Family Plot

by Sheri Cobb South

  Pickett sighed. “Very clear, sir. And what of my request?”

  “Ah, yes. A rise in wages so that you might take a harlot to wife. As to that, Mr. Pickett, you may consider it denied.”

  Having all the efficiency of the Royal Mail at their disposal, and being unencumbered by the presence of schoolboys, Mssrs. Colquhoun and Pickett accomplished the trip to Scotland with a speed that Lady Fieldhurst might have envied. They reached the seaside village of Ravenscroft a scant three days after their departure from London, at last ending their journey at a quaint old inn of local grey stone whose rear-facing windows offered a fine view of the sea. An ostler hurried from the stables and began unhitching the horses, while a sturdy lad from the inn unfastened the straps securing their baggage to the roof. Pickett, by this time well-travelled enough to know that these persons would expect to be rewarded for their services (and that this reward must be financial in nature), could not but be relieved when Mr. Colquhoun dispatched him on another errand.

  “If you’ll go inside and bespeak a couple of rooms, I’ll square things with these fellows,” the magistrate said, drawing a coin purse from the inside pocket of his coat. “I wouldn’t say no to a wee drop of something awaiting me in the taproom when I’m done, mind you.”

  “Yes, sir. I shall see to it,” said Pickett, and went inside.

  “Guid day to ye, sir,” the innkeeper greeted him. “Whit can I do for ye?”

  “I have need of two rooms for the next fortnight,” Pickett said.

  The innkeeper dragged a heavy leather-bound notebook from beneath the counter and began to write in it with the painstaking scrawl of the unlettered. “Names?”

  “Mr. Patrick Colquhoun.” Pickett paused to allow the man to catch up. “And Mr. John Pickett.”

  The innkeeper looked up, stroking his bushy red beard. “Pickett, you say?”

  “Yes. P-I-C-K-E-T-T. Pickett.”

  The innkeeper wrote it down. Curiously enough, he seemed to have no difficulty with “Colquhoun,” which, at least in Pickett’s opinion, was far more difficult to spell. He could only suppose that, the magistrate’s surname being of Scottish origin, the innkeeper had encountered others of that name, while the English Pickett must be a novelty.

  Having arranged for a roof over their heads, Pickett wandered into the taproom, ordered two tankards of ale, and sat down to wait for Mr. Colquhoun. He passed the time in observation of his fellow patrons, and decided that most of them were either local fisherfolk fortifying themselves for the afternoon’s labors or, like the magistrate, sportsmen on holiday.

  “Sorry to be so long,” said the magistrate when at last he joined Pickett in the taproom. “Would you believe, it turns out the ostler’s sister’s daughter is chambermaid to my aunt’s grandson?”

  “Imagine that,” Pickett said obligingly. Deprived of an extended family due to his ancestors’ propensity for ending their careers either languishing in a cell at Newgate or dangling from a noose on Tyburn Tree, he had never experienced the charm of finding previously unknown family connections in unexpected places.

  “I think I’ll step outside and blow a cloud before dinner,” said Mr. Colquhoun when the tankards were drained.

  Pickett suspected the magistrate was more interested in dredging up further mutual acquaintances, but he bade his mentor a good evening. For his own part, Pickett had a job to do, and before he began his investigations the next morning, he wished to become more familiar with the details of the letter that had summoned him northward. With this end in view, he left the taproom and would have sought his bedchamber, where he might study this correspondence in relative peace and quiet. But as he passed the counter, the innkeeper called out to him.

  “Mr. Pickett, sir!”

  “Yes? What is it?”

  “It appears we have only one room vacant tonight on account of the fine weather bringing all the anglers to the coast for a last bit of fishing ere the winter sets in. That being the case, I’ve taken the liberty of having your valise sent up to your wife’s room. I hope that’s agreeable.”

  “My—my wife, you say?”

  “Aye, Mrs. Pickett. You did say that was your name?” the innkeeper asked in some consternation.

  “Yes, that’s it.” Pickett darted a quick, bewildered glance up the staircase.

  “You’ll think me a regular noddy for not connecting the pair of you at once,” the innkeeper continued. “Truth to tell, I had the impression Mrs. Pickett was a widowed lady. Not that I’m not pleased to see you in such good health,” he added hastily.

  “No, that’s quite—quite all right,” Pickett assured him, wanting only to be rid of the man so that he might resolve the situation upstairs with the woman whom the innkeeper imagined to be his wife.

  And just when he had been noting the lack of people who shared his name! He wondered what sort of female he would find upstairs; a woman of a certain age, apparently, if the innkeeper had assumed her to be a widow. Pickett knew there were young men who married older widows as a way of advancing themselves in the world, but any affront he might have felt at being taken for one of their number was forgotten in the greater concern of placating an elderly widow who, upon discovering a man entering her room, might accuse him of having improper designs upon her person.

  Too late, he realized he should have spoken up at once and told the innkeeper he was unmarried, Pickett thought as he climbed the stairs. Since being promoted from the foot patrol, he had developed a habit of being quick to observe and slow to act. It was a practical course to take when conducting an investigation, but less so in other areas of life, as his present dilemma made plain. He continued up the stairs with a growing sense of dread until, reaching the top, he stopped before the room the innkeeper had indicated. He wished he might give the poor woman some advance warning by knocking first but, upon glancing back down the stairs, he saw that he was in full view of his host, who looked up at him expectantly. Taking a deep breath, he grasped the knob and opened the door.

  Just as he expected, a high-pitched shriek greeted his entrance, only to be bitten off at once as the lady recognized her unannounced caller. For instead of confronting an outraged dowager, he found himself face to face with the Viscountess Fieldhurst. She was clad in nothing but her shift and stays, and as his slightly dazed brain registered this interesting fact, she snatched up a pink dressing gown lying on the bed and clutched it to her bosom.

  “Mr. Pickett!”

  “My lady?” At any other time Pickett would have nobly turned his back on her déshabillé, but such was his sense of shock that gallantry fell by the wayside.

  “Sssh!” She started to raise a hand in warning but, as the dressing gown began to slip, apparently thought better of this maneuver. “You must not call me so! Shut the door, and I will explain everything.”

  Valiantly if belatedly turning away, Pickett closed the door and shot the bolt home. When he turned back to face her ladyship, he was both relieved and disappointed to discover that she had shrugged on the dressing gown and was in the process of tying the belt about her trim waist.

  “The innkeeper had my valise brought up to this room,” Pickett said, gesturing toward the worn leather bag at the foot of the bed.

  “Oh!” exclaimed her ladyship. “Is that yours? I confess, when I saw it there, I thought it must be Harold’s. He has so many, it has been difficult to keep up with them all.”

  “My lady,” Pickett said, conscious of having conceived a violent dislike for the unknown Harold, “the innkeeper seems to be laboring under the misapprehension that we are man and wife!”

  Lady Fieldhurst heaved a sigh. “An entirely reasonable assumption under the circumstances, I fear. It is a long story, Mr. Pickett, and one that does me no credit. Will you not sit down?”

  He took a seat on the room’s only straight chair while Lady Fieldhurst perched on the edge of the bed as if poised for flight. It was not the first time he had enjoyed a tête-à-tête with the lady; while investigating the Holl
ingshead incident in Yorkshire, he had posed as her footman and in that rôle had conferred with her privately, usually in her bedchamber, almost every day. Still, there had been subtle differences between those occurrences and this; for one thing, on all those other occasions, the viscountess had been fully clothed.

  “I suppose you must wonder why I am in Scotland when I was in London only three weeks ago,” she began, her fingers plucking at the quilted counterpane that covered the bed.

  “I—yes, I suppose I am.” While not uppermost in his thoughts, this home question was far better suited to polite conversation.

  “In fact, Mr. Pickett, I am in disgrace with my husband’s family—again!” she added with a rueful smile.

  “Are you indeed? And what did they find this time to offend them?”

  “Can you not guess? I had the effrontery to summon an Undesirable to the family box at Drury Lane!”

  “I see. I—I’m sorry,” Pickett said. “I should have declined your kind invitation.”

  She raised an ironic eyebrow. “In fact, you would prefer to offend me than to run afoul of the Bertrams!”

  “No, my lady!” exclaimed Pickett, aghast. “I only meant that I would not wish to be the cause of dissension between you and your husband’s relations.”

  “As it turns out, I cannot be sorry, for the incident did allow me to escape London for a time. I have been banished to Scotland, you see, with George and Caroline’s three sons in my care.”

  “Ah!” Pickett’s brow cleared at hearing her absence from the theatre so easily explained, to say nothing of the identity of the mysterious Harold. “Then that is why—” He broke off abruptly.

  “ ‘That is why’ what?” asked Lady Fieldhurst, puzzled.

  Pickett could hardly explain to her ladyship his haunting of Drury Lane Theatre, craning his neck for a glimpse of her in the boxes overlooking the pit. He shook his head. “Never mind. It wasn’t important. But why the false name?”

  Now it was her ladyship’s turn to be embarrassed. “As to that, Mr. Pickett, I am afraid I have behaved impulsively, with disastrous results! Harold Bertram, you see, has been having a most difficult time at school, given his sudden change in status. It is not easy for a young man to go from being the heir to a viscountcy to, er, having the legitimacy of his birth invalidated. On the journey north, he confided a wish that he might go someplace where he would be quite unknown. I confess to having had similar feelings myself over the past six months, and so, since the boys had never seen the sea, we decided on a whim to stop here. When Harold wished to further confound any potential gabble-mongers by using a false name, it seemed amusing at the time to grant his request. And since we needed a name that would be unknown in polite circles, I—well, I chose yours.”

  “Certainly unknown in polite circles,” agreed Pickett somewhat bitterly, more wounded than he cared to admit by this casual reminder of the differences in their respective stations. “My lady, you are more than welcome to make free with my name any time you may have need of it. Still, I’d best go downstairs and square things with the innkeeper. I believe all the rooms are full, but I’m sure Mr. Colquhoun won’t object to putting me up.”

  He rose and would have suited the word to the deed, but she clutched at his sleeve. “Wait! Perhaps I could help you with your investigation, as I did in Yorkshire.”

  Pickett shook his head. “That was different. You were embroiled in that case from the first. I can’t implicate you in this one.”

  “Can’t implicate me?” Lady Fieldhurst echoed, torn between exasperation and amusement. “My dear Mr. Pickett, who do you think it was who discovered the body?”

  Pickett fell back onto his chair with a thud. “Do you mean to tell me it was you who found the mysterious woman on the beach?”

  “Since I am convinced that absolute honesty is imperative when dealing with an officer of the law, I must confess it was Edward, George’s youngest, who was first on the scene,” admitted her ladyship.

  Finding this particular officer of the law temporarily bereft of speech, she added, “So, since it appears I am already involved in the case, you might as well take advantage of whatever help I am able to offer.” She smiled. “We made a rather good team in Yorkshire, did we not?”

  Yes, they had made a very good team, particularly on that one occasion when they’d been obliged to rifle Sir Gerald Hollingshead’s desk in search of incriminating papers. They had been interrupted at this task and, in an attempt to offer some explanation for their presence in an apparently locked room in the middle of the night, had allowed themselves to be discovered in a passionate embrace. Thrusting the memory to the back of his mind (whence it would no doubt return that night to haunt his dreams), Pickett forced himself to concentrate on the present predicament.

  “I’ll not deny your assistance was invaluable, my lady, but I cannot ask you to pose as my wife for the next fortnight.”

  “Why not? If I remember correctly, you posed as my footman.”

  “I’ll admit I am no expert on the subject, having never been married, but it seems to me there is a great deal of difference between a footman and a husband!”

  “Nonsense! It is not as if we must actually share the same room. You may come to my room to give me instructions as to what you wish me to discover, or to hear what I have learned, and then go back to Mr. Colquhoun’s room to sleep once everyone in the inn has settled down for the night. No one need be the wiser.”

  “And what of the boys—George’s sons?”

  “Robert and Edward are too young to suspect any impropriety. Depend upon it, to them the whole thing will seem a great lark!”

  “And the eldest? Harold?”

  Her brow puckered as she pondered the problem of Harold. “Harold is eighteen—certainly old enough to assume the worst, but unless I am very much mistaken, he will be too caught up in his own affairs to spare us a second thought.” Seeing his puzzled expression, she added, “Harold, it seems, has conceived a violent tendre for the fair Miss Kirkbride.”

  Pickett’s expression devolved from merely puzzled to utterly bewildered. “Is the daughter of the house so young, then? Did she disappear as an infant? Mr. Kirkbride’s letter gave me to understand that she was much older.”

  “Oh, she is thirty if she is a day! But it was bound to happen: a beautiful, mysterious woman unconscious on the beach, a damsel in distress in need of rescue—I daresay it was almost inevitable that poor Harold should succumb.”

  “And Harold is, what did you say? Eighteen? Whether the woman is who she says she is or not, it will end badly for him.”

  “Oh, certainly! But tell me, Mr. Pickett, did you never in your misspent youth conceive a grand passion for a wholly ineligible female?”

  A rueful smile twisted his lips. “Once.”

  “So have we all, I believe. When I was fourteen, I was desperately in love with my dancing master.”

  When she was fourteen, Pickett was twelve, and was serving an apprenticeship of sorts, supplementing his father’s earnings (if one could call them that) by picking gentlemen’s pockets in Covent Garden. He’d had no thought to spare for the fair sex, all his efforts being concentrated on outwitting—or outrun-ning—the constable. No, his own impossible attachment was of much more recent date.

  “Harold will survive, as we all do, and will be the wiser for the experience,” Lady Fieldhurst continued. “In fact, if you can persuade him to take you into his confidence, you might find his insights useful.”

  Privately, Pickett thought it more likely that a young man with a severe case of calf-love might be far more inclined to darken the daylights of anyone imprudent enough to cast aspersions on his ladylove’s character. He made a mental note to choose his words with care when discussing the woman in Harold’s presence, and to keep a circumspect distance between himself and that enamoured young man’s fists. At the moment, however, he had a more pressing matter to attend to. Mr. Colquhoun would be finishing his pipe at any moment, and Picket
t would have to break the news to him, first, that they would be sharing a room; second, that he had acquired a “wife”; and third, that the wife in question was the very same Lady Fieldhurst of whom the magistrate so strongly disapproved.

  “I’d best find Mr. Colquhoun and inform him how things stand before he says something to queer our pitch,” Pickett said, crossing the room to the door. “Is there some time and place where I may speak privately with you and the boys? I should like to hear about how the woman was discovered.”

  Lady Fieldhurst thought for a moment, then put forward a suggestion. “I am sure nothing could be more natural than a pleasant family stroll along the beach after dinner. We should be able to walk there and back before dark, and the pounding of the waves will make it possible for us to speak without being overheard.”

  “Excellent! By the bye, how am I related to the boys? Are they all named Pickett, too?”

  “Indeed, they are. And as they are supposed to be my nephews, I daresay you must have an elder brother whom you have quite forgotten.”

  “Of course—how could I be so careless?” Pickett asked, entering into the spirit of the thing. “But then, George and I were never close.”

  She smiled but made no response to this sally, instead addressing the more serious aspects of their charade. “I suppose you had best leave your valise here for the sake of appearances.

  Perhaps you can transfer its contents under cover of darkness to the clothes-press in Mr. Colquhoun’s room. I hope he will not be too put out by having to share.”

  Mr. Pickett bade her farewell until their rendezvous after dinner, but inwardly he was convinced that the magistrate would have the room to himself after all. For once he learns how things stand, Pickett thought, he’s going to kill me.

  CHAPTER 6

  IN WHICH JOHN PICKETT’S

  INVESTIGATIONS BEGIN

  * * *

  Pickett had no difficulty in identifying the magistrate’s room by the sight of that gentleman’s well-travelled trunk placed in the corridor just outside the door. He rapped on the panel and, upon hearing Mr. Colquhoun’s voice bid him enter, opened the door and stepped inside.