The Ghosts of Ardenthwaite (The Northminster Mysteries Book 5)

by Harriet Smart

  “We are only passing through,” Lazenby said. “Catherine needs to go home and rest if we are to manage the reception at the Guildhall later. The crowds were a little too much for her.”

  Mrs Lazenby was, Giles suspected, with child again. Lazenby had been energetic in that department. There were twins born last year and three others in the nursery before that.

  “I feel so silly,” said Mrs Lazenby. “It was such an occasion and I really did not wish to miss it.”

  “I don’t like crowds much either, Mrs Lazenby,” said Giles. “How was the sermon?”

  “Oh, so very passionate,” said Mrs Lazenby. “Most inspiring. He seems such a sincere, good man. Oh, and Lord Rothborough was there – I never met him before today, but he was so kind when I was all at odds. And he said such things about you, Major Vernon, I think you would be horrified – no, that is not the word, what do I mean? Embarrassed.”

  “I hope you took it all with a pinch of salt, ma’am,” said Giles, smiling.

  “I did not,” said Mrs Lazenby. “And I do hope he talks about my husband like that!”

  “He does,” said Giles.“Now, may I just steal him for a moment, ma’am? I have a little business that I need to discuss with him.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. In fact, why do you not just stay here, Henry?” she said to her husband. “I am better driving home alone, than sitting here waiting for you to rush through what should not be rushed, am I not?”

  Captain Lazenby agreed to this plan, and Giles and he went back into The Unicorn, where Giles briefed him on the morning’s events.

  “So you think this Baxter is using an alias?”

  “Yes. And he wishes to feed us a particular version of events.”

  “Even though it may hang him?”

  “I think he is following orders. He is a loyal soldier prepared to sacrifice himself.”

  “Loyal to whom?”

  “That is the large and troubling question. And one which we will need to devote considerable resources to answering, I’m afraid. I do not like any of the implications of this business. The injuries that were sustained were both brutal and considered. We are dealing with something well-organised and dangerous.”

  “Then do what you must, Major Vernon. But I beg you to be discreet, for the sake of public morale.”

  “I shall do my best,” said Giles.

  “Will you be at the Guildhall later?” said Lazenby. “You were invited, I think?”

  “I may look in, if I have time,” Giles said, without any real intention of going. After all, the riddle of Horatio Baxter and his willingness to be hanged seemed hardly likely to be solved by making small talk and listening to dry speeches.

  He left Lazenby and was just approaching the main entrance gates when he noticed the figure of a woman standing in the street beyond. She was wrapped in a large drab shawl, but she was also wearing a pale, expensive bonnet with a white lace covering her face. He realised he had noticed her first from the corner of her eye when he had been talking to Mrs Lazenby in her carriage. The dark shawl was a poor match for that bonnet, and as he approached her and she moved away a little, the shawl flapped to reveal a pale lilac coloured dress that looked as if it were made of silk.

  She seemed, in short, to be a great deal more fashionably dressed than Catherine Lazenby, so why was she standing at a dirty corner, covered with a dull cloak, outside the Constabulary Headquarters?

  He gave her an enquiring glance, and she lifted up her veil and looked back at him as he approached. She was young and handsome, but appeared troubled.

  “Can I help you?” he said, and crossed the road, at which point she picked up her skirts and began to walk away briskly.

  Chapter Five

  “Why are you following me?” she said, stopping halfway up the alley. She had a touch of the local accent in her voice.

  “Because you wanted me to,” he said. “And I wanted to know why you were waiting outside a police house.”

  “There’s no law against stopping outside, is there?”

  “No, but I wondered why you were waiting there. Did you want to speak to someone? Perhaps you have some information for us.”

  “No,” she said. “I was just stopping.”

  “Are you certain about that?”

  “Who are you, anyway?”

  “Someone you can trust.” She laughed at that, somewhat bitterly.

  “I mean it,” he said. “Why were you waiting there so long? You were there at least a quarter hour. I may be able to help you.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Then why?”

  She bit her lip and glanced around her.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  “My name is Vernon,” he said.

  “And you’re one of them.”

  “By which you mean, the police?” She nodded. “Yes. And I know it’s hard for you to trust me, but believe me, I will help you if I can. And I sense you want help of some kind.”

  Again she seemed to hesitate, her gloved hand twisting her expensive bonnet ribbon.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Have you...” she began but then moved away, as if she meant again to give flight. He reached out and caught her arm.

  “Something is troubling you,” he said. “Tell me.”

  She wrested free.

  “All right, all right. But not here. And it will cost you. You need to look as if you are one of my punters. You look as if you could afford me, anyway. I don’t pick ’em up. They come looking for me. They know where to find me.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Giles, considering the usual haunt of high class prostitutes in Northminster. There were not many, and they kept to a very particular locale so that they could not be confused with other, less expensive women. They worked carefully and cautiously and rarely found themselves up before the justices as a result. “Peacock’s Lane, I suppose?”

  She shook her head and he realised there was a degree of finish about her that not even the most expensive whores he had seen in Northminster displayed.

  “No, not there,” she said. “Nothing like that. Here, come with me. It will look better if you come back with me. If anyone asks, you are here for your health, yes?” He could not help smiling at such a euphemism. “Now, give me your arm.”

  He did so, and she led him into a secluded quarter of the town, with which, he realised, he was only slightly familiar. It was a district of plain, old streets, neatly kept up, but quiet, and all in the shadow of a venerable old Parish Church, St Mary Magdalene. That such a saint should watch over a previously undiscovered nest of vice seemed appropriate, to say the least. If that was where she was leading him, of course, rather than into some elaborate trap.

  It was a risk, he decided, that was worth taking.

  She stopped outside a gate in a wall, produced a key from her pocket, and unlocked it, and then led him down a long, twisting lane, with high walls on both side, until they emerged into a court in which sat a couple of neat looking houses at right angles to each other with window boxes, painted shutters, and lace glass cloths decorating every window. There was even a fat tabby sunning itself on a well-scrubbed doorstep. It did not look like a bordello.

  “Who –?” he began.

  “No questions here,” she said. “You are here for –”

  “My health, yes,” said Giles.

  She stooped to caress the sleepy cat before unlocking the door. That cat would have made an excellent witness if it could speak, Giles thought, and agreed to co-operate. But what cat was ever so obliging?

  The house seemed to be in just as good order inside as out, and as they went in, she slipped off her shawl and revealed the full neat, elegance of her figured-silk dress. She rustled ahead of him, up several flights of stairs and then along a passageway. There seemed to be no one about and he could hear so signs of life.

  She unlocked another door, and took him into what appeared to be a sitting room, with a bedroom adjoining. It was elegantly furnished, w
ith floral papered walls and matching curtains. There were prints on the wall of a mildly salacious nature. He noted how she locked the door behind her but left the key in the lock.

  “Have some wine,” she said, pointing to the table where a decanter and glasses waited. “Make yourself at home.”

  “Thank you. Will you have a glass?”

  She crouched by the grate and lit a fire that had been carefully laid

  “It’s always so cold in here,” she said. “Half a glass. A cigar?” She offered a box from the mantelshelf. “These are... oh, I don’t know. They are very good ones, I think.” He shook his head.

  “It would look better if you smoked.”

  “Do they all smoke?”

  “Yes, usually.”

  He sipped his wine, and watched her take off her bonnet. She carried it away to the bedroom and then returned to take the glass he offered. She stood nervously, twisted the stem in her hand, glancing at the door.

  “Are you waiting for something?” he asked.

  She put her finger to her lips to silence him and sure enough, a moment later there was a tapping at the door.

  “Kate?” said a woman’s voice, refined enough but with a touch of the local accent about it. “Are you in there?”

  “Yes, but I’m engaged.”

  “With who? At this time?”

  “With the Colonel. I told you he was coming to town. Remember?”

  The door handle rattled as the woman outside attempted to come in.

  Kate went to the door, unlocked it and opened it a chink. “So don’t be bothering us,” Kate said to the woman outside.

  The woman put her fingers about the edge of the door as if she meant to force it open.

  “Now, Miss,” said the woman. “I hope you are behaving yourself.”

  “Go away,” said Kate, closing the door as if she meant to trap the woman’s hand. “It’s all as it should be. He knows all about it!”

  “We shall see about that,” said the woman pulling away her hand as Kate smartly shut the door in her face. She stood with her back to the door, exhaled and then turned and locked the door again.

  Then she crossed the room and came and stood very close to him, almost pressing herself against him.

  “If I had any sense at all then I wouldn’t have –” she said softly.

  “Tell me,” he said, wondering now who ‘he’ was and indeed who was the Colonel.

  “In bed. I’ll tell you then. Afterwards. And you’ll have to do it, Colonel. She’ll be watching us now.”

  “What?”

  She pointed at the wall where, only just discernible, as a result of carefully chosen paper, there appeared to be a peep-hole. He was surprised, having thought such things were found only in scandalous novels and in the fevered dreams of young ensigns.

  So he kissed her with what he considered was sufficient fervour and moved to begin unfastening her bodice. “And there is one through there?”

  She nodded.

  He wondered how easy it would be to simulate the necessary act convincingly for the eyes of the spying woman. Kate, however, seemed determined that it would not be a simulation. She was loosening his cravat now, with practised fingers, and in a moment, she had tossed it across the room. She stood smiling up at him, her fingers were raking through his hair and although he knew this was a routine, her every movement as studied as a dancer, it was impossible not to desire her pretty face and figure. Her hand was now on the fall of his breeches and brushed across his fly.

  Play-acting might be impossible, he thought. He was tempted, more than tempted. She was such a conundrum, playing the whore so professionally, in the manner he recalled from his youthful experiences when he had degraded himself and the women he had paid for their bodies. Those memories alone ought to have made him step away. Yet her anxious pacing outside The Unicorn, her evident anxiety and the secret that she was so reluctant and yet determined to divulge – that weakened him more than the basic physical desire he felt for her.

  After all, he was well used to continence. It was a fact of his life. He had got on very well for some time, barring one or two lapses. But now he could not think straight. He could only think that he wanted what was on offer.

  In the minutes that followed, as he found himself naked on top of her in the bed, all too acutely aware of the spy on the other side of the walls, he knew he was taking pleasure from the situation for all the wrong reasons. It was meaningless for both of them, yet that sense of transgression, the wilful disregard of all the rules he attempted to live by, gave him a sense of potent liberation. He could not help but rejoice in the sheer sensual pleasure of this beautiful, vulnerable woman, who so obligingly lay beneath him and allowed him to exert himself with such fierceness upon her.

  There was still a part of him which wished she would fight him or push him away and slap him and sit and cry in misery at such vile treatment, or better still berate him. He would have let her flog him raw with curses. But she did not. She endured, as he supposed, all such encounters, and worse, for the sake of her bread. Worse still, it did not make him stop. He continued and took his pleasure to its natural conclusion.

  It was pleasure that lasted only a moment. His heart beat faster and his limbs fell into a soft, warming paralysis as he climbed off her and lay beside her, catching his breath.

  “Can you really help me?” she said, softly. “Can you?”

  He rolled onto his side and looked at her. She had wrapped herself up in the sheet. This sudden modesty made him feel wretched.

  “I will do all that I can,” he said very quietly, wondering if they might be overheard as well as overlooked. “Why were you at The Unicorn? Is there someone there that you were worried about?”

  She swallowed and said in a whisper,

  “Yes, and he’ll be hanged.”

  He had known it before she said it. That sudden clarity of thought that he had often experienced after congress had made him glimpse the connection.

  “Wrongly hanged?” he said.

  “No, no, he did it, but he wasn’t the only one, and he wasn’t –”

  “Horatio Baxter?” Giles murmured.

  “That’s not his name,” she said.

  “I thought not,” he said. “What is his real name?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” she said.

  “Because you don’t know?”

  “I wish I didn’t,” she said. “No, because I can’t. There are rules.”

  “I see,” Giles said. “So your Baxter –”

  “He did what he had to. He had no choice. He had to do it.”

  “That doesn’t excuse him.”

  “I know, but, but –” She took a deep breath. “There are rules.”

  She broke away from him and got out of bed. She crossed the room and reached for a chemise hanging on a hook. Then, just as she slipped it over her head he saw it – a mark on her lower back, just above her buttocks. It looked familiar. A swallow?

  “What’s that on your back?” he said. “A tattoo?”

  She came back to the bed and sat down beside him.

  “My little swallow,” she said. “I did that for him. He has one like it, so I thought... but he was so angry when I showed him. I thought he’d be pleased. What a fool I was. Women always are for men. I bet you have made a few women cry in your time, Colonel.”

  “I regret to say that’s probably true.”

  She touched his cheek.

  “It’s no use,” she said in a whisper. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Forget it. There isn’t anything to be done. He’s going to hang and I’ll never see him again.”

  “Where was that done?” he asked, putting his hand on her back, feeling with some pleasure the warmth of her flesh. “Can you tell me that, at least?”

  She leant against him then, and sighed.

  “Oh God, this was a mistake. Such a mistake. I can’t tell you anything –”

  “But you want to. You want to help your man. If he was forc
ed into it, then there is help for him. It won’t be easy, and you will need all your courage. But I think you have courage. You would not have done so much otherwise. So, who made your little swallow for you?”

  “A woman up Bank Street way. You’ll find her mostly in that fancy new gin place. You know the one I mean?” He nodded. “Ask for Eliza. But don’t say it was me who –”

  “No, I shan’t,” Giles said.

  She slipped away from him then and began to get dressed again. He noticed that she stood in front of the peep-hole to do this, as if to indicate to the watching eyes that the transaction was over. He gathered his own clothes and also began to dress.

  “You can come and go as you please?” he said after some moments had passed. She had resumed her pretty figured silk and was at the glass of her sitting room rearranging her hair.

  “Yes, mostly I can.”

  “Then I can meet you again – if they think I’m your Colonel?”

  “Yes, if we take care.”

  “He’ll want to see my money,” he said. “Your governor or whatever you call him.”

  She shook her head and said, “The Colonel’s on a tab.”

  “Lucky fellow.”

  She turned and gave him a quizzical look.

  “No, lucky you,” she said. “You married?”

  “No.” She looked as if she did not believe him. “Is your Colonel?”

  “Of course.”

  “And he was introduced here by...?” She shook her head. “He has a tab. He must be a favoured customer.”

  “He spends a lot here, and elsewhere. The more he borrows, the better it is for business. You know how it works.”

  “Then not so lucky,” said Giles, fastening his cravat, “to be in hock.”

  “He’s a fool. But he wants what he wants. And his wife has expectations of an inheritance, so he gets credit.”

  “And why did you say I was he?”

  “Because you’d pass for his brother. Tall and thin, and there’s something about the look of you.”

  “When shall I see you again?” he said, taking up his coat. She helped him into it, with a sort of wifely care, smoothing his lapels and brushing away some imaginary dust. No doubt she did this with all her customers. It probably encouraged them to tip her.