Back in Society (The Poor Relation series)
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M. C. Beaton is the author of the hugely successful Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth series, as well as a quartet of Edwardian murder mysteries featuring heroine Lady Rose Summer, the Travelling Matchmaker, Six Sisters, House for the Season and School for Manners Regency romance series, and a standalone murder mystery, The Skeleton in the Closet – all published by Constable & Robinson. She left a full-time career in journalism to turn to writing, and now divides her time between the Cotswolds and Paris. Visit www.agatharaisin.com for more, or follow M. C. Beaton on Twitter: @mc_beaton.
Titles by M. C. Beaton
The Poor Relation
Lady Fortescue Steps Out • Miss Tonks Turns to Crime • Mrs Budley Falls from Grace Sir Philip’s Folly • Colonel Sandhurst to the Rescue • Back in Society
A House for the Season
The Miser of Mayfair • Plain Jane • The Wicked Godmother Rake’s Progress • The Adventuress • Rainbird’s Revenge
The Six Sisters
Minerva • The Taming of Annabelle • Deirdre and Desire Daphne • Diana the Huntress • Frederica in Fashion
The Edwardian Murder Mystery series
Snobbery with Violence • Hasty Death • Sick of Shadows Our Lady of Pain
The Travelling Matchmaker series
Emily Goes to Exeter • Belinda Goes to Bath • Penelope Goes to Portsmouth Beatrice Goes to Brighton • Deborah Goes to Dover • Yvonne Goes to York
The Agatha Raisin series
Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death • Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener • Agatha Raisin and the Walkers of Dembley Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage • Agatha Raisin and the Terrible Tourist Agatha Raisin and the Wellspring of Death • Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham Agatha Raisin and the Witch of Wyckhadden Agatha Raisin and the Fairies of Fryfam • Agatha Raisin and the Love from Hell Agatha Raisin and the Day the Floods Came Agatha Raisin and the Curious Curate • Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House Agatha Raisin and the Deadly Dance • Agatha Raisin and the Perfect Paragon Agatha Raisin and Love, Lies and Liquor Agatha Raisin and Kissing Christmas Goodbye Agatha Raisin and a Spoonful of Poison • Agatha Raisin: There Goes the Bride Agatha Raisin and the Busy Body • Agatha Raisin: As the Pig Turns
The Hamish Macbeth series
Death of a Gossip • Death of a Cad • Death of an Outsider Death of a Perfect Wife • Death of a Hussy • Death of a Snob Death of a Prankster • Death of a Glutton • Death of a Travelling Man Death of a Charming Man • Death of a Nag • Death of a Macho Man Death of a Dentist • Death of a Scriptwriter • Death of an Addict A Highland Christmas • Death of a Dustman • Death of a Celebrity Death of a Village • Death of a Poison Pen • Death of a Bore Death of a Dreamer • Death of a Maid • Death of a Gentle Lady Death of a Witch • Death of a Valentine • Death of a Sweep Death of a Kingfisher
The Skeleton in the Closet
Also available
The Agatha Raisin Companion
Constable & Robinson Ltd.
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London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the US by St Martin’s Press, 1994
First published in the UK by Canvas, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2013
Copyright © M. C. Beaton, 1994
The right of M. C. Beaton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-78033-322-9 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-47210-494-6 (ebook)
Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon
Printed and bound in the UK
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Cover design and illustration: www.kathynorrish.com
For Ann Robinson and her daughter, Emma Wilson, with love.
ONE
The poor always ye have with you.
THE BIBLE
The Poor Relation was no longer an apt name for what had become London’s most fashionable hotel. The Prince of Wales’s coat of arms gleamed over the entrance with that magic legend ‘By Special Appointment.’ In residence and taking up every guest room except one for his retinue of friends and servants was Prince Hugo Panič, from some Middle European country which everyone swore they had heard of but no one seemed to know anything about.
The owners of the hotel had been poor relations themselves when they founded it, that despised shabby genteel class eking out a difficult living. But Lady Fortescue, Sir Philip Sommerville, Colonel Sandhurst, and Miss Tonks, the owners, had made it prosper, at first by theft from their relations, and then by a combination of guile, hard business and luck. An actor, Mr Jason Davy, had recently bought his way into shared ownership, and yet, because of old Sir Philip’s jealousy and dislike of him, had never felt he was one of them.
The open-handed prince paid hard cash as he went along and the hoteliers felt their days of penury were truly behind them. This gave them an added happiness and sparkle, and even Sir Philip had not been heard to utter anything loathsome for quite a number of days.
But their very happiness intensified the black misery of the occupant of the one apartment not taken up by the prince or his entourage. The occupant was Lady Jane Fremney, youngest daughter of the Earl of Durby. Through her refusal to marry the man her father had picked out for her, she had been cast out ‘until she came to her senses.’ That, her father considered, would not take very long as she had only one small trunk of clothes and none of her jewellery.
Lady Jane had used what was left of her pin money to travel from Durbyshire to London. She thought back on her miserable, lonely childhood, thought of her bullying governess, thought of the family servants who had treated her harshly because her father, the earl, encouraged them to do so. ‘You have to break a woman’s spirit to make her a good wife’ was one of his favourite maxims, and Lady Jane often wondered whether that was why her mother had gone to such an early grave, when she herself was but two years old.
So she decided to put an end to her life. She had told the owner of the Poor Relation that her maid would be arriving shortly. Her empty jewel case was weighted down with stones.
She ate by herself at a corner table in the dining room, only half interested in the noisy, garrulous prince who sat at the centre table with his equally noisy mistress. She picked at the delicious food which the hotel always served, hardly tasting what she ate. She did not notice the owners much, and a London hotel being such an anonymous sort of place, she supposed that they barely noticed her.
In this she was wrong.
Four days after her arrival, the owners were gathered in their private sitting room at the top of the hotel. They looked very different from the threadbare people who had first banded together to share their lot. Lady Fortescue, in her seventies, tall and erect, wore a cap of fine lace on top of her snowy, impeccably coiffured hair, and a silk gown of expensive cut. Colonel Sandhurst, very grand in Weston’s best tailoring,
and occasionally glancing down at the shine on his flat pumps, fiddled with a diamond stickpin in his cravat and beamed around at everyone with his mild, childlike blue eyes. Also in his seventies, his one ambition now was to sell the hotel and marry Lady Fortescue.
Sir Philip Sommerville, equally old, was quite the dandy in a padded coat and enormous cravat. His tortoise-like face looked unusually benign, but then Sir Philip claimed that money could make a saint out of anyone.
Miss Tonks, fortyish, or, as Lord Byron put it, a lady of certain years, years uncertain, had a certain elegance, not entirely due to French taffeta and the clever hands of the royal hairdresser. She no longer blinked nervously or hung her head. She was as erect and confident a figure now as Lady Fortescue, and her gentle, sheeplike face turned from time to time towards the door, awaiting the arrival of the man of her dreams, Mr Jason Davy.
Just when she was beginning to think he would never arrive, Mr Davy entered. He was a middle-aged man, slim and nondescript, with bright eyes and thick brown hair streaked with grey. He, like Colonel Sandhurst, was impeccably dressed, and the only person who thought that he never could, never would look like a gentleman was Sir Philip Sommerville. Sir Philip had marked down Miss Tonks to take care of him in his declining years, but the ‘silly’ spinster did nothing but make sheep’s eyes at the actor.
And Miss Tonks then proceeded to dent Sir Philip’s new-found euphoria by saying eagerly, ‘I am so glad you are come, Mr Davy. We have a problem.’
Mr Davy smiled and sat down next to her. ‘What problem?’ demanded Sir Philip with a scowl.
‘Why, Lady Jane, to be sure,’ said Miss Tonks.
‘Oh, that one. I am sure she hasn’t a feather to fly with, and what’s more, doesn’t mean to pay her bill.’ Sir Philip tapped his nose. ‘I can smell poverty. But does it matter? We’re in funds. She’s a beautiful lady, so we may as well be charitable for a change. She’s in the poorest rooms. She can stay for a month and we’ll give her a bill and if she don’t pay it, we’ll kick her out.’
‘That is no answer to the problem,’ said Lady Fortescue. ‘I, too, have remarked on Lady Jane’s downcast looks. She is the daughter of the Earl of Durby and yet no one calls on her, nor does she call on anyone. The maid she spoke of has not arrived. She seems to walk and move in misery.’
‘Do you mean she might commit suicide?’ asked Mr Davy.
‘Here now!’ Sir Philip sat up straight, his pale eyes registering alarm. ‘That would be a disaster. Get a suicide and the place is damned. Our prince would take himself off and it would be ages before anyone else would come. But what has she to commit suicide about? She may be poor and obviously in trouble with her family, but she is beautiful.’
‘Perhaps she does not know it,’ said Colonel Sandhurst. ‘What lady so sunk in misery as she obviously is can think of her looks? How old is she, would you say?’
‘Nineteen or twenty,’ said Lady Fortescue. ‘Her father is a brute, I believe, her mother dead, her four brothers in the military.’
‘Let’s get back to this suicide business.’ Sir Philip was becoming increasingly worried. ‘I mean, how do we stop her?’
‘Perhaps,’ volunteered Mr Davy, ‘she might confide in one of us.’
‘Meaning you?’ jeered Sir Philip. ‘Always the ladies’ man, hey.’
‘I was thinking of Miss Tonks here,’ said Mr Davy, casting a forgiving smile on Sir Philip, which irritated that elderly gentleman every bit as much as Mr Davy had meant it to do.
‘I have tried twice to engage her in conversation,’ said Miss Tonks, ‘but she looks at me with such blank eyes that I cannot go on. But I will try to watch her as closely as I can.
‘You can’t be with her every minute of the day and night,’ pointed out Colonel Sandhurst. ‘Would not the best course of action be to write to her father? He cannot know she is alone and unchaperoned in London.’
‘Let us see what Miss Tonks can find out,’ said Lady Fortescue. ‘We have had enough trouble in the past. It is time to enjoy comfort and to look after ourselves. Someone as young and as beautiful as Lady Jane may be distressed for the moment, but suicide! No, I think not.’
Miss Tonks slept late the following day. She had recently become accustomed to that luxury because the hotel had now a highly paid, efficient staff. It was well known among the servant class that the Poor Relation paid for the best and would sack anyone who was not willing, bright and efficient.
But her first uneasy thought was about Lady Jane. She washed and dressed hurriedly in her room in the apartment which the hoteliers rented. It was next door to the hotel.
When she entered the entrance hall, a heavily veiled figure walked past her and out into Bond Street. Sure that it was Lady Jane, Miss Tonks turned about and followed in pursuit.
Ragged clouds raced over the dingy sky above. Miss Tonks hoped it would not rain, for rain turned the streets of London into slippery, muddy hazards, and she was not wearing pattens, those wooden clogs with the high iron ring on the sole, so useful in wet weather. A strong wind was howling down the narrow streets and sending streams of smoke snaking down from the whirling cowls on the chimney-pots. Ahead of her, the slim figure of Lady Jane moved easily and quickly, heading always in the direction of the City. By the time Miss Tonks and her quarry reached the bottom of Ludgate Hill, Miss Tonks was feeling tired. Up the hill went Lady Jane and then turned off into one of the narrow lanes where the apothecaries had their shops. Miss Tonks saw her go into one of these shops and hesitated. outside, peering in over the display of leeches in jars and coloured bottles of liquid. She saw Lady Jane buy two flat green bottles of something. She drew back into a doorway as Lady Jane emerged, and then, as she watched her hurrying off, Miss Tonks wondered what to do. After a little hesitation, she pushed open the door of the apothecary’s and went in.
‘I wonder,’ said Miss Tonks to the assistant, ‘whether my lady’s-maid has just been here. I sent her to buy something for me, but as I was in the City, I thought I would find out, you see, whether she had bought it. A heavily veiled woman.’
‘I have just sold two bottles of laudanum to a veiled lady,’ said the assistant.
‘Oh, really? Yes, that is it. I have great difficulty sleeping at night.’ And Miss Tonks chattered her way out of the door, discoursing all the while on her mythical sleeplessness.
On Ludgate Hill, she hailed a hack to take her back to Bond Street, where she called her partners together and told them of Lady Jane’s purchase.
‘A lot of ladies take laudanum,’ said Mr Davy.
‘Fool!’ said Sir Philip. ‘Not two whole bottles of the stuff. I have it. We’ll get Jack, the footman, to collect her as soon as she has deposited the stuff in her room. I’ll take her into the office and say that bills should be settled monthly, a new policy, and we will be presenting her with her account at the end of the month. I will hold her in conversation. Perhaps then Lady Fortescue and Miss Tonks can go to her room and change the mixture for something innocuous.’
‘But why not confront her with the fact that we suspect she plans to do away with herself ?’ said the colonel.
‘All she has to do is lie,’ said Sir Philip. ‘She’ll leave a note for her father. Bound to. I know, leave enough laudanum in the bottles to knock her out. We’ll keep checking on her and as soon as we find she’s left a note, then we’ll have her and out she goes.’
‘Oh, no, we cannot do that,’ exclaimed Miss Tonks. ‘It would only add to her shame and wretchedness. Yes, we find her out and then we try to do something to help!’
Sir Philip groaned and clutched at his wig so that it slipped sideways. ‘Look, we’re happy and rich and we’ve got our generous prince to thank for it. Why bother ourselves with some mad girl?’
‘Because it is our duty,’ said Lady Fortescue awfully, and that silenced Sir Philip.
Lady Jane walked along Bond Street. Rain was beginning to fall, an appropriate day to end her life. She could feel the dragging weight of the t
wo bottles of laudanum in her reticule. She had found her way to Ludgate Hill because one of the maids had drawn her a map. She would write a letter to her father and beg him to settle her account at the hotel. A smart carriage moved past. A pretty girl looked out of the window. Two soldiers on the pavement stared at her boldly. Three young matrons followed by their footmen and lady’s-maids sailed into the hotel, no doubt to take coffee, because the Poor Relation was really the only place in London outside of Gunter’s, the confectioner’s, where ladies could meet.
In her rooms, Lady Jane unpinned her hat and veil and threw them on a chair. She put the two bottles on the toilet-table and then crossed to the writing-desk in her small sitting room. She was just sharpening a quill with a penknife when there came a scratching at the door and Jack, the footman, walked in.
‘My lady,’ he said, ‘Sir Philip Sommerville requests the honour of your presence in the office.’
Lady Jane stood up. ‘Where is this office?’
‘At the back of the entrance hall, my lady.’
‘Very well, I will follow you shortly.’
Jack hesitated on the threshold, remembering his instructions, which were not to leave her alone for a moment. ‘I beg pardon, my lady, but Sir Philip said the matter was pressing.’
Lady Jane gave a little sigh. They had probably guessed that she had no maid following on. They would have noticed that no one called on her. They would be anxious to find out whether she could meet her bill or not. Well, it didn’t matter any more. All she had to do was tell more lies.
‘I will come with you,’ she said.
Colonel Sandhurst and Mr Davy were also in the small office. They stood up as Lady Jane entered.
She was wearing a plain grey gown of some shimmering stuff which seemed to highlight her extreme pallor. She was, despite the shadows under her eyes and the look of strain on her face, still very beautiful. Her skin was without blemish and her eyes, very large and grey, were fringed with thick lashes. Her mouth was perfect.