“He wore no disguise?” I asked.
Archibond sighed. “Not only did he fail to wear a disguise, he took one of the Prince of Wales’ coaches.”
“Oh dear,” I murmured.
The three of us exchanged glances, our lips twitching in suppressed mirth.
“Heaven help us,” Stoker said, shaking his head. “The future King of England is a simpleton.”
“He is not quite so hopeless as that,” Archibond said with a fond expression warming his features, “but I will admit he is considerably less adroit than his father in managing his affairs.” He retrieved the thread of his narrative. “We had known for some time that the prince frequented this establishment and that knowledge—coupled with Madame Aurore’s penchant for diamond stars—made it easy enough to guess who was in possession of the jewel. I reported my findings to the princess and Lady Wellie, and only then did I discover why Her Royal Highness was so keen to retrieve the star.”
“That poor child,” I said, “Princess Alix of Hesse.”
Archibond spread his hands. “No one will force her to marry him,” he assured me. “But she is a princess. She will marry from a very small, very exclusive circle of dolts and simpletons. At least if she chooses to throw her lot in with Prince Eddy, she will be most tenderly loved. He is capable of great affection, if not great intellect.”
“She is sixteen,” I reminded him. “How can she know what she wants?”
“She might not,” he agreed. “But whoever he marries, his mother is quite correct—she will be the making of him. He wants a strong character beside him.”
“A rather tall order for a young girl,” Stoker said.
“Show me an aristocratic girl who doesn’t know she’s meant for such things from the cradle,” Archibond replied. “But this one may be what he needs. If she demands he refine his character to her standards, then he will be worthy of her.”
“I begin to think you are a romantic,” I teased.
“My greatest secret is that I am an idealist who will never relinquish my ideals,” he said simply.
I ventured a question. “Out of curiosity, how did you expect us to even retrieve this jewel? Presumably it is secured in a bank vault.”
“Oh no,” he said quickly. “That is part of her mystique, this Madame Aurore. She wears her collection of stars several times in the course of a month. Every Wednesday, she holds a sort of masquerade where her regular guests are permitted to bring visitors in hopes of attracting newcomers. One need only know when and where and one can easily gain admittance.”
The inspector’s gaze suddenly fell upon the tickets to the Savoy. “The Yeoman of the Guard!” he exclaimed. “I do love Gilbert and Sullivan, but I fear it is to be quite some time before I can spare an evening for this. Enjoy yourselves,” he said, rising to his feet. “Do send for me if Lady Wellie takes a turn,” he urged.
I promised that we would and Stoker rose, shaking hands with him. The inspector turned to me. “I am glad to know you a little better, Miss Speedwell. Lady Wellie thinks very highly of you, very highly indeed. I begin to see why.”
CHAPTER
5
His departure left a heavy silence as Stoker occupied himself with finding a sausage to break up for the dogs.
“Shall we quarrel now or later?” I asked pleasantly.
He gave a heavy sigh and pitched a bit of herbed pork to Huxley. “We shall not quarrel at all.”
I blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Veronica, you might give me a little credit for knowing you as well as I do. We might argue back and forth about this ridiculous endeavor and it will end with you haring off into danger and me trotting obediently after like your very own mastiff.”
“Not a mastiff,” I protested. “A partner.”
“A sidekick, as you have informed me upon occasion,” he reminded me.
“Yes, well, I was wrong to say so. We are equal partners in these enterprises. We have both benefited from them, both been harmed by them. We have undertaken them at your instigation and at mine. We are both of us worthy of the blame and the credit.”
“Exactly. And I do not much feel like quarreling with you at present,” he said, his eyes bright with meaning.
“Oh,” I told him, feeling suddenly breathless. “I would rather do otherwise as well.”
I took a step forwards, but he moved quickly, putting the sarcophagus between us. “That is not a good idea.”
“What isn’t?”
“Proximity,” he said through gritted teeth. “I have spent the last years in strictest control of my baser instincts, but when I am with you, I find myself rather less able to keep my mind on loftier matters.”
I swallowed hard. “I understand. I share your difficulties,” I reminded him. “And there is no need to fight such impulses any longer. We have decided upon that.”
“Veronica,” he said flatly, “I am not going to take you on top of a moldy sarcophagus. I do not require love poems and fireworks, but kindly grant me a better audience than a stuffed wildebeest and a pack of sausage-breathed hounds.” (For accuracy’s sake, I should note that he did have a fondness for Keats, and the hounds did have sausage breath, but the wildebeest was, in point of fact, a gnu.)
I nodded. “Yes, quite. A quick tumble amidst the collections is hardly fitting. Besides, we have other matters to attend to at present.”
“Yes,” he said heavily. “Like breaking into Lady Wellie’s desk to see what she was concealing from the inspector.”
I blew him a kiss and he retrieved his lockpicks. He treated me to a discourse on the ethical conundrum of burgling the private correspondence of a friend.
“It is not burgling,” I told him in a tone of indignance. “We shall not remove anything. We only wish to see it. Besides, what if we learn something of significance? What if we are able to piece together what worried her and provide some sort of resolution? She might very well awaken to discover that we have relieved her of that burden.”
He grunted by way of response, but neither of us needed to speak further. We both knew the real reason we were undertaking this bit of sleuthery. My denial of her last request had been both swift and severe. If I had the means to undo it, I would. Breaking into her desk and uncovering her puzzle to solve it for her was not for my own excitement. It was expiation.
* * *
• • •
It was a simple enough matter to gain access to Lady Wellie’s sitting room. A private woman, she never permitted the housemaids to clean her rooms unattended, insisting instead that Weatherby attend to the dusting and the scattering of damp tea leaves to brush the dust from the carpets. The austere lady’s maid stood guard over the footman who came to black the grate and lay the fire each morning, and if she were not at hand, he was instructed to wait until she was. And woe betide the bootboy who tried to collect her shoes for cleaning without Weatherby’s presence. She was also instructed to burn all of the blotting papers herself on the hearth, changing them hourly for fresh and destroying any correspondence that Lady Wellie directed be burnt. She was paid a handsome bonus for her additional duties, but I suspect she would have happily engaged in them without. I have never yet met a lady’s maid who did not enjoy a bit of intrigue, and who could blame them? Washing another woman’s corsets for a living was a shiversome prospect, I decided, and the occasional bit of skullduggery would certainly relieve the tedium. She was, mercifully, absent when we slipped into the room, although the lovebirds set up a fuss, wittering fluently as we worked.
Stoker bent to his task, fitting the lockpicks to the elaborate inlaid desk as I stood watch and soothed the lovebirds by crooning a soft tune.
“Veronica, for the love of Lucifer, stop singing to those bloody birds,” he ordered in a harsh whisper. He had eased open the lock and was pulling the center drawer open with careful fingers.
; “Her diary,” I suggested. He drew out a large volume of dark blue kid stamped in gold with her initials and the year. He flicked through the pages until the book fell open to a place marked with a scarlet silk ribbon. Several loose items had been tucked between the leaves of the diary, and he skimmed them quickly.
“Well?” I prodded. It seemed wildly unfair that he had proverbial first crack at searching her things when the whole idea had been mine to begin with. And all because he was the one who knew how to break into things, I reflected bitterly, making a mental note to apply myself to learning the illicit arts of lockpickery.
Suddenly, he snapped the book closed and shoved it under his arm. He closed the drawer silently and locked it up again without a word. I opened my mouth to speak but he cut me off with a single sharp shake of the head. We slipped out of the room as quietly as we had come, and it was not until we were back in the Belvedere that he spoke.
“I know what was distressing her,” he told me. He opened the diary to the marked page and handed it over along with the collection of loose pages.
“Newspaper cuttings?” I asked. I thumbed through them. Each was from the Court Circular, a daily announcement of the whereabouts of the members of the royal family, everything from investitures to ribbon cuttings. There were those who made a habit of following along, but these were usually the folk who could be relied upon to buy commemorative plates bearing pictures of the royal family and to drape bunting from the lampposts. People sometimes made use of the circular for their own purposes—presenting informal petitions or the odd attempt at assassination—but they were by far in the minority. Every cutting was dated in the margins, each noted in her elegantly sprawling hand. I flipped through them again, narrowing my gaze.
“How very peculiar. They go right back through August, and she has scored under Prince Eddy’s name in every one of them, as if she were making notes on his movements and whereabouts on particular dates.”
“Keep going,” Stoker said grimly. Beneath the Court Circulars were a series of cuttings taken from the Daily Harbinger. Each of these had been dated as well, but in a different hand, the numbers thick and black, slashing at the page.
“Each is a précis of the Ripper murders,” I noted. “And not from the Times. Lady Wellie would never read the Harbinger.”
“She didn’t,” he told me, nodding towards the collection again. At the bottom was a single piece of cheap paper, marked with the same strong black handwriting, a few simple words in capitals. WHERE WAS PRINCE EDDY?
I looked from the dates marked on the cuttings to those of the Court Circulars, then lifted my gaze to Stoker. “The dates of the Whitechapel murders. Someone sent her this note and the Ripper cuttings to—”
“To suggest that dear dolt Eddy might be responsible for the most heinous crimes of the century,” he finished.
I tamped the pages together almost angrily. “Stoker, it is absurd. She could not believe him capable of such an atrocity.”
“Of course not,” he agreed. We fell silent a long moment, lost in our own thoughts.
“Unless she did,” I ventured finally. “She was cross-referencing his whereabouts on the nights in question.”
“It is the logical place to begin,” he agreed. “If there were the slightest possibility that he had some involvement, however tangential, establishing an alibi for him would be the first step.”
I looked at the cuttings again. “He has one. He is at Balmoral at present, which puts him quite out of the running for the murders on September 30.” The night that had driven Lady Wellie to send for us had been the setting of an obscene double event. Two victims, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, had fallen to the Ripper’s knife, and hysteria had gripped the capital—not just at the murderer’s ongoing reign of terror but at the notion that he seemed to be falling even further into butchery.
“Trains run to Scotland,” Stoker pointed out.
I frowned. “He is with the queen. I should think she would notice if he went missing.”
Stoker canted his head. “You are protective of him.”
I opened my mouth, then snapped it shut again. I counted to twenty in Mandarin, then spoke calmly. “I am not. I am merely pointing out the flaws in the case against him.”
His voice was gentle. “It would be nothing to marvel at if you did feel as though you ought to defend him. He is your little brother.”
I cleared my throat. “The merest accident of birth, I assure you. Besides, you know I do not subscribe to the belief that blood is thicker than water. One has only to observe you for ten minutes with any of your brothers to understand the fallaciousness of that philosophy. Now, whoever intended to set the cat amongst the pigeons, they must have worked quite quickly to have got this in the post to her that morning.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps they had the scheme laid out and close at hand, waiting for the next outrage to implicate the prince.”
The notion of a poison pen writer carefully assembling a hoard of cuttings, marking them and tucking them neatly away until it was time to send them, was faintly horrifying. To do evil suddenly, to kill or harass when provoked beyond endurance, when life or safety was threatened, that I could understand. It was the plotting and planning of it that I could not comprehend.
“If Lady Wellie did believe Eddy had anything to do with the crimes, she would never cover over his involvement. She loves England too dearly for that,” I told him.
“I agree,” said Stoker. “But she did not yet have proof one way or another. I think at that moment it was only a notion, a hideous one, almost too terrible to contemplate. So she put together the dates to see for herself if it was even possible.”
“It is not,” I told him flatly.
He shrugged. “I daresay there are plenty of servants and visitors at Balmoral who could vouch for him, either because he was actually there or because they are loyal.”
“You just agreed she would not countenance his involvement in the crimes,” I reminded him.
“But why send for us if she even entertained the possibility of his connection to the murders? The telegram made reference to the crimes in Whitechapel. She said it was a matter of life and death,” he said to me. “The recovery of the diamond star is hardly a matter of such grave importance.”
“Unless she was not thinking of the diamond star when she sent for us,” I began, working it out as I spoke. “It is too great a coincidence that he should be implicated in two scandals at once. What if she feared the star might be somehow connected with this?” I asked, brandishing the flurry of cuttings. “What if she wanted us to retrieve the star not because—as the princess fears—it might be used to scupper his marriage plans by proving him to be unchaste but because it might be used to implicate him in something much, much worse?”
“I think that is the sort of sensationalist nonsense J. J. Butterworth only wishes she could imagine,” he began, but a note of doubt crept into his tone.
I waited and he finally gave a gusty sigh. “Very well. It is possible,” he conceded.
“Better than possible,” I said with conviction. “I am certain of it. Lady Wellie would never dare raise such a possibility in front of the princess. Her Royal Highness is already quite distraught at the idea of her son’s dalliance with a courtesan becoming public knowledge. What sort of hysterics might she be prey to if she suspected he was being spoke of in relation to the most vicious crimes in London?”
“Lady Wellie could very easily have told us if she feared such a plot,” he pointed out.
“Feathers!” I retorted. “Lady Wellie would never speak to anyone of such a thing until and unless it were confirmed. She plays her cards well close to the vest,” I reminded him. “Far simpler to commission us to retrieve the jewel, using the princess’s influence to persuade us.”
“But it did not,” he returned evenly.
“She was not to kno
w that!” I strove for patience, but my exasperation was growing. I could see it all so clearly, the devoted retainer determined to preserve her future king’s reputation, her future queen’s serenity. She would take no one into her confidence until necessity required it.
“She must have been on the verge of telling us when she collapsed,” I mused.
“Well, we cannot do anything until Lady Wellie recovers,” he began.
“But what if she does not?” I challenged. “I know we do not want to consider such a possibility, but we cannot deny that while she might have passed the crisis, the future is uncertain. She might have suffered damage of some sort to her mental capacity, mightn’t she?”
Stoker gave a grudging nod. “Yes. It is far too soon to ascertain any type of permanent infirmity.”
“And damage to her memory or faculties might mean she is never able to retrieve her thoughts, her intentions with regard to this matter,” I went on. “And only we know of it.”
I paused then, letting the weight of my words settle between us before going on. “We are the only ones who know of Lady Wellie’s suspicions. We can examine the facts and ascertain the truth.”
“And then?” he inquired. “What if we discover that the author of that vicious little note is correct? What if Eddy is involved?”
“You said he had alibis for the nights in question,” I reminded him.
A Murderous Relation Page 6