The Sleeping Partner

by Madeleine E. Robins

  Lord Lyne dismissed the servant. As the door shut behind the man, “Well, Papa, what’s to do?” Mr. Thorpe flicked an imaginary mote from his cuff.

  “You may stay, but keep quiet,” Lyne snapped. He had not expected this addition to the party, Miss Tolerance thought.

  “Please, Henry,” Lady Brereton echoed. She extended a hand to her brother as if to warn him away. Instead the man raised it to his lips; Miss Tolerance thought she had rarely seen the gesture made so satirically.

  Lady Brereton took her hand back and stepped further into the room. She wore pale pink muslin with embroidered roses, and looked demure and fragile until one noted the expression in her eyes. At their first meeting Miss Tolerance had been impressed by the sweetness of Lady Brereton’s countenance. Today what was remarkable was the mixture of apprehension and anger. She looked at her father, then back to Mr. Thorpe, and finally to Sir Adam, as if waiting for support to come from some quarter. At last she turned to Miss Tolerance.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Tolerance. You know me as Mrs. Brown, but my real name, as these gentlemen will have informed you, is Brereton.”

  Miss Tolerance curtsied. “They have, Lady Brereton. Good afternoon. Would you prefer to have this conversation in private?”

  “She does not require privacy for what she is to do,” Lord Lyne said.

  “Is that not for her to say, my lord? Your daughter is of age and a married woman, and I believe she can answer for herself. Lady Brereton?”

  Sir Adam made a strangled sound and looked from his father-at-law to his wife. Lady Brereton forestalled his attempt to speak.

  “My father is correct, Miss Tolerance.” She took a few more steps into the room and nodded at her father. Miss Tolerance thought, from the anger in her eyes, that she was about to receive another scolding. “I do not need to be private to say what I must say.”

  Lyne gave a satisfied snort.

  “I am very sorry to have drawn you into our misfortunes, Miss Tolerance.” Lady Brereton took a breath that squared her shoulders and removed any suggestion of fragility in her bearing. “I should not have done so, but that the persons most responsible for my sister’s welfare have defaulted of that charge.”

  Lord Lyne took a step from the fireplace. Sir Adam’s mouth gaped.

  “As to your employment, I regret that my father wishes me to dismiss you from your search. For myself,” Lady Brereton stuck her chin out. “For myself, I am more determined than ever that you should locate my sister so that I may help her out of any distress in which she finds herself.”

  Bedlam ensued.

  Lord Lyne spun on his heel and retreated to the fire, shouting “Damn you, sir, control your wife!”

  Sir Adam, to whom this was addressed, stood between wife and father-at-law, turning first one way then the other with an expression of panic Miss Tolerance recalled from her childhood. And Henry Thorpe observed the chaos with as much satisfaction as if he had created it himself, first laughing, then clutching his head, as if merriment was painful.

  At the center of this riot Lady Brereton stood, her back straight and her lips set. Despite this show of resolution,she appeared stunned by the effect of her rebellion.

  “You will continue?” The lady said, low, to Miss Tolerance..

  “It will be my greatest pleasure, ma’am. I congratulate you on your firmness of mind.”

  Sir Adam joined his wife, interposing himself between her and his sister. He turned to glare at Miss Tolerance as if she was responsible for the ado, but when Lord Lyne again told him to control his wife or he would, Sir Adam reminded him that Lady Brereton was no longer under his rule.

  “Well, she’s damned well under my roof, and I tell you again, sir, to get control of her or—”

  “We shall go to Claridges, then,” Sir Adam snapped. “If you wish to lose both your daughters.”

  Lyne turned without replying and left the room.

  Well done, Adam, Miss Tolerance thought. Aloud she asked Lady Brereton, “Will you be all right?”

  Lady Brereton nodded and looked at her husband, in whose arms she sheltered from her father’s wrath.

  Mr. Thorpe had recovered from his mirth and joined Lady Brereton. He had the red eyes and pinched brow of a man who had drunk deep the night before. Miss Tolerance wondered if he had only just returned home. “The old man will make you pay for that, Clary,” he said. He turned his attention to Miss Tolerance. “And who is this? Your hatmaker come to dun you?”

  Lady Brereton frowned at her brother. “What a fright you are, Henry. You have not been home since dinner, have you?” She fussed with his collar. “And you’re talking of things you don’t understand. Miss Tolerance? Please permit me to introduce you to my brother, Henry Thorpe. Henry, this is Miss Tolerance, whom I have hired to find Evie.”

  Miss Tolerance curtsied. Thorpe did not return the courtesy, but looked her up and down as if she had been a horse on display at Tattersall’s auctions. His decision about what civility was due her was evident in his expression. He turned to Lady Brereton.

  “Is that your notion, Clary? Set a whore to catch a whore?”

  Lady Brereton brought her hand up and boxed her brother’s ear with force.

  Miss Tolerance decided it was time to step in. “Do you know something about your sister’s whereabouts, Mr. Thorpe, that you would give her such a character?”

  Sir Adam, who had been shocked into silence when his wife slapped Thorpe, cleared his throat. His face was red. “This is Evie, man. As m-m-Miss Tolerance says—”

  Thorpe ran a thumb along his jaw where his sister’s blow had landed. “How do you intend to find my sister?”

  “By asking questions, Mr. Thorpe. ‘Tis a job to which I am far better suited than whoring. I do not suppose you have any idea of the identity of her seducer?”

  “No, how should I? The girl did not confide in me.”

  “You have no friends who admired her?”

  A look of revulsion passed across Thorpe’s face. “My crowd? God forefend. I thought the chit had run off to Gretna—”

  “There is no sign of it,” Miss Tolerance told him. “She has not been seen in any of the inns that handle northern coaching routes. Is it so unlikely that Miss Thorpe might have met one of your crowd when he was visiting—”

  Thorpe snorted. “I play with the Corinthian set, gamblers and drunkards and whore-masters. Precisely the sort my father would welcome into his house.”

  “Then your sister could never have met any of these upright persons?”

  “Never? London society is a small world, Miss…Acceptance. Evie might have met anyone. But I don’t think it likely; respectable girls are hedged round with maids and governesses. Who’d make such effort?” He turned to Lady Brereton. “Spend your silver as you like, Clary, but I don’t see how anyone will be able to turn the girl up until she wants to be found.” He nodded at Sir Adam and, without further acknowledgement of the women, strode to the door. There he turned to give a warning. “My sister will not tell you so, Miss Lenience, but hiding in her skirts won’t keep you harmless if you cross my father.”

  Too late to worry about that.

  Mr. Thorpe left. Lady Brereton hastened to apologize for her brother again. “He has had no sleep, I think. He would never speak so otherwise.”

  Miss Tolerance wondered if the idea that one of his friends could be involved in Evadne Thorpe’s disappearance had struck Henry Thorpe too close. That was not something she could discuss with Lady Brereton until she had learned more. “Lady Brereton, shall I continue to leave my reports to you at Tarsio’s, or here, or somewhere else?”

  “Oh. I had not—Tarsio’s is still best, I think. I cannot be certain that anything you leave for me here will reach me.”

  “Given your father’s opinion of the matter,” Miss Tolerance agreed. “Now, before I take my leave of you, I have several questions to ask to speed our inquiry.”

  Lady Brereton took a seat on the sofa and invited Miss Tolerance to
sit as well. Sir Adam went round to stand behind his wife, his arms crossed and his expression closed.

  “First, ma’am, is there any way I might interview the servants of this house? Not here, of course—I can imagine your father’s reaction. But elsewhere? You need not answer now, but consider, please. Next: can you—or you, Sir Adam—think of any man who might have fixed his interest with Miss Thorpe? I was quite serious in asking Mr. Thorpe the same question. What about you, Sir Adam?”

  “Me? Good God, no, I barely saw the girl.”

  “I will think harder,” Lady Brereton promised.

  “Thank you: a list of men who were regular callers here would be helpful. And can you tell me if Miss Thorpe took anything with her? In particular, jewelry she might have sold? To finance an elopement?”

  “I will find out.”

  “Had your sister any particular friends in whom she might have confided?”

  “Not in London, no. In Warwickshire there was—” Lady Brereton frowned thoughtfully. “She was friends with Anne Harlow, I know. And the Ball sisters. Perhaps some of the Lutonage girls?”

  Miss Tolerance, sensing that the discussion could devolve into a catalogue of all the young women in Warwickshire, suggested that Lady Brereton might send her a note at Tarsio’s. “Lastly, do you have the direction of your sister’s governess?”

  “Father dismissed her almost at once. I don’t know where Miss Nottingale would have gone—I should have asked, I know, but we were all so upset.”

  Sir Adam surprised his wife and sister. “She has a brother who’s a parson somewhere in the east of London.” He ducked his head, looking abashed. “John’d likely know. I came looking for the paper one day and found John asking Miss Nottingale about poor relief at her brother’s church.”

  Lady Brereton regarded her husband with delight. Miss Tolerance found herself a little shocked that her brother could be the target of such uncomplicated affection. “How clever of you to remember, Adam! Miss Tolerance, my brother John is studying to take orders; most days you will find him working in Pitfield Street at the almshouse there. I know he will tell you how to reach Miss Nottingale; he feels just as I do that Evie must be found. Now, shall I ask my husband to escort you home, Miss Tolerance? I know you are quite independent, but it is a very pleasant thing to have a masculine arm to lean upon.”

  Miss Tolerance expected that her brother would revolt against the suggestion. Instead he agreed at once, and, when Miss Tolerance attempted to demur, told her he quite insisted.

  Feeling as though she had stumbled from farce into comic nightmare, Miss Tolerance curtsied, took her leave, and left Lord Lyne’s house on her brother’s arm.

  “This is all very well, but you don’t think you can find the girl, do you?” Sir Adam asked as he hurried Miss Tolerance up the street.

  “Adam, if you do not wish to walk with me you have my permission to return home. Otherwise please do not push me through the streets as if I were a wheelbarrow. I do not know if I can find Miss Thorpe, but I shall certainly try.”

  “What you were doing before—talking to us, asking questions. Is that what you do?”

  “In the main, yes. I ask questions and consider the answers. I have been an agent of inquiry for several years. It suits my talents.”

  “Talents.” He was dubious.

  “Talents.” Miss Tolerance was firm. “I always liked to puzzle things out. Did I not know when you had been rusticated from Cambridge before you told Father?”

  “You never said anything to him, did you, Sally?”

  It had been years since Miss Tolerance had been called so. Hearing it twice in an hour recalled to her how much she disliked it. “Discretion is another of my talents.”

  “But how did you come to this?” Sir Adam spread his hands as if to indicate London and investigation in equal measure.

  “Connell and I taught fence in Holland, but when he died I could not continue to do so. I had to find some way to keep myself. Despite our father’s predictions, I have no taste for whoredom. So I came up with a different employment for myself.”

  “But why here, in England? How could you?”

  Miss Tolerance deliberately misunderstood. “I took passage on a corvette from Le Havre, and the mail coach thence. I would doubtless have been more comfortable on a private yacht and in a chaise and six, but as I spent most of my money burying Connell and bribing the dock officials, I made shift as best I could. Our aunt took me in—”

  “What aunt?”

  “Papa’s sister Dorothea. The mistress of the house of joy in Manchester Square? Surely Father warned you about her, the Black Ewe of her generation! From what Aunt Thea says, Father studied to cast me off by watching how Grandfather behaved on the occasion of her fall. Whatever her sins, Aunt Thea acted more familial to me than you or my father ever did. You will be happy to know, Adam, that she disapproves of my career as much as you do.” Miss Tolerance smiled. “Aunt Thea believes I would be better off as a whore, with the promise of inheriting the business from her some day.”

  The look of horror on Sir Adam’s face was very rewarding, but it was too easy to tease him. She steered him around a knot of people trying to extract a very fat woman from a carriage and resolved to be more conciliatory.

  “When did you marry?” she asked.

  “Trafalgar year. You would have been—wherever you were—”

  “In 1805? In Amsterdam.”

  “I was in London for the season, met Lady Brereton—Miss Thorpe, she was—at Almack’s.”

  “My father must have been beside himself with joy. How did you marry so well?”

  “How did I—what do you mean? Why should I not marry well?”

  “One of the last things Father said to me was that I had ruined your chance of marriage with a respectable woman. Obviously he was pessimistic.”

  “It made the matter more difficult—I wanted to tell Lyne that you were dead—I was afraid to lose Clarissa. But Father insisted we reveal it all, and Lyne—it was not what he liked, how could he? But in the end, when Father assured him that you were as good as dead—”

  “He was comforted?”

  Sir Adam was impervious to irony. “Reassured. And he could see that our attachment was very strong.”

  “Well, I congratulate you, Adam. I like her.”

  Sir Adam’s expression softened. “She is the dearest girl—”

  For a moment Miss Tolerance felt only pleasure in her brother’s happiness. “I am very glad for you, Adam.” She patted his arm.

  This moment of genuine family feeling seemed to be all Sir Adam could tolerate. He hurried them across the street.

  “Why aren’t you dead?” he asked. “And Connell, how did he die? In the war?”

  “Nothing so romantic. He had a feverish cold that went to his chest. It killed him. And I lived.” Miss Tolerance had no intention of edifying her brother with the grief and difficulty that had surrounded her return to England.

  “And you are here.”

  “I am. And I had as well tell you, Adam, that I intend to help your sister-at-law if I can.”

  “Yes, I see that,” Sir Adam agreed. “Lyne is not a cruel man, Sally.”

  “Nor was our father a cruel man. But men who are not cruel can yet do cruel things. And stupid things. Look, we are nearly to Manchester Square and my aunt’s house. I shall not trouble you to walk me further.”

  “Sally—” Sir Adam put his hand on Miss Tolerance’s and would not let her leave him. “You must promise me. You cannot tell. My wife is not like you. She has been sheltered, she is—what’s the word?”

  “Fastidious?” Miss Tolerance did not think that Lady Brereton was so easily shocked as her husband believed, but he was very anxious. She took pity on him.

  “Did I not say that discretion is one of my talents, Adam? What possible purpose would it serve for me to tell anyone of our relation?”

  “You must promise,” Sir Adam urged.

  “I will say nothing to
your wife or her family. No one who does not now know we are related will have any word of it from me.”

  Sir Adam released his sister’s arm. “Thank you. And you think Evie must be in London?”

  A little startled by the shift in topic, Miss Tolerance nodded. “Well, as what I have so far learnt suggests that she is in the city, I choose to focus my investigation here.”

  “You choose?”

  “In my profession, Sir Adam, one frequently has recourse to instinct, and my instinct is that Miss Thorpe is still in London.”

  “Oh, well, then.” Sir Adam bowed over Miss Tolerance’s hand. She was left with the impression that he had no particular faith in her instinct, but that as he would find his life very much easier if she should fail to find Miss Thorpe at all, it did not trouble him.

  Chapter Six

  It is not to be supposed that an unexpected reunion with her brother left Miss Tolerance unmoved. However, she had work to do. She turned south to Wigmore Street, hailed a hackney coach, and gave orders for Pitfield Street, where she hoped to find Mr. John Thorpe. As the carriage moved through the congested streets, she considered if her interview at Lord Lyne’s house had added to her investigation. She had already satisfied herself as to Evadne Thorpe’s identity. She had met Lord Lyne and Mr. Henry Thorpe; Lyne she discounted, as he would do nothing to assist in her investigation. But Henry Thorpe interested her: a dissolute brother with unsavory friends was worth at least a second glance.

  Miss Tolerance thought it unlikely that Lady Brereton could arrange for her to interview the servants in Lord Lyne’s house, and yet that was her chiefest desire. Butlers and housemaids have useful opinions of their employers’ families, and the most reliable intelligence regarding their movements. The governess Miss Nottingale might have an idea of Evadne Thorpe’s admirer, but the man who opened the door and delivered a note upon a tray, or the maid who laced the girl into her gown and listened to her chatter, was likely to be more broadly informed. She must hope that Mr. John Thorpe would have something useful to add beyond the governess’s direction.