“It will depend on what Mr. Screws gives William permission to do,” Charles responded. “If we can have use of his carriage for a day, we can get them home without additional cost.”
“He’ll need milk,” Lucy said. “I know someone who keeps a goat, just about ten minutes’ walk from here.”
Charles gave her the money. The girl took a jug and ran out the door. She returned just as Fred called that William had stepped down from a coach in front of the chophouse.
Charles took the jug and a bundle that Julie handed him, complete with food, hot bricks, and a drinking cup. Fred pulled on his coat and helped Lizzie with her shawls while Julie and Lucy took turns whispering good-bye to the now sleeping infant.
“He was fed just before you came,” Julie told Charles. “He needs milk again in about five hours.”
“It will be tricky, but she’ll have to manage,” he responded.
“I could go with her,” Lucy cried. “To help, and come back to London on the coach.”
No one had considered the girl’s feelings, or the fact that Timothy was her employment. “Lizzie?” Charles asked. “Would you like a helper on the way to Hatfield?”
“If she wants to come I’d be ’appy,” Lizzie said. “But I don’t ’ave the money for another fare.”
“There won’t be a fare at all,” Julie said. “Go downstairs with them, Lucy, and do what William says.”
She nodded and everyone streamed out of the door, leaving her in their wake. Charles glanced back but Julie seemed at peace, her hand back on her stomach. He shook his head and found himself grinning as he followed everyone down to the coach.
By the time they arrived in Brompton the hour had grown late. Both of the girls yawned and the baby woke. Charles told Mr. Screws’s coachman he’d bring him food and drink before he had to drive to Hatfield and they’d only be a little while. He could see that the upstairs lights were already out.
Resolutely, and followed by everyone, he opened the gate and walked up the front walk, hoping someone would wake upstairs and then lights would go on with the commotion.
Instead, when he rapped on the door, it opened right away. Mr. Hogarth stood with a lamp, still in his clothes. He looked exhausted, even the hair of his muttonchops fluffed out.
“It’s ye, is it?” the editor said, “the cause of our holiday disfavor, come to life?”
“I am sorry for it, sir, but I told you the truth, and I can prove it.”
Mr. Hogarth stepped back, sighing, and let them enter. His gaze moved over Fred, who grinned merrily, and Lizzie, resting on her burned cheek, then to the baby and Lucy.
“Could Kate come down?” Charles asked.
“No, Charles. She’s gone to bed after crying her way through services. I won’t wake her.”
He took them into the dining room. “Fred, can you stir up the fire?”
A sleepy maid peered out of the kitchen. Charles asked her to provide a hot drink and sandwiches for the coachman outside. She nodded and shut the baize door.
“Are you going to Hatfield?” Mr. Hogarth asked.
“Miss Porter is taking her son home. Lucy is going along to help her,” Charles said. He made the introductions.
“He’s a precious bairn,” Mr. Hogarth said roughly after taking a longer look at Timothy. “Dark hair like yers, Charles.”
“’is father were called John Dickinson,” Lizzie said. “We were to be married but ’e was kilt afore we could. I never saw this man, Mr. Dickens, until tonight. My sister told me what she’d done. She’s a bit touched, my Madge. I’m very sorry for the trouble.”
“We thought ye died,” Mr. Hogarth said, a gentler tone now.
“I were in the ’ospital. No one knew because the man who took me were from another village, and I didn’t come ’ome for almost a month. I didn’t even know ’er ladyship ’ad died.” She sniffed and wiped her eyes on Timothy’s blanket.
“Is this the truth, Charles?” Mr. Hogarth asked.
“As I know it.” He looked the man right in the eye. “I have told you the rest, how I’d never been to Hatfield until the paper sent me there.”
Mr. Hogarth pulled out his pipe, his gaze going to the stem. “Very well. Ye can return to work after the first of the year.”
Charles wished he were in a position to turn the offer down after what he’d suffered. He knew Mr. Screws didn’t expect him to stay on, though, and he wasn’t suited for the counting-house life. His head was too full of stories, and if his book sold well, an entirely new world could open for him. One with novels and plays and every form of writing. “Thank you. And Kate?”
“I will speak to her in the morning.” Mr. Hogarth clenched his teeth around his pipe stem.
Charles nodded. The kitchen maid brought out a jug and a wrapped package. “Then I will say good night. Miss Porter and Lucy have a long journey tonight.” He handed the items to Lucy and she gently propelled her charges out of the room.
Mr. Hogarth hesitated, then said, “What about you?”
“Fred and I will walk as far as we have to, and hopefully find a conveyance. I need to see Mr. Screws and tell him when he can expect to see his carriage again.” Fred stepped next to Charles and squared his shoulders in line with his older brother’s.
“Very well. I’ll have my daughter write ye.” Mr. Hogarth lit his pipe.
“Are you sure you don’t want to wake her?” Fred asked. “It’s such good news. They can be married now.”
Mr. Hogarth patted Fred on the arm. “Nae, not at this hour.”
Charles wanted to turn away, but he much preferred to be in Mr. Hogarth’s good graces. Recent events had taught him how much power the man retained over his life. He took a deep breath and said, “I look forward to resuming our pleasant personal and professional relationship. I am sorry if this situation gave you any personal embarrassment, but I had to do what was right for this poor child.”
Mr. Hogarth sighed. “Ye should have brought the child to us that night.”
“What would you have done with him if I had?” Charles asked. “He was in a fragile state. You have no wet nurse across the hall here, nor sympathy for an illegitimate child. The baby is not at fault for the misfortune of his parents.”
Flames licked tobacco as Mr. Hogarth lit his pipe. “Ye are right far too often, Charles.” He smiled around his pipe. “Yet look at all the trouble caused.”
“We had better go.” Charles took Mr. Hogarth’s proffered hand in a firm grip, then gestured to his brother. When they went outside, Lizzie and Timothy were already in the carriage.
“What will I do now, Charles?” Lucy asked in a whisper. Her words flew from her mouth like smoke on the biting air.
“I’m sure Julie will continue to need you. For now, enjoy the adventure. A Christmas trip to Hatfield and back.” Charles reached into his pocket and gave her his last two shillings.
She smiled and waved shyly at Fred, then climbed up. The coachman called to the horses. In his high-crowned beaver hat and red coat, he looked a lot like Father Christmas. The old team had been with the old driver for so long that he didn’t even need his whip to get them moving.
Charles smiled at his fanciful thoughts and turned away.
“Let me guess, you gave her all your money, didn’t you?” Fred asked.
Charles wiggled his fingers in his gloves. “She might need it during her travels. We can walk and think about Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem. This is nothing.” He hesitated, wanting to go to the side of the house and throw pebbles at Kate’s window, but he didn’t want Mr. Hogarth to catch him.
Fred followed him past the Jewish burying ground next door to the Hogarths’ house. Few people were out walking here and fog brushed at them as they walked toward London.
“We’d better find a hackney before we lose visibility,” Fred said.
“No money,” Charles sang.
“I have enough.” Fred broke into a rousing rendition of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” that had
a passerby step back in surprise.
Charles reached for his brother’s arm and pulled him on. “Not next to a graveyard. It’s in poor taste.”
“Look, isn’t that a hackney?” Fred asked, ceasing his warbling and pointing into the swirling fog.
“A phantom hackney or a real one?” Charles pushed his curls out of his eyes and back under his hat so he could see.
Fred blinked. “I think I imagined it. Let’s walk more quickly, shall we?”
“I thought Lizzie Porter might have been a phantom tonight,” Charles mused aloud as they trotted. He slowed down. “I cannot keep up this pace.”
“Too many mince pies,” Fred snorted, but he slowed down, too.
“I have to tell you about the curious case of Mr. Fletcher today.” He beguiled them both with the story of the American confidence man.
“Zooks,” Fred exclaimed. “Is he the murderer?”
Charles shrugged. “No one seemed to think so. The Americans seemed to know about confidence men.” The gears of his mind worked, a water wheel seeming to sluice facts for his perusal. “What if he was the ghost that night? A confidence man might know the sort of tricks that could break a window like that.”
“He could have had an accomplice,” Fred suggested.
Charles squinted. A public house, windows bright with light, the shadowy figures of men hoisting glasses, and the sounds of carol singing tempted him, but he pressed on with feet and thoughts. “I do believe his height matched that of the ghost.”
“A confidence man might have a kit of disguises, I suppose,” Fred added.
“Why not?” Charles asked, pulling his brother to the street. A hackney cab had just pulled up to the public house and disgorged a couple of drunken young fools, holly sprigs in their caps. “Hold up,” he called to the bundled driver, and climbed into the open cab, followed by Fred. It would be a chilly ride, but at least they would reach Mr. Screws more quickly.
The driver whistled to his horse. “Bit of a slow ride tonight, sirs, what with the fog.”
The rocking of the carriage soothed the brothers into a daze. Charles and Fred both pulled their mufflers over their mouths and noses and burrowed as deeply into their hats and coats as they could. The driver amused himself by nipping from a flask and singing bits of old country carols. After he ran out of holiday tunes, he began to sing drinking songs, after begging their pardon. A couple of songs in, he started one about a Covent Garden actress.
“Wait a minute,” Charles exclaimed, half a verse in. He had remembered something. “Driver, take us to Maiden Lane, first.”
“Very good, sir. We aren’t past it yet,” the driver said, taking another swig from his flask.
Chapter 22
Fred stirred next to Charles. His brother had been half asleep on the coach’s seat despite the bitter Christmas Eve chill, rocked by the motion of the moving vehicle. “Why do you want to go to Covent Garden?”
“I remembered Julie told me about the actress Amelia Osborne. What if Mr. Fletcher’s fiancée really is that same woman? Julie told me where she lived. She’d been there for a party.”
“An actress could play a ghost,” Fred agreed, sitting up. “If either she or the American played the specter, wouldn’t that mean they were the killers?”
“No.” Charles’s brain churned. “I was warned to leave the Screws household alone. No confidence man would want me prying.”
“He has a good reason to kill, though, at least he might,” Fred said. “What if Mr. Harley discovered what Mr. Fletcher was up to?”
“We still don’t know what that was,” Charles pointed out as the cab turned onto Maiden Lane. “Presumably he was learning enough of the business in England to know how to fleece people, though there is no sign of him having done anything yet.”
“Except two men are dead,” Fred said. “And he was practically running the place as a result. He didn’t even need to be the heir.”
“You’re right,” Charles said slowly. “He just needed to have authority. People who loan money have a great deal of power. It is an excellent way to gain wealth. It is a confidence game if you lend money to people who will never be able to do more than pay off the interest.”
Fred sucked on his teeth loudly as the horse stopped in front of a dilapidated building. “The actress must not be wealthy.”
“There is a chance we have the wrong woman,” Charles said, glancing up at the stone façade. A lamppost stood in front, emanating enough gaslight for him to see cracked windows with rags stuffed through in an attempt to keep winter out.
“It is a boardinghouse, not a fine address,” Fred said. Light glinted off a sign before the fog swirled and obscured it.
“Let’s go in,” Charles said. “Pay the driver, please.”
They both hopped down as a crowd passed by, staggering a bit as they sang “I Saw Three Ships.” One of the girls was dancing and grabbed Charles’s hands, attempting to spin him around. He spun her into one of her friends. They both giggled and danced away.
When Charles glanced at the building, he noticed a face in the window above the dressmaker’s shop Julie had mentioned, an old woman in a lace cap. He waved at her and she opened her window.
“Wot?” she demanded.
“I hope you are having an excellent Christmas, madam,” he said. “I wonder do you have a Miss Osborne in residence?”
“I might,” she said suspiciously.
“She’s about my age, very slim and pretty, with dark hair. Dresses in quite a flashy style, like her fiancé, who is an American?”
The old woman sniffed. “She’s not at home this evening.”
Charles nodded. “Thank you.”
He pulled Fred down the street. “Let’s go into the mews and see if we can find a way in, out of prying eyes.”
“What are you hoping to find?”
“Maybe we can find the cloak the specter wore that night,” Charles suggested. “I helped Mr. Fletcher pack up his room at Mr. Screws’s house, but it wasn’t there.”
They went around to the back of the buildings. The mews held none of the delightful scents or sounds of the holiday. Despite the cold, it reeked of decaying garbage. Charles counted the buildings. Miss Osborne’s had been the third.
“Do we know which rooms we are looking for?” Fred asked, as Charles pulled open the back door.
“Julie told me where the party was.”
The door led immediately to the back steps. This had probably been a single-family home in some century past and these had been the servants’ stairs. He went up to the second floor and pushed open the door that led to the main passage. “The party was in the front,” he whispered.
Fred lit a lucifer. “Four doors. Was she on the left or right?” “Above the dressmaker’s shop,” Charles said. “Top of the house.”
“It ran the length of the building.”
Charles bit off a curse. “You’re right. Let’s try the rooms on the left, because the ones on the right are above the old woman and she might hear our footsteps.” He went to the door and rattled the knob. It twisted under his fingers.
Holding a finger to his lips, he pushed open the door. Behind him, the match went out. He blinked, his eyes not sure what was in front of him. Eventually, he could discern a little light from the windows in the front of the room. He stood very still and listened for breathing, but heard none.
Gesturing Fred in, he lit a lucifer of his own. “How many rooms?”
Fred pointed to a cavernous darkness. “Must be at least one more.”
Charles crept into the darkness, illuminating a little more with each step. A fainting couch, upholstered in faded velvet; a table piled with scripts; a cracked vase, pretty but empty.
“Scripts,” Fred said. “We must be in the right place.”
Charles put his finger to his lips again as his lucifer burned down. He held it in the open doorway and saw a bed, empty and neatly made. Quickly, he went to the plain candleholder next to a washbasin and lit
the stub of candle.
“No one’s here,” Fred said.
Charles circled the room. The only other piece of furniture was a wardrobe. He opened it and recognized the dress Miss Osborne had worn the night he’d met her.
The evidence was clear. Mr. Fletcher’s fine miss and Julie Aga’s actress were one and the same. He grabbed a box at the bottom of the wardrobe and opened it up, holding the candle high. It appeared to be letters.
He pulled out the box and brought it to the bed. “Fred, come and help me look through these.”
He and Fred stood shoulder to shoulder. Holding the candle between them, they flipped through the letters.
“Actress,” Fred confirmed, setting a letter on the yellowed coverlet. “This is from a theater just near here, confirming a part last year.”
“Mr. Vail was correct,” Charles said, finding a folded notice from an American theater. He set it in the box. “I don’t see Mr. Fletcher’s possessions here. But what about that ghostly cloak?”
Fred went back to the wardrobe and hunted around. “Just women’s clothing.”
Charles went to the doorway and stood, looking for hiding places. The floor, just tired wood boards, seemed nailed down and there was only minimal furniture. With a sigh, he went down on his still sore knees and crawled under the bed. “Blasted woman!” he cried, coming out with a wadded lump of dark wool.
When Fred spread it out on the bed, they both could see the greasepaint marks in the hood.
“Mr. Fletcher’s begging for a second chance was a total act. He was in cahoots with Miss Osborne all along. They are confidence men,” Charles declared.
“But are they murderers?” Fred asked, wiping the greasepaint smeared on his gloves back onto the wool.
“Or simply thieves?” Charles added.
“Just thieves.”
The Dickenses whipped around at the sound of the seductive female voice. They’d been discovered.
Chapter 23
Amelia Osborne stood in the doorway of her bedroom. As Charles and Fred watched, she let her blood-red hood slide off her glossy hair. Her cloak fell down her bare shoulders and puddled on the floor. She unpinned her hair as they watched, open mouthed. Long tendrils of curling chestnut flowed over her creamy skin, caressing her breasts, scarcely contained in the V-necked evening bodice of bronze lace she wore.
A Christmas Carol Murder Page 26