Petty Treason

by Madeleine E. Robins

  Mrs. d’Aubigny rose and took up the handbell. Beak appeared at the first ring as if he had been waiting by the doorway. The staff indeed appeared most solicitous of their mistress.

  “Beak, Miss Tolerance wishes to see the—the room. Then she will have some questions for you and the others about the day of—” she waved her hand, then brought it back to her lips as if to contain the word murder. “It will please me if you will be helpful to her.”

  She did not wait to hear the man’s “Yes, madam.” She turned back to Miss Tolerance, and this time offered her hand. “I must thank you for your efforts, Miss Tolerance. You will let me know what you learn?”

  Miss Tolerance curtsied in lieu of agreement and took her leave. She had a good deal to think about.

  Beak led Miss Tolerance to the first floor with a posture which suggested outrage. She was sympathetic: if for days he had been fending off strangers who wished to gape at the sight of the murder room, what was he to make of a woman who demanded—and was given the right!—to examine the room closely? She did not apologize aloud, but resolved to make her investigation as efficient as possible, to avoid antagonizing the man further. He might be of considerable help to her in the days to come; best not to lose his goodwill at once.

  The chevalier’s chamber was in the front of the house. It was a large, square room furnished in a heavy old-fashioned style. The drapes, now drawn and admitting wintry light, were a pale, frosty brown; the bed-curtains were of the same material. The bed itself had carved posts reaching nearly to the ceiling; there were a chest and garderobe in the same dark, carved wood. Miss Tolerance noted that not all the bed-curtains were in place; only the curtains at the foot and far side remained. From the description in the newspapers, Miss Tolerance surmised that the missing drapes had been smirched with blood and brains that no amount of laundering had been able to remove, and had been destroyed. There were neither sheets nor blankets upon the bed, and the feather ticking showed signs of an imperfect attempt to clean it. She gathered her skirt and dropped to one knee to examine the floor around the bed, and noted that sanding had not completely removed the stains there, either.

  There were other commonplace furnishings of a gentleman’s room: writing desk, chairs, fire tools, mantel clock, toilet cabinet Everything was orderly and clean, but she had no idea if everything that ought to be in the room was there. The room was melancholy in its emptiness and very cold. When she exhaled, a plume of breath rose up before Miss Tolerance’s eyes.

  “There was nothing taken? Nothing missing from the room after—”

  Beak shook his head. “Nor I found nothing extra, miss. You’re wishful to talk to the staff, miss?”

  Miss Tolerance sighed. They had quite reasonably wished to scrub away the marks of murder, but doing so had likely scrubbed away evidence that might have proved useful. Would that I had seen this room that morning, she thought. Two weeks gone, now.

  “Thank you, Beak. I should very much like to speak to each of you alone.”

  Miss Tolerance spent the next several hours talking with the staff of the house in Half Moon Street, in a small room belowstairs usually reserved to Mr. Beak’s use. Mary Pitt, the maid who had discovered the murder, was a plain, moon-faced girl who had clearly come to enjoy her role in this important drama. What she had to say did not materially enlarge upon the report in the newspaper, but Pitt recited her piece with considerable relish, and details Miss Tolerance suspected had been added as telling piled upon telling.

  The cook, Mrs. Sadgett, was tall and thin, unlike many of her calling. She treated Miss Tolerance’s interview as an insufferable interruption, giving her testimony with sniffs of aggravation, her lips pursed tight. When the master’s death had been discovered she had been in the midst of her baking, she reported. She had arrived in the house an hour or more before Mary Pitt found the body, and gone straight about her business like a good Christian woman. When Miss Tolerance released her, Mrs. Sadgett left the room without a further glance at her interlocutor.

  Sophia Thissen, Anne d’Aubigny’s maid, was summoned downstairs by Beak. She was small—even shorter than Anne d’Aubigny, which made Miss Tolerance feel like a giantess—rosily plump, dressed neatly and without pretension in a brown stuff gown. Her eyes and hair were dark brown and her complexion dark; her vowels were Yorkshire with a veneer of London and gentility. She gave the impression that she might like to lean forward and straighten Miss Tolerance’s collar or smooth back any lock of hair which was unwise enough to stray from her bonnet. When the maid had accounted for her own whereabouts on the night of the murder, Miss Tolerance asked the woman the same question she had asked her mistress.

  “With your master dead in his sheets, why did no one think to wake Mrs. d’Aubigny until hours later?”

  “He weren’t my master. And what could poor little Madam have done?” The maid shrugged. “Mary Pitt was crying and carrying on, the house was all a-maze. And I had brung Madam her medicine the night before,” she added. “The laudanum makes her sleep so deep it’s hard to rouse her, and when she’s waked she’s addled and not much good for anything. It wouldn’t have been a kindness. Had I waked her early she’d have had hysterics, and how would that have helped?”

  Anne d’Aubigny might be correct that her staff was protective of her, Miss Tolerance thought, but her maid had more the tone of someone used to dealing with an idiot child.

  “Did not the officer of the watch wish to speak to her?”

  “I explained that Madam was en dishabille and not available yet. He was most agreeable about waiting.”

  That was a most peculiar way to manage an investigation, Miss Tolerance thought. Well, watch officers were not usually in the way of encountering full-blown murder in such a parish as this, and likely inclined to defer to persons of consequence. It might have been stupid of the officer, but it was not, Miss Tolerance regretted, unlikely.

  “When you did wake your mistress and give her the news, what, exactly, did she say?”

  Sophia shrugged again. “I don’t recall exactly. Oh no! or My God, something like that. And then she wept. And then she bid me help her get dressed, for she knew there would be a great deal of business to attend to that day.”

  Miss Tolerance blinked. “Were those her words? A great deal of business?”

  The maid shook her head. “That was the meaning of it, but I don’t recall the words exactly.” She glared at Miss Tolerance.

  “Have you any idea at what time the chevalier retired that night?”

  Sophia shook her head. “No, ma’am. I did my best to—to not to be close to the master, particularly in the evening. Not to speak ill of the dead, but—”

  “I understand,” Miss Tolerance said.

  “You might ask Jacks. Sometimes he did for the master after Mr. Norris left.”

  Miss Tolerance dismissed Pitt and called for Peter Jacks. The footman could add little, however. On the evening of the chevalier’s death he had let the master into the house at a little past ten. The chevalier had said he would see to himself, and sent Jacks off to his bed.

  “What did you make of that?” Miss Tolerance asked.

  “Miss?”

  “Was there any reason why the master might have sent you to bed and seen to himself? He has not—you will forgive me—but he has not impressed me as the soul of consideration.”

  Jacks grinned for a moment, then recalled himself. “Master didn’t make no secret that I wasn’t up to his standards as a valet. Half the time he did for hisself at night, said he didn’t want me racketing over him.”

  “And that night was one of those nights?”

  “I suppose so, miss. He just said ‘That’s all, Jacks.’ So I went to bed.”

  Miss Tolerance asked the footman to go over what had happened the next morning, but it varied little from what she had already learned. Jacks had been called from the kitchen by Mr. Beak to fetch the watch. “Glad to leave I was, too, with Mary Pitt bawling as loud as a trumpet. I ran out a
nd fetched the old man back—”

  “The door was locked until you left?”

  “Oh, yes, miss. Tight as a drum every night. Mr. Beak locked it after master got in.”

  Miss Tolerance sent for Beak.

  Adolphus Beak came into his parlor and made a little ceremony of seating himself opposite to Miss Tolerance, clearing his throat, and composing himself. He agreed that the testimony he had given at the Coroner’s Court, reported in the Times, was correct. The house had been securely locked the night before, bolts thrown on both the front and kitchen doors. The windows in the chevalier’s room had been undisturbed. The staff that slept in the house had been abed—he had personally locked the door to the servants’ stairwell before he retired, to guard against kitchen pilfering.

  “When you discovered the chevalier’s body, your first act was what, Mr. Beak?”

  Beak looked down his nose—a large, well-made feature, somewhat marred by a brown stain which indicated he was addicted to the use of snuff, but not so habituated in the use of his handkerchief. “I know what’s proper, miss. I sent Jacks off to bring the watch.”

  Miss Tolerance was unmoved by the man’s condescension. “Very proper. And he had to unbolt the door to do so, I believe? Which door was that?”

  “The front one, miss. Didn’t want to delay a second in Jacks finding the officer.”

  “Very right, Mr. Beak. But could not Mr. Jacks have used the kitchen door?”

  “The kitchen door, miss?” Beak looked blank.

  “Surely it had been unlocked when Mrs. Sadgett arrived that morning, to permit her entry to the house. Would that not have been quicker?”

  The old man’s face sagged at the import of the question was borne upon him. “I never did, miss.”

  “Never unlocked the door?”

  He shook his head. “No, miss. I threw the bolt myself the night before, when Mrs. Sadgett left, but I never heard her knock that morning. Next thing I knew, she was in kitchen doing her breads.”

  He called for Mrs. Sadgett, who came in with an air of superlative annoyance. “The door locked? In course it were not, Mr. Beak. When I come that morning I just thought you’d brought in the milk—no, the milk seller come round a little while later. But that door was not locked when I got here, Mr. Beak.”

  Beak dismissed the cook back to her oven before he turned to Miss Tolerance. “Who unlocked it, miss?”

  “Perhaps you should ask the others in the house, Mr. Beak. The answer may be quite simple.”

  But when Beak magisterially summoned each of the servants save Mrs. Sadgett back into his presence and put the question to them, the answer came back unexceptionally: none of them knew who had unlocked the kitchen door for Mrs. Sadgett. Miss Tolerance herself inspected the lock: an old-fashioned iron bolt that required considerable force to throw it; one would remember having bolted it. It was possible, Miss Tolerance reflected, that Beak scared the culprit from confession with his scowl of disapproval. But it was also possible that the door had been unlocked by some other party, including the chevalier himself. With a sigh at this conundrum she rose, gave her thanks to Beak, and suggested that she might come back again to talk. Beak conducted her up the stairs and back through the green baize door which separated the servants’ hall from the rest of the house. In the hallway Miss Tolerance noted that a door which had been closed earlier now stood open, revealing a pleasant formal salon. She stopped, staring into the room.

  “Is that a painting of your late master, Beak?”

  The old man followed Miss Tolerance’s glance. Upon the far wall, over a desk, was a portrait of a man, perhaps thirty years of age, with dark hair worn a little long, and dark winged brows. His features were handsome, and he was smiling, the smile perhaps intended to be pleasant; but the effect of those brows was to make him appear sinister. Upon second thought, Miss Tolerance decided that it was not a trick of the brows: the smile, and the expression in the eyes, was sinister.

  “That is. A good likeness, too. He was a well-looking man, but the artist caught something about his eyes.”

  “Indeed he did,” Miss Tolerance agreed, happy to turn away and follow Beak to the door.

  She stepped out of the house and into the street, moving through the crowd, thinking. With all the doors to the house locked and no windows broken, the likely suspects would have been only those who slept in the house. With the kitchen door unlocked sometime between midnight and seven in the morning, the murderer might have been anyone in London. Anyone in the world.

  Five

  Miss Tolerance’s interviews, which had occupied the greater part of the day, left her with generous avenues for inquiry. She returned to her cottage in Manchester Square with much to consider, and decided to pay a call upon her aunt. Mrs. Brereton, despite fixed rules against gossip between her employees with regard to her patrons, was quite variable in the application of this principle to herself. She had been in the past one of Miss Tolerance’s best sources of information.

  Darkness had fallen, and the brothel was discreetly bustling with activity. Miss Tolerance climbed the stairs to her aunt’s apartment, nodding to the servants and employees as she passed, looking blankly past the faces of clients in the hall. She was considerably surprised to find Mrs. Brereton in her bed, being ministered to by her elderly abigail. Frost was fussing around her mistress, plumping pillows and laying hot bricks wrapped in flannel by her feet. The maid wore that expression, part disapproval and part delight, which is common to persons who believe themselves to be indispensable.

  “A feverish cold she has, from not taking proper care. It’s a scandal!” Miss Tolerance was not entirely clear what scandalized Frost: that a cold had had the temerity to strike her charge, or that Mrs. Brereton was still ignoring her advice after all these years. “Look at her, at Death’s door!”

  Mrs. Brereton did not look very ill to Miss Tolerance’s eye. She lay propped upon half a dozen laced pillows, and as her cap and nightdress were equally laced, it was difficult to tell where the pillows left off and the madam began. The only sign of illness Mrs. Brereton exhibited was a flush to her cheeks and a reddening around her nose from too-frequent recourse to her handkerchief.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Frost, and stop fussing at me,” Mrs. Brereton snapped. “For God’s sake, get me a cup of tea and stop fluttering.”

  Frost glared at Miss Tolerance as if her mistress’s behavior proved her point, and stalked out.

  “A certain class of servant comes to believe that she is the secret mistress of the house,” Mrs. Brereton said irritably. “I do not know why I suffer these pretensions.”

  “She does keep you looking remarkably fine,” Miss Tolerance pointed out. She took a chair near her aunt’s bedside. A silence fell between them.

  “What brings you to me tonight, Sarah?” Mrs. Brereton asked at last.

  “I’m in need of gossip, Aunt.”

  “Not about my clientele, I hope.”

  Miss Tolerance shook her head. “I know better than to ask such a thing. Someone nearer in line to a competitor, I think.”

  “Nearer in line? When is a competitor not a competitor? Very intriguing.” Mrs. Brereton’s eyes brightened. She sat up a little against her pillows and tilted her head encouragingly. “Who?”

  “Camille Touvois.”

  “Good lord, she’s no competitor of mine,” Mrs. Brereton said. Her scorn was complete. “She gives parties. Chat-chat-chatter and bad wine and poets, heaven help us, holding forth on politics! That people meet there and go elsewhere for their liaisons does not make her salon into a house of assignation.”

  “I’m sure that distresses her nearly as much as it does you, Aunt. People meet there and go elsewhere?”

  “Why else would they go? I understand that La Touvois has a knack for introducing people of like interests.”

  “Aunt, at the risk of exposing my naivete, I wish you will plainly state what you are hinting at.”

  Mrs. Brereton rolled her eyes. “Molly
to molly, Sarah. Bircher to birched. The old man who wants a young woman and the young woman who seeks a man just like her dear father—or granddad. From what I understand, she has a talent for discerning whose taste match; she introduces them and lets nature take its course.”

  “She is paid to do so?”

  “Not in coin. But this one brings that one, and her gatherings are enlarged. I believe,” Mrs. Brereton said offhandedly, “that her trade is in information and favors.”

  “But how difficult it must be to eat favors,” Miss Tolerance observed.

  Frost returned with the tea tray and bustled noisily for several minutes, pouring out tea and fussing over her mistress until Mrs. Brereton shooed her away impatiently. Then the abigail retired to the dressing room, glaring at Miss Tolerance. Miss Tolerance drank her tea.

  “What about Camille Touvois herself? Can you tell me anything?”

  Mrs. Brereton bristled as if her professional competence had been questioned. “Only a little,” she said blandly. “Her family came here from France about the time she would have escaped the schoolroom, I think. She married another emigré—all of them as poor as rats, of course—and was widowed very quickly. The poor fellow was at Valenciennes with the Duke of York. Then she was someone’s mistress—Lord, who was it? Whoever it was, he put her in society’s way and she became acquainted with a vast number of the Opposition.

  “So her sympathies—and her parties—partake of the liberal establishment?”

  “Oh, I believe so, my dear,” Mrs. Brereton said. While her own sympathies were as firmly in the Whig camp as Madame Touvois’ were said to be, Mrs. Brereton’s establishment took no notice of the political affiliations of its clientele. “But does this mean that Camille Touvois is tangled up in some inquiry of yours?”

  Miss Tolerance shrugged. “Perhaps.”

  “Oh. Yes. Of course.” Mrs. Brereton blew her nose. “You may ask me all you like, but you will tell me nothing.”