Murder While I Smile

by Joan Smith

  Corinne’s lips tensed in derision. Just what had Chamaude done with that by-blow Luten mentioned, if not put it out for adoption? There was no sign of it in the house. As to Carlton House, she would be there as fast as a dog could trot if she had been invited. She had not been so coquettish when Yarrow was present.

  “Claret,” Lady Chamaude said, when the wine arrived. “That is what you English gentlemen like, I think?” She cast another of those speaking glances at Luten and directed her next speech to him. “It is made with cabernet sauvignon grapes for vigor, and merlot for softness and suppleness.” Her velvet voice fairly purred the last words. “I am coming to know, a leetle, what pleases English gentlemen.”

  “You always d—” Luten’s eyes flickered uncertainly to Corinne, who was listening like a spy. “I’m sure you do, Yvonne,” he said.

  Corinne’s anger simmered hotter. Did! “You always did!” That was what he was going to say.

  Over the wine, the comtesse tried a few more lures on Luten. With his fiancée playing chaperon, nothing came of them.

  Sir Reginald asked her if she knew of any paintings of King Arthur for sale, in an effort to hear more praise of his Rondeaux.

  “Alas, no,” she said, “but I shall make a few inquiries if you are interested, Sir Reginald.” Then she recalled the Rondeaux and added, “But of course, you would be interested in that subject, on which you are such an expert.”

  “What of the Watteau in the hall?” Luten asked.

  “I should dislike to part with it,” she said with a sad sigh. “As I am trying to accumulate money to buy a house, however, I could not refuse if a truly ... interesting offer were made.” Her eyes smoldered into Luten’s. A sudden silence descended on the room.

  Corinne could take no more. She set aside her wine and said, “Shall we go now, Luten? You have not forgotten we are going for a drive?”

  “My picture,” Coffen said. “Ah, here it is now. Dandy.” The butler appeared, carrying the painting, now wrapped in plain brown paper. “Then we’re off?”

  “Must you leave so soon?” the hostess asked with a pretty little moue. “You haven’t finished your wine.”

  “We really must be off. Thank you so much,” Corinne said.

  Coffen emptied his glass, smacked his lips, and nodded to the butler to carry the painting out to the carriage.

  “Well, what do you think of her?” Prance asked eagerly, as the carriage lurched away.

  “I think she is a hussy!” Corinne said angrily. “She practically threw herself at you, Luten.”

  “We used to be friends, some years ago.”

  “The thing is,” Coffen said, “she don’t know you two are engaged. She likely took the notion Prance is your fellow, Corinne, as you came twice with him. Mean to say, there was no engagement notice in the journals.”

  “I shall tell her, the next time I visit,” Sir Reginald said, happy to have discovered a reason for the comtesse’s lack of interest in himself.

  “You’re not going back there, Reg!” Corinne exclaimed. “What on earth for? You can’t possibly hope to bring a trollop like that into fashion.”

  “I’m going because she is obviously on the lookout for a new patron, goose.”

  “I can’t believe men are so gullible.” As Luten was wearing his stiff face, she decided to say no more on the subject.

  “The comtesse appreciated my Rondeaux,” Sir Reg said, smiling contentedly. “And by the by, Luten, I have not heard your verdict.”

  “Oh, admirable, Prance. I was highly impressed with your grasp of the subject. Shall we go on the strut on Bond Street and check out the bookshops?”

  Corinne suspected this was suggested to avoid being alone with her. She hadn’t seen him for over two weeks, and the minute he got home, he went pelting off to visit Chamaude, then to waste the afternoon walking on Bond Street with Reg and Coffen. It was really too bad of him. She had displayed quite enough jealousy for one day, however, and pretended to be happy.

  “Yes, let’s,” she said, with well-feigned pleasure. “And tonight we are to go to Carlton House. Pity you were not invited, Luten, but we shan’t stay long.” She waited, hoping to hear an objection. Luten just nodded.

  “Did any of you receive the invitation?” Coffen asked, looking at the others.

  “Not I,” Prance said.

  “No, nor did I,” Corinne said. “Do you think Yarrow forgot to tell Prinney?”

  “They wouldn’t come in the post,” Luten said. “They’ll be delivered by a royal footman. They’ve probably arrived by now.”

  “What will you do while we’re gone, Luten?” Corinne asked in a seemingly casual way.

  “What else but wait on pins and needles for your return, my beloved?”

  Luten was not given to flowery speeches, except in derision. His facetious reply goaded her into ill humor.

  “Why, I thought you might take the opportunity to renew your friendship with the comtesse,” she said, smiling snidely.

  “From the way you were staring at us, I thought you realized I had already done that.”

  Prance would normally have enjoyed this little altercation, but his mind was on other things. “We are on Piccadilly,” he said. “Let us get out and stop at Hatchard’s.”

  He was eager to look at the window of London’s premier bookshop and see what was on display. He had a dreadful foreboding it would be Childe Harold.

  Chapter Five

  To facilitate the distribution of free copies of the Rondeaux, they descended from the carriage and strolled along Piccadilly. Each member of the Berkeley Brigade carried one book as they proceeded toward their inevitable destination, Hatchard’s bookshop. As they approached the bow window, Prance drew a little ahead of the others.

  When they reached him, he was standing like a statue, frozen in consternation, with his nose perilously close to being pressed against the windowpane. They were soon in possession of the cause. The entire window was filled with copies of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Corinne instinctively put a hand on his arm to comfort him in his distress. This was poorly done of the bookshop. If Prance’s Rondeaux were not considered worth promoting, what of other authors? Were Scott and Rogers, Southey and Wordsworth and Coleridge, not worth a few inches? What of the ladies, Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth? She cast a beseeching eye on Luten.

  She had come to learn that under his veneer of haughtiness and sophistication there beat the softest heart in London. He was one of the driving forces of the Whigs, not because he wanted to make a great name for himself, but because he genuinely believed that the underprivileged deserved a better lot in life. He revealed no lack of ease at enjoying to the fullest the perquisites and pleasures of his position, but at the bottom of his heart there must rest some feeling that he didn’t really deserve them.

  When he spoke of politics to her, it was the usual party line of ousting Mouldy and Company. It was only in odd moments when he was off his guard that he let slip little things about the conditions in the rookeries and prisons and almshouses. He had visited them all. He knew firsthand the trials of society’s misfortunates. She often puzzled over this strange admixture of pride and genuine concern for others.

  Luten would spare no pains to aid the distressed, and when the distressed party was one of his own brigade, he would move heaven and bend earth. And he would not make a public display of his kindness either. He seemed almost ashamed of it.

  One glance at Prance’s drooping shoulders and Luten determined on the spot that he would return later and speak to the proprietor. Whatever number of copies was required to make a success, he would buy them, and get Prance’s work into that window. The tricky bit would be concealing the purchase from the others.

  “This is only one shop,” he said dismissingly to Prance.

  “Too kind, my dear Luten, but we all know this is the shop. I mean to say, where is the glory in being sold in the stalls? You may find Mrs. Radcliffe’s gothic novels there, along with chapbooks. There is
nothing else for it. I must shoot off a toe and take up limping.”

  “That would hardly make the Rondeaux more interesting,” Luten replied. “Not that they aren’t plenty interesting enough,” he added hastily, when Prance squinted at him.

  “Did you really find them interesting?” Prance asked with pathetic eagerness.

  “Certainly I did.”

  “They are fascinating,” Corinne lied earnestly.

  Coffen, with an equally kind heart but less finesse, stared from Luten to Corinne with a wrinkled brow.

  “What did you think of my characterization of the dux bellorum? Both of you. The truth, now.”

  “Very interesting,” Luten said, with an earnest frown, as if recalling various intriguing details.

  “I tried to give him a broad interpretation,” Prance said, his face assuming a professional air that threatened expansion of his favorite theme.

  “I was just a little uncertain,” Coffen said, for he didn’t want to make a faux pas in his praise, “was it Arthur you meant by the dux bellorum? It might have been clearer if you had called him King Arthur.”

  “Bah! You are biased by the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Total fiction.”

  “Geoffrey Monmouth, you say? Can’t say I ever heard of the fellow.”

  Luten said, “We don’t know that the whole story isn’t fiction. Surely it is myth, or legend.”

  Prance shook his head at their abysmal ignorance. “The Arthur you were expecting is the product of the French Middle Ages. Arthur is much older than that. My research goes back to Nennius, the Historia Britonum, a ninth-century compilation. According to Nennius, Arthur was, in fact, a mercenary. Nothing but a professional soldier.”

  “That don’t add much to the romance,” Coffen said.

  “It adds considerably to the authenticity!” Prance snapped. “It is only the French, and of course, the Welsh, who transform Arthur into a man of miracles and marvels, slaying monsters and shooting the boar.”

  “I noticed all that sort of thing was missing from the Rondeaux,” Coffen said. “It’s all arguments between leaders before the battles, then the actual battles.”

  “Naturally I tried to include some parallels to our Peninsular War, to give the works a modern meaning. I saw the dux bellorum as a symbol for our Wellington.”

  “How clever!” Corinne said. She saw he was enjoying himself and decided to indulge him with a question. “I am halfway through the book, Reg, and I have not read anything of the Round Table yet,” she said with a questioning look.

  “That is more nonsense!” Prance cried, his ire rising at this familiar complaint. “There was no mention of a Round Table until Wace’s Roman de Brut. A French author! Then Layamon, cribbing from Wace, came up with the actual carpenter and implied dimensions of the table. The table held more than sixteen hundred men. It’s ridiculous. I did the arithmetic. Do you know what the diameter of such a table would be?”

  “Nope,” Coffen said, scratching his ear and glancing along the street in a way that implied he was ready to move on.

  “One thousand and nineteen feet. That is the diameter, mind, not the circumference, and it allows only two feet apiece at a conference. This is scarcely room for a chair. Not that they had chairs at the time. At three feet each, and some of them must have been fat, the diameter would be over fifteen hundred feet. There isn’t a room in all of England big enough to hold such a table.”

  “You might squeeze it into Westminster Abbey, or Saint Paul’s,” Coffen said, in an effort to be helpful. “I never thought poetry would take so much arithmetic.”

  Luten and Corinne exchanged a look. Her lips moved unsteadily.

  Luten said, “Perhaps you are too literal, Reg. Poetic license, you know ...”

  “Need a license to write rhymes, do you?” Coffen asked. “Another dodge to squeeze money out of the taxpayer.”

  “I was just giving you a notion how unreliable later accounts are,” Prance said, high on his dignity. “It was perfectly clear to me there never was such a thing as a Round Table.”

  “Now, there you’re wrong. My mama has one at home,” Coffen said.

  Prance threw up his hands in defeat. “You are a disgrace to the mother who bore you, Pattle.”

  Coffen’s blue eyes snapped. “I’ll thank you to leave my mama out of this. And besides, she never bores me. She’s dashed interesting. More interesting than your dashed dux bellorum.”

  Corinne darted in to forestall a nasty exchange. “If there was no Round Table, Reg, why did you call your poem the Round Table Rondeaux?

  “It is called a metaphor,” he said icily. “I see you ignored the footnotes.”

  “I hate footnotes,” Coffen muttered into his collar.

  Prance ignored him. “There is no head to a Round Table. It was a meeting of equals, of which Arthur was one, and not a king. He was a dux bellorum. I expect they sat on the ground with a fire in the middle for roasting wild boar. No one mentioned a Round Table before Wace, and that I do know.”

  “Speaking of wild boar, ain’t it time for fork work?” Coffen said, but no one paid him any heed.

  “Well, this is very interesting, Reggie. I’m glad you explained about the metaphor,” Corinne said. “I hope you aren’t going to rob us of the legend of Guinevere and Lancelot.” That, and her feelings for Reggie, were all that kept her plodding through the dreadful book.

  “Why should I drag in that hussy? The real meaning of the work is the search for the Holy Grail. Guinevere was a mere distraction.”

  Coffen scowled. “Then why did you call it a romance of the Middle Ages, raising hopes—”

  “You surely didn’t think I had written a maudlin love story! I meant a romance in the true sense—chivalry, adventure, stirring deeds.”

  “Of course. That was obtuse of you, Coffen,” Corinne said, with a warning look.

  “But you found it interesting?’ Prance asked, turning again to Luten and Corinne.

  “Very interesting,” they both agreed, and could not for the life of them come up with another complimentary adjective. “Scholarly,” Luten finally said in desperation, as Prance was eagerly waiting for more praise.

  “Exactly!” Prance smiled. “I did a deal of research, winnowing the wheat from the chaff.”

  “Superb research,” Luten said. “But perhaps—”

  “I knew there would be a but!”

  “Never mind. It’s nothing.”

  “No, let me hear your thoughts. I want your true opinion.”

  “Perhaps, for nonscholars, you know, a little chaff would have lightened the hard kernels of fact, since it was couched in the poetic idiom. Something to stir the emotions and imagination. Only if you are interested in a wide sale, of course, such as Byron is enjoying.”

  “We who are not so intellectually inclined as you, like a little circus along with our bread,” Corinne ventured.

  “Byron is certainly providing the circus,” Prance snipped.

  And Prance, in her opinion, had provided a great lump of unleavened bread.

  “Here come a couple of likely recipients,” Prance said, as he spotted two bucks walking toward them. Their closely fitting blue jackets, fawn trousers, and sprigged waistcoats proclaimed their status as gentlemen of fashion. Both wore curled beaver hats, York tan gloves, and Hessians.

  The gentlemen were Robert Marchant and Peter Inwood, both MPs holding Tory seats in the House of Commons from rotten boroughs in the West, while endeavoring to win acclaim in Parliament. Marchant was a self-consequential sprig of a noble family, with no title of his own. He was tall and blond, with a voice in training for perorations to his fellow members in the House.

  Inwood was shorter, darker, more handsome, less sure of himself, and more likable. The young men drew to a stop in front of Hatchard’s and were presented to Lady deCoventry.

  “Prance, are you sunk to handing out copies of your Rondeaux on street corners?” Marchant asked with a smirk.

  “You’ll have to buy
a copy if you want one, Marchant,” Luten replied, even as Prance’s hand moved forward. “These copies are spoken for. If you hurry, you might get one before they’re all taken.”

  “Both copies?” Marchant replied waggishly.

  “Where could I get one?” Inwood asked, with apparent sincerity. “I’ve always been interested in King Arthur.”

  The solecism of mistaking the dux bellorum for King Arthur was noted, but forgiven. “You can have this one,” Prance said, handing it over. “I have a spare copy in the carriage.”

  “I daresay you can spare me a copy as well,” Marchant said, glancing at the copies each of them carried, and biting back a grin.

  “Afraid not,” Luten said.

  Inwood opened the book and began leafing through it. It was enough encouragement for Prance, who immediately began to speak of dux bellorum.

  Marchant turned aside in disdain and said to Luten, “Where are you folks off to on this fine day?”

  “To call on the Countess de Lieven, who is eager to receive this copy of Prance’s book,” he lied. “And you?”

  “Inwood and I have a very important meeting this afternoon. We have been assigned to a special project of the Ordnance Committee, under the secretary for war.”

  “Meeting before the House sits to prevent us Whigs keeping an eye on you, eh?” Luten said, only half joking.

  “The world doesn’t stop wagging because some of the members want a long summer vacation, milord,” Marchant replied

  “Any news from the Peninsula? I’ve been out of town for a spell.”

  “Not what Grey and Grenville and you Whigs would like to hear. We’re not pulling out of Spain and Portugal to let Bonaparte bestride the world like a colossus. We thank Lady Hertford for Prinney’s support,” he added with a lecherous laugh. “She is a staunch Tory, of course. The prince’s carriage is at her door in Manchester Square every afternoon. He will hear what he ought to hear there, no fear.”