The Constant Companion

by M C Beaton

  And having felt that he had discovered the reason for Constance’s flight, he plunged bitterly into all his old familiar sports and pastimes.

  By the second week of Constance’s disappearance, London Society had found something else to talk about. Lord Philip did not even know that the urgent note summoning him to go to his sister’s in Kensington that night had been a forgery. He had arrived at the villa and had said abruptly, “I believe you wished to see me on some urgent matter?” And Lady Eleanor, who considered all of her business urgent, had found nothing amiss, and had proceeded to bore him with a long dissertation on how she hoped to get Mr. Rider elected to Parliament.

  He loved Constance, and he hated her. At times he prayed he would never see her again so that he could get over his pain, and at others he longed to hold her in his arms so that he could choke the life out of her.

  He barricaded his feelings behind a facade of impeccable dress and chilly manners. He had his long hair cut short in the new Brutus crop, and broke more hearts than he had ever done before.

  But time did not ease his hurt. It only built up a picture in his mind of a leering, cunning, laughing Constance who had stolen his jewels and his heart and his best friend.

  He was dressing one afternoon to go out. It was now four weeks since the disappearance of his wife and he was carefully “putting on his armor,” as his valet sadly described it to Masters. Cravat tied in the Mathematical, coat of Bath superfine, striped waistcoat, doeskin trousers moulded to his long legs, and glossy Hessians, so brilliant that if he stared at his toes he could see the distorted reflection of his white and bitter face.

  His valet was flicking a brush across his shoulders when Masters appeared in the doorway of his dressing room.

  “Mr. Potter has called, my lord,” said Masters, his face like wood. For the servants had learned from Mr. Potter’s servants that Mr. Potter had disappeared on the night of my lady’s disappearance, and had put one and one together, making two.

  “What!” Lord Philip swung around so violently that he struck the brush from the valet’s hand.

  “Mr. Potter, my lord,” repeated Masters.

  Lord Philip took a deep breath.

  He strode from the room and slowly descended the stairs.

  Peter was sitting in the dark drawing room, happily sipping Madeira and turning the glass round and round in his fingers. He was busy composing a poem while he waited and was suddenly brought forcibly back to the present as the point of a sword pressed into his neck. He stared up, looking more foolish and sheepish than ever, along a yard of cold steel to the blazing green eyes of Lord Philip Cautry.

  “Where is my wife?”

  Peter blinked, and gingerly took the steel between finger and thumb and tried to push it away.

  “I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “I’ve only just got back. Are you trying to kill me, Philip?”

  “I will, an you don’t tell me the doxy’s whereabouts,” grated Lord Philip.

  “Steady on,” said Peter, feeling the point of the rapier scraping his neck. “I don’t know.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “At Channelhurst,” said Peter. “My aunt died, you know, the one I told you about. Left me a packet. What on earth is up with you?”

  Philip lowered the sword, feeling suddenly weary. As he stared down at his friend’s amiable face, he wondered how he could possibly believe Peter guilty of any treachery.

  “I must be going mad,” he cried, sitting down in the chair opposite. In a low voice, he told Peter what had happened.

  Peter took out his quizzing glass, and began to poke it inside one of his shoes. Then he took the straps of his pantaloons, and began to tug at them one after the other until one of them snapped, and his trouser leg, released from its mooring, began to slowly climb up his leg, revealing a canary yellow stocking embroidered with a bird of paradise.

  “You are going mad,” he said at last. “It’s Constance, we’re talking about. Sweetest little girl I ever met. She couldn’t do a thing like that. Why should she? She had all the money in the world as Lady Philip.”

  “I thought she had gone off with you,” exclaimed Philip. “God, what a fool…”

  “Off with me?” Peter’s mouth fell open, and he finally closed it again by shoving the knob of his cane under his chin.

  “Yes, you. I thought perhaps… well, I was very fond of her father, but there’s no denying the Lambertons are a wild lot, and…”

  “You’ve got windmills in your head. When it comes to that old family name of yours, Philip, you become a different person. You’re much too high in the instep for your own good. You’re still ashamed of having married Constance because you might have had a duke’s daughter. Come, now. Admit it! Didn’t it ever cross your mind that something might have happened to her? Someone might have been getting money out of her for some reason? After all, someone did try to kill her on her wedding day.…”

  Philip suddenly remembered the Comte Duval, and despite his promises of secrecy to the gentlemen of the Foreign Office, decided he must tell Peter.

  “So you see,” ended Philip, “it was pretty fishy. She only caught bits of it but she remembered ‘trahison’ and ‘espion’—traitor and spy. The comte and his friend may have thought she understood what was said and was going to blab about it some time or t’other.”

  “Well, now you think about it, he may have been behind her disappearance, so what do we do?” said Peter, sitting up.

  Lord Philip gave a nasty smile. “Why,” he said gently, “we will do what I should have done a long time ago. We shall go round and pay a call on the Comte Duval—and if he has any information at all, we shall choke it out of him.”

  The comte lived in a narrow house in Half Moon Street. Lord Philip and Peter noticed with sinking hearts that the knocker was off the door and the blinds were drawn. The day was slightly chilly, and a small red sun peered through a haze of smoky cloud high above the city. A Punch and Judy man was entertaining a group of servants at the end of the street, and the shrill voice of Judy berating Punch cackled over the cobblestones. At the other end of the street, out of sight, a barrel organ was murdering the music of the young Rossini.

  The pair gloomily surveyed the house, and Philip was about to turn away when his eye caught the twitch of a blind on one of the upper floors.

  He whispered something to Peter who nodded, and then they walked off down the street.

  Through a chink in the blind, the Comte Duval watched them go. He had known the game was up when he had been seated next to Sir Augustus Curtis at dinner last night. Sir Augustus Curtis was a prominent member of the Foreign Office. He had barely been able to bring himself to speak to the comte, and at one point during the dinner, when the comte had teasingly laid a hand on Sir Augustus’s arm, that gentleman had jerked his arm away, and had carefully dusted his sleeve with his lace handkerchief as if the very touch of the comte was contaminating. So they suspected him. They certainly had no proof. But it was time to leave. He had dismissed all his servants, sold his carriages and horses at Tattersall’s, and put his property up for sale at Garroway’s coffee house in the City. A small portmanteau, his only luggage, lay strapped on the floor. He would wait a few minutes to make sure that accursed pair had well and truly left, and then take a hack to Ludgate Hill and then from there travel by stagecoach to the coast.

  He crept quietly downstairs through the deserted empty house and stood behind the front door. Punch’s squeaky voice at one end of the street mingled with the strains of The Italian Girl in Algiers from the other.

  Rapid footsteps approached the house and he waited, holding his breath, only to let it out in a gasp of relief as the footsteps went on past the house.

  He cautiously opened the front door a crack, and then stared down at the reflection of his face in a glossy Hessian boot which had been thrust into the crack in the door.

  In the next minute Lord Philip Cautry had forced his way in, followed by Peter Potter.
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  The comte backed off up the shadowy hall, a smile pasted on his thin rouged lips. “Ah, it is only you, Cautry,” he said, pleased to note that his voice was steady. “I thought footpads had found their way in.”

  “Where’s Constance?” said Philip in a cool pleasant voice, which was somehow more frightening than if he had screamed.

  “Your wife? Why should I know the whereabouts of your wife?” smiled the comte. “Come, man, relax and have some wine with me. Your family tragedy has turned your head.”

  Philip looked at him. “Constance overheard you talking to someone at my sister’s. No, she didn’t know French, but she memorized some of the words and caught the words ‘traitor’ and ‘spy.’

  “Of course she did,” laughed the comte, very much at his ease. “I was discussing the sad business of traitorous spies working in this country for Napoleon Bonaparte.”

  Philip felt his heart sink. Then to his surprise, he heard Peter saying in a light voice, “Oh, really, my dear comte. Fanny Braintree told us all. We know everything down to the last document she stole from her father’s desk.

  “Lies,” said the comte weakly, but Philip noticed his face had gone chalky white under his paint.

  Surprising both men, the comte darted for the stairs and began to run up them as fast as he could. Philip and Peter bounded in pursuit.

  The comte fled upwards, but knowing there was no escape. An image of the gallows at Tyburn flashed before his eyes. He darted into a bedroom on the second floor and slammed the door, leaning against it, panting, and hearing the heavy thud of footsteps running up to the door outside. He turned the key in the lock and ran to the window and hauled it up. The sun had disappeared and long yellow fingers of fog were beginning to creep along the streets. The door behind him shook as Philip threw his weight against it. Like most people, the comte credited everyone with his own sins. He had tortured and beaten many a victim in his checkered past, and he felt sure there would be little of him left to hang on the gallows by the time Lord Philip was finished with him.

  With a final ear-splitting crack the door gave behind him. With a great cry he flung himself from the window and his body hurtled down to the cobbles and lay still, looking like the lifeless puppets on the counter of the now finished Punch and Judy show.

  Philip and Peter ran out into the street and slowly turned the comte over. Blood was pouring from a wound in his head and his breath was coming in rapid, fluttering sighs.

  Philip knelt down beside him.

  “Where is Constance?” he said. “What have you done with her?”

  The comte’s black eyes slowly opened, their dying light enlivened by a faint flicker of malice.

  “In… the… river. Dead,” he said. He choked and a stream of blood gushed from his mouth over the cobbles, and the little gleam of malice in his eyes flared up triumphantly and then died.

  “He’s dead,” said Peter, pulling Philip away.

  “And so is she,” muttered Philip. “How shall I live without her now, Peter? How shall I live with myself?”

  The news of the comte’s perfidy was all over London next day. Peter saw to that. Constance was exonerated. Lady Amelia tried to spread gossip that Constance had been the Comte Duval’s mistress and found herself socially ostracized as a result—her dear friend, Mary Besant, making sure everyone knew from whence the rumor had hailed. Dismal, chilly fog lay over the streets of London as if it had come to stay forever. Summer had gone and there had been very little autumn, only a hurried descent into the depths of winter.

  Lord Philip’s tall figure dressed from head to foot in mourning black became a familiar figure in the streets of London as he walked and walked and walked, only returning to his home late at night to fall into an exhausted and nightmare-ridden sleep.

  His grief was aggravated by a persistent feeling that Constance was not dead—that somewhere among all these dark and twisting and fogbound streets, he would find her. Perhaps around the next corner, his mind would torment him.

  One night, he wearily returned from one of these long walks and climbed slowly to his room. He was suddenly obsessed with the idea that Constance might have left some clue, some message for him. He had ordered her rooms to be left untouched and, since Bouchard, the lady’s maid, had left shortly after Constance’s disappearance, no one had been near them.

  He walked along the corridor and pushed open the door. All was just as she had left it. Lying on the bed, he saw the frivolous dress and bonnet he had taken objection to. If only she were alive and well, she could wear any damn bonnet in the whole of the world! Overcome with sadness and weariness and loss, he picked up her dress and buried his face in the soft folds. He drew back and stared at the dress with a puzzled frown on his face. Instead of Constance’s faint perfume, there was a stale, rank smell of sweat from the dress. Well, it had been a hot day. Still, he frowned, picking up the bonnet and turning it over in his long fingers. Sticking to the inside of the gauze was one reddish brown hair.

  He sat down on the bed and stared at it. Constance’s hair was midnight black. But where had he seen that color of hair before? And then he remembered the lady’s maid, Bouchard. He rang for Masters.

  No, Masters could not recall the mamselle saying she had found new employ. She had just packed her bags and left, which had seemed natural as her job was redundant.…

  Lord Philip looked thoughtfully at the butler.

  “Where did we find Bouchard?” he asked. “Did you employ her?”

  Masters thought for a long moment. “No, my lord. As I recall, it was Mr. Evans who employed her. If you remember, my lord, the day before your lordship’s wedding, you said as how my lady would need a maid. I could not promise to find anyone suitable at such short notice, and your lordship said you would ask Mr. Evans to engage someone.”

  Lord Philip pulled out his watch. Past midnight. He could not go calling at this late hour. He would just have to wait until the morning.

  “Tell me, Masters,” he said. “On the day my wife disappeared, you said she returned to the house.”

  “Yes, my lord,” said Masters surprised. “I told…”

  “Did you see her face?” demanded Philip harshly.

  “Well, no, my lord,” said Masters. “That bonnet you’re holding concealed her face.”

  “Go rouse the coachman,” said Philip, “and bring the groom who was on the back strap that day.”

  He waited impatiently while the servants were ushered in.

  The coachman and groom could not remember whether they had seen my lady’s face or not. “But you heard her speak?” demanded Philip in exasperation, “after she left my sister’s house, that is.”

  The coachman’s great brow was furrowed in thought. Philip felt like shaking him. But it was the groom who answered, a sharp-eyed Cockney.

  “My lady didn’t say nuffink,” he said (“my lord,” prompted Masters in a scandalized whisper). “It was that there Mr. Evans who told us for to take my lady home… me lord,” said the groom, “being as how she was feeling poorly.”

  Philip took a deep breath. “Now I want all of you to think hard,” he said. “Could the female you took home have been Bouchard masquerading as my lady?”

  A shocked silence greeted this. The groom again spoke first. “I dunno,” he said. “But there was something, not much…”

  “Yes?” said Philip impatiently.

  “I didn’t like ’er,” said the groom. “I felt I didn’t like that there lady in the carriage. I thought the ’eat must’ve got to me brain ’cos I like ’er ladyship but that there lady… I dunno… Course I thought it was the ’eat, like, cos I never thought for a moment it wasn’t my lady, ’er with that there bonnet and all.”

  “I will call on Mr. Evans in the morning,” said Lord Philip grimly. “Not a word of this to anyone.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Lady Eleanor seemed startled at her brother’s urgent request the next day to speak to Mr. Evans. The secretary was out, somewhere in t
he City, with Mr. Rider. Both would be returning in time for her musicale that afternoon.

  Philip went in search of Peter to tell his friend of the latest developments. He finally found Peter just as that gentleman was emerging from the elegant portals of White’s in St. James’s Street. Peter was looking exceedingly fine in a double-breasted redingote with a satin collar. A curly-brimmed beaver sat at a rakish angle on his thick fair hair, and his hussar leather boots gleamed like twin mirrors. The day was raw and chilly, and Peter had his hands thrust into an enormous sealskin muff.

  They elected to go to the Wanderers Club, a new and not so fashionable establishment on the fringe of St. James’s. They settled themselves in the chart room, confident that they would not be disturbed. The rest of the club was empty with the exception of a bunch of Cits playing a tepid game of hazard in the card room.

  “Evans!” exclaimed Peter. “It can’t be Evans. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “I agree,” said Philip, “but he could be easily tricked. Anyway, my sister’s house is the last place Constance was seen. Before I tackle Evans, I want you to keep him in conversation while I search through his rooms. You know, Peter, I’m so sick and worried and the whole trouble is that I can’t believe she’s dead. Sometimes I think I’m losing my mind. I am losing my mind. There’s two green eyes staring at me out of your muff.”

  Peter had placed his muff on a small adjoining table. As both men watched, the muff appeared to take on a life of its own and rolled slowly over.

  Peter picked it up and shook it. A large tabby cat rolled out, stretched itself, and then proceeded to wash with aristocratic indifference.

  “The kitchen cat,” said Peter in disgust. “It gets everywhere.”

  “Do you mean you’ve been carrying that great mangy thing around in your muff and didn’t know it?” said Philip.

  “Well, it’s odd now you mention it,” said Peter looking thoughtfully at the cat. “I thought it felt unusually soft and warm and heavy. It must have been sleeping the whole time. By Jove, I remember thinking, these muffs are so cunning you would almost think they were breathing. And then, of course at White’s, I didn’t take off my hat or gloves or anything because it’s not the thing to do unless you’re staying longer than ten minutes, which I wasn’t. Amazingly clever brute that. I had better go home and change for your sister’s musicale. At least it ain’t a rout. Never can see anyone at routs. All push and shove on the stairs to get in, and push and shove to get out and the hostess doesn’t feel it’s been a success unless several people have fainted in the crush, and some poor fellow’s carriage has got shattered in the traffic outside.”