the Reverend Kendrick was attempting to divert her, during one of the sun’s rare appearances, by reading aloud. Under happier circumstances, she would have enjoyed this, for the tome he’d selected was a history of the ancient world, comprised entirely of the writings of persons who had lived in it.
“‘ . . . and forthwith, he banished Zeno to Cinaria,’” read Mr. Kendrick, “‘home of the artichoke.’ Is that not wonderful, Miss Beaumont? I can fairly picture the hapless Zeno!”
“And I can picture the artichoke,” Arabella replied. But Mr. Kendrick smiled, as though her sarcasm were contributing to the general joy of the moment.
“Suetonius was not the only one who wrote in that fashion,” he said. “This is what Juvenal says of the many-storied city dwellings in Rome’s residential section: ‘When a fire burns one of these buildings down, the last to die are the poorest, who cannot get out, living as they do in the cheapest rooms beneath the eaves, where the gentle doves lay their eggs.’
“Do you see how cunningly the thing is done? The sentence begins by discussing something of great import, and then suddenly finishes with an engaging irrelevance. I should give anything to be able to write like that!”
“But you do write like that, Mr. Kendrick,” said Arabella. She stretched herself beneath the heavy blanket and yawned. It pleased her, in this mood, to be insulting. “There is nothing in all the world so dull as a sea voyage,” she said when she had finished her yawn, “unless one has the good luck to be violently ill, or swept overboard in a storm.”
“ . . . or carried away by pirates,” added Belinda brightly. Her hands were buried in a muff the size of her own head plus two more, and the ends of her shawl flapped wildly in the stiff breeze.
“Yes. I am sure you could become quite carried away by pirates, Bunny,” said Arabella, “but we are not likely to see any on this trip. The British Navy has the area too well secured.”
“Pirates would never be dull,” said Belinda dreamily. “Imagine! An entire crew! All those lusty Spaniards . . . and Africans . . . and Arabs . . . and oneself a helpless captive!” A seraphic smile stole across her features.
“The state of being dull is subjective, you see,” Charles explained to Arabella. “You should have said, ‘there is nothing in the world so dull as a sea voyage . . . to my way of thinking. ’” He had secured his top hat to his head with a scarf tied under his chin, and looked a perfect prat. “Belinda finds fantasizing about her pirates anything but dull, and old Kendrick is invariably content, provided you are close by. As for me, there is always a lively game of knucklebones on offer between meals in the mess. Which brings me to the point rather nicely. Could you lend me some blunt? If you don’t, I shall have nothing to do, and become as dull as you are.”
Charles was never dull so long as there was gambling in the vicinity. He would bet on anything at all: the number of times Penderel Skeen would say “piffle” in a given conversation, what color shoes Miss Worthington was likely to wear with her badly cut puce-colored gown, and whether Cuthbert Savory-Pratt, observed from across the street, would turn to his right or his left after exiting from his hairdresser’s.
None of this would have mattered, were Charles’s luck not so infernally consistent, but the fellow nearly always lost. Consequently, he was a damned nuisance, eternally plaguing his sisters for money. Arabella had once observed that Charles seemed to have substituted one vice for another.
“You must have noticed it,” she said to Belinda. “His behavior is fixed in stages: First, he spends twenty minutes or so begging—generally from me. The instant his suit finds favor, he goes straight for the game, in a wild lather of general excitement, but once engaged, his pleasure becomes focused and intense. After that, it builds swiftly to a climax, and then, all of a sudden, it’s over. He crawls from the table to an easy chair, totally spent, and slumps there, either sleeping or eating, until his strength returns. I am not complaining. Merely noticing. At least, this vice has the merit of not producing offspring and requiring childcare from us.”
Taken altogether, the voyage was fairly humdrum: entirely devoid of pirates for Belinda, a fond return of love for Kendrick, and big wins, or wins of any kind, for Charles. Nor did Arabella get swept overboard, despite her frequent forays out on deck in bad weather to relieve her mild seasickness symptoms. But midway through the crossing, the party were invited to dine aboard the Minerve, a British man-o’-war under the command of Rear Admiral Cockburn. Naturally, Charles pronounced the name phonetically.
“Come again?” asked Kendrick.
“Ignore him,” Belinda suggested.
Charles, to whom the invitation had been conveyed via the captain, grinned like a basket of chips and said nothing.
“I apprehend the joke,” said Arabella. “What, pray, is the officer’s real name?”
“I knew you would suspect me of making it up!” cried Charles gleefully. “Both the name and rank together! Yet I swear it is true! Kendrick will bear me out!”
He handed the invitation to the rector, who peered at the print and confirmed the unfortunate appellation, though he colored up whilst he read it.
“You mustn’t worry, old chap,” said Charles, throwing his arm across the rector’s shoulders. “I shall protect you from our wicked host! But you must also do your part, by remaining seated as much as possible!”
Whereupon, to the general merriment of the assembled company, Mr. Kendrick fled the saloon for the privacy of his own quarters.
Yet the dinner proved fairly stultifying, for all that. Rear Admiral Cockburn, despite his saucy name, was a man “exceeding dry.” The sisters thought him stodgy. And Charles, afterward, reviled the battleship’s plain fare at great length. There was but a single occurrence of note. One of their fellow guests, a passenger aboard the Minerve, changed ships that evening in order to continue on to Naples in the Perseverance.
Arabella believed herself to be on intimate terms with all the best and brightest men in London. Yet she had never heard of Cecil Elliot. Never heard of this paragon, who seemed to possess all the qualities that she herself had pronounced most agreeable in a partner, and she wondered at their not being previously acquainted. He was somewhat vague on the subject of his profession, and Arabella gathered that it had something to do with government or diplomacy or one of those subjects in which she took no interest.
“But why are you so averse to the subject of politics?” he had asked her at dinner.
“When one is not permitted a vote, Mr. Elliot, surely the process of determining who gets in and what measures will or will not be passed cannot be interesting.”
Nevertheless, Arabella found whatever Mr. Elliot said to be of profound interest, and would willingly have listened to him holding forth upon the corn laws the whole night through, had he wished to go on speaking that long. Capable minds always impressed her, and Cecil Elliot was charming and attentive into the bargain. Handsome, too, in t
hat unusual, individual way that she liked, and obviously powerful. But most compelling of all, he had known who Arabella was, and what she was, and yet, after a week’s acquaintance, had still made no direct attempt at seduction. Instead of trying to bed her, he seemed intent upon getting to know her better. Nothing intrigues a courtesan more than this type of behavior, so striking in its novelty.
“If you would not think it obtrusive of me, Miss Beaumont,” said he, “I should like to know the reason for your coming to Naples. It can scarcely be amusement or recreation this late in the season.”
“You have hit the nail squarely upon the head, Mr. Elliot,” she replied. “Recreation it is! I am engaged in the pursuit of art. Quite literally, in fact.”
She thought it better to keep back the details, not because she feared his disapproval, but to encourage him to talk more about himself, and in so doing, fall in love with her. So far, he had managed to turn the tables, and she was falling in love with him. It was not supposed to work this way. But there was plenty of time. Arabella planned to see a great deal of Mr. Elliot—every inch of him, in fact—during their stay in Italy.
But they had no sooner reached the Bay of Naples, than the Perseverance met with the Sea Lion, a xebec bound for England. Both ships hove to, and a boat was rowed out from the one vessel to the other, to facilitate the transfer of Mr. Elliot and his valet back to London, whither the regent had commanded his immediate return.
“The regent? What does he want you for?” asked Arabella, who was so distressed at the thought of his leaving that she steeled herself to listen to a lengthy discourse on the details of political in-fighting and government protocol.
“God knows,” said Elliot gloomily, watching his valet pack the rest of his things. (There wasn’t much to be done, above cleaning and re-packing his fork and knife. The Perseverance had been about to dock, after all.) “I shall be candid with you, Miss Beaumont. The regent is a man quite given to fits of whimsy. Everyone knows that, of course, but only those of us in close contact with him apprehend the extent of it. If you were to offer me diamonds enough to fill this cabin, on the sole condition that I change places with the regent’s valet for a week, I should not do it.”
Death Among the Ruins (Arabella Beaumont Mystery) Page 5