by M C Beaton
Mr. Carruthers grunted and tossed the spirits down his throat. The whole house seemed to shudder and heave in the gale, for all the world like a prison hulk.
“What a place to live,” said Carruthers. “I would have thought that with your social ambitions, you would have set up house in the West End.”
“I was not prepared to sport my blunt until the peerage was a fact,” said Mr. Barrington with a sort of mad amiability.
“It’s a wonder you didn’t try to get your claws into one of the Prince Regent’s friends,” said Mr. Carruthers curiously. “That way your peerage would have been assured.”
“I could have got it through Erskine,” replied his host. “Why wasn’t Erskine elected? All my plots and plans gone for nothing, not to mention a fortune in getting a deal of silly, useless young men like yourself in my power.”
“I have killed three men on your behalf,” said Mr. Carruthers hotly. “I do not call that the act of a weak man.”
“And yet you could not kill a woman.”
Jerry Carruthers helped himself to another tot of gin. “Killing,” he sneered. “We’ll never escape suspicion. You’ll have to kill the whole of London.”
“Not I,” said Mr. Barrington equably as the house gave another shudder and heave. “You should have interrogated Lady Standish first. You should have found out whom she had talked to.”
“I was simply carrying out orders,” said Mr. Carruthers sulkily. “Li’s probably disposed of her by now.”
“Yes, a good girl is Li,” said Mr. Barrington, as if praising a serving maid.
“Why should I care?” muttered Mr. Carruthers, drinking more gin. “Human life is cheap in this horrible city. People kill each other every minute of the day. What’s a few more lives?”
Mr. Barrington sat down on the chair opposite and tilted the green bottle, watching the liquor rise in his glass. “Frightened of divine retribution?” he asked.
“Don’t start that,” said Mr. Carruthers wrathfully. “If anyone’s going to rot in hell, ’tis you!”
“You are too nervous, my friend,” Mr. Barrington smiled. “No one will find out about us… ever.”
“That Giles Hartford was saying something about Guy finding out something of national importance.”
“Then he must be killed too.”
“He must… let me out of here!” Jerry Carruthers leapt to his feet, knocking the chair over. “You’re mad. I’m mad. We’re all mad. I should kill you and do the world a favor.”
“You forget, I hold papers of yours which will be published on the event of my untimely death.”
Mr. Carruthers turned and sat down at the table again, after righting the chair. He calmly helped himself to more gin, and grinned at Mr. Barrington over the rim of his glass.
“A thought has suddenly come to me,” he said. “You have closed shop in Fetter Lane. You’ve closed your business. You’re too clutch-fisted to pay a lawyer to hold papers when you ain’t in business, see? Therefore, my friend, I think you have all the papers in this rathole of a house!”
“I would not be so stupid,” said Barrington, his eyes moving restlessly about the room.
“We’ll see,” said Mr. Carruthers. He took a pistol from his pocket and began to prime it. “Now, you may sit there like the horrible old codger you are, and don’t try to stop me.”
Mr. Barrington looked down at the oily remains of his gin and did not look up.
Triumphantly, Jerry Carruthers left the room. He ran through the creaking, shaking house as great gusts of snow billowed past the dirty windows.
It was deathly cold, and every room was filled with the beating sound of the storm.
He searched through the moldering rooms, full of old furniture and bric-a-brac, and through the empty cellars. He at last found what he was searching for as he pushed open the door of an attic at the top of the house.
Papers and documents were piled up on shelves, mountains and mountains of paper. “It will take a year to find mine,” he muttered savagely. Up at the top of the house, the noise of the storm was immense. The whole building shuddered and creaked and groaned.
He saw a stub of a candle on the mantelpiece and lit it with a lucifer. Then he ran about the room, setting pile after pile of papers alight.
“Free,” he muttered as the papers started to blaze. “Now to get out of here.”
He wrenched at the door and found it locked.
“The old fox.” He grinned. “That will not stay me for long.”
He took out his pistol and shot the lock clear away, and then pushed confidently at the door. To his horror, it refused to budge. A low chuckle came from the other side, and then the sound of heavy objects being piled on the other side of the door.
“Let me out!” he screamed.
Somewhere over the racket of the storm came the sound of a laugh.
He turned desperately and faced the flaming inferno of the room. There was only one window and it was barred. His domes caught fire and he screamed and beat at the flames with his hands.
There was a tremendous crack of wind. The building seemed to rear up like a horse, and then slowly it started to tumble in and collapse like a house of cards. Flames and plaster and dust rose into the blinding sheets of snow.
Jerry Carruthers inside the blazing room and Mr. Barrington outside—both plunged to their deaths through the splitting, collapsing floors.
No one came to help. The storm was too severe. People died in London all the time in the ruins of falling buildings. One or two more bodies was not an out-of-the-way thing, after all.
Mr. Barrington would have appreciated that philosophy.
Had he been alive, of course.
Chapter Nine
Lucy, Marchioness of Standish, lay still and listened to the storm, frozen with fear. Her gag had been removed although her wrists were still bound behind her back. She was too frightened to utter a sound.
The main focus of her fear was the other occupant of the room—the strange silent figure in the grotesque, glittering robes, the white-painted face, and the almond eyes—who sat on a low couch at the other end, as unmoving as a statue.
The narrow room was bathed in white light from the snow outside. How long had she been unconscious, wondered Lucy—a day? A year?
At last the still figure of Li moved. She searched in her robes and took out a long, wicked knife, and advanced on Lucy.
Lucy opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out.
She struggled into a sitting position and watched the approaching knife, hypnotized. Then she noticed that Li was carrying a length of clothesline in her other hand. The Chinese girl stooped over her, and Lucy shut her eyes. To her surprise, she felt the bonds of her wrists being cut and then one end of the clothesline was tied firmly round her ankles. Li tottered across the room on her bound feet, and fastened the other end onto an iron ring on the wall. She turned and surveyed Lucy thoughtfully, turning the long knife over in her beringed fingers, and then, with an odd little bow, she left the room.
It seemed to Lucy as if death were inevitable. She would never see Simon again. With all absence of hope, a blessed numbness crept over her mind and body and she sat unmoving on the floor.
The door opened again, and Li came in bearing a tray on which was a bottle of wine, a glass, a quartern loaf, and a lump of cheese.
She put the food on the floor next to Lucy and then retired to the couch, where she sat down with her legs tucked up under her robes, and surveyed her prisoner with an unblinking stare.
Lucy looked at the food and looked at Li and looked at the food again. After some hesitation, she helped herself to some wine, and then realized she was ravenously hungry. The street sounds which she had noticed when she had recovered consciousness had rapidly faded as the storm outside grew in intensity. There was a small fire burning in the grate, and she shakily stretched out her hands to the blaze.
“Bleedin’ cold, innit?” said the Chinese vision suddenly.
; At the sound of that Cockney voice, hope flooded Lucy’s chilled body. But Li looked as strange, as alien, and as unwinking as ever, and with a little sigh, Lucy thought she must be imagining things.
“I don’t like it. Not a bit!” Li spoke again and Lucy gave a nervous start.
“You speak English?” she exclaimed.
“Yus,” said Li moodily. “I am English, ain’t I? But the way some goes on, you’d think I come out o’ ’ell. Stick ’er in the ribs, ’e says, says ’e. Nuthin’ to the likes of you. But I got feelings,” said Li passionately. “If we wus to ’ave a bit o’ a fight, that’s different, but just stickin’ someone, ain’t my ken.”
“Oh, don’t kill me!” cried Lucy. “I will pay you. Please don’t kill me. Why should you? Who wants me dead?”
“I can’t tell you,” said Li. “But I took the money, din’t I? So I gots to do it some’ow.”
“But I will pay you more,” cried Lucy desperately, while a kaleidoscope of colored thoughts tumbled through her head. Simon, if only I can see you again… oh, Mother and Father, no more will I keep you in social seclusion… could I overpower this girl and get the knife away from her?
Li surveyed her thoughtfully. “Temptin’,” she said after a pause. “Very temptin’. But they’d kill me an I wouldn’t stay alive long enuff to enjoy it. Who are you, anways?”
“My name is Lucy, Marchioness of Standish.”
“’Ere! You’re never.”
“I assure you that I am, and if you get me out of here…”
But Li had stopped listening and had begun muttering to herself.
“That old fox, I knew ’e’d gone barmy. Every runner, every watch, every constable in the ’ole of London’ll be arter me. Oh. Gawdstreuth!”
“Which old fox?” asked Lucy. And then with a sudden flash of intuition, she leaned forward. “Do you mean Mr. Barrington?”
Li shook her head slowly from side to side so that the fake jewels on her headdress glittered and sparkled. “Now you been and gone and done it,” she said. “I got to kill you now. You knows too much.”
With a sad little sigh she pulled the knife out from her robes.
Lucy jumped to her feet, straining at the halter that held her prisoner.
At that moment, there came a tremendous knocking at the door.
“Open up in there!” cried a man’s voice over the sound of the wind.
“Simon!” screamed Lucy. “Simon! She’s going to kill me!”
The door heaved on its hinges and crashed open as the Duke splintered the lock. Li rushed forward and held the knife to Lucy’s throat.
“I’ll kill ’er,” she said fiercely, “if you take one step forward.”
Lucy looked at the Duke with agonized eyes. A great deal of men seemed to be pushing into the low room behind him. In front of them was Harriet Comfort, white and shivering, a great bruise marking one side of her face.
“Li!” she screamed. “Barrington’s dead.”
For the first time, Li’s impassive face showed expression. Her mouth dropped open and her eyebrows rose up under her headdress.
Then, quick as a flash, she dropped the knife and scampered into the far room, slamming and barring the door behind her before the surge of men, headed by the Duke, could reach her.
The Duke caught Lucy in his arms and held her close. “I never thought to see you alive again,” he murmured. “Don’t cry, Lucy, it’s all over now.”
There was a splintering crash as his servants broke down the door through which Li had fled. But of the Chinese girl, there was no sign. It turned out that holes had been knocked through the walls of the adjoining houses to supply the mostly criminal inmates of the street with a fast means of escape.
For the first time, Lucy began to feel really ill. Her head throbbed, and the room swung before her eyes. The Duke cut the rope that was tied around her waist and turned to take her in his arms again. And just in time. For with a little choked sob, Lucy fainted dead away.
Lucy was to be ill for a long time. One of the most severe winters London had known raged outside the Hartfords’ home where she lay for weeks in the grips of a fever.
And then at last, when Ann Hartford was about to give up hope, the fever abated, leaving Lucy white and thin and weak.
She held onto Ann’s hand and murmured, “Simon.”
“Gone to the country,” said Ann softly. “He has been here, every day and night, since you arrived. The minute your fever abated, he had to leave to see to his affairs. He will be back soon.”
“How soon?” whispered Lucy hoarsely, her mind filled with all sorts of nameless perils which could stop his return.
“A few weeks,” said Ann soothingly. “Plenty of time for you to recover your looks.”
“A few weeks,” Lucy said, struggling to raise herself up on the pillows. “And my looks! Give me a looking glass.”
“The affairs of his estate were pressing,” said Ann, pushing Lucy back with a firm hand. “And you will have a looking glass when you are feeling stronger.”
“No! Now!”
“Very well.” Ann silently handed her a glass.
“Oh, dear,” said Lucy. “Is that really me?”
A thin, wasted face with huge, dark circles under the eyes stared back at her. Her hair hung lank and dull over her forehead.
“You have been very, very ill,” said Ann quietly. “Now you will recover. And you must never doubt Habard’s love. His devotion was… very moving.”
“Tell me what happened… to Barrington?” asked Lucy.
“Later,” said Ann, watching Lucy’s eyelids beginning to droop. “It is a fantastic story. Your parents have called every day. You must be strong for them too.”
But Lucy was already asleep.
In the days that followed, Lucy began to piece together bits and pieces of the story until she had nearly the whole.
The Duke had broken the code. He realized he had been trying too hard, and that whatever the code was, it was bound to be something simple. One could hardly consider the late Marquess an intellectual. And so he had counted from the end of the alphabet instead of the beginning, and there he had it.
The authorities were quickly alerted. At first, they could not find Barrington or Carruthers. The Marquess and Sir Percival Burke were dead. The Earl of Oxtead had fled the country and rumor had it he had been killed by Napoleon’s troops in a drunken brawl.
Young Harry Chalmers had fought like a tiger before he was finally subdued. He at last admitted that Jerry Carruthers had been responsible for the deaths of the Marquess and Sir Percival, after he had disposed of the Prime Minister.
But apart from the address in Fetter Lane, he did not know where else Barrington might be.
The Duke, his servants, and the authorities had searched all over London for the missing bill broker.
And then the Hartfords had arrived, terrified and exhausted with their story of the mysterious abduction of Lucy.
It was then that the Duke had thought to call on Harriet Comfort. What had transpired there, Ann said, no one knew, but he had managed to find Barrington’s address. But when they got to Surrey-side, the house was a blazing ruin. They had dug frantically, the Duke crying Lucy’s name, everyone convinced that her dead body would be found in the rubble. But only the bodies of Barrington and Carruthers had been found. And that was when the Duke had returned to Harriet Comfort’s and had emerged, dragging her behind him.
“She knew nothing of the plot to kill the Prime Minister. But she did know where Li could be found. And so… the rest you know.”
Lucy was out of bed and lying on a chaise longue in the Hartfords’ drawing room as Ann finished the story.
“Simon does not say when he will return,” said Lucy, looking out at the pale sunshine. “In fact, I am not quite sure what he says in his letters at all. It is amazing that such an elegant man should have such atrocious handwriting.”
But Lucy would not admit to qualms of unease. She had been able to
decipher most of Simon’s letters and they had seemed very correct and formal, although he always showed concern for her health.
Ann told her she was vastly improved in looks, but Lucy had lost confidence. All the glass told her was that she looked pale and insignificant.
What if Simon had met some other lady? What if his letters showed that he really considered her only as a friend?
And so Lucy’s worried thoughts twisted and turned in her head as the long winter passed and the days grew lighter and still he did not come.
She was now allowed visitors. Her parents came almost every day. Lucy found the courage to tell them she had lied about the court dress.
“Well!” gasped Mrs. Hyde-Benton. “It was very naughty of you, dear, but I suppose we must forgive our little puss now she is to marry a Duke.”
“I have not seen him for some time,” said Lucy. “Mayhap he will not be of the same mind.”
“Never say so,” cried her mother. “He is honor bound to marry you and so we shall tell him.”
“Oh, no, Mama,” said Lucy wretchedly. “Not another arranged marriage. I could not bear it. I want a man who loves me for myself.”
“You are very unworldly,” said her father severely. “You would not have married into the aristocracy in the first place had we not taken matters in hand.”
“And you consider it a great thing that I was married to a criminal, a wastrel, and a womanizer?” said Lucy.
“You musn’t be so rigid, dear,” said her mother. “The aristocracy will have their little ways. I hope you aren’t going to be too prudish with His Grace. A fine thing it would be if you threw away this magnificent chance because of your moralizing. I don’t know where you get it from.”
“No, Mama,” said Lucy quietly. What on earth would Simon think of these parents of hers? But she had resolved never to exclude them from her home or friends again. Guy had been wrong. But on the other hand… she had a sudden vision of the elegant and fastidious Duke entertaining her mother and father to dinner, and shuddered.
And then she felt ashamed of herself. Her parents loved her very much and had done their best for her as far as they could see it. It was no use pointing out that her marriage had nearly led to her death.
