Petty Treason

by Madeleine E. Robins

  “Oh, lovey-dovey stuff, promising undyin’ devotion and that sort of thing. P’raps ’e took a partiality to ’er, and when ‘e couldn’t ’ave ’er, cut ’er throat?”

  “Couldn’t have her? Even if their association had to this point been blameless, I was under the impression that money carried all for Mrs. Vose; surely a royal duke would be able to come to an arrangement.”

  “‘E lost ’is ’ead and cut ’er throat, like some of ‘em do,” Mrs. Lasher suggested again. “Cut ’er throat and ’ad ’er thrown out into the street. At least it was a prince, and not some bully-boy she met on a street corner.”

  “Being killed by a prince makes one no less dead,” Miss Tolerance said practically. “In any case, a body clutching an incriminating note seems far too convenient for Bow Street, and far too inconvenient for the duke. Whatever his faults may be, I have never heard that His Royal Highness was a fool. Rather the opposite, in fact.”

  “A man in ’eat—”

  “I agree. A man in heat might do anything. Cumberland is said to have the Devil’s own temper; I could believe him capable of crime passionelle. But that man’s advisors would not let the servants toss the body of his mistress into the street with a love note in her hand! Cumberland has already survived one scandal this year.”

  “Killed ‘is valet,” Mrs. Lasher agreed. She gave the final word a hard t. “Proves ’e’s of a killin’ disposition.”

  Miss Tolerance wondered if Mrs. Lasher had been bribed to support this theory so rigorously. She shook her head. “The Coroner’s jury cleared him of involvement. A jury with several notable Whigs on it, they’d not have cleared him had there been evidence against him. Mrs. Vose’s death points too conveniently to Cumberland, at a time when all the royal dukes are under scrutiny. I don’t believe it.”

  “Who’d kill ’er? You think it’s to do with the chevalyer?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps. Perhaps she was killed to put Cumberland under suspicion.”

  “What, kill someone to make someone else look guilty of killin’ the first party?” Mrs. Lasher shook her head. “That’s too clever for me, and too cold-blooded.”

  Miss Tolerance rose. “Cold-blooded it is. I am sorry—” she had remembered that Mrs. Lasher was in mourning, after a fashion. “I am sorry Mrs. Vose was killed.”

  “Well, it does you out a witness, don’t it?” Mrs. Lasher said practically. “And we shall ‘ave to wear black gloves ’ere. We was as close to family as I s‘pose Josie ’ad.”

  Miss Tolerance curtsied. “Then permit me to condole with you, ma’am. If you hear anything more, you will let me know?”

  “I suppose I will, though it seems to be a dangerous business, givin’ information to you. Your Mrs. Smith’s settled right in,” she added, not at all off the topic. “Alice is teachin’ ’er to mend linens.”

  At the door Miss Tolerance remembered a last question for the madam. “Was Mr. Beauville here on the night the chevalier was murdered?”

  “You don’t think he had aught to do with it? They was friends, and Beauville is such a well set-up gent.”

  “He and the chevalier were as thick as thieves, you said.”

  “Well, he wa’n’t here,” Mrs. Lasher said firmly.

  “That is very helpful, ma’am. I need only to ascertain that he was not in any other of London’s five thousand houses of joy. As I have my work cut out for me, I hope you will excuse me.” Miss Tolerance curtsied; already Mrs. Lasher had returned to peering at her papers.

  Miss Tolerance went down the stairs, enough absorbed in her thoughts that she did not, at first, realize that someone was calling her name softly. She looked for the source of the summons. It came from a little woman in a wrennish brown dress, who might have been the apprentice of the severely dressed woman Miss Tolerance had met in the house a few times. Only her bruises, and her toothless smile, made her recognizable as Betty Strokum.

  “A word, miss?” Mrs. Strokum gestured down the hall with her chin, winced, and led the way until they stood just under the stair.

  “You have something new to tell me?” Miss Tolerance asked.

  “Only I want to know how long I got to stay here.” The bathing Mrs. Strokum had been subjected to had scrubbed away a quantity of dirt and the worst of her unpleasant odor; her bruises were livid, but less spectacular than they had been the day before.

  “They are not mistreating you?”

  “I suppose not, if you don’t count making me ‘em their sheets. But it’s dull as ditch water; can you believe when the girls ain’t occupied one of ’em reads to the others? I can’t chat up the gentlemen” —she wrinkled her nose—“because I don’t come up to the standards of the establishment! How long do I have to stay here? You ain’t turned Boyse in to no one yet?”

  “Not yet. I need to make my case as convincing as possible. You have nothing else to tell me?”

  “I told you all I have to tell.” Mrs. Strokum shrugged and winced, looking sideways at Miss Tolerance in a manner ill calculated to inspire trust.

  “If I go back to the Duke of Kent and speak with the barman there, will his story agree with yours?”

  “Oh, ‘im. ’E’s got no reason to love me. God knows what he’ll say.”

  Miss Tolerance felt her patience teetering precariously on the brink of outrage. “Mrs. Stro—Smith. If there is any detail, anything else you can tell me about Boyse’s contacts on that night, I require the absolute truth from you. You’ve already been beaten—it might mean your life if you hold back from me.”

  Mrs. Strokum recoiled. “You’d not hurt me?”

  “I?” Miss Tolerance said blankly. “Of course not. But another woman in this case is dead because of what she knew. I should dislike to find you had joined her. Tell me simply, without varnish: did you see Mr. Boyse speak with a Mr. Millward on the evening of the seventeenth?”

  Startled by the force of Miss Tolerance’s tone, Mrs. Strokum shook her head.

  “I thank you. Did Mr. Boyse speak to anyone that evening?”

  “The barman.” Mrs. Strokum frowned. “You ain’t asking about ‘Keep it down over there, you’ or ‘Outta my way, damn your eyes,’ are you?”

  Miss Tolerance shook her head.

  Mrs. Strokum closed her eyes; her tongue crept into the corner of her mouth.

  “‘E asked Jerry Conway about ’is boots,” she said at last. “What polish ‘e used to get ’em so shiny. And said a word or two to that bitch Molly Purse. A Frenchman come and said something to ‘im, quick-like, but I never ’eard what it was. But those was all quick bits, not a long jaw.”

  Miss Tolerance felt a flush of excitement. Her voice trembled when she asked, “Can you describe the Frenchman?”

  Mrs. Strokum shrugged. “Middlin’ height. Light hair. Fancied ’imself a bit, I think: that nice in his dress, and his hair cut just so. Nothing so special about ‘im but what he thought of ’isself.”

  Henri Beauville to the life. “And you heard nothing of what he said to Boyse?”

  “Nothing. Frenchy pulled Boyse aside and muttered a few words in his ear, then off he goes, and Boyse come back to me like nothing ever happened. You don’t think that was Millward, do you?”

  “It would be very interesting indeed if he were, but I don’t think so. If you saw the Frenchman again, would you recognize him?” Miss Tolerance asked.

  “Aye, I would. But I won’t risk my neck—”

  “Then stay in your room while you’re here,” Miss Tolerance counseled. “The man I’m thinking of has been a customer here in the past. If he comes and you see him, get word to me at once. Your life may depend upon it, do you hear?” She was conscious of the melodrama of her words, but feared that anything less than fear for her life would not spur Mrs. Strokum to cooperate. The whore took Miss Tolerance’s assurances at full value; when she left the room she looked both ways as she crossed the hall, as if to ensure that neither Beauville nor his agents could have crept in to the building while she was occupie
d.

  Miss Tolerance took a chair to Manchester Square, deep in thought. Beauville knew Boyse? From what Mrs. Strokum said, the two men had not talked long enough for Beauville to have told the long story that Boyse said he’d heard from “Millward.” And Mrs. Strokum had spoken as though the men knew each other, but the Duke of Kent did not seem like Beauville’s venue, nor John Boyse one of Beauville’s regular companions. Which suggested—in the wake of her conversation with Sir Walter, Miss Tolerance was careful not to leap to conclusions—that their association was an irregular one.

  And there was the question of Beauville and the fire in her cottage. The image of Beauville, watching the blaze from one of Mrs. Brereton’s windows, came to her unbidden. Fire was no trivial threat in London; the Great Fire was still spoken of, stories passed from mother to child as a warning to be careful with the coals. If Beauville had something to do with burning her cottage, it suggested that he believed that she knew something which would endanger him.

  Could the exchange of words at the Duke of Kent have been Beauville hiring Boyse to set the fire? When she thought the matter out, she discarded the notion: Beauville had spoken to Boyse on the seventeenth—the same evening she had been attacked. The fire had been two nights later, on the nineteenth. Why hire such a thing done on an evening when he himself was at Mrs. Brereton’s? Had he wanted her dead? Was the fire meant as a warning? The action of a Village Simple who loved the sight of a blaze? Miss Tolerance closed her eyes and envisioned the pile of table, chairs, ledger, her writing box—

  An idea came to her with such force that she nearly upset the chair in which she was riding. Miss Tolerance apologized to the chairmen and sat back again. What if Mrs. Brereton had been, in some fashion, right, and the fire was meant to destroy something? Not a record of a past case, but evidence in this current one. But if that were so, it was evidence Miss Tolerance herself did not know she had.

  The only things which had been burnt beyond recovery were her ledgers, two chairs, and her writing box, of which only the bottom panel survived.

  Her writing box, in size and shape, closely resembled the box taken from the privy house in Half Moon Street, in which the chevalier kept implements for inflicting pain upon his sexual partners.

  If I were a blackmailer, what a splendid hiding place that would be for my evidence! If I were the blackmailer’s victim, might I know of the box but not recognize it and mistake it for the one in my cottage?

  Miss Tolerance gave orders for the chairmen to turn back to Half Moon Street.

  The d‘Aubigny household, already in mourning, seemed haunted. The crowd which Miss Tolerance had formerly seen there was gone now; perhaps Anne d’Aubigny’s arrest had satisfied their vulgar gawking; perhaps they had relocated to Farrington Street outside Cold Bath Fields Prison, to keep their morbid vigil there. The door was opened by Peter Jacks, the footman, who greeted her as a familiar of the household, and asked at once if there were any news.

  “Nothing definite, but I am in hopes to have your mistress back with you in a day or so,” Miss Tolerance was pleased to tell him.

  “We’re grateful, miss.” Jacks looked down at her from the doorway with an expression of bewilderment.

  “May I come in, Jacks?”

  “Oh. Well, yes, miss. Only—” Jacks stepped back to permit Miss Tolerance to enter. “There’s no one to call upon. With Madam away, and the chevalier dead—”

  Miss Tolerance apprehended Jacks’ dilemma. “Oh, I have not come to call. I came to look for something which may help to bring Madame d’Aubigny home.”

  “What is it, miss?”

  “Evidence, Jacks. Will you trust me to look about where I will?”

  “I’ll fetch Mr. Beak.” In default of his mistress, Beak was clearly the one who would make weighty decisions. Miss Tolerance waited for a few minutes. The hall was chilly, and there was neither the noise nor the scent of a fire in either of the near rooms. What she could see was clean and in order, but Miss Tolerance suspected that the servants were spending most of their time in the servants’ hall by their own fire, waiting word of the household’s fate.

  Beak, roused from belowstairs, had apparently struggled into his livery coat and attempted to tweak his collar into place; the top button was not fastened, and his hair was rumpled. Jacks followed him down the hall, watching his superior with concern.

  “Good evening, miss. Jacks says you need to make further inquiries?”

  Miss Tolerance nodded. “I need a word with Sophia if I may.”

  Beak signaled Jacks to find the maid.

  “Perhaps I may use in the chevalier’s office?”

  From the expression which passed over Beak’s long face, Miss Tolerance could see that intrusion into his late master’s privacy troubled him, but concern for his present mistress’s welfare won out. He nodded and led Miss Tolerance into the chevalier’s office.

  “Shall you have the door closed, miss?” The drip at the end of the old man’s nose trembled. Miss Tolerance could not judge whether it was with indignation or excitement, and in any case she did not intend to indulge the manservant’s curiosity or territoriality.

  “I think so, Beak,” she said firmly. “You needn’t fear; we shan’t disturb anything.”

  At that moment Sophia Thissen arrived, and there was a brief confused flurry of motion as Beak stepped aside to permit her to enter; Sophia curtsied to Miss Tolerance; Miss Tolerance inclined her head as she attempted to reach around the maid and ease the door shut. Beak coughed and stepped back into the hall, and Miss Tolerance pulled the door to.

  “Pardon, miss, but how does Madam?” The maid looked anxiously at Miss Tolerance, as though she had been summoned to receive bad news.

  “I saw her this morning, and I believe she goes on comfortably, although of course she wishes to be home with you all. You have not been to visit?”

  Sophia shook her head. “Not since that night I brought her there, miss. It’s an awful place; breaks my heart to think of Madam there.” Sophia’s affection for her mistress appeared to be quite genuine, but not quite strong enough to outweigh her fear of the prison. Miss Tolerance could hardly fault her for that.

  “Sophia, the day that the constables came for Mrs. d’Aubigny, there had been some ado in the kitchen, do you recall? Someone had left a box—”

  “In the privy house. Yes, miss, I recall.”

  “I need to examine that box. When last I saw it, it was in your keeping.”

  Sophie nodded. “Master’s box,” she said slowly. “When them men come to take Madam, it clean drove every other thought out of my head. But when I come home that night and smelt something—everyone’ d forgot it. I cleaned it up and put it away.” Miss Tolerance, remembering what condition the box had been in when last she saw it, nodded appreciatively.

  “Please fetch it,” she said firmly.

  Sophie still appeared unwilling. “Madam said—”

  “Sophie, I would not ask if I were not hopeful of finding evidence to secure your mistress’s release. Please.” Miss Tolerance sought the maid’s gaze and held it. “I know the use to which it was put, and I shall not speak of that to anyone.”

  A moment’s thought appeared to decide the matter. Sophie nodded and left Miss Tolerance alone to examine Etienne d’Aubigny’s office.

  Aside from the painting of the late chevalier above the fireplace, there was little about the room to distinguish it from similar rooms in the homes of any number of well-off gentlemen in London, or indeed, anywhere else. A desk stood before the heavily draped window, its pen-box, sanding jar and inkwell lined up with military precision along the right edge of the desktop. There was one handsome cabinet containing three shelves of books which, by their look, must have been bought for the handsomeness of their bindings. Two armchairs faced each other in front of the fireplace, under the chevalier’s painted gaze. Two smaller paintings of oddly proportioned horses at graze hung on the wall by the window. The effect was one of masculinity unleavened b
y any degree of imagination, a room seldom used.

  As a matter of form, Miss Tolerance ran her fingers around the edges of each picture frame, but found nothing jammed there. She examined the books and found only one whose pages had been cut. Miss Tolerance had some experience of peculiar hiding places; it seemed to her that a cut book in a showcase library must have some significance, but a few minutes’ inspection convinced her that the man who never read his books had not imagined hiding anything within them, either. She opened the desk drawers and found nothing more interesting than writing paper and a Bible. The last seemed so unlikely an object for the Chevalier d’Aubigny to possess that it immediately begged closer inspection. She pored over the book, going so far as to pry up the endpapers in case something had been hidden under them, but she found nothing. She ran her hands along walls and examined the floor, but found nothing resembling a safe or locked box in which the chevalier might have hidden blackmail evidence.

  At last Sophia Thissen returned, apologizing for the delay caused by having to explain her errand to Beak, with the chevalier’s box held in front of her as if it might explode. She placed the box on the chevalier’s desk and turned to close the door behind her.

  The reluctance with which Miss Tolerance examined the box had nothing to do with its smell, for it had been thoroughly cleaned, and now smelled only of turpentine and beeswax. It was the contents and their associations which repelled her. She found herself lingering over her examination of the exterior, running careful fingers around the edges of the box, checking for the catch of a secret drawer. Likewise she examined the carving on the sides. She found nothing more than a splinter in her finger, caught on a rough edge.

  Miss Tolerance took a breath, stiffened her resolve, and opened the box.

  She removed the scarves and the cat-o’-nine-tails and the six tiny pearl-handled knives in their case one at a time, arranging them carefully on the desk. There was another whip at the bottom, a few cords, and a fold of black cloth which, when unfolded, proved to be a domino—an old-fashioned masquerade mask. When the box was empty Miss Tolerance picked it up and shook it, but nothing rattled, nor did anything drop out when she turned the box upside down.