Exchanging looks of alarm Daniel and I followed her to the drive, where Greta was attempting to coax a very reluctant Bertie and Alexander from the carriage. It was well past the boys’ dinnertime and naptime, and one look at Bertie’s flushed cheeks and scowling brow told me he was hungry and overtired.
Christa reached her arms out to him. “Albert, there’s my sweet boy. Come and meet Mr. Thornfax’s aunties!”
“Stay wid Tom.” Bertie pouted, and hung on to the carriage door with both hands.
“Silly boy. What are you—?”
Tom Rampling emerged from the carriage beside Bertie and stepped onto the gravel with Alexander’s arms clamped tightly round his neck. The baby’s silk suit was even more rumpled than his brother’s, and he buried his pink face in Tom’s shoulder.
“Ah, excellent, Mr. Rampling,” Daniel said. “I had hoped you would receive my message on such short notice. Hitched a ride with the whole Dewhurst clan, have you?”
“Greta! Take them away from that man at once,” Christabel hissed.
“Stay wid Tom!” Bertie sat on Tom’s shoe and wrapped his limbs around Tom’s leg like a chimpanzee. Out of habit Tom lifted his foot a bit, and Bertie erupted in a wild fit of giggles. His little straw hat popped off and rolled under the carriage.
“My dear, whyever have you had Greta bring the children here?” Daniel wondered. “You know they’re far too young for this sort of gathering. It’s not at all appropriate.”
“Nonsense, Dr. Dewhurst.” Christa made her voice bright. “We must show them what sweet babies the Somerville women can produce!”
My face flamed, and I glanced back to ensure that Mr. Thornfax and his family hadn’t seen us all dash outside. Then I caught Tom’s expression—a mix of horror and amusement, cloaked a second too late—and my humiliation increased.
Greta attempted to pry Alexander from Tom’s neck and was rewarded with an ear-splitting wail. “Sorry, mum,” she said. “It’s only they’re so fond of Tom, you see.”
“Dr. Dewhurst. Take your sons in hand!” Christa ordered.
“I don’t see what I can—”
“I won’t have them touched by that … that criminal,” she spat, and stamped her foot.
Daniel took her by the elbow. “My dear, you are becoming overwrought.”
“He’s a friend to whores and cutthroats! You told me yourself.”
The doctor coloured. “I said no such thing.”
“Yes, you did,” Christa shrilled, raising her voice over Alexander’s squalling. “‘Tom Rampling has too keen a conscience for wastrels and fallen girls,’ you said.” She narrowed her eyes venomously at Tom. “It is my belief you have fallen in with an opium gang. What do you say to that, Mr. Rampling?”
Tom’s face was hewn stone, his eyes steel grey. Only his red ears betrayed his embarrassment. He put the screaming, flailing baby into Greta’s arms and bent down to murmur to Bertie. In a moment the boy released Tom’s leg, only to climb mulishly back into the carriage.
“Now look what he’s done!” Christabel was in tears.
“Mrs. Dewhurst, here is your remedy,” Tom said, and handed her a blue glass vial from his pocket.
“Daniel, ’tis time to take your family home.” Aunt Emmaline’s low voice somehow cut through the din of Alexander’s tantrum. Behind her a small group of onlookers had gathered in the doorway. “Miss Somerville and I will follow you in my chaise.”
As usual the countess’s tone brooked no dissent. My sister sniffled and looked at her shoes, and Daniel nodded at the butler to retrieve their coats.
When Christa, Greta, and the boys had been loaded into the carriage, Daniel turned Tom aside. “I am sorry for all this fuss, Rampling,” I heard him say. “Thank you for coming to my wife’s rescue, even if she cannot appreciate it just now. I believe Curtis waits in the mews to convey you to the laboratory. Mr. Thornfax keeps insisting that you’re just the man for these urgent duties of his, so I shan’t begrudge you the time away.”
Aunt Emma steered me back inside and turned the guests’ questions aside with a vague comment about the difficulties of finding good nursemaids for babies nowadays.
Later, as we drove back to Hastings House in her carriage, my aunt said, “Is your sister entirely happy, do you think?”
I shook my head no. In fact over the past week I’d come to realize that Archie’s insinuation about “dope” and the ladies of Hastings was well founded: Christabel imbibed a heavy daily dosage of laudanum. I had begun to notice that she was going to bed early every night despite napping two hours or more every afternoon. When she wasn’t groggy she was agitated, perceiving dangers and enemies everywhere. The “remedy” Tom had brought her at the doctor’s bidding today was almost certainly laudanum, too.
“Do you think Dr. Dewhurst is a good man?” Aunt Emmaline continued. “Does he love poor Christabel, I mean? I can’t help but feel she may have been hasty in marrying him after all that sorry business back at Holybourne.”
By sorry business my aunt meant George Clayton. We seldom spoke Mr. Clayton’s name; certainly, neither of us would ever speak it in Christa’s presence for fear of stirring old hurts. After all, it had been the Lady Hastings who’d driven that handsome young suitor from our house five years ago when it was revealed he was trying to win Christa’s money rather than her heart. And it was me—or rather, Mimic—who had revealed it, after overhearing Mr. Clayton in conversation with his dissolute London friends. At twelve I had understood only dimly what it all meant. Aunt Emma had needed to explain to me the danger of a fortune hunter to a young woman destined to inherit.
“From now on I shall take it upon myself to investigate any young man visiting Holybourne,” Aunt Emma had decided. “’Tis my money that makes you and Christabel targets for rogues like Clayton, so ’tis my duty to ensure you make good marriages.”
That same September Christabel had met Daniel Dewhurst—plump, balding, twelve years her senior—and begged to be allowed to marry him at once. Aunt Emmaline had found Dr. Dewhurst’s finances mediocre but his prospects in medicine promising and his character solidly affable. She’d given her blessing upon the match, along with her permission—and a sufficient allowance—for the newlyweds to set up residence at Hastings House. By Michaelmas that year my sister was married and gone, and I was left alone with my ailing father at Holybourne.
But Daniel was fond of his young wife, I thought. In these past eighteen months with them at Hastings I had never seen him impatient or short with her. He smiled at her, and stroked her hair, and told her she was beautiful nearly every day. “I believe D-Daniel l-loves her,” I told Aunt Emma.
She nodded. “And the new Lord Rosbury? Shall he care for you properly, do you think?”
“I hope he t-takes me away to sea!” I said.
Aunt Emma laughed. “I’m sure he would, my dear, if you asked him!”
Until the words left my lips I’d had no idea exactly how desperate I was to leave Hastings House. But the thought of Mr. Thornfax marrying me and then leaving me behind while he went sea-voyaging seemed a dreadful prospect, suddenly. It wasn’t only Hastings’s dank halls and Christa’s erratic moods. It was the whole business of Tom Rampling. Tom, with his pale skin and dark, unruly curls. Tom, with his gentle, clever fingers unselfconsciously smoothing my hair. Tom, who could pick a lock—or a pocket, presumably—as easily as breathing. Tom, who had never exactly lied to me, had never denied his responsibility for the death of young Will. Whether he was good or bad—or worse, that he might somehow be good and bad at the same time—Tom Rampling had become such a puzzle for me that I felt it would be best to go far away from him.
Mr. Thornfax, at least, was always direct with me, was always exactly himself. How I admired his forthrightness! Perhaps I should simply be direct with him in return, and tell him I wanted a life with him at sea. If he insisted that it wasn’t safe, or that a ship was no place for a lady, I would find a way to convince him otherwise. I smiled inwardly at the mem
ory of his warm hand at my nape today, his clear blue gaze upon my face. I could talk to Mr. Thornfax despite my stammer, despite Mimic’s intrusions, even, and he would listen to me. Of that much I could be sure.
My aunt, as usual, seemed to read my unspoken feelings on my face. She reached over, drew me into a sturdy embrace, and said, “Above all, Leonora, you must know your own mind. Only take care to discover all the facts before you make it up!”
As we pulled through the gates of Hastings, Aunt Emma sighed and said she always forgot how grand a house it was. “It was never my home, not really,” she mused. “I was too young when I married the count and became its mistress. I never got over my intimidation of the place.”
“The Countess of Hastings, intimidated? N-never!”
She laughed.
“It isn’t my home, either,” I reminded her.
Aunt Emma kissed me and said, by way of a goodbye, “You’ll make your own home soon enough, my dear. Perhaps even a floating one!”
FOURTEEN
As the days passed into weeks, thoughts of the bombings and of opium-trade politics and of poor Hattie’s fate kept whirling round my head. I found that I could not keep my mind on ladies’ lunches and card games. I would open a novel and see only the smoke and dust rising in the opera gallery. I would hear Bertie laugh and think for a moment that it was young Will chased by Tom across the yard. Even when I was with Mr. Thornfax—when we walked in the park, when we dined with Christa and Daniel, when we danced at a ball, when we visited Parliament and he introduced me to some of his new friends there—part of my mind was always preoccupied by fear of the Black Glove. At night I woke again and again with dreams of people falling to their deaths. To ease my nerves I would lie in my bed and imagine the tinkling of a music box, the delicate tapping of crystal birds.
One afternoon in late April, nearly three weeks after Lord Rosbury’s funeral, I screwed up my courage and crossed the plum court. My breath came shorter as I approached Daniel’s surgery, and I hesitated at the door. Partly it was the still-raw memory of poor Hattie lying on the tiles just inside. But I had other memories of doctors’ offices—no less harrowing for being older than the recollection of Hattie’s death. Sterile, comfortless rooms where I waited and tried not to look at the walls with their frightening diagrams of cross-sectioned larynxes, of incisions to the tongue, of metal bracers suspended across the roof of the mouth and soldered to the teeth. One of my most frequent and lasting nightmares stemmed from the memory of standing against such a wall in such an office—as though I were just another illustration!—as Mr. Brinsmead, Surgical and Mechanical Dentist, pressed a wooden utensil into the back of my throat whilst I wept and struggled to say the alphabet around its intrusion. On that occasion Mimic had had enough. Spitting out the instrument I’d shrieked and cursed and hurled at the poor man every vile word Mimic had absorbed a few weeks before when I saw a horse-thief arrested in Holybourne village.
Today I was planning to ask my brother-in-law about the exact nature of Tom Rampling’s misdeeds and why Mr. Thornfax might be taking such an interest in his skills. But it was not the doctor I saw when I stepped into the surgery. It was the girl from the Seven Dials alley, reclining on a pallet under a calico blanket.
“I’m s-sorry,” I stammered. Half expecting Mr. Sears and his stick, I turned to flee.
“Miss Somerville, stay!” she said. A naked arm was thrust at me, and she nearly tumbled from the bed.
I closed the door and stood with my back against it. “Daisy, isn’t it?”
“Yes, mum.”
“What are you d-doing here?”
“Resting, mum. Doctor’s orders.”
“Are you a”—patient stopped my tongue—“is Dr. D-Dewhurst t-treating you?”
Daisy sighed, nodded, and let her head loll back on the pillow as if to demonstrate how in need of treatment she was. She did look dreadfully ill, I thought. Ghost-white without her face paint, and more bruised and withered through the neck and chest even than one month ago.
I thought of how she’d tried to protect young Will when I’d asked after him in the alley. She’d claimed to be his sister, in fact. I cast about for a tactful way to offer my condolences on her loss.
But Daisy anticipated me. Still gazing at the ceiling she drawled, “Me brother’s dead, mum.”
“I am s-sorry,” I said, but she didn’t seem to hear.
“It’s me own fault. It should ha’ been me that went. It was me as they asked to do it.” She sniffled and wiped her nose with her filthy neckerchief.
“Who asked you? And to d-do what?” I wondered, but Daisy sighed again and, eyelids fluttering, seemed to slip into a sort of doze.
I ventured closer and winced at the pungent odours that rose from the bed. Black crescents ringed Daisy’s fingernails; her hair, skin, and clothes alike were coated with yellowish grime. This girl was near my own age, but a life in London’s dark and shelterless streets had bent and wasted her. I was jolted with a sudden sense of how easily, how arbitrarily, our situations might have been reversed. After all, I’d once been a patient of the poppy flower, too—maybe not of Dr. Dewhurst’s new derivative of morphine, but certainly of more dilute versions of the drug. My memories of dozing and of dreaming poppy-dreams were still vivid enough. Only the move to Kew and my aunt’s distaste for such treatments had saved me from what might have been a life confined to my bed. How thin, really, was the luck that saw me coddled and fed while this girl drudged and starved.
A small table nearby held several delicate glass tubes, each tipped with a pointed copper cap. I picked one up and held it to the light. Its inner surface was stained with a dark, resinous residue. A glass rod ran through the tube, flanged at one end and stoppered with a disc of India rubber at the other. A silver pin protruded through the copper cap. Drawing the rod from the tube and replacing it produced a puff of air from the needle; upon closer inspection it proved to be hollow.
“I wouldn’t touch that.”
Daisy’s slurred words startled me. I nearly dropped the tube.
“Dr. Dewhurs’ll get fearsome angry. Built those hisself, he did. Or rather, Tom builds ’em. Works of art, the doctor calls ’em.”
“W-what is it?”
“A syringe. For me medicine. Sticks here in me arum.” She extended her wrist to display a cluster of wine-coloured punctures inside her elbow.
My throat pinched shut. My brother-in-law had spoken of drugs being introduced under the skin for more direct absorption, but I had never imagined such a device for the purpose or such brutal effects of its use. I struggled to remember why I’d come to the surgery. “Daisy. What did T-Tom Rampling have to do with Will’s d-death?”
She sat up. “’Tweren’t his fault, as I tol’ him. Lauk, but he sunk in melancholy, bless his soul!” She gave a vacant smile. “I tol’ him I’d marry him, if he’d only bring away a supply of me medicine with us.”
“And w-what did he say to that?”
“He said he’d have me in a blink, acourse, only I needs get well first.” Daisy placed a hand to her hollow cheek. “Tom is the best man I ever known, mum.”
Naturally, I thought, Tom Rampling was a saint—in a universe of housebreakers and whores. With a sour taste on my tongue I bid Daisy a curt goodbye.
She lunged forward and took hold of my skirt. “Only I’m so afeared, mum!”
“Why?”
“Sure, it’ll be me who goes next time.”
Next time? It took me a moment to understand what she meant. I’d been so absorbed in the shock and horror of the opera house attack that I hadn’t considered a “next time.” “B-but why?” I asked her. “Why would you go at all?”
Daisy shrugged. “Can’t get me medicine, elsewise.”
“From Dr. D-Dewhurst?”
“It’s too dear to hand round free. Mr. Watts says we has to work to pay our portion.”
“And who is Mr. W-Watts?”
Another shrug. “The man what’ll give us the bla
st stuff. My Tom, though. He says he’ll fashion the lightning cap hisself, special. He’ll keep me safe.” The girl actually sounded proud.
Here was confirmation, then. Tom Rampling had helped to set the explosion that had killed young Will. Poor old Lord Rosbury, all those innocent people dead—it was Tom’s doing.
Bile rose in my gullet. My thoughts raced and tumbled together. I had to tell someone at once, warn someone! My brother-in-law, perhaps—he knew that his assistant had a criminal past, but he couldn’t know that Tom was a murderer! Could he? Or Archie. Maybe my cousin would know what to do. Aunt Emmaline! I should go directly to my aunt— but immediately I pictured her sitting straight in her chair, arching one eyebrow at me and questioning whether I was sure I truly had all the facts at my disposal.
I stared at the dark circles under Daisy’s eyes, the hollows above her collarbones. One thought pushed out ahead of the jumble in my mind: they deserved each other, Tom Rampling and his Daisy.
“D-does your medicine cure you, do you think?” I asked her.
“Oh yes, mum.” A dreamy look was in her eyes. “It feels like floating. Soft and sweet, like.”
“Like laudanum?”
“No, mum. Laudanum just turns your head. Even morphine ain’t the same, times I tried it. Dr. Dewhurst’s doses make you fly and fly, forever.”
Two mornings later I still hadn’t decided what I should do. My indecision was unforgivable, I knew—my silence might be responsible for more innocent deaths, if Daisy was sent out to set an explosive as she feared she would be. Yet my thoughts were clouded with doubt upon doubt, and eventually I understood what it was I was waiting for. Tom Rampling hadn’t been at Hastings since my encounter with Daisy, and I needed to see him to know for sure. Whether Tom would confirm or deny my accusations I didn’t know, but I felt I needed to see the truth on his face, to hear it in his words, before I could act.
That morning I was fetching something from my bedchamber when I heard a noise below my open window. At the breakfast table I’d recognized Mr. Thornfax’s handwriting on an envelope, but the note had been addressed to Daniel, not to me. Now I spied the man himself striding across the plum court to the surgery. The new Lord Rosbury was out of his funeral darks but wore a black arm band over his suit and a black felt bowler. He carried a silver-tipped walking stick, which he twirled like a baton as he walked. Regally handsome, he looked like he might own the whole world, and I shivered behind the curtain with all the furtive pleasure of a voyeur. This must be what a title does to a man, I thought. Lengthens his stride and sharpens the ring of his boots against the stones. And what would the title do to me, I wondered, once I became the Lady Rosbury?
Mad Miss Mimic Page 11
