The Sign of the Raven

by L. C. Sharp

  “I believe the magistrates are holding a man, pending his arrest for murder,” Ash said in an offhand way. “As for your husband, I have no doubt the person who ordered the deed will be in custody soon.”

  “The Raven? Do you have him in custody?” Eagerness lifted her ladyship’s tone. “Did he have my husband killed?” Belatedly she recalled her state, and lifted the handkerchief again.

  “I’m not in a position to say.”

  Lady Coddington clasped her hands together, the handkerchief squashed between them. “I can at least say that my husband’s sad demise resulted in the worst criminal in the country being apprehended.”

  “Indeed,” Ash said coolly, “but we would wish it had not happened that way.”

  “Oh yes, of course.” She had recourse to her handkerchief again.

  Ash got to his feet. “If we are to get to the inquest on time, I fear we must leave.”

  He raised his brow as their hostess left the room, but said nothing, merely offered his arm to Juliana. They went into the hall and put on their outer clothing.

  Her ladyship came down the stairs wearing a hat over which a heavy black veil was draped. Her face was only dimly visible. Long black gloves covered her arms and hands. She’d removed the pearl necklace that had encircled her throat. She was ready to play the grieving widow.

  * * *

  Inquests were generally held at inns. The laughing, shouting crowd that had gathered barely hushed when they saw the carriage draw up and the widow get out of it. She paused for a dramatic and well-judged moment then allowed Ash to take her arm and lead her inside. People moved to allow them through.

  The coroner nodded to Ash. Naturally, Ash knew the man.

  Cutty Jack stood at the back of the room, holding a foaming tankard of beer. He was at his most disreputable, ragged, grubby coat and a waistcoat with several stains and mismatched buttons. A neck cloth that must have once been white was wrapped carelessly around his throat.

  Ash carefully escorted her ladyship to a bench at the front, helped Juliana to sit next to her and then stood behind them, as if on guard.

  The hubbub stilled when the coroner smashed his gavel on the table that was being used as a makeshift bench. “Order!”

  Only when the noise had died down did Juliana notice who sat close by. Her parents were in attendance. Their footmen stood either side of them, creating a human barrier between them and the unwashed masses.

  Juliana stood and bobbed a curtsey. Her father granted her a gracious nod. Her mother ignored her. Duty done, Juliana regained her seat and watched her first inquest.

  Several inquests were to be held today, but the murder of Lord Coddington featured first on the bill. Since they already knew what the verdict would be, Juliana felt little tension, only interest. Aware that Ash watched her now and again, she even felt cherished, cared for. Nobody had concerned themselves with her feelings before him.

  They’d brought their own footmen, the redoubtable Freeman and Smythe, who stood at the back of the room. Unlike the servants her parents had brought, they wore no gaudy livery. Baronets did not go in for that kind of thing, Ash had told her. She’d laughed at that, and he’d amended his statement. “Well, this baronet doesn’t.”

  At least they didn’t have to sit through half a dozen verdicts that didn’t concern them before they got to Coddington.

  Juliana watched the law churn its inevitable way forward. Lady Coddington walked forward to give her evidence, which was brief and uttered with a quavering tragic tone that had the audience sobbing with her. “And now he will never come home!” she concluded.

  Ash gave evidence clearly and succinctly, about finding the body and who else was present. When the coroner asked him if he knew any way this death was not murder, Ash said simply, “No.”

  The widow sobbed. Juliana touched her hand, passed her a clean handkerchief. Ash was dismissed and came back to them.

  Few people looked in her direction.

  The coroner addressed the jury. “Heard enough? Do you need to retire to consider your verdict?”

  The twelve people sitting together by his side exchanged glances at each other, and one shrugged. The foreman, a powerful man looking as if he would burst out of his coat at any moment, the seams were so tight, got to his feet. “Murder by person or persons unknown,” he droned before he sat.

  The crammed space erupted with noise. Shouts about who did it, and demands to arrest this person or that, combined with “the Raven,” who seemed to get everywhere these days. Spittle flew, and a few pints of beer were spilled. Fortunately, no fights broke out, but it was a close thing.

  The coroner had to bang his gavel half a dozen times before he could quiet the room enough to repeat the verdict. “So noted,” he said, and suited words to fact, scrawling the verdict in his book.

  It was done. Cacophony and confusion reigned, but at the heart of it all, justice moved another tooth along the cog.

  Ash got to his feet and helped Juliana up. Lady Coddington hung on to his other arm, her face buried in a fresh handkerchief.

  Juliana did not give her parents a glance as they waited to leave the inquest in the space between one case and the next. Had curiosity or appearances made her parents turn up? They knew his lordship, but so did a lot of people, and they weren’t here today.

  However, Lady Coddington stopped to speak to her husband’s “good friends.”

  “We will do anything we can to help you in your hour of need,” her mother said. Anything that did not put them out too much, Juliana assumed.

  Her father glanced at her, and then looked away, as if embarrassed to see her. He probably was. His daughter had flourished from being a cipher, a nothing, into a woman with her own mind and her own life. She could be nothing but an embarrassment to him. But again, they were acknowledged in public. Not the cut direct.

  They let people rush past them. The case of the day had just concluded. Only a few people remained in their seats, presumably the relatives and officials directly involved in the other cases to be heard that day.

  To their relief, Lady Coddington accepted the Hawksworths’ offer to take her home. She had a lot to think about. “I will take my poor husband home next week,” she told them. “His heir is arriving soon, but he will not be in time for the funeral.”

  “You heard from him?” Lady Hawksworth said.

  “Indeed. He was kind enough to send word that he is arriving very soon, and he will join us in Shropshire. A charming man, as I recall. A diplomat.”

  “Ah yes,” Juliana’s mother recalled. “And possessed of a considerable fortune of his own, or so I hear.”

  Ah. The widow wanted a shot at the new baron, did she? A baron in the hand was worth more than an earl in the bush.

  “But the case?” Lord Hawksworth gave Ash a steely glare.

  Lady Coddington drooped. “It is over, and the murderer apprehended.”

  “Not quite,” Ash murmured.

  Before they could say any more, he curved his arm around Juliana’s waist, holding her close as he worked his way through the room, Freeman and Smythe clearing the way for them. He nodded to Ransom, who stood at the back of the room, sketching furiously while dictating to a young man next to him.

  “How soon before you have this edition out?” he asked the journalist.

  “An hour from when we get home. I have boys to help me set the type now,” he replied. “Do you have anything to add, Sir Edmund?”

  Ash shook his head. “Not to the inquest.”

  Ransom stopped his sketching and gave Ash his full attention. “But...” he prompted.

  “But,” Ash said smoothly, and moved on.

  On their way home, jolting over the cobbles, Ash said to Juliana, “She enjoyed being the center of attention, knowing she was fooling everyone. It’s a heady drug, the pursuit of power. She won’t hes
itate to get rid of people who get in her way. Not now.”

  Appalled, Juliana could only agree. “And she has her sights on the new baron, if I’m not mistaken. She’ll drag him up the aisle as soon as she can.”

  “You’re not mistaken. We’ll have to stop her. We’ve given her the opening. She knows Stanton’s house will be quiet and all but deserted tomorrow, with the new earl arriving the day after. She has to come tomorrow or not at all.”

  “We couldn’t have made it much clearer,” Juliana agreed. “She has her future all mapped out. Now she has rid herself of the only man who could point the finger at her, she believes she is free to attract the next unfortunate into her web.”

  “We will ensure that nobody else dies because they get in her way,” Ash said grimly.

  She’d seen Lady Coddington grow into her new role, build her new character as the grieving but courageous widow. She feared Ash was right.

  Murder suited Lady Coddington.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ash lay in the coffin, wondering if he’d taken the right course of action. But what else could he do?

  Abercorn had offered to take this place, relishing the idea of it, but when the box arrived, Ash had a wildly inappropriate moment and said he’d do it.

  Too late to back off now.

  Why not just put a closed coffin there, he’d asked.

  Abercorn had said, “Have you ever tried to lift the lid of a coffin from the inside?”

  Ash didn’t want to know how the duke had known that. But for curiosity’s sake, he’d tried, and understood. So, they’d had an open coffin. The only reason he’d allowed her to come tonight was if he was there too, protecting her.

  Hence the coffin. Hence the embalming fluid daubed all over him, stinking the place out. Hence the face paint that put every nerve on his face on high alert. It itched like hell and he couldn’t scratch.

  The knowledge that his wife sat in the center of the black-shrouded bed at his side only made him more impatient and on edge.

  This was the most bizarre action he’d ever taken, and all the time his valet was applying the enamel to his face, he kept asking himself if he’d made the right decision. The stuff was part white powder, part egg white, supposed to impart a perfect complexion to the fashionable man or woman. It just made Ash look like an unbroken egg.

  What madness had made him do that? When he’d concocted the scheme, he’d imagined a closed coffin, not this macabre simulation of death.

  “This stuff itches,” he managed, moving his mouth as little as possible, so as not to disturb the elaborate face paint.

  “How do you think I felt?” she said, her voice muffled by the heavy drapery between them. “I had to wear it every day. Once you’re enameled, you keep it on for days. I had to learn to control my expressions, for fear of cracking it. I couldn’t laugh or cry without damaging it, and if I did that, my mother would be angry. I learned to live inside it.”

  Since Ash chose to keep most of his thoughts to himself, and had done since he’d taken this path in life, he understood some of what she said. “But I look like a porcelain doll. I have red circles on my cheeks and black stuff around my eyes. It’s appalling.”

  “Some women use lampblack. It smears and makes your eyes water.”

  “Why do they do it?”

  “To look beautiful.” She paused before adding, “And to be fashionable. Being derided by the fashionable is a terrible fate.”

  He didn’t like to think of that, but at least the topic took his mind off where he was. He tongued his cheek pads back into place, inserted to make his face shape the same as the man he was impersonating before he said, “Were you derided?”

  “Oh no. I was very fashionable. Admired by some, hated by others. But rarely derided. I was an heiress, you see.”

  “I see. Well, you’re not one anymore.”

  “I’ve never been so glad to lose a fortune.”

  Because that fortune had come with no consideration of her as a person, an abusive husband and demands of absolute obedience. Juliana would have put up with the terrible treatment her husband meted out to her, hidden the marks with the kind of face paint he was sporting tonight. She’d have done it all bravely and without complaint.

  He could not bear to think about that possibility.

  The doorbell clanged, and then they heard the sound of the door opening. Muffled words, probably the butler telling the visitor that she was early, that she’d be alone up here, the script they had prepared for the man.

  Abercorn was concealed downstairs, behind the heavy curtains of the book room, in case the letters were hidden there. Cutty Jack had the drawing room. Ash kept his fingers metaphorically crossed that light-fingered Jack would leave the treasures there alone, but if he helped himself to a trinket or two, he wouldn’t make a fuss. After all, Col had been as good as gold in his own house.

  Ash was sure the letters were in this room somewhere. They’d searched it again. They’d upended drawers, felt under the bed, lifted the mattress, looked inside every carefully folded shirt, each garment in the clothes press.

  They’d discovered the private stairs, originally intended for servants. The butler had informed them that Stanton had blocked them off, claiming they were unsafe. That gave the lovers private entrance and exit. They would spend their time here, making love, with Lady Coddington whispering poison into her lover’s ear, making him hers.

  What techniques had she used to enthrall him? While Ash was thoroughly enchanted by the prospect of making love to his wife, he was fully aware that practice, of which he had little, and learning, of which he had much more, were very different beasts.

  He still had no idea about some aspects of the act, not least what caused a man to behave as stupidly as Stanton had. Ash had found him likeable enough, but he knew men could conceal any number of wickednesses, especially if they knew what they were doing.

  The muffled sound of feet on the thick carpet outside came to his ears, together with the rustling of expensive silk. Hastily, he put the pennies on his closed eyes. The discs had warmed in his hands, and the smell of copper sent a tang to his mouth.

  Their quarry had arrived. The butler opened the door. “My lady.”

  “Please leave me.” Lady Coddington’s voice trembled. A good touch.

  “My instructions are to remain, my lady.”

  Ash’s heart missed a beat. What the devil had got into the man? He was to bring her here and leave her alone, give her the chance to retrieve the incriminating letters.

  “I told you that you may go. I wish to pay my respects in private. It is why I came before the visiting hour.”

  They’d banked on it. But they’d also ensured nobody knew about this change of plan, to bring the body of his lordship here. Because Stanton still lay at the church, awaiting his funeral service.

  “Very well, my lady. Please ring the bell when you have done.”

  “I can find my own way downstairs. Go.”

  A moment of doubt seized Ash. What if the letters were hidden in another room on this floor? The other bedrooms were shuttered and closed, but that may not have stopped Lord Stanton concealing his parcel of letters somewhere close. Or what if he’d had the sense to burn the most incriminating notes?

  She moved around the room, her skirts rustling. The sound came closer. He could swear he felt her breath on his cheek.

  He did. She kissed him. Ash had to stop himself shuddering, forcing himself to keep his muscles absolutely, utterly still. A satin cover enclosed him from the neck down, thicker than it appeared and heavily starched, so he could breathe without it becoming evident. He held his breath now, only letting it out slowly, as she leaned back, and, presumably, stared at him.

  “It was your fault,” she said, in such a conversational way Ash feared she had seen through the elaborate disguise. “Trying to force me
to marry you, threatening to expose me. I will not spend the rest of my life in thrall to one man.” She sighed, her breath gusting against his hair, the only part of his upper body that could feel anything. “And telling me you would take care of the letters? What kind of a fool do you think I am? I had to do something, my dear, you must see that. And I couldn’t trust anyone else this time, could I?” She laughed, an ugly, harsh sound. “You caused me a great deal of inconvenience. I will say my goodbyes now, and wish you better fortune in the next world.”

  With another sigh, she turned away. Ash couldn’t see where she was going, or what she was doing, but he couldn’t move. Anything other than the shallowest of breaths would stir his shroud, and then the game would be up far too early. He concentrated on keeping still.

  She tapped on a panel to the left of the bed, behind his head. She must have her back to him, so he took the chance and took a deep breath. Then another tap, and an unladylike grunt. “There you are!”

  Well that saved them some time.

  Ash had to trust that Juliana would see what she was doing and confirm it. He couldn’t move yet. But there was nobody else he would trust more than her.

  Another scraping sound indicated a key being pushed into a lock. The snick came to his eager ears. Then a fumbling, the bump of fingers against wood.

  Juliana shouted and made her move, the rattle of rings against the bedrail making him start in shock, even though he’d been expecting it.

  Now!

  Her voice was still echoing around the room when Ash pulled the coins from his eyes and sat up. The shroud tangled around his legs and it took him an agonizing few seconds to kick free. The sound of tearing cloth joined the sudden hubbub. It didn’t matter how much noise they made now.

  A shot sounded, echoed, and plaster fell, bits falling on his hair. Lady Coddington screamed, “But you’re dead!”