An Unseen Attraction

by KJ Charles

  It was not possible that Edmund had contracted a bigamous relationship and fathered a bastard on the marquess’s daughter he had wed with such pomp. It was not conceivable that any Taillefer could have abused the family name that Clem had been raised to regard with reverence. It was not bearable that he was implicated by blood in events that had hurt Rowley.

  It was all wrong and awful and incomprehensible, so much so that Clem was still chasing his thoughts in miserable little circles when the clocks chimed the quarter to, and he realised that he should have left for the Strand at least fifteen minutes ago.

  He arrived at the Twinings Tea House hot, flustered by crowds and hurry, and decidedly late, but at least Tim was there, staring blankly into his tea, with a second cup waiting. Clem slipped into his seat with a mutter of apology that his cousin waved away. “I’ve only just arrived myself, old chap. The day I expect you to be on time, I’ll have them take me away.”

  He poured Clem a cup. It was Earl Grey, mostly tasteless as far as Clem was concerned, but much though he’d have preferred a strong cup of Indian tea now, he didn’t want to waste time.

  “Look, Clem, this business…”

  “Did you find anything?”

  Tim was a clerk at the General Register Office that handled births, marriages, and deaths for the nation. He didn’t, as far as Clem knew, greatly enjoy the work, but his father had died bankrupt, and the old earl’s will had been no more concerned with his brother’s orphaned children than with his own bastard. Tim and Clem, aged fifteen, and Lily, aged nineteen, had all been commended to Edmund’s care. He had given Lily a sufficient sum that she could marry the army officer of her choice, set Clem up in the lodging house, and told Tim, once he’d finished his schooling, to find employment for himself.

  If Tim resented his position, he didn’t complain to Clem about it. He was a cheerful fellow, companionable, easy-going, and warm-hearted. But he was chewing his lip now in a way Clem recognised.

  “Oh heavens. What is it?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you.” They had a table in a booth; it reduced the noise a little, but in this case it also gave privacy. Even so, Tim leaned forward. “Firstly, there is no record of this marriage at Somerset House.”

  “Is that good?”

  “That depends,” Tim said. “The system demands three copies of the marriage record. The parish register, the duplicate register that goes to the superintendent registrar of the district when it’s full, and also a quarterly summary. The minister sends that to the superintendent registrar four times a year with a record of the quarter’s marriages, and when the duplicate register’s complete, it’s checked against the summaries. Then we at the General Register Office get an index of the information. So if a marriage isn’t recorded at Somerset House, either it didn’t happen, or it was a secret marriage in the first place, or someone’s been playing the fool. Now, the page you showed me looked like a real one, and I checked a couple of the other records on the page. They both appeared. But the index has no Taillefer. What it does have is a record of the marriage of one Mr. Edmund Dalltefer, on the twenty-ninth of January.”

  “Dalltefer? Is that a name?”

  “Not that I know of. The thing is, the superintendent registrar checks the duplicate registers for missing pages before certifying them against the quarterly accounts. You wouldn’t get away with cutting pages out. But if you altered the duplicate entry unobtrusively, and made up the quarterly account to match, that might well go unnoticed.” He fished out a propelling pencil and a bit of scrap paper and wrote Edmund Taillefer 19th in a copperplate hand Clem could only envy. “The minister is meant to write out dates in full, but many of them don’t. But the reason they should…” He made a couple of extra strokes so the words read Edmund Dalltefer 29th. “I don’t know if it would stand up to close scrutiny, but it wouldn’t get close scrutiny, because ministers of the Church aren’t meant to falsify the records!” He crumpled the paper in his hand and pushed it into a pocket. “You fiddle the duplicate and make a nice clear note in the quarterly record, the superintendent glances through and sees they match, a lovely index with the false information comes to Somerset House, and anyone who happens to be looking up Edmund Taillefer won’t find a thing. The duplicate goes in the district archives, where nobody has reason to look at it again. And if someone did happen to notice a missing page in the parish register, well, that’s a very peculiar thing, but all the records have been approved and entered, so who’s to say what was in it?”

  “I see.” Clem thought about it. “If the marriage isn’t recorded, does that mean it’s not legal?”

  “Marriage is vows in front of a minister, recorded or otherwise. This business doesn’t cancel the marriage, it just conceals it. No, Edmund married this Emmeline woman, and Lugtrout falsified the records to conceal the fact. That’s a felony, a really serious offence, and I can’t believe Lugtrout would have done it without being asked. And it gets worse.”

  “How?” Clem asked, with a decidedly sinking feeling.

  Tim’s usually cheerful face had a very different set to it. “I found a death notice, from Norfolk. A woman giving her name as Emmeline Godfrey Taillefer died in the workhouse of a wasting illness in March this year, aged thirty-nine, which to save you mathematics is exactly the right age, and there’s no trace of a divorce. He’s a bigamist, Clem.”

  “Well.” Clem stared into the pallid tint of his tea. “Well. Uh. There’s a thing.”

  “You might say so. What on earth are we to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Edmund’s marriage is invalid, and Peter’s illegitimate,” Tim said, so low it was almost inaudible. “Lady Moreton—Lady Lucinda, I suppose since she isn’t actually married, Lord help us—is free to walk away. Desmond is Edmund’s heir, and since he’s going to shuffle off any time soon, the next in line is Phineas. Phineas, head of the family. Just think.”

  “Oh no.” Clem hadn’t looked that far ahead. Phineas was open in his contempt for both Clem as misbegotten and Tim as a drudge. “Ugh.”

  “I wish to God I didn’t know about this. I’d rather see Peter inherit than Phineas, blighter that he is. But that’s hardly fair on Lady Moreton, given how much she loathes Edmund, and in any case this is a serious crime. Oh, Lord. Where did you get this blasted page?”

  Clem hadn’t told Tim anything about the murder, arson, or burglary. It seemed too much to heap on his cousin at once. “Don’t know,” he mumbled.

  “What?”

  “I mean—” His thoughts were jangling. It was too bright in here, with all the gaslight flaring against the November gloom; too loud, with what felt like a hundred people all shouting to be audible over one another, voices bouncing off walls, spoons clattering on china like a thousand Rowleys tapping the pipe to make everyone stop shouting. He wished someone would do that now. He wanted Rowley so much it felt like a physical urgency to be with him and hold him and be alone together. “I need to think.”

  Tim accepted that without question. “I dare say there’s no hurry. Off you pop, then. I haven’t written to ask about the district copy of the registry. I’ll wait until we speak again before I do anything.”

  Clem had to take several seconds to orient himself on the Strand before he set off on foot. He was upset, but also, the air was getting thicker. November became colder and wetter by the day, people kept their fires burning longer, and the air was starting to curdle. Woodsmoke and coal and factory fumes, roiling like thunderclouds over the city, ready to mix with the miasmatic exhalations of the river and turn the usual wintry fog into something hellish. The air already rasped in his lungs. He probably ought to take up smoking, to protect himself against the foulness, but he hated the way the smell felt, and anyway Rowley wouldn’t thank him for adding extra flames to their lives.

  Rowley. Edmund. Peter. Bigamy. What the devil, what the devil should he or could he do?

  He was heading up Newcastle Street as he thought. The left turn on Blackmoor Street,
a route he often took to the Strand, loomed to his side. He took it before he quite realised what he was going to do.

  He was going to talk to Edmund.

  Obviously he was going to talk to Edmund. All of this uncertainty and confusion and the dark motives, and, yes, the evidence, but couldn’t anyone see how this bigamy business might happen without any ill intent? Not the tampering with records, of course, but the remarriage—that sort of thing happened all the time. Most people couldn’t lawfully end a marriage, so those who needed to did it unofficially instead. Clem had been quite sure that one was entitled to remarry if one’s spouse had been gone for seven years. That was common law, or if it wasn’t, it ought to be. It seemed thoroughly unfair otherwise.

  He needed to give Edmund a chance to explain, to understand. Edmund had supported him in the teeth of his own bitter, lifelong resentment at his mother’s treatment; Clem could support him now against an error of judgement. He and Lady Moreton had been married in every meaningful sense, after all. Clem had a pang of guilt about Lady Moreton, always so coldly miserable, but maybe he could persuade Edmund to agree to her petition for divorce, as a return for quietly ignoring the first marriage? And Emmeline Godfrey, or Taillefer, or the true Lady Moreton, was dead; there was nothing to be done for her.

  If Edmund’s only sin was an ill-judged marriage, Clem had no intention of seeing him suffer for it. His own affections scarcely adhered to the letter of the law; he would not punish his brother for doing the same.

  Edmund’s London residence, where he lived while Parliament was in session, was a large townhouse on St. Alban’s Place, near the Haymarket. Clem rarely visited him there, having no need or desire to, and the footman gave him a very sceptical look when he demanded the earl. Eventually he was shown into Edmund’s drawing room, with its heavily patterned paper on the walls, where his brother stood by the mantel with an irritable expression.

  “Clement. I trust you’ve come to tell me something of use about my poor friend Lugtrout.”

  “Uh, no, I haven’t.” Clem checked that the door was shut. “I know about Emmeline Godfrey.”

  The blood drained from Edmund’s ruddy cheeks and his hand closed hard on the back of a chair. Clem could have led up to that a bit more gently, he realised, and felt a pulse of concern. “Look, don’t worry. I understand. I didn’t mean to shock you, only, well, I know, and we have to talk about it. Sit down, please.”

  Edmund sat, heavily. “What do you mean?”

  “I know that—” Clem dropped his voice. “I know you were married to her, and she only died this year. I understand what that means for Peter, and I swear I don’t want to cause problems for him. But you must see, with Mr. Lugtrout’s murder, and the police, I want to sort this out. I want your side of the story.”

  Edmund’s eyes were fixed on his face. “You don’t want to cause problems,” he repeated.

  “Absolutely not.” Clem came up and, greatly daring, put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Edmund, listen. You gave me my home and my occupation and I’ve always been grateful for that. If you had a marriage that, that didn’t work, if she’d left you, I don’t see why anyone should be punished for it. Not you, not Peter. I know it’s the law, but, well, it’s not a law I care about unless anyone’s been hurt.”

  Edmund’s mouth moved silently. He still looked a rather bad colour.

  “Was Lugtrout blackmailing you over this?” Edmund nodded. Clem sighed. “I wish you’d said. I’d have helped if I could.”

  “Helped.”

  “Of course. If I can do something for you, I will. Look, will you tell me about it? So I understand?”

  Edmund passed a shaky hand over his pallid face. “How do you know this? What do you know?”

  “Oh. Um. Well.” If Edmund realised that his sordid secret was known to Tim, let alone Rowley, a private enquiry agent, and a journalist, he’d probably have an apoplexy on the spot. “Well, it was obvious that whoever killed Lugtrout was trying to find something, and I thought it might be a document because, um, the burglar searched through Mr. Green’s papers.” Clem felt rather pleased with that tweak to the truth. “So I had a look around and found the page from the parish register. The one with your marriage. It seemed obvious why that might be a problem, so I asked at Somerset House about a record of Mrs. Taillefer’s death.”

  Edmund stiffened. “You didn’t bring Timothy into this.”

  “Of course not,” Clem said reassuringly. Tim wasn’t a man to hold a grudge for shabby treatment, but Edmund would never believe that.

  “Good. Good. Where is the page?”

  “At home. Very safe, don’t worry.” He’d thought long and hard about where to keep the thing, and in the end left it with Rowley.

  “Who else knows of this? Did you tell anyone?”

  And now he was stuck in a lie, but there was nothing to be gained for Edmund in hearing the truth. “Nobody. Nobody at all.”

  “You must not tell anyone. Not a soul. I must have your promise.”

  “I won’t tell anyone else, and I will help you,” Clem said firmly.

  Edmund sagged slightly. “You are—a good brother, Clement. If I had known I could rely on you— Well, I shall. Make no doubt of that. I shall. Thank you.”

  Astonished, Clem took the hand extended to him. Edmund gripped it for a few seconds. “Sit down.”

  Clem sat. “Will you tell me how it happened?”

  Edmund sank back into his chair. “The truth is this. During my period of estrangement from Father, when I lived in High Wycombe, I made the acquaintance of a young lady. She was of low birth, the lowest, but remarkable beauty, and when I expressed my fascination with her, she rebuked me in terms that left me certain her character matched her appearance. She was a lovely, virtuous, modest young woman, and I was a very angry young man. I don’t blame you for your birth, Clement, but Father’s actions had filled me with disgust and horror at every part of my family. I was distressed, and lost in admiration, and I married her. I doubt a man has ever regretted an action more.”

  “Why?”

  “The virtue with which she had entrapped me into matrimony was but a mask. She proved to be soiled goods on our wedding night.”

  “Oh. Oh dear. Um, can you tell?”

  Edmund shot him a look. “For heaven’s sake, of course one can tell. A man of any worldly experience knows at once when a woman has indulged in sinful intimacies, and she was thoroughly debauched. She taunted me with the fact, even as she expressed her intention to sin no more, so that I should have no way to petition for my freedom, and she might enjoy a life of luxury at my expense. The scales fell from my eyes. I had been trapped by a fiend in female form.”

  “Gosh,” Clem said, for lack of anything else to contribute.

  “To imagine this creature as Countess of Moreton, myself bound to her, was intolerable. I might have put a period to my life had I not had the Church’s teachings to warn me off such a dread course. I was kneeling in the church in Chepping Wycombe, praying for any escape from my folly, when William Lugtrout noticed my distress and asked if he could aid me.” Edmund took a deep breath and sat up straighter. “What we did then was against the laws of the land, I make no bones about it. We agreed that he would falsify the parish records—”

  “That’s a felony,” Clem observed.

  Edmund twitched. “Yes, I know. He engaged to ensure that the marriage was not recorded, to remove all proof of my folly. I believed that would be the answer. I thought I was free.”

  “But what happened to Emmeline?” Clem found himself quite caught up in the tale. It was the stuff of the Wilkie Collins sensation novels he enjoyed. Very like Basil, even, with its beautiful, youthful, guilty siren.

  “Her. Yes. Naturally she had to be dealt with. I paid her an immense sum to leave the area and not darken my doorstep again. I told her that she would do well to accept it, that I would hang for her murder or cut my own throat or both rather than let such a one bear the title of my countess. Sh
e left with her foul imprecations hanging in the air. It felt like a bad dream from which I had awakened. And then, years later, when I had not seen hide nor hair of her in all that time—”

  “She didn’t come back to ask for more money?”

  Edmund’s lips tightened. “No, she didn’t. I cannot speculate why not. Perhaps she repented of her ways? One can only hope so, for the sake of her immortal soul. In any case, time passed, and I met Lady Lucinda Brereton. It may seem peculiar to you, Clement, but it felt as though I had never been married, as though none of it had ever happened. I truly did not feel I was doing anything wrong when I wed her. And it was then that the man Lugtrout, now sadly degraded by drink, arrived to blackmail me.”

  Clem sat forward. Edmund shook his head in melancholy. “He had the page from the register. He had altered the duplicate, changing the name written there, but the original page was untouched. Whether he had always intended blackmail, I cannot say, but it seems dreadfully likely. He produced evidence of my wrongdoing and demanded money, and perhaps I was a fool—indeed, there is no doubt of it—but I gave in to his demands. I should have confessed all then, but happiness seemed within my grasp, so I paid, and paid dearly.”

  “Did you—” Clem swallowed. “Is that why you set me up in the lodging house? Because that way he was under your roof?”

  Edmund’s eyes searched his face. “I won’t deny it seemed a good idea. I knew I could trust you to do as I asked. But I wanted you to have a home and employment that would suit you, I give you my word. And it did, didn’t it? You like the work, it does not exceed your abilities. It was the right thing for you.”

  Clem’s throat felt tight. “Thank you.”

  Edmund rubbed at his face. “You know that my marriage, my true marriage, did not meet my expectations. Perhaps it was my fault. Lugtrout’s demands, my own consciousness of guilt, cast a shadow over everything. I have failed, Clement. I know it.”