Nowhere Man

by Sheri Cobb South

  Pickett stammered an incoherent apology and stumbled back out into the street, no more the wiser than he’d been when he had first entered the house. As the door closed behind him (punctuated by a giggle from Lady Dunnington that suggested he and his unwelcome interruption had already been forgotten), he scanned the street for some sign of the apple seller, but saw none. If he couldn’t find Julia soon, he reasoned, he would have to track the woman down, as she seemed to be the only person who might be able to tell him why everyone was acting so strangely, but his first priority was discovering what had happened to Julia, who had apparently been put out of her house by the old harpy now in residence there.

  Fortunately, he was not entirely without resources. There was one more place he might try; in fact, it was quite possible that Julia, finding her presence at Lady Dunnington’s house an imposition, had gone there already, and would be waiting for him at the Fieldhurst town house in Berkeley Square, presently occupied by the former George Bertram, cousin and heir presumptive of her first husband.

  4

  Which Has More Unpleasant Surprises

  in Store for John Pickett

  THE DAYS WERE GROWING shorter with the approach of winter, and long shadows fell across Berkeley Square by the time Pickett reached the Town residence of the current Lord Fieldhurst. He looked forward to the coming interview with the same eager anticipation which Lady Dunnington’s footman had displayed at the prospect of interrupting her romantic tryst; still, if anyone would be aware of Julia’s whereabouts, George, Lord Fieldhurst would be the man. He’d made it his business to keep up with her doings—and to express his disapproval of them—ever since the death of her first husband had made him, in the absence of direct heirs of the body, Viscount Fieldhurst and titular head of the Bertram family.

  Pickett lifted the brass door knocker and let it fall. A moment later, the door was opened by a stiff-rumped butler whose bulk effectively blocked the opening, denying any caller even a glimpse of the hall beyond.

  “The family is not receiving visitors,” he informed Pickett bluntly, and began to shut the door in his face.

  “But I’m a member of the family,” Pickett put in hastily, thrusting his foot into the rapidly narrowing gap to prevent the door from closing.

  Clearly, the butler was not expecting this, and wasn’t quite sure how to handle it. “I see,” he said warily, giving Pickett an appraising look that made him glad he was wearing one of the new coats Julia had seen fit to bestow upon him; he suspected the butler would not have been impressed with his old brown serge. “If you will come in, sir, I will inform his lordship.”

  Pickett stepped inside, and the butler hastily closed the door behind him, as if fearful that all of London’s great unwashed would attempt to sweep past him in Pickett’s wake. Having successfully forestalled this calamity, he turned to address Pickett somewhat sheepishly.

  “I meant no discourtesy, sir, but—well, under the circumstances, one can’t be—but if you will give me your name, I will inform his lordship.”

  Pickett found himself reaching once again for a card case that wasn’t there. In the absence of any written form of identification, he said, “Pickett. John Pickett.”

  “Very good, Mr. Pickett. I shall return directly.” The butler left him standing in the hall and went up the stairs, presumably in search of his master. When he returned a short time later, his manner had undergone a change—and not for the better.

  “ ‘Member of the family,’ indeed! ‘John Pickett’! His lordship says he has never heard of such a person in his life. Now, leave this house at once, before I summon the constable!”

  George Bertram knows something, Pickett thought desperately. He knows something, and he’s not telling. Granted, there had never been any love lost between him and George ever since Pickett, as a Bow Street Runner conducting his first investigation into a murder, had questioned the heir presumptive and uncovered a guilty secret of quite another sort. Still, George’s sense of duty as head of his family had obliged him to recognize the second husband of his cousin by marriage, whatever his disapproval of the union. Now it appeared that grudging sense of obligation had its limits.

  Pickett, undaunted, ignored the butler’s threats and strode across the hall to the foot of the stairs.

  “I know you’re up there, George!” he shouted in the general direction of the landing above. “Hide if you wish, but I’ll find her, do you hear me? You may do your damnedest, but I will find her!”

  Alas, Lord Fieldhurst’s damnedest proved to be more than sufficient. Pickett’s shouts had attracted the attention of most of the household staff, including two footmen—young men very nearly as tall as Pickett himself, and who outweighed him by three stone or more. The butler gave them a nod, whereupon they seized Pickett and bore him inexorably toward the door. They had not quite reached it when it flew open to admit a very young gentleman of about nineteen, clad in the exaggerated fashion of the aspiring dandy.

  “I say, it’s deuced cold out there. Daresay we might even have snow by morning,” he complained, brushing at the fashionably peaked shoulders of his wasp-waisted tailcoat as if to rid them of any early snowflakes.

  “Harold!” exclaimed Pickett. The last he’d heard of Harold Bertram, that young man had been a midshipman aboard His Majesty’s frigate Dauntless. Pickett hadn’t known the ship was in port, but he wasn’t about to quibble at this stroke of good fortune. “I’m looking for Julia. Tell me—”

  “Oh?” Harold asked in the bored drawl affected by the dandy set. “Julia who?”

  “Your cousin Julia,” Pickett said, impatient with the young man’s willful ignorance. He’d thought life in the Royal Navy had done much to improve Harold Bertram’s character, but it appeared he’d been mistaken.

  “If you mean who I think you mean, I must point out that she’s no cousin of mine,” Harold demurred hastily. “She’s only the wife—widow, that is—of Papa’s predecessor. Not a drop of Bertram blood in her veins, ’pon my soul.”

  “Harold, my pet, is that you?” called a fretful feminine voice, and to Pickett’s utter astonishment, Caroline Bertram, George’s bigamously wed second wife, hurried down the stairs. “Thank God you’ve come at last! I trust none of those dreadful newspaper persons accosted you. Your brothers are already here, and your father is determined that we shall none of us leave the house until this dreadful business is behind us, and the scandal has died down.”

  “Yes, I’m here, Mummy,” said Harold, stating the obvious. “But I might have made the journey from Oxford hours ago if only Papa would stand the nonsense for a curricle and pair—which he can well afford, now that he’s stepped into Cousin Frederick’s shoes.”

  Caroline Bertram embraced her firstborn, and received from him a dutiful kiss on the cheek. “Now, Harold, you cannot have thought! A fine thing it would look, you tooling about Town in such a showy rig with this hanging over our heads! Really, it puts me all out of patience with Julia! Not that we haven’t benefitted handsomely from it in some ways, of course, but I should have thought she would have more consideration for the family!” Having delivered herself of this complaint, she turned toward Pickett, still struggling to free himself from his captors. “Good heavens, is that fellow still here? Pray, get rid of him at once!”

  Recalled to their duty, the beefy footmen lost no more time in thrusting Pickett bodily into the street and slamming the door shut behind him.

  What the devil—? thought Pickett, picking himself up and dusting himself off. George and Caroline Bertram had never been legally wed. The lady who should have been living here—and who would no doubt have been far more sympathetic toward his quest—was George’s first wife, married in secret when they were both very young. The scandal which had followed that revelation had been sufficient to drive poor Harold from Oxford. But apparently Harold was still there, or else had resumed his studies after only a very short stint in the navy.

  It made no sense. None of it made any sense, and the on
ly person who might be able to explain it all—the Covent Garden costermonger—had seemingly vanished off the face of the earth; certainly he could see no sign of her in the twilight that had by this time descended upon the elegantly manicured square.

  Not that he would expect to see such a person in Mayfair, amongst England’s aristocracy; her domain would be the fruit and vegetable markets where he had first seen her. Granted, there was her unexpected appearance in Curzon Street, but this was surely an aberration.

  He stepped aside to make way for the lamplighter, realizing that with the darkness would come the farmers’ wagons which, having traveled all day from the surrounding countryside, would be unloading their produce to be offered for sale the next morning. Wherever she might have been earlier in the day, the woman would surely have returned there to fill her cart with fresh wares for the following day. He would return to Covent Garden and find her, and this time he would not let her escape until he had some answers.

  IT WAS FULLY DARK BY the time he reached Covent Garden, for his progress had been slow. Clouds obscured the moon, and the streets were illuminated only by flickering circles of yellow light from the lamps that stood sentinel at regular intervals along the pavement. Still, the piazza bustled with activity in spite of the limited visibility. Wooden crates and coarse burlap sacks of potatoes, cabbages, and late beans were passed from hand to hand from the men on the wagons to their fellows on the ground, while beyond them, a bevy of women swarmed about the offloaded produce, selecting some samples and rejecting others as they filled their baskets in preparation for the next morning’s commerce.

  And among their number was a short, plump woman in a poke-fronted bonnet and a knitted shawl with a border of fringe.

  Pickett could not quite bring himself to manhandle any female, regardless of the circumstances; still, his hand fell heavily upon her shoulder, and he gripped it firmly enough to forestall any attempt at escape.

  Not that she appeared to be making any attempt to do so. In fact, she turned to regard him with every indication of pleasure, as if she had been hoping for just such a meeting.

  “Why, good evening, dear boy! I hope you have spent a productive afternoon.”

  Pickett refused to be diverted. “A word with you, if you please.”

  “Of course! What may I do for you?”

  Without releasing his grip on her shoulder, Pickett steered her out of the crowd to the portico of St. Paul’s Church, where they might speak in relative privacy. “You may tell me just what the devil is happening! A stranger has taken up residence in my house, and I’ve just seen a man, alive and well, who was shot at close range following a dinner party hosted by a friend of my wife.”

  “It’s as I said before,” she explained with exaggerated patience. “You were never born. Sir Reginald Montague was never shot, because the dinner party never took place.”

  “You’re saying Lady Dunnington wouldn’t have hosted her dinner party if I had never been born? That makes no sense at all! Besides, what about the stranger living in my house? What about my wife? Where is my wife?”

  And that was the matter in a nutshell, never mind Sir Reginald, or Dulcie, or even the lady now living in his house. He knew what it was like to be alone in London, having been turned out onto the streets to fend for himself at the age of fourteen. It was intolerable to think of Julia in such a situation. His background, at least, had given him some idea of how to survive on the streets, scavenging for food and sleeping in doorways or under bridges; presumably, his young half-brother would have similar resources to sustain him, at least until Pickett could locate him. Julia, on the other hand... Nothing in his gently-bred bride’s experience would have prepared her for such an existence. A hundred things might happen to her—might already have happened, each scenario more terrible to contemplate than the one before.

  “Where is my wife?” he asked again, pleadingly this time.

  She gave him a rather pitying smile. “Look inside yourself, dear boy. You already know, don’t you?”

  Pickett threw out his arms in a gesture of helpless frustration. “How can I possibly know? How can I know anything at all, when nothing makes sense anymore?” A sudden thought occurred to him. “You said I had never been born, and yet here I am. What about Julia? Has she been born?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, nodding reassuringly.

  “If you won’t tell me where she is, will you at least tell me—is she—is she safe?”

  It seemed to Pickett that the woman hesitated a moment before saying, “She is in no immediate danger. But I’m afraid I won’t be able to say the same for you, roaming the streets after dark, and you all alone. Get some sleep, dear boy, and perhaps in the morning you’ll find the answers you seek.”

  Whatever he might have said to this advice was interrupted by an altercation between a draft horse and a stray dog in search of scraps. Pickett was not aware of having released his grasp on the woman’s shoulder, but when he turned away from the fracas to ask her how he was to “get some sleep” when he hadn’t so much as a roof over his head, the woman was gone, and the hand that had gripped her shoulder now hung over empty air.

  5

  In Which John Pickett Discovers

  You Can’t Go Home Again

  Since there was clearly no more help to be had from that quarter, Pickett was left with the challenge of exactly where he was to sleep when his house was inhabited by strangers and he possessed not so much as a farthing with which to hire a room for the night. Aside from his wife and his half-brother, he had no other family beyond a father in Botany Bay and a nominal “stepmother” who had driven him from the house the very same day his father was transported. It was unlikely that any assistance would be forthcoming from so dubious a source, even if he could swallow his pride enough to ask for it.

  In the absence of any blood relations, what other connections might he have to whom he could apply for help? The obvious choice was, of course, his magistrate—his former magistrate—Mr. Colquhoun. And yet something Harry Carson had said made him reluctant to seek out this usually reliable source—afraid, perhaps, of what he might discover. Failing Mr. Colquhoun, his former landlady, Mrs. Catchpole, might extend him sufficient credit as to allow him the use of the flat above her shop, just for the one night. Provided it was unoccupied, of course, which was by no means a given.

  There was only one way to find out. He set out for Drury Lane, and soon came to the chandler’s shop whose upper story housed the small furnished flat that had been his home for five years. The shop, he knew, would be closed at this hour, so he knocked on the door with sufficient force that Mrs. Catchpole would be able to hear him from her own lodgings in the rear of the building. No one answered. He knocked again, rattling the latch this time for good measure. Still no answer.

  Exceedingly loth to give up his best hope of shelter, he groped above the door frame for the key that used to be hidden there. Mrs. Catchpole had never approved of the irregular hours his investigations had often required, but she had reluctantly made this small concession, admitting that it was better than being awakened in the middle of the night to open the door to her boarder.

  There was no key. He groped once again up and down the length of the door frame, then switched hands —as if that would make a difference!—and tried again. No key was hidden there. She must have ended the practice after he had married and moved out of the flat to take up residence in Julia’s house.

  “Mrs. Catchpole?” he called, hammering on the door with his fist. It was too early for her to be in bed, but he had no doubt he was interrupting her dinner. He only hoped she would hear him over the rattle of pots and pans. His stomach rumbled at the reminder that he’d had nothing to eat since nuncheon with Julia, and wondered wistfully if his former landlady might invite him to share her own repast. “Mrs. Catchpole, it’s me—John Pickett.”

  From somewhere inside came the sound of heavy footsteps—Mrs. Catchpole hurrying to greet him, just as he’d anticipated.
<
br />   Unfortunately, he had failed to predict the broom she clutched in her hands, swinging it to and fro like a weapon.

  “Out! Out!” she commanded, as her broom made contact with his shoulder. “Shop’s closed. You want anything, you’ll have to wait ’til morning.”

  “I don’t—ow!—I don’t want to buy anything,” Pickett protested, dodging the broom as it sailed past his head on its return trip, scattering straw in its wake. “I just need a place to stay for the night, and I wondered if—”

  “Do I look like I’m running an inn? You want lodging, you’ll have to—”

  “Mrs. Catchpole, it’s me,” he said again. “John Pickett.” He grabbed the end of the broom on its next pass, putting an end to the attack and forcing his former landlady to look at him, really look at him, for the first time since she’d opened the door. “Don’t you remember me? I used to live in the flat upstairs.” Although he had been very careful to keep his name out of the events that had followed his vacating the flat, he decided that, at the moment, he could use any bit of leverage he could get. And so he added, “I’m the one who discovered the cache of coins under the floor.”

  This, it appeared, had the desired effect. Her grip on the broom relaxed, and if Pickett had not been holding the business end, it would no doubt have fallen to the floor. “That was you, was it?”

  “Yes!” Pickett cried with a sense of relief bordering on euphoria. “That was me! Surely new clothes and a haircut haven’t changed me as much as all that!”

  To his utter astonishment, Mrs. Catchpole snatched the broom out of his grasp and set to with a will. “Have you no shame?”—Whack!—“That you could leave in the middle of the night with two months’ rent in arrears—” Whack!

  “What? I never—”