The Sleeping Partner

by Madeleine E. Robins

  Wheeler looked at Miss Tolerance as if she might explain all even if she could not mend it.

  “When do you expect that Lord Lyne will return?”

  “He told his valet before he left that he would take dinner at home. Said he didn’t want to see mutton on his table.”

  Already it was after noon. The baron might return in an hour or at sunset. It was to be hoped that Miss Thorpe could be removed from the house and returned to the Godwins or to Claridge’s or somewhere before that happened. What did the girl think to do? Upbraid her father? Make a public accusation of his crimes? Miss Tolerance had seen Evadne’s vengeful wish to see her father reduced; she understood it. But she did not believe that seeing her father exposed as a speculator and traitor in time of war, as complicit in her own rape and imprisonment, would be as satisfying as the girl believed.

  When the door was opened in Duke of York Street the footman wore the same expression of bewildered concern as Wheeler did. In a moment of inspiration, Miss Tolerance turned to Wheeler, behind her on the step.

  “You see the boy on the corner there? The crossing-sweep? Will you give him a message, please?”

  Wheeler looked at her blankly. “Give a message to a crossing-boy?”

  “Tell him Miss T asks him to give a sign if he sees Lord Lyne approaching the house. What sign? If he can whistle loudly, tell him to whistle for all he’s worth. I’ll make certain to listen for it.”

  Satisfied that she had done what little she could to provide warning against Lyne’s early return, Miss Tolerance allowed herself to be escorted upstairs.

  She found a curious tableau. The room in which the Thorpe children had gathered was a girl’s sitting room with cheery yellow paper, books, lacy pillows on the two flowered sofas, an embroidery frame. Evadne Thorpe sat on one sofa, a crow in a spring garden. She was flanked by Lady Brereton on her right and her brother John on her left, each watching the girl with a mix of solicitousness and anxiety, as if she were a petard which might explode.

  Henry Thorpe stood by the fireplace with one arm draped along the mantel, which casual pose was at odds with his glowering countenance. Behind the sofa at Lady Brereton’s shoulder Sir Adam stood, red-faced, ill at ease, but clearly prepared to support his wife. He was the first to notice Miss Tolerance’s arrival.

  “What the Devil are you doing here?” His tone was fraternal in the extreme. It seemed Sir Adam realized it; he looked anxiously to see if anyone had noticed.

  Lady Brereton raised her head. “I asked Miss Tolerance to come, Adam. I thought she might be helpful—might help persuade Evie—”

  “Persuade her to what?” Mr. Thorpe asked in the manner of a much-tried man.

  “That Evie should permit me to take her back to the place where she has been staying,” John Thorpe said.

  “Or to the hotel, with me,” Lady Brereton added. Sir Adam’s eyes widened. Was he dismayed at the thought of escorting his Fallen sister-at-law through the foyer of London’s most fashionable hotel? Wisely, he made no protest.

  “You’d best persuade me first, then.” Henry Thorpe drew his hand over his face. “I don’t know why you’re in such a damned hurry to remove her from the house. There’s little love lost between me and the old man, but you can’t tell me he won’t want to see Evie.”

  John Thorpe glared at his brother. “Such a meeting would be ill-advised, Henry. Please take my word for it.”

  “Ill-advised? You’re talking as if Evie’d broken a teacup and wanted to escape a scolding. Good Christ, the girl’s been missing for weeks, it ain’t like Father don’t know it.”

  His words brought a small, bitter smile to Miss Thorpe’s face.

  Miss Tolerance spoke from the doorway. “Mr. Thorpe, perhaps you do not remember your father’s very firm statement that he did not wish your sister returned to him. Have you any reason to think his feeling is different now?”

  “He never changed his tune, if that’s what you mean. But with Evie standing before him?” Henry Thorpe abandoned his pose against the mantel and seated himself on the sofa opposite his sister. He leaned forward. “Evie, you know well that Father and I have had our quarrels. To be honest,” he smiled a rueful, winning smile that gave Miss Tolerance her first glimpse of his charm,“I’ve given the old man cause to toss me out on my ear. I’ve drunk and gamed and piled up debt. In the end the old man has always forgiven me. At least give him the chance.”

  A flush rose in Evadne Thorpe’s pale cheeks. She pressed her lips together, damming words that made her tremble. “To forgive me?” Her voice was flat.

  “In the end he will, you know.” Mr. Thorpe was earnest. “It won’t do for you to stay here, but you know the old man will want to assist you. He’s bound to cut up stiff at first, but he’ll come round in the end.”

  Miss Thorpe raised her chin. “Then by all means, I must stay.”

  Lady Brereton shook her head. “No, Evie.” She looked to her younger brother, then to her husband, and at last to Miss Tolerance.

  Miss Tolerance advanced into the room and, ignoring Henry Thorpe, knelt before Evadne to meet her eyes levelly. “I have some idea of what is in your mind,” she said very quietly. “And I have a very good idea of what you face from this day forward. Your road will be a difficult one, even with the assistance and love I see for you here. A moment’s reflection: need you make your own path harder? At least, I beg you, come away now with your brother, or your sister and my—” she broke off, aware of Sir Adam’s eyes on her. “And myself. They will not say so, but such a meeting will very likely affect your sister and brothers as well as yourself. For their sake, take a little thought before you undertake an interview which will be at the very least…volatile.”

  A little of the rigidity eased from Miss Thorpe’s posture. She looked into Miss Tolerance’s face as if to read something there; Miss Tolerance returned the regard unflinching. The girl nodded.

  “I will go. Johnny, will you take me back to the Godwins’ house?” She smiled apologetically at Lady Brereton. “I am not quite up to the bustle of Claridge’s, I think.”

  Sir Adam nodded and, after a moment, Lady Brereton echoed him. Each looked relieved. Immediately Evadne’s spencer and bonnet were produced and Lady Brereton, fussing over her sister as if she had been a child of six, tied her ribbons and buttoned her buttons, solicitous as a nursery maid.

  Evadne left the room with Lady Brereton at her side and John Thorpe just to the fore; Sir Adam followed close after his wife, and Miss Tolerance was left to walk out beside Henry Thorpe, who still could not fathom a reason for her presence. In the front hall Lady Brereton sent for her own pelisse.

  At which moment Lord Lyne returned.

  The baron stopped in his doorway, half-turned to give his stick and hat to Wheeler. Evadne Thorpe and her siblings were ranged at the bottom of the staircase, as dumbstruck as their father. In the silence that followed Miss Tolerance heard a sharp, shrill whistle emanating from the street. Too little, too late.

  Lord Lyne spoke first. “So, girl. So you’ve come back.” Miss Tolerance thought she heard a quaver in the baron’s voice. He cleared his throat. “Do you expect a welcome?”

  “Father—” Henry Thorpe and John Thorpe said at once.

  “A welcome? No, sir.” Evadne’s voice was steadier than her father’s, low and without inflection.

  “Evie, dearest,” Lady Brereton murmured. She put a restraining hand on her sister’s shoulder. The two exchanged an eloquent look.

  Evadne turned back to her father. “I beg your pardon. I should not have come.”

  Lyne dismissed Wheeler with an irritable wave. “Well, you’re here now. We will not make a gift of our business to the servants’ hall. Come.” He pushed through his children and strode up the stairs and into to his office, clearly expecting them to follow. Mr. Henry Thorpe took his sister’s arm and pulled her after their father, with Lady Brereton and John Thorpe following after apprehensively.

  Sir Adam and Miss Tolerance were lef
t in their wake.

  “Come along, Sally,” Sir Adam muttered. “I won’t go in there alone.”

  Miss Tolerance did not argue. She followed him into the same room where she had first met Lyne. The curtains were drawn and the room was bright and cool.

  The older Thorpe children clustered around Evadne, either for support or to contain a possible tirade. Lord Lyne had stationed himself before the window so that he was a stocky shadow framed by sunlight, his hands clasped behind his back. Light glinted off the frame of his spectacles and obscured his eyes.

  Lyne began. “As you’ve come home, we must discuss what is to be done—how to save the family from the worst of it. I don’t want to hear where you were or with whom,” he began.

  “No, sir. Why would you?” The girl spoke in a flat, hard voice.

  Lord Lyne shrugged off the interruption. “To preserve the family—save your brothers and sister from disgrace, that must be our goal. As for you—I’ll think of something for you, girl.”

  “Shall you, sir?”

  Lyne scowled at his daughter.

  Mr. Henry Thorpe regarded his sister anxiously: this was not the conciliatory tone he had counseled her to use. “For God’s sake, Evie,” he said, sotto voce. “Be a little—at least attempt an apology.”

  Evadne smiled at her brother, an expression with an unsettling taint of ferocity. “Apologize, Henry?” She turned back to her father, raised her chin. “Should I apologize? I beg your pardon, Father, but I think I will be safer if I do not permit you to make further plans for me.”

  Lyne took a step forward, one hand fisted and raised. “You take that tone with me, miss? After you leave your home and whore yourself out to God knows who—”

  “But you know, Father. You knew from the day I was taken who had me and what he was doing to me.” Lyne was driven back a step by the venom in his daughter’s voice. “When I tried to escape Him you sent me back. I was beaten and…used. It wasn’t I who made a whore of me, Father. It was you.”

  Miss Tolerance could not tell, from the baron’s face, whether his horror was for his daughter’s ill-use or because she knew his part in it. Henry Thorpe stood with his mouth frankly open, staring at his sister.

  “The man who stole me from this house was your partner, Father. You and—” the girl had difficulty getting the name out. “You and Abner Huwe made a profit together out of death. What a disgrace if it were known, Baron Lyne of Wandfield speculating against the Army with a Welsh merchant.”

  Lyne had taken a further step backward, staring at his daughter, transfixed. It was Henry Thorpe, galvanized by his sister’s words, who demanded an explanation. She turned to him blindly and shook her head.

  “Will someone explain to me what she is saying? Who is this Huwe? How could my father be involved in Evie’s—Evie’s—” he shook his head. “Someone explain it to me.”

  No one spoke. At last, “I can tell you the burden of it, Mr. Thorpe,” Miss Tolerance offered. “Your sister or your father will correct me when I err. Several years ago your father found himself in financial difficulties. With his knowledge of the Navy’s plans and of naval history, he came up with a scheme, involving Mr. Huwe, to recoup his fortune. When he had repaired his finances your father wished to distance himself from an endeavor which, had it become publicly known, would have caused trouble for them both. Mr. Huwe was displeased; there was still money to be made, and he wanted to continue. I suppose he might have threatened to lay information and expose what your father had done, but that would mean exposing himself, which he did not like to do. He chose another lever.”

  Henry Thorpe’s gaze went to his sister.

  “Exactly so. I am not certain if your father was coerced by threats to your sister’s life or by the threat that her ruin would become public. Which ever it was, he did nothing to regain her; you will remember that he forbade anyone in the family to seek her. And Mr. Huwe attempted to avenge himself on the daughter for slights at the father’s hand. He raped her nightly—” Henry Thorpe recoiled at Miss Tolerance’s merciless emphasis on the word. “He used her so vilely that once he had to call a—a nurse—of his acquaintance to minister to her.”

  “That was after I had tried to escape him. After you had returned me to him, Father. I wrote to beg you for help and you returned me to him.” Evadne bit hard upon each word. Tears ran unstopped down her cheeks.

  At her side Miss Tolerance felt her brother, rigid with shock. Had his wife told him nothing when she insisted they leave Lyne’s house?

  “In God’s name, Father, do you say nothing to all this?” Henry Thorpe had begun to pace, weaving back and forth behind a straight-backed chair.

  Lyne, as marble-cold as his daughter, stared at his son, then at Evadne, then took in the whole room. “What should I say? What choice had I? He’d already got the girl, blackened her name.” His voice was sullen. “Your name too, boy, if you’d take the moment to think of it.”

  “And the business that brought all this to our door, that ruined my sister?”

  “I did what I had to do!” Lyne was no longer cold; he was spitting with anger. He feels ill-used, Miss Tolerance marveled. “What was I to do with you damned near bankrupting me, and dowries and fripperies to be paid for, and the damned Spanish threatening to steal my property in Venezuela? I was done up! Should I have let you default on debts of honor? Shame the family? What was I to do? I didn’t mean to go on once my finances were recouped.”

  It is all perfectly reasonable, Miss Tolerance thought. In his mind the wrong would have been in being caught.

  “Where did the money come from? What could be so dreadful that it could not be known?”

  Lyne pressed his lips together.

  “I believe they were trading in cinchona bark,” Miss Tolerance said. “When the force at Walcheren fell sick, Huwe’s ships, full of your father’s bark, would arrive providentially and charge whatever price they set.”

  Henry Thorpe shook his head. “Sharp dealing, perhaps, but—”

  “Except that your father knew of earlier attempts on the lowlands that had failed for the same cause. He suspected the dangers; did no one listen to you at the War Office, sir? He began to amass quantities of bark well before the invasion, so that he and Huwe should control scarcity and mete it out as might make the most profit.”

  Lyne shrugged the matter off. “I saw an opportunity.”

  Both of his sons looked at him as at stranger.

  “When the commission investigating the failure at Walcheren first met, Father, did you not feel the least—” John Thorpe groped for the word. “The least remorse? So many dead or sickened beyond recovery, when you might have been a hero to them, to the nation—”

  “And who would have paid your brother’s debts?” Lyne barked. “Who would have laid by a dowry for your sister?”

  “I congratulate you on your excellent economy,” Evadne Thorpe said quietly. “I shall never need a dowry now.” Lady Brereton moved to put an arm around her sister. “Does it comfort you, Papa, to know that you traded not only my virtue but the lives of thousands of English soldiers?”

  “I made it possible for thousands to have the bark that saved their lives!” Lyne countered.

  “Once the price was high enough. I read your letters—I took them with me when I ran from Huwe. When the world knows how you handed me to a villain to hide—”

  Lyne’s outrage was explosive. “You’d let that be known? I did it to save this family! By God, you liked your pretty clothes well enough. Where do you think money comes from, girl? For your brother’s charities and Henry’s horses and gambling? To keep this house running? We were close to losing it all, do you understand? My mistake was putting myself in the hands of that Welsh bastard—”

  “You bought his silence with my sister’s honor.” That was John Thorpe. His voice was thick.

  Lyne smiled mirthlessly. “You know Genesis, boy. That must be my model.” All four Thorpe children stared at him uncomprehending. His voice
became more insistent. “The Bible—”

  Miss Tolerance felt sick. “You cannot claim authority from the Bible, sir.”

  “Can I not? Lot gave his daughters to the town—”

  John Thorpe shook his head. “He offered them as hostages for the lives of strangers—of angels of the Lord, Father. Not to hide a crime or save his name.”

  “Lot was a righteous man! God took him from Sodom, although he gave his daughters to the mob.” Lord Lyne stood with his hands at his sides, fisted, his head jutted forward. His voice was querulous, the pitch rising.

  Miss Tolerance said coolly, “We are taught that Lot was a holy man, but for my part I have never thought that was holy behavior.”

  “Your part. Shut your mouth, whore. I can destroy you—”

  “And me, Father? I have Huwe’s ledger, your letters.” Evadne Thorpe’s tears had dried.

  “My letters?” Lyne stepped forward. “Where are they?”

  “They are safe from you.” Evadne was quiet, as though a storm had passed through her and gone again. “You will not find them. Perhaps my brothers would like to read them? Your secret lies with all of us now. I know Miss Tolerance will divulge nothing without our authorization—”

  Lyne’s glance at Miss Tolerance was hot with rage. “You’d trust this slut?”

  “She is no more slut than I am,” Evadne said. A step to the right brought her to Miss Tolerance’s side.

  “Or I, Father.” Lady Brereton came to stand with them.

  Lyne looked from one to the other.

  “Most sluts do not share their clients’ secrets, and nor do I. It is your children you must treat with.” Miss Tolerance kept her tone as level as Evadne’s own.

  “Should we be kind to you, Father?” Miss Thorpe asked. “Kinder than you were to me?”

  “The name, the family. I could not let it be—”

  “I am Fallen by your design, Father. How if it became known that you gave your daughter to buy a man’s silence? How would your honor fare if it was known you hid behind my skirts?” Evadne bit her lip, closed her eyes, and appeared to regain her composure. “Shall I use the letters? I do not know what to do. I suppose Henry and John and Clary and I will discuss it.” Something that might have been a smile played on her lips. “If you wish to beg my forgiveness, Father, now would be the time for it, for I swear by God I shall never speak to you again in this life.”