by M C Beaton
Henrietta’s eyes were like agate. “I take leave to inform you, my lord, that I attended the Beauchamp’s ball last night chaperoned by your sister.”
He got to his feet in surprise. “Then what is the meaning of all this. You cannot be in two places at once…or can you?”
Henrietta stared at him wide-eyed. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, it is starting all over again. Someone is out to discredit you. They hired the magician and then disposed of him. Perhaps they have now hired someone who looks exactly like you. I shall need to try and track this person down if that is the case. Unless you produce your double, all London is shortly going to think you have gone to the dogs!”
He walked forward and took her hands in his. “My dear,” he said in a softer voice, “if you would accept the protection of my name…”
“Never!” choked Henrietta, jerking her hands out of his grasp. “I do not feel for you in… in… that way, my lord.”
He studied her bent head thoughtfully. Then he put a long finger under her chin and raised it. “I could teach you to feel otherwise.” He said it, meaning to sound teasing, but his voice came out assured and arrogant.
“Oh, save your charms for little opera dancers,” snapped Henrietta, unforgivably. “You will find me made of sterner stuff. I bid you good day, my lord.” He caught her wrist as she stretched out her hand for the bell-rope and slowly drew her towards him.
She came towards him, weakly, as if mesmerised. His arms went round her slowly, taking an infinity of time.
Henrietta’s excellent butler was long to regret that that day of all days, he happened to be suffering from a cold. He had quietly opened the door to announce the arrival of Lady Belding and, taking in the situation, had meant to quickly retreat and inform her ladyship that Miss Sandford was not at home. But at that precise moment he sneezed. The couple broke apart and Lady Belding and Alice edged past him and made their way into the room.
“Ah, Lord Reckford,” declared Lady Belding, holding out her arm like the wing of a dying swan, “I saw your carriage outside. One of our horses has cast a shoe and I wondered if I could prevail upon you to escort Alice and myself to Bond Street.”
The Beau kissed the air above her fingers and murmured that he would only be too delighted. He left, reminding Henrietta that he would see her with his sister’s party at Raneleigh after the theater. She stood on the hearthrug, staring at the closed doors, long after he had gone.
That evening, Lord Reckford decided to forego the theater, and search for the fake Miss Sandford. She had been seen at three notorious gambling hells and he proposed to visit each one in turn. He enlisted the aid of Jeremy Holmes. “I do not anticipate any difficulty in gaining admission,” he informed his friend dryly. “My fortune is well known if my face is not.”
“What shall we do with the woman should we find her?” asked Mr. Holmes.
“Why, pay her,” remarked his lordship dryly. “Offer to pay her more than she is getting from her present employer. Then she’ll give us his name, I warrant you.”
“You think a man and not a woman is behind all this?”
The Beau shrugged his elegant shoulders, “Who knows? Someone, anyway, with enough money to hire people to do the dirty work. Shall we go?”
The couple decided to go on foot as the night was a fine one. Armed only with their swordsticks, they ambled towards an area of London where the distances between the parish lamps grew longer, leaving sinister shadows. “Here we are. This must be the place,” said Lord Reckford eventually, stopping in front of a narrow building. He rapped on the door with his stick and then popped a guinea and his card through the judas and waited for results. In a few seconds the door was opened by an enormous footman, his livery bursting at the seams.
“Members only, me lord, this being an exclusive place. But we allus does waive the rules for a gent like yourself,” remarked the footman, trying to divest the gentlemen of their hats and gloves.
“We shall, in all probability, not be staying long,” remarked Lord Reckford and strode into the club. He paused on the threshold of the first room… and caught his breath.
His friend looked over his shoulder. “My God! There’s Henrietta!” cried Jeremy. “Why, the little minx.”
And there indeed, it appeared, was that lady, much the worse for liquor. She was seated on a dandy’s knee and helping herself liberally to snuff. The game was about to recommence and she swung herself off her gallant’s knee and settled back into her own chair with the feverish light of the true gambler burning in her eyes. Her eyes!
“It’s not Henrietta.” Jeremy heaved a sigh of relief. “Henrietta’s eyes are hazel, hers are blue.”
Lord Reckford felt a momentary-twinge of irritation that his friend should have noticed the color of Henrietta’s eyes. They both watched the game in silence. The girl was certainly remarkably like Henrietta. Her heavy fair hair had been dressed in the same style, her jewellery had been faithfully copied, and she had Henrietta’s manner of turning her head. She was losing heavily. Lord Reckford went to stand behind her. He leaned forward and placed a rouleau of guineas at her elbow. She turned to flash a smile at her latest gallant, looked Lord Reckford full in the face, and turned white. Quickly she popped the rouleau down the front of her gown and rose shakily to her feet.
“Not so fast, my dear,” said Lord Reckford, holding her arm in a grip like iron. “If you do not wish me to make a scene, you will smile like the good little actress you are and accompany me.”
Her eyes wide and terrified, she nodded dumbly. He pulled her over to a quiet space beside the window and lowered his voice. The people in the room were all intent on their game. Smoke hung in heavy wreaths over the green baize tables and nothing could be heard but the click of the dice and the clink of glasses.
“Who is paying you to do this?”
“La, sir! I don’t know what you mean.” She made a desperate effort at coquetry and then winced as his grip tightened. “You’re hurting me,” she whimpered.
“And I shall hurt you a good deal more unless you tell me what I want to know.” Really, it was unnerving how like Henrietta this girl looked. “On the other hand,” he went on smoothly, “if you do tell me the information I desire, you will be paid handsomely, a small fortune, I assure you.”
A gleam of avarice nickered through the wide blue eyes. “How can I believe you?”
“You can’t,” drawled the husky voice. “But if you do not do what I say, I shall drag you before the Bow Street magistrates for impersonating a lady of quality.”
She looked round nervously. “All right, my lord. I’ll tell you. But not here. They watches me every move.” Fright was disolving her voice into its normal Cockney whine. “I know you is to be at Raneleigh with Miss Sandford. There is a temple there… a sort of Greek thing… near the river…” She suddenly saw the burly footman approaching and wrenched out of his grasp. “Twelve o’clock, my lord…” The slight whisper came back to him faintly. He felt a hand on his arm. “Everything all right, my lord?” said the footman. There was a hint of underlying menace in his voice.
His lordship raised his quizzing glass. “Take your hand from my arm, fellow,” he said icily. “You are soiling my coat.”
The footman looked narrowly from Lord Reckford to the fake Miss Sandford who was to all intents and purposes wholly absorbed in a rubber of piquet. He gave a surly grunt and lumbered back to his post by the door.
Lord Reckford collected Jeremy and suggested that they should leave quickly. They walked along, discussing the mystery of Henrietta’s impersonator. “Do you think she will come?” asked Jeremy.
“Of course,” replied his friend cynically. “Money rules her world as much as our own.”
Henrietta was tired of Raneleigh. All the social world flocked to the pleasure gardens after the theater to see and be seen. The ritual was to stroll down one crowded walk bowing or cutting various acquaintance as the case might be and then stroll back going th
rough the whole process again. Miss Scattersworth was surrounded by an audience of bright young men who danced around her in their tall heels, shrieking with laughter and clutching their long walking canes like so many demented Bo-Peeps. The spinster was enjoying her fame as a wit immensely and was almost as noisy as her admirers. She had again begun to dress in clothes too young for her years and had discarded her caps and… oh, horrors… Henrietta could not believe her eyes. For the one sedate thing in all her vagaries of dress had been Miss Mattie’s prim grey hair. Now her head was covered in a mass of improbably golden curls held in place with a baby blue silk ribbon tied in a bow over her left ear.
Henrietta writhed in embarrassment. People were beginning to look at her oddly as well, since the whispers about her supposed debauches in gambling clubs had gone the rounds. She sighed with relief as she recognized the tall figure of Lord Reckford coming towards her. He bent over her hand and then whispered quietly that he had some news for her. “I shall ask Miss Scattersworth for permission to take you for a stroll although Mr. Holmes is coming with us and should be chaperone enough.”
His lordship looked round in a puzzled way. “Why, where is Miss Scattersworth?” Henrietta waved her fan faintly in the spinster’s direction. Lord Reckford bit his lip to hide a smile. He broke through Miss Mattie’s twittering ring of admirers. “I have come to beg your permission to walk a little way with Miss Sandford,” he said in chilly formal accents, embarrassed and irritated by the ring of foppish and painted faces.
“Why, of course, you naughty, naughty man,” said Miss Mattie with a roguishness awful to behold. She tried to bat her eyelashes at him but she had painted them so thick with blacking that they stuck together. The Beau bowed and left her surrounded by the waving handkerchiefs of her court as they vied for the honor of prying her eyelashes apart.
Henrietta walked a little way, flanked by Lord Reckford and Jeremy Holmes, pleasantly aware of the envious glances cast in her direction. When they had left the crowds behind, Lord Reckford outlined what had happened and their discovery of her impersonator.
Henrietta clasped her hands. “But that is marvellous. Let us go quickly.”
They hurried along the more deserted walks. Lord Reckford noticed gratefully that Henrietta was too absorbed in her mission to notice or be embarrassed by the sounds of noisy love-making in the bushes around them.
At the far end of the gardens stood the temple, shining faintly in the moonlight. They mounted the short flight of steps and went inside.
A couple of lovers hurriedly leapt to their feet, adjusting their dress. The woman seemed more enraged with the interruption than the man and she departed shouting raucous advice to Henrietta about how to cope with two men at the same time. Henrietta’s escorts were thankful to note that she did not understand one word the woman was saying.
Henrietta sat down on the bench vacated by the lovers, Jeremy sat next to her, and Lord Reckford leaned against a pillar and stared out at the muddy waters of the Thames. After what seemed to Henrietta to be hours, Lord Reckford said in a flat voice, “She isn’t coming Jeremy. We should have waited for her at the club and taken the risk. Damme, if I ever find out who’s behind this, I’ll murder him with my own hands.”
Henrietta rose wearily to her feet and stumbled. Jeremy caught her round the waist and led her gently down the steps of the temple. He turned to address a remark to his friend and received such a blazing look of rage that he stepped back a pace. “Oho! So that’s the way the land lies,” thought Jeremy.
The silent threesome made their way back into the crowds. Miss Mattie had gone on to a party with her admirers. “What! At two in the morning!” raged Lord Reckford stuffily, much to the amusement of his friend. “Come, Miss Sandford, I shall escort you home. Goodnight, Jeremy. I shall call on you tomorrow.”
“Wait a bit,” said Mr. Holmes, an imp of mischief dancing in his eyes. “I ain’t your servant, Guy. I shall come with you. Want to make sure Henrietta’s right and tight.”
Lord Reckford’s thin black brows snapped together and he gave in with bad grace. Jeremy chatted pleasantly all the way to Henrietta’s home, leaving his furious friend to curse him mentally for a prattling idiot.
They waited patiently while Henrietta searched in her reticule and produced a heavy key. “Why on earth don’t you tell at least one servant to wait up for you,” snapped his lordship.
Henrietta looked at him in surprise. “I do not think it fair, my lord. I am not a child, you know. I have opened my front door and put myself to bed for some years now. Why, it would be the height of selfishness to expect my butler to lose his night’s sleep to perform such a simple chore for me.”
“Dash it all,” protested Jeremy. “That’s what they’re paid for.”
“They are not paid to perform unreasonable duties or to work unreasonable hours,” said Henrietta. “And may I remind you, they are my servants.”
She opened the door and they followed her into the hall. Henrietta turned and held out her hand, “I must thank you both…” Then she broke off and put a frightened hand to her mouth. “What’s that?” From the drawingroom came the sound of an irregular tap, tap, tap.
The very house seemed to hold its breath as if waiting for their next move.
Henrietta gave an impatient shrug as if to dismiss her fears and strode forward and flung open the double doors of the drawingroom. She stood for a second, framed in the doorway, then she fell to the floor in a dead faint.
Her impersonator swung gently in the breeze from the long open windows. She was hanging from a belt round her neck which was strapped to the Waterford chandelier. Her protruding eyes gazed glassily round the room as her body slowly swung round and round, her tiny feet tap, tap tapping rhythmically against the chair she had been standing on. And with every revolution, the crystals above her sent out a chattering unearthly tinkling like the voices of wicked fairies mocking the dead.
A note lay on the escritoire by the window. While Jeremy helped Henrietta to a sofa, the Beau crossed over and picked it up.
The writing straggled wildly across the page. “My dear Miss Sandford,” he read. “The man you are seeking is Guy Reckford. He plans to drive you mad because he is mad himself. Ask him what became of Lucinda. I can stand it no more. God forgive me….”
Lord Reckford crumpled the parchment in his hand, and stared unseeingly at a portrait of one of Mrs.
Tankerton’s simpering ancestors over the fireplace. Slowly he took down a tall wax candle from the mantleshelf and held it under the paper. His arm was seized by Jeremy Holmes. “For God’s Sake, Guy, what’s in the note?”
He shrugged his friend off and dropped the letter on the hearth where it crackled and blazed. “Later, Jeremy,” he said softly with a glance at the slowly recovering Henrietta. “Later.”
There was a commotion in the hallway outside as Miss Scattersworth returned with her admirers. Lord Reckford dashed to bar the door but he was too late.
To his surprise, Miss Mattie neither screamed nor fainted. She glanced quickly from the grotesque swinging figure to Henrietta and then back to her shocked and twittering entourage. “Home gentlemen,” she said firmly, hustling and shooing them before her. Then she returned to the drawingroom and looked at Lord Reckford, seeming suddenly old and tired. “I shall take Henrietta to her bedchamber while you summon the magistrate, my lord.”
She waited until Lord Reckford and Jeremy had left and then turned to Henrietta. “Come, my dear. Come to bed and I shall find something to make you sleep. Come with Mattie.”
Henrietta rose to her feet like a sleepwalker. She was just about to leave the room when the letter which had been burning merrily on the hearth gave a final spurt of flame and went out.
Shaking off Miss Scattersworth’s arm, she walked over to the fireplace and picked up the charred paper. It had not burned completely and a few trails of handwriting stood out sharply.
“…Reckford… mad… what became of Lucinda….”
&nb
sp; Chapter Ten
TWO DAYS HAD passed and the mystery seemed darker than ever. The dead girl was identified as a high class prostitute and interest in the case promptly died as far as law and order were concerned. The girl had obviously committed suicide and London was well rid of her.
Henrietta had got rid of the remains of the letter and confided her fears to Miss Mattie. What if the elegant Beau himself were tormenting her as part of some mad game played out by a bored aristocrat? After all, look at the insane and violent crimes that had been committed by the Mohawks. Seeing that her friend, although worried and frightened, at least showed no signs of succumbing to the vapors, Miss Scattersworth had volunteered to solve the mystery of what had happened to Lucinda by discreetly questioning her new acquaintances, many of whom, as she pointed out, were confirmed gossips.
Waiting for her return, Henrietta wished she had never enlisted the help of her friend. She found herself not wanting to know anything at all about Lucinda.
She heard Miss Mattie’s brisk step in the hall and sat bolt upright in her chair. Please let him not be guilty of anything, she murmured to herself.
Miss Mattie trotted in and then seemed to spend an unconscionable amount of time divesting herself of many fluttering shawls and several bulky packages.
“Well, well, Henrietta,” said the spinster finally, sitting down with a bump. “These Roman sandals of mine are so pretty but I declare, after any amount of walking, they do cut into one’s legs so.”
“A plague on your Roman sandals,” snapped Henrietta. “Honestly, Mattie. I’ve been sitting here all morning nearly dying with apprehension. What about Lucinda?”
Miss Mattie looked rather wildly about the room. “I really would rather not tell you, my dear, and gossip is never reliable and…”
“I would rather hear it no matter what,” said Henrietta quietly.
Miss Mattie sighed. She began, “Remember I told you that Lucinda Braintree went off with the Marquis of Glenmorrison. Well, it seems that after a year, she had a hankering to see Beau Reckford and managed to get herself invited to a house party at which he was to be present. It was somewhere in Essex, I forget the name of the people. Anyway, it seemed as if the affair was to begin again. Lucinda certainly seemed eager enough but after a few days, Lord Reckford was obviously trying not to be alone in her company.
