“And once he arrived, he discovered something havey-cavey about the matter,” Harry deduced. Even though Pickett had abandoned the room’s only chair, Harry didn’t quite dare to stake a claim to it, choosing to remain seated on the edge of the bed.
Pickett nodded. “Very likely.”
“So, what’s the plan, chief?”
“I want to make a few inquiries before calling on Mrs. Avery this afternoon. You can stay here and try Mr. Brockton’s door from time to time. He has to come back to his room sooner or later. In the meantime, you can see what our host can tell you—if you can look the man in the face, after trying to seduce his daughter.”
“It’s not as if I forced the girl!” protested Harry, all wounded innocence.
Pickett gave him a speaking look, but addressed himself to Thomas. “Keep your ears attuned for any mention of him in the stables—not necessarily Brockton by name, but any complaints about a man coming and going at odd hours, calling for his rig or leaving his horse to be tended at inconvenient times. You need not make any inquiries, but you might put it about that you’re in the service of a Bow Street man, and see if they’re impressed enough with your credentials to tell you anything. If they do, you’re not to make any judgment calls as to whether or not it’s important. Tell me anything that’s said, or if I’m not here, you may tell Mr. Carson.”
“Yes, sir!” Thomas said, all eagerness to be included.
“I’m done with being discreet,” Pickett concluded. “We’ve tried that, and it’s got us nowhere. We’re going to let it be known who we are and why we’re here. If discretion is as important as Mr. Brockton’s letter claims, he’ll have to come out of hiding long enough to silence us.”
Harry squirmed uncomfortably, and the mattress crackled beneath him. “Define ‘silence,’ chief.”
“Unfortunate choice of words,” Pickett offered apologetically. “I only meant that he wouldn’t want us bandying it about that we’ve come from Bow Street. I didn’t mean to suggest that he might have summoned us here only to kill us.”
“I’m relieved to hear it! But what if he can’t ‘come out of hiding’?”
Pickett remembered Carson’s suggestion that Brockton might be dead, and realized he didn’t want to say the words in front of Thomas. He was surprised—and, yes, relieved—to realize his colleague possessed more circumspection than he’d credited him with.
“In that case, we’ll hope the presence of two Bow Street men in the vicinity makes his enemies very nervous.” In a much lighter tone, he turned to his valet. “I’ll have the green coat, Thomas, if it isn’t too wrinkled from the journey.”
“If it is, I’ll press it for you, sir,” declared Thomas, all eagerness to serve.
“That won’t be necessary—” he began, only to be cut short by Carson.
“Of course it is! We can’t have you going off to see Mrs. Avery in a wrinkled coat, now, can we?”
Pickett took back every charitable thought he’d had about him.
7
In Which the Hunter Becomes the Hunted
Thankfully, the village of Dunbury was not so large as to offer a great many commercial enterprises, and it boasted even fewer legal offices. Pickett began his search at the local bank, reasoning that this establishment might have a foot in both camps, so to speak. Unfortunately, the clerk he questioned had no knowledge of any person answering to such a name, and when Pickett persuaded him to summon the bank’s governor, this individual was able to state with certainty that the institution numbered no one by the name of Brockton among its clients.
The one solicitor charged with handling all the legal business of Dunbury professed the same ignorance, and so Pickett was forced to turn his attention to an odd mix of retail endeavors, from the greengrocer at one end of the High Street to the emporium at the other. Hope surged briefly when he discovered Dunbury numbered a livery stable amongst its commercial endeavors, but this promising lead shriveled and died when the owner of the establishment categorically denied having hired out any of his livestock to anyone by the name of Brockton, then segued into a lengthy diatribe on the dearth of business in a village the size of Dunbury, concluding with his stated intention of trying his luck in nearby Wells. Pickett listened to this speech with every appearance of sympathy, while inwardly conceding that if business were indeed as slow as the man claimed, he would certainly have remembered any visitor from out of town who had hired a hack for a stay of almost a week, and quite possibly more.
Eventually, he had covered every shop in the High Street, and had nothing at all to show for it. It appeared that he would be obliged to pin all his hopes to his meeting with Mrs. Avery. He recalled that her house was in the High Street—on the other end, which necessitated traversing that thoroughfare yet again—and she might well have stood in the window and watched him pass by. The day was warm and the unpaved street was dusty, and Pickett wished he might return to the inn long enough to change his coat and put on a fresh cravat. But aside from the fact that Harry Carson would almost certainly have something to say about that, there was also the possibility that Mrs. Avery had seen him from her window. He would not want her to think he had dressed specially for her, lest she get entirely the wrong impression. And so, stifling the sense that he was somehow betraying Julia by calling on another woman while dressed in the finery she had bestowed upon him as a gift, he trudged back up the High Street and rapped on the door of the last house but one, just past the bookseller’s shop.
It was opened to him at once, and not by any servant, but by the lady herself. In fact, no servants were in evidence at all; it was as if they were alone in the house. If the widow truly wanted to avoid becoming the subject of malicious gossip, she certainly had strange ways of going about it.
“Do come in, Mr. Pickett,” she said warmly, inviting him to enter with a wave of her hand. “I’m so pleased you finally summoned the courage to knock. I confess, I was beginning to wonder.”
The coy smile on her red lips as she closed the door behind him gave Pickett to understand that she had indeed been watching from the window, and that she was laboring under just the misapprehension he had most wished to avoid.
“No, no, it isn’t that,” he assured her hastily. “I’m in the midst of an investigation, you know. Rather, I ought to be in the midst of one; in fact, I’ve scarcely even begun, for although Mr. Edward Gaines Brockton summoned me here, I’ve yet to find him. I believe you said you were acquainted with him?”
“You don’t waste any time in coming to the point, do you? I wonder, is that a good thing, or a bad one? I daresay time will tell. But come! Let us have our tea, before the water grows cold!”
She led him into a small but elegantly furnished parlor, and after they were seated side by side (and with less space between them than Pickett might have wished) on the gold brocade sofa, she dispensed tea and cakes, all the while pressing him with questions about life in London and asking if he were acquainted with a number of persons whose names he had never heard before.
“I’m afraid we move in different social circles,” he confessed. Then, seeing an opening, he added, “And what of Mr. Brockton? In what circles might one expect to meet him—yours, or mine?”
She shrugged her black-clad shoulders. “I really can’t say.”
“ ‘Can’t,’ Mrs. Avery, or ‘won’t’?” Pickett asked with some asperity, frustrated at being treated more like a favored suitor than a Bow Street investigator.
“Won’t,” she confessed with a wholly unrepentant smile which might have been charming to a man less impatient to conclude his business and return home to his wife. “I have a feeling that, once you have pumped me for any information I might give you about Mr. Brockton—a man in whom, I confess, I take not the slightest interest—you will have nothing more to say to me. It is very lowering to a woman’s amour propre, you know.” She took the teacup from his unresisting hand and set it on the small table at her elbow, then slid her hands up his arms to his shoulder
s, whereupon she groped for the end of his cravat and tugged the knot loose.
“Look here,” Pickett said, no longer bothering to hide his growing impatience as he edged away from her toward his own end of the sofa, “you told me yesterday that if I would call on you, you would tell me about Mr. Brockton. Well, here I am. So—talk.”
“I’m afraid your memory is faulty, Mr. Pickett. What I said was that if you would come to tea, I would make it worth your while.” And, having delivered herself of this speech, she seized Pickett by the ears, pulled his head down, and plastered her lips to his.
“I am a married man, Mrs. Avery!” he protested, prying her loose with an effort, “If this was what you intended, you would have done better to issue your invitation to my colleague, Harry Carson!”
Deprived of her primary object, Mrs. Avery gave a little huff of annoyance. “I thank you, but no! Men like your Mr. Carson may be found under every bush—usually in the company of some village lass or farmer’s daughter. I have no desire to become a notch on his bedpost.”
“No, you would prefer that I become a notch on yours.”
She gave him a rather pitying smile. “You do yourself less than justice, Mr. Pickett.”
“Be that as it may, I came to Dunbury for one purpose, and one purpose only: to find Edward Gaines Brockton—”
“Do you know, I am becoming very tired of hearing that name?”
“—and to discover why he summoned me from Bow Street. If you have no information to offer on the subject—”
“I believe that makes two,” she said.
“I—I beg your pardon?”
“You said you came for one purpose alone, but you named two.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “To find this man Brockton—that is one—and to discover why he had sent for you—that makes two. Dare I hope to interest you in a third?”
Seeing that she had every intention of advancing upon him again, Pickett leaped to his feet. It took some doing, since she was determined to keep him there, but at last he was able to make good his escape, none the worse for his experiences beneath the amorous Widow Avery’s roof.
Or so he thought. He was soon disabused of this notion. He returned to the Cock and Boar to find Carson and Thomas there. Both young men looked up at his entrance, and Harry grinned with fiendish delight.
“Productive afternoon at Mrs. Avery’s?” he asked, giving Pickett a knowing look.
“Ahem!”
Thomas cleared his throat, and Pickett’s gaze shifted from Carson to the valet standing some little distance behind him. Having gained his master’s attention, he tapped his finger against the corner of his mouth. Pickett glanced toward the mirror mounted over the washstand, and the reason for Carson’s unholy glee became clear. The corner of Pickett’s mouth was smudged with Mrs. Avery’s lip-rouge and his cravat was untied, the loose ends hanging down over the front of his waistcoat. In fact, he looked thoroughly debauched. Worse, he had walked all the way down the High Street in this condition. Worst of all, Dunbury was near enough to Norwood Green that Julia’s parents might have acquaintances in the town.
There was no help for it: he would have to write to her that very day and make a clean breast of the matter, before word reached her from some other source—including the one standing before him. In the meantime, there was nothing for it but to put on a brave face.
“Productive? I’m afraid not,” he said with as nonchalant an air as he could manage, under the circumstances. He crossed the small room to the washstand, poured water—now cold—from the pitcher into the bowl and began to scrub the evidence of the widow’s amorous assault from his mouth. “I’m afraid Mrs. Avery was less interested in the investigation than she was in the investigator. And Thomas, I’ll be the one to tell Mrs. Pickett about this, if you please.”
“Of course, sir,” Thomas, who had been Julia’s footman when she was still Lady Fieldhurst, readily agreed.
“As for Mr. Brockton,” Pickett continued, “I’m beginning to wonder if Mrs. Avery knows anything about him at all.”
Carson made some remark about some fellows having all the luck, but Pickett, only half listening, made no reply. In fact, the suspicion that Mrs. Avery knew nothing of their quarry was not the most far-fetched of the theories beginning to form in his brain. And that very night, he intended to put one of them to the test.
WHILE PICKETT FENDED off the lascivious lady, Julia was undergoing a trial of quite another kind. For it was the day of her tea-party, the event that was to mark her re-entry, in a small way, to the society in which she had moved before the murder of her first husband and the marriage to her second. It was ridiculous, in a way, that she should be in such a perturbation of spirits over entertaining some half-dozen ladies to tea—she, who had once been a political hostess of some note, having arranged dinners whose guest lists had included various Foreign Office dignitaries, Members of Parliament, and even, on one momentous occasion, the Prince of Wales himself. After such rarified company, half a dozen ladies of the ton should have no power to terrify.
She had already suffered a small setback in the form of a letter from the elderly Lady Oversley, expressing her regrets due to a toothache of sufficient severity to render her unable to rise from her bed, and closing her correspondence with the hope that she might avail herself of Mrs. Pickett’s hospitality at some future date. Julia accepted this reversal of fortune with some misgivings. She did her ladyship the justice to own that her toothache was very likely quite genuine, for when she had seen Lady Oversley in church the previous morning, the dowager marchioness had professed herself to be looking forward to the event.
Still, Julia felt somewhat as if the floor had begun to give beneath her feet. Her dearest friend Emily, Lady Dunnington was not in residence in Town at present, having recently been brought to bed of a daughter—her first girl after presenting her husband with two boys—and feeling quite satisfied with herself, if her letters were anything to judge by. In Lady Dunnington’s absence, Julia had counted upon the presence of Lady Oversley, who had herself benefited from the expertise of Bow Street’s principal officers only a few months earlier, and who might (she hoped) have been depended on to support Julia in case her other guests should choose to express their disapproval of, if not outright scorn for, their hostess’s second marriage.
Now, as the echoes of the longcase clock sounding the hour began to fade, she rose from her place on the sofa and began to pace restlessly about the drawing room, pausing from time to time in order to make minuscule (and wholly unnecessary) adjustments to the arrangement of cakes on a silver tray, or to pluck a stray leaf or petal from the bouquets of flowers purchased fresh that morning from the floral markets of Covent Garden.
The ticking of the clock seemed unnaturally loud in the still house, to such an extent that when it chimed the quarter-hour, the sound was sufficient to make Julia start. It is too soon to worry, she reasoned. The traffic in Mayfair on a Monday could be heavy enough to make anyone late, as the delivery wagons of merchants obliged to remain idle the previous day in honor of the Sabbath now scrambled to make up for lost time. Perhaps the mistake had been hers, for scheduling her party on a Monday instead of waiting until later in the week. But she had not wanted to wait, hoping against hope that her husband would have returned before the end of the week. If that should prove to be the case, she would not want him to be made uncomfortable were he to walk into the drawing room with his valise and find himself in the middle of a ladies’ tea party. Nor, a little voice whispered, would you want him to suffer any mortification, should the party be a failure and he the unwitting cause.
When the clock chimed half past two, she recalled a book lying on the bedside table upstairs, and wondered if she might send Andrew, the footman, to fetch it. But no, she reasoned, it would not do to have one’s guests ushered into the room just in time to see one stuffing Mrs. Radcliffe behind the sofa cushions.
By the time the clock struck a quarter to three, she was so thoroughly bored w
ith her own company that she yielded to impulse and dispatched Andrew on the errand; surely, she decided, anyone with no more courtesy than to make an appearance a full forty-five minutes late deserved no better.
When the Whittington chimes announced the three o’clock hour, her pacing was interrupted by Rogers, who called her attention to his presence with a soft clearing of his throat.
“Begging your pardon, ma’am” he said, and although his tone was scrupulously correct, Julia thought she read something of silent sympathy in his eyes. “I was wondering if there was anything else you needed. Shall I refresh the hot water for the tea, perhaps?” His gaze shifted from her to the teapot; the water it held would by this time certainly be tepid.
“Actually, there is,” she said, much too brightly. “It appears that you and the rest of the servants have quite a treat in store. Pray take these things downstairs and share them with the staff, with my compliments.”
He opened his mouth as if to say something, then shut it, moved toward the tea table, and finally spoke again. “All of it, ma’am? Are you certain you would not like to make up a plate and pour a cup of tea for yourself first?”
“To tell you the truth, I am heartily sick of looking at it,” she confessed. “Only, pray, do not tell Cook I said so, for she worked so hard on it all!”
“Yes, ma’am.” He picked up the tray and took two steps toward the door before pausing and turning back. “If you will pardon my presumption in saying so, ma’am, you made the better bargain.”
She did not have to ask for an explanation. Rogers, at least, had never wondered at her choosing to marry a man so far beneath her socially, for he, too, stood in his debt. A sudden longing for her husband’s return lanced through her like a knife to the heart. “Yes,” she said, blinking back the tears that filled her eyes. “Yes, I did.”
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