The Earl's Mortal Enemy

by Issy Brooke

  “I wonder how he keeps track of it all. After all, he said he’d been in the police for decades and he’s been a private agent for many more years. That’s a great deal of information that he must have amassed. There must be cross-referencing and indexing, and all sorts of links that need to be made, or he wouldn’t be so good at his job. He can’t possibly hold it all in his head. I expect he has a network of informants across the city but how does he collate all that constant information so that it’s to hand when he needs it?”

  “I ... have never thought of that.”

  “It’s the same as the lack of useful information about the hotels here,” Edith went on. She was walking very slowly and staring out across the dark tidal water of the Thames. Even in the gloom, a few boys were down on the exposed mud, poking about with sticks. “I am sure if we had read the right papers, we would have known that Claridge’s was closed. But when we needed the information, we didn’t have it.”

  “Er ... no. How would you have done it differently?”

  “Me?”

  “How would you have made the information make sense?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought that’s what you were getting at.”

  “Oh, mama, stop picking and prodding me! Let’s go back to the hotel. It’s late, dark and cold. My feet hurt.” Edith made it sound as if all the walking had been Adelia’s idea, and therefore it was her fault her daughter now had sore feet. Adelia bit her tongue, and hoped that Mr Nett could come up with information rather swiftly.

  A NOTE FROM CHARLOTTE was waiting for them when they returned to the hotel. They ordered room service to deliver some snacks and sandwiches to their rooms, and Edith read the letter as she lounged back on a long couch, her shoes discarded on the floor and her stockinged feet up on the cushions. Adelia sat rather more properly in the window, trying not to feel irked that the note had come back addressed to Edith and not to her.

  “Ugh,” said Edith as she threw the letter down. “She wants us to go to a gallery opening party tonight. Tonight! It is impossible. I am exhausted.”

  “Oh, how wonderful. That is, I assume she’ll be there?”

  “Apparently so. Honestly, she is beyond all reason sometimes. I told her she should come here and have tea and cake with us. I told her, mama, that you missed her and wanted to see her.”

  “Thank you for doing that. May I read her reply?”

  “Be my guest.”

  The letter was brief and impersonal. It gave the address and the dress code, and mentioned the name of the gallery owner. Adelia recognised it. The gallery was an old and well-established one, and after all, her own family background was from the same trade. It was at a gallery that she had met Theodore. She smiled to herself. “She is actually rather thoughtful, don’t you think?” she said.

  Edith was lounging back on the couch, her eyes closed. She didn’t move. She muttered, “How so?”

  “Well, she knows that it’s something which will bring back happy memories for me, and interest me.”

  Edith grimaced. “We shall have to dress up and mingle and make polite conversation. You can go alone, can’t you, mama? I have books to read so I would be perfectly happy to stay behind. We have travelled all day.”

  “Nonsense. Don’t you want to see your sister? After all, you have been corresponding.”

  “And it’s precisely because we have been corresponding that I don’t need to see her. We have nothing new to say to one another. Her world is not my world. It’s a world which is certainly better appreciated from a distance. I know what I shall do – I’ll go through the facts of the case and see if I can’t come up with a convincing reason why one of those men killed Halifax, and I’ll work out a way of trapping them so that they are forced to reveal their guilt. That’s how it works, isn’t it?”

  “No, Edith,” Adelia said sternly. “You will come with me tonight, and that is that.” She got up as a tap at the door let them know that room service had arrived.

  Edith groaned, but she did not argue back.

  Adelia stalked across the room, her feet sinking into the plush carpets, and she glanced at her daughter as she went past the prone form. How did I end up having such a contrary child? She is my youngest. I thought I’d got the whole business of child-rearing right by the time I got to her.

  Edith opened her eyes as if she felt the scrutiny upon her.

  Adelia tried to smile. She hurried on to answer the door.

  Twelve

  Adelia felt ten years younger as she swept into the glittering party being held in one of London’s most exclusive galleries. She was tired, it was undeniable, but she had shaken off the worst of it and felt herself invigorated by the chance of a night out in society. Smith had worked wonders with her dress, ensuring that her gown was of the very latest in tasteful fashions without making her look like she was trying to be a debutante again. Edith had submitted to Smith’s machinations too, and looked beautiful, although she did roll her eyes in disdain when Adelia told her so, and muttered under her breath about her weariness.

  All the very best people were there, and Adelia was delighted to find that many of the art world still recognised her as a member of the once-lauded Pegsworth family. They’d been successful art dealers when she was a child, and had been so for many generations, advising everyone in the upper classes – even acting on behalf of royalty across Europe. Once, they had been a powerful and wealthy family, even if they were only ever “trade.” They had mingled with the very best of society, and that had not been forgotten. How else could she have been allowed to marry Lord Calaway?

  Such social climbing was clearly lost on Edith who seemed utterly bored by the whole affair, not recognising the importance of speaking with people and being seen to speak with people – particularly the right sort of people.

  Edith’s attention, in between bouts of heavy sighing, was focused on finding Charlotte and Adelia could hardly blame her for that. Edith held her still-full champagne flute in one gloved hand while searching the crowds. It was difficult to spot anyone as they weaved around the short expanses of wall which made a maze upon which to display the paintings, but she suddenly gave a cry and nudged Adelia with her elbow.

  “There she is, by the ugly woman. I mean the painting.”

  “I believe that is a Gauguin and the woman depicted is utterly gorgeous,” Adelia said, irked by her philistine of a daughter. “Oh – I see her! Yes! Come on.” She started forward. She had not seen Charlotte for nearly two years, and had had only the barest of correspondence with her during that time. She had married a bright young man called Robert Lassiter, the heir apparent of Patrick Lassiter, the Earl of Mareham. As the old Earl was still hale and hearty, Robert used the subsidiary title of Viscount only. Adelia didn’t think that Lord Robert Lassiter and Lady Charlotte Lassiter would be becoming Lord and Lady Mareham any time soon; the Lassiters were a very long-lived family and the Earl himself had only just assumed the title.

  Adelia had just a moment to think to herself that Charlotte was looking very fine indeed, dripping with jewels, and dressed in gloriously adorned silk – the very model of a titled lady, in fact – when she disappeared around a corner. Adelia huffed. “I was sure that she saw us,” she said.

  Edith said, “She can’t have done.” She drank down her champagne in one unladylike swoop and passed the empty glass to a waiter so that she could hitch up her skirts and go off in pursuit of her sister. Adelia followed.

  “Charlotte!”

  A few heads turned although Charlotte’s was the last. She could no longer evade her mother. A woman near to Charlotte put out her hand to stop her, and nodded towards Adelia.

  Charlotte turned, and plastered on the most false smile that Adelia had seen for some time. She looked tired and strained, and her gaze did not rest on her mother’s face.

  “Charlotte! How lovely to see you!” Adelia cried, knowing her own smile and delight was as faked and forced as that of her daughter. What had happene
d to her bright, fun-loving child? “Are you well? You see – distracted, if I may say so.”

  Charlotte glanced at Adelia, blinking rapidly. “Oh – yes, sorry, mama. I had hoped to be able to speak with you tonight, of course, but I’ve seen someone here who I must...”

  “Who?” Adelia asked, and she followed the direction of Charlotte’s attention. “Who is that man?”

  “I am so sorry, mama.”

  “Do you need to speak to him?”

  Charlotte looked startled. “Oh, heavens, no! I need to avoid him. He was not supposed to be here tonight. I cannot stay. Mama, I’ll write...” She lunged at Adelia, pecked her on the cheek in a continental fashion, and whirled away. She headed straight for the doors and was swallowed up by the crowd.

  Edith was at Adelia’s side but speaking to a well-dressed older man. She turned back to her mother and whispered, “Apparently, the gentleman that Charlotte is avoiding is an art dealer, Mr Digby Nettles.”

  “And why is she avoiding him?”

  “I really have no idea. I have never heard of him.”

  Adelia said quite crossly to Edith, “This is all quite unseemly. Why would she do such a thing? She asked to meet us here. What on earth has happened?”

  “I don’t know, and I am very annoyed too,” Edith replied, looking as hurt and confused as Adelia felt. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “I have half a mind to go and speak to this Mr Nettles.”

  “No, mama, let’s not make a scene. Not until we know why Lottie wanted to avoid him.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. My taste for this evening has quite disappeared,” Adelia said. “Everything seems flat and I am sure I am gathering a headache.”

  “I am not surprised. I feel the same.” Edith folded her arms as if she were a millworker leaning on a wall and glared around with a menacing expression. “Honestly, mama, sometimes I really don’t care for my own sisters. She’s been most rude.”

  “That’s not a nice thing to say.”

  “But you understand, don’t you? I mean, you and Uncle Alf...”

  “Me and Uncle Alf what?”

  “You don’t get on at all. I can see it whenever you mention him. I don’t think papa even realises that, does he? What have you two argued about? You and Uncle Alf, I mean.”

  “Your Uncle Alf is always very welcome at Thringley.”

  “That is not an answer.” She paused as if she were going to challenge Adelia further, but she changed her mind and simply said, “Come on, mama. Let’s go back to the hotel.”

  Adelia agreed, but she refused to drink any more wine when they got back to their rooms, because she knew that Edith was trying to loosen her tongue. She didn’t care to spill out all her secrets to her daughter.

  And she felt deeply uncomfortable now that she realised Edith knew all was not well in the family.

  She hoped that Edith would not raise the matter with Theodore.

  THEY WERE BOTH BLESSED in managing to evade any kind of hangover the next day. Adelia could not settle and wait at the hotel for news to come to her, so at eleven in the morning she set out to speak to Mr Nett. Edith came with her, out of sheer boredom, and Smith was given licence to spend a few hours of her own in London, though quite what she was going to do, Adelia had no idea. It was Saturday, still less than a week since the murder. The world carried on as normal, which sometimes struck Adelia as almost obscene. Yet murders happened every day – just not usually in her own house.

  “Mama, it is far too early to expect him to have any information for us yet,” Edith complained as they walked briskly through the streets.

  And she was proven correct. In fact, Mr Nett was not even at the office although they knew he worked Saturdays like most people. The young man on the front desk assured them that they would be notified as soon as any significant fact was discovered. “I can tell you, however, that we do know Mr Montgomery left his post at the university very abruptly.”

  “Do you know why?” Adelia asked.

  “Was it voluntary?” Edith put in.

  The young man shook his head. “We don’t yet know why, but it does not look like it was voluntary, no. We shall let you know.”

  Adelia felt despondent as they wandered slowly back down the street. It was a relatively warm day, with a weak sun in the sky now just showing above the tops of the tall buildings around them. She dawdled along, lost in her own thoughts about why Mr Halifax might have been killed – and, she asked herself, why now? She started to wonder if the timing was perhaps significant. She needed to find out how long this business venture had been going on. Was it brand new, or was it the result of a long partnership of many months? Suddenly, such questions seemed vitally important. There was a question that she hadn’t asked yet, and she wasn’t sure how to phrase it, but it was irking her. Did the death have anything to do with the arrival of all four men at Thringley House?

  Or had the move simply offered the killer an opportunity?

  Was it planned, or was the murder an act of impulse?

  Her musings carried her along the street for quite a way before she realised that Edith was no longer at her side. She stopped and spun around, her natural maternal instinct causing fear to rise up like bile almost automatically – when did one ever stop worrying about one’s children?

  Never, was the answer, and she knew it.

  But there was Edith, tall and striking, with an expression almost of wonder on her face as she peered through the small square glass panes of a window. Adelia hurried back towards her daughter, smiling when she saw that Edith’s attention had not been caught by bolts of the finest silk, or delicately hand-stitched gloves. She was, in fact, pressed up against a printer’s workshop.

  The crowds in the streets were thick and suddenly Adelia’s view of Edith was cut off by the imposition of a large group of dandyish young men, all jostling and pushing one another, calling in loud voices as if hailing someone across a field not addressing a companion two feet away. Cabs, carts, drays and carriages were thronging the cobbled carriageway, with horse-drawn omnibuses swaying their way through the middle of it all. Adelia did not want to step off the pavement and instead she tried to push her way through the group of men who seemed utterly unconcerned by the fact they were blocking the footway.

  They parted, slowly but willingly, and she burst through to see Edith a few yards away. Edith heard Adelia call out. Edith stepped back, but collided with a black-clad priest who was hurrying along on business of his own. He grabbed her and spun her around as if in a dance, using her momentum to whirl her almost off her feet, and she cried out in surprise.

  Adelia stopped and laughed at the incongruous sight.

  But Edith had no idea that a man of the cloth had safely taken hold of her, and instead she panicked at the touch of an invisible stranger and jerked herself forward to get away from him, stumbling as she slipped her foot off the raised pavement and twisting herself headlong into the mire-filled gutter at the edge of the thoroughfare.

  And she screamed.

  It tore at Adelia’s ears and heart. She jumped forward, though the priest was bending over the prone figure of Edith before she even got to her daughter’s side. Edith was clutching her lower leg through her skirts, and whimpering. She was deathly pale, and grimacing as tears ran down her cheeks.

  The priest was babbling a stream of apologies, and his eyes were likewise pink and watery.

  “No, sir, it is not your fault – but please, I pray you, find us a doctor or some medical assistance,” Adelia said.

  “He – he pushed me!” Edith gasped.

  “He didn’t. You ran backwards into him and he stopped the pair of you falling back into the path of a carriage,” Adelia said firmly, as much for the scared young priest’s benefit as Edith’s. She looked at him. “A doctor, sir, if you please.”

  Luckily he had some wits still about him. He jumped to his feet and set off. The jostling young men had made a little crowd around them, and turned out to be both s
ensible and very helpful. Within the half-hour, Edith had been carefully lifted into a carriage – a feat managed very sensitively by the young men who made a little cordon around her to screen the undignified manoeuvre from as many prying eyes as possible, and the presence of the priest who had returned had a sobering effect on the onlookers too. He rode with them to a hospital. He had already sent advance word that they were arriving, and they were soon whisked into an examining room where Adelia was greeted, to her utmost shock and surprise, by a lady doctor.

  She could not help herself. “Are you – fully qualified? With the same training as a real doctor?”

  “Mother!” Edith managed to spit out.

  The lady doctor smiled. “Oh, I get asked that all the time. It has been a rocky road but we were admitted to the British Medical Association last year.”

  “Only last year?” Edith struggled to sit up but the lady doctor put a hand on her shoulder and pressed her down onto the table.

  “Well, a few pioneers managed it decades ago but there were certain arguments against us, and it went rather around the houses before being finally settled, I hope for the last time, recently. From this point, I expect that we will soon see almost equal numbers of men and women in the medical profession. After all, that would be logical, given that half the population is female, don’t you think? It shouldn’t take long now we’ve made a start.” She beamed with hope.

  “Huzzah to that!” Edith said.

  While the lady doctor continued her examination, and Adelia remained at a discreet distance as chaperone, she told Edith all about her own training and background. Adelia realised that it was not that Edith was particularly interested in medicine, but she was fascinated by a woman doing her own thing in life and she listened intently. Furthermore the conversation interested her so deeply that it was an effective distraction to what the lady doctor was actually doing.

  The lady doctor finally turned to Adelia. “I am afraid that your daughter’s tibia – the shin bone – has been fractured, but it does not seem to be a complicated break and will heal easily with rest and care. There is no need for a surgeon, I think. We’ll set it using the Dutch method. I shall bring a strong nurse in to assist me in stretching out your muscles and dressing the leg; this will be painful but we have some ways of easing the worst of it which will make you feel very groggy, I’m afraid. I would like, if I may, to keep Lady Ivery here at the hospital overnight.”