By the King's Design

by Christine Trent

  “Mr. Boyce, I appreciate your concern. But you’ve probably misinterpreted what you’ve seen. Perhaps my brother has merely joined a club of some sort, and the secretary is for storing papers.”

  That sounded ridiculous even in her own ears.

  “If that were true, why the subterfuge about the desk being for you? Why couldn’t he tell me it was for his club? And do you seriously think some men starting a social club would meet in a stable? Or that they would make the purchase of a secretary their first expenditure?”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Miss Stirling, you don’t seem overly surprised by any of this, other than the desk. Why do I have the impression that you might know something about your brother’s activities? Is he involved in something illegal?”

  “No. I don’t know. Wesley hardly tells me anything anymore. I told you before that I mucked up my relationship with him somehow, and the end result is that I have no idea what my brother does, who he sees, and where he goes. He could be dining with slavers every evening for all I know about his whereabouts.”

  Curse Put and his penetrating gaze. She felt like he was absorbing every thought she’d ever had and keeping them for his own.

  As if understanding how uncomfortable he was making her, Put relaxed his tone. “I’m sorry, Miss Stirling, I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just worried for your brother, and by extension you, if he’s up to something that’s, shall we say, less than suitable for a draper. But you say you have no idea what it could be?”

  Put knows I’m not telling the entire truth.

  You could tell him. Maybe he could help you track Wesley down and talk some sense into him. And it would be comforting to share this.

  But you don’t know him well enough. If he found out how serious Wesley’s connivances were, he’d run to the authorities. Then I’d be personally responsible for seeing Wesley into a cell in the Fleet.

  She slowly shook her head and met that deep forest of a gaze. “No, I don’t know what he might be doing.”

  He shook his head, and Belle sensed it was in frustration with her. Well, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time she’d exasperated him, would it?

  Time to change the subject. With a sharpened tongue she said, “Tell me, Mr. Boyce, how fares your lady friend?”

  “Ah, finally you’re willing to let me speak on the subject. My ‘lady friend’ whom you saw is my cousin, Frances. She’s mostly deaf, and she spends a part of each year with different relatives. I try to see her whenever she’s in London. And if you weren’t so mulish, you might have given me an opportunity to tell you about her. In fact, you could have joined us at our meal.”

  Belle paused. “Oh. I see.”

  “I think your problem, Miss Stirling, is that you don’t know who to trust. As a result, you place faith in the wrong people, and cast aside those of us you can depend upon.”

  “I always thought my problem was that I’m entirely too quick to speak my mind.”

  He laughed. “No, that’s what’s most interesting about you. So tell me, can I be forgiven enough to have you accompany me on a walk through Vauxhall Gardens?”

  “My brother ...”

  “I hardly think your brother has voice to this anymore, given his apparent dealings.”

  Oh, how true. If only she could float out the door with Put this very instant, padlocking the shop forever, forgetting Wesley’s despicable dealings, the king’s peccadilloes, and Mr. Nash’s loveless marriage, and ... well, just everything. Just retreat somewhere idyllic where none of these men and none of her problems existed.

  But she was a realist. And a proprietress. And a sister.

  “That’s not what I mean. How can we consider such distractions when Wesley might be on the verge of such troub—rather, while he is under a cloud of your suspicion? No, my brother must be free of distrust before I can even consider it.”

  “I see. And what if I’m not mistaken, and Wesley is indeed in grave circumstances?”

  “Well, then, my concerns will be far greater than that of promenading through paths of boxwood, won’t they, Mr. Boyce?”

  12

  There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.

  —Jonathan Swift, Irish writer, 1667–1745

  Wednesday, February 23, 1820

  London

  Belle closed the shop as early as she could, then practically ran back to her lodgings to see if Wesley was there. She hadn’t seen him all day. In her hurry, she splashed repeatedly through icy puddles of water and was numb by the time she got home.

  Wesley’s room was dark and silent.

  She took the opportunity to stretch before a fire their landlady had started in the tiny parlor. She closed the door to contain the heat, untied her pattens, and removed her shoes, putting them on the floor so they could dry as well as her stockinged feet. She needed this time to think. Instead, her eyes grew heavy and her mind softened.

  She was in a drowsy state of half sleep when the front door opened, rousing her. She reached down and touched her shoes. Dry. As were her legs. She slipped back into her shoes as she heard the door to Wesley’s room open and close.

  And now for the question she should have been wrestling with instead of napping. Should she confront him? Or wait to see if he went out again, and follow him to see where he went and who he was meeting with such regularity?

  Neither choice was appetizing. She straightened her skirts nervously while mentally seeking the right course of action.

  But before she could decide, Wesley came back out of his room and left their lodgings again. Her decision was made for her.

  Belle would follow him.

  She peered out a window and watched as he headed down Oxford Street in the direction of Edgware Road. Was he headed to the Cato Street address Put mentioned? Leaving behind her noisy, clinking pattens, she slipped out of their lodgings when Wesley was far enough ahead of her that he couldn’t possibly notice her.

  Striding with great purpose, Wesley turned north on Edgware Road, then east on John Street. Belle was nearly running again to keep up, but this time avoided the slushy pools of water that filled every rut and dent of the street.

  And now he headed south onto Cato Street. Her heart beat wildly. Where would he go next? She halted in surprise. He ducked his head as he entered what looked to be a public house, from the sign jutting out from the building, as well as the light and laughter spilling outside.

  So much for Mr. Boyce’s abandoned stable. But Belle still wasn’t sure what to do. Enter a tavern unaccompanied? Would she even dare confront her brother in such a public place? She crept closer to the building, staying in the ever-increasing shadows along the street.

  Once again, though, she didn’t have long to wait. Wesley reemerged, stumbling as he came over the threshold. A pair of feminine hands reached through the doorway, pulling him back in again.

  He was out again a moment later. “Wicked tart,” he said to the invisible woman, whose screech of good humor followed him. Belle prepared to follow him farther up Cato Street, but instead, he simply walked across the street and knocked in a rhythmic pattern against a wide set of black doors. One of the doors opened a sliver and Wesley slipped inside.

  Belle stood still, shivering even inside her warmly lined wool cloak. This must be the stable. Through the smudged and icy upper-story windows, she saw the faint but discernible glow of candlelight.

  Was this where Wesley met with Mr. Thistlewood?

  Shadows moved and slithered behind the windows. She could make no sense of what might be happening up there, only that it couldn’t be good, else why would it be in such a strange place?

  Oh, Wesley, how did this happen to you?

  She stood clutching the corner of what she now saw was the Horse and Groom tavern. The overhang helped keep her secreted while she waited.

  You were a fool to follow him, Belle. What do you propose to do now? March into the hayloft, stamp your feet, and drag Wesley out by
the ear?

  She wished she had an additional scarf to wear. It was bitterly cold enough while traipsing along behind Wesley. Standing motionless reminded her that they were in the middle of a notably frigid winter, snow having fallen intermittently since mid-October.

  Come out, Wesley. Let’s talk about this. We’ll go back to Yorkshire and start over there. Just please don’t do something you’ll regret.

  If she expected him to hear her silent plea, she was to be disappointed. She determined that she’d stand there all night waiting for him, and that she’d agree to anything he wanted if he promised to abandon this conspiracy of the king’s.

  Her internal reflection was interrupted when a stream of men burst through the same entryway of the Horse and Groom. Several spread themselves out in the street in front of the tavern, while at least a half dozen stormed inside the stable.

  “Hallo!” someone shouted from inside the tavern. “They must be runners!”

  Oh dear Lord, no, not the Bow Street Runners.

  London’s force of constables. This couldn’t possibly end well.

  Belle listened, paralyzed, to a cacophony of shouting, chairs scraping on wood, and the overturning of tables inside the stable. The runners waiting in the street between the tavern and the stable paced anxiously. One picked up a rock. “This’ll scare ’em down,” he declared, and hefted it at one of the front windows, shattering it.

  The noise inside the stable was stilled for only a moment, then the struggle resumed, except now the din was more voluble as it took flight out the broken window into the cold night air.

  The tinkling of glass aroused even more attention from the patrons in the tavern, who spilled out onto the cobblestones in front of the establishment, holding mugs of ale and chattering as if they were watching no more than their favorite cricket teams compete against each other.

  And then a noise erupted that Belle couldn’t have predicted: a gunshot. But the runners didn’t have pistols in their hands when they came out of the Horse and Groom, did they? She supposed it was impossible to tell. She regretted that she hadn’t thought to bring one of her own pistols with her, although she could have had no idea the evening would come to this.

  Dear God, please let Wesley be unharmed.

  A hulking figure crawled out a side window and dropped down to the ground, unnoticed by anyone other than Belle. It was Arthur Thistlewood. He waved to someone else on the upper floor, and three more men promptly slid down to the ground. The last man down lay on the ground, clutching one knee. The others lifted him up, with two of them slinging the injured man’s arms around their shoulders and half dragging him along.

  The group of escapees started running to the back of the building, but something stopped them and they turned back to run toward the front. Directly toward Belle’s hiding place across the street.

  Were they fools? They thought they could get past the constables fanned along the street?

  She opened her mouth to shout to the runners, but realized that the injured man was Wesley. Not that the constables needed her help, anyway. One of them noticed the set of men, hampered as they were by their injured member, and called out to the others.

  Realizing that the authorities had seen them, the two men carrying Wesley dropped him unceremoniously to the ground, and took off with Thistlewood, who was running full tilt back toward John Street.

  Wesley fell with a thud, and howled in pain. He was struggling up again when a runner got to him and kicked him in his ribs. Wesley fell again, his face landing in a carriage wheel rut full of water. The runner dragged him out of the water by his hair. “Can’t have you dead yet, son, that’ll come soon enough.”

  But Wesley’s limp form was just a feint. For even in the dim light provided by a single gas streetlight and the lamps still burning in the tavern, she saw the glint of steel as Wesley pulled a knife from his waistband, and thrust it at the runner who was still pulling him through the street.

  The knife made contact with the man’s arm, and he howled in outrage as he let go of his prey. “Insolent puppy! I’ll shoot you now, trial be damned!”

  He fumbled with a pistol at his waist.

  No, Belle thought. No, no, no, no. That’s my brother!

  From the corner of her eye, she saw another, vaguely familiar, woman rushing from the tavern into the street. Her screaming was discernible only by her white-eyed stare and open mouth, but Belle couldn’t hear her over the general chaos.

  Without pausing to think any further over her profound and immobilizing fear, Belle ran out from the corner of the building, intending to throw herself over Wesley’s body. Surely they wouldn’t shoot an innocent woman.

  She heard herself shouting as she ran toward the runner and Wesley, but at a distance, as if it were someone else screaming like a banshee. The runner looked up, startled, and out of habit pointed his pistol directly at her.

  She heard another gunshot, felt something heavy slam against her shoulder, and was aware of a peculiar drifting sensation as she, like Wesley, fell helplessly to the ground, her arm stretched out as though pointing to her brother. Her last thought was of outrage that someone was lifting her out of the street. But the resulting pain was so shockingly exquisite that she retreated into the bliss of unconsciousness.

  A young woman was peering into Belle’s face, her eyes open wide in surprise. The woman opened her mouth as though to shout, but all Belle heard was an agonized bark and then the woman was gone.

  Am I still unconscious? Is this a macabre dream?

  But the cup of water being pressed to her lips was real enough, as was a man’s voice somewhere close by.

  “Thank you, Frances. You’ve been so kind to my guest. Miss Stirling? Belle? Can you hear me?”

  Put’s face hovered over hers.

  “Where am I?” Her voice sounded like little more than a frog’s croak. Lord, but her head clanged, as if a smithy were pounding out a blade on it.

  “My home. After I got you out of the scuffle last night, I brought you here to recover. You’re badly bruised, but you should be fine.”

  Belle wrinkled her nose. So many questions formed in her mind. She wasn’t sure which to ask first, so naturally she went for the most foolish one. “Were we alone here together?”

  “Don’t worry, as soon I settled you down, I sent for my cousin. I didn’t want any improprieties, either. But Frances has been most devoted to you.”

  The young woman moved into her view again, this time with a wet cloth in her hands. She used it to wipe Belle’s face, neck, and hands. It was refreshing, Belle realized, given how feverish she felt.

  “Your house is unfathomably hot.”

  “Ah, that’s probably all of the blankets we put on you. Just to be sure you were warm.” He gestured at his cousin while speaking his next words. “Frances, you should probably help Miss Stirling into a more, ah, comfortable state. I’ll return shortly.”

  Using a variety of facial expressions and hand signals to indicate what she was doing, Put’s cousin put Belle into a seated position, with a bolster of pillows behind her, and removed a couple of blankets. Belle saw that she had been divested of her own clothes and now wore a nightgown, and blushed to think how she might have gotten into it. She prayed it was by the woman helping her now.

  Frances undid whatever remaining pins Belle had in her mess of curls, and sat down to brush it out in long waves, running the brush gently over what Belle now realized was a very large protrusion.

  Belle couldn’t remember the last person who had done this for her. Perhaps her mother, when Belle was around ten years old? She wept from the sweet attention, and the uncertainty of her and Wesley’s futures.

  Put’s cousin sat in a chair next to the bed, pointed to the brush, and shook her head.

  You don’t want me to do this?

  Belle smiled, nodded, and pointed back to her head. Frances resumed brushing. After Belle’s hair was tangle free and spread softly around her shoulders, Frances poured her anothe
r cup of water.

  “Thank you, Frances.”

  Put’s cousin motioned for her to drink. Belle did, then Frances fussed over her, retying the laces of her robe, giving her mint to chew to sweeten her breath, and pinching her cheeks to bring color into them. Frances stepped back and looked at her, as if judging her masterpiece. Nodding, she held up a finger and left the room.

  She returned moments later with Put, and winked at Belle as she quietly made her exit again.

  Put sat in the chair his cousin had just vacated. “You look well for having been caught in the violent dispersion of a conspiracy.”

  “It would seem you’ve become my hero, Mr. Boyce.”

  “You’re lying in my bed after I carried you dozens of blocks to my residence, and now my cousin has been tending you for a day. I believe we can dispense with the formalities, can we not ... Belle?”

  “I suppose I can’t argue with you. Very well, Put-rhymes-with-shut, tell me, where is my brother? Is he safe? His so-called friends abandoned him. And how did you happen to be there?” She reached up to her shoulder. “I don’t feel a bandage here, although the pain is considerable. Did the bullet pass through me?”

  “You weren’t shot.”

  “I wasn’t? Impossible! I saw the runner point his pistol at me, and heard it fire.”

  “He pointed it at you, but the gunshot you heard was elsewhere, and killed one of the conspirators. You were struck by a rock thrown by one of the runners that unbalanced you, and your head made regrettably good contact with the ground.”

  “And what of Wesley? Is he safe?”

  Put cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, but your brother is sitting in Newgate Prison. He and about a dozen other men are all awaiting trial.”