Deadly Affair: A Georgian Historical Mystery (Alec Halsey Crimance)

by Lucinda Brant

  “Janie, I cannot find the parcel from Bricknell and Moore’s. The one containing colored thread. I promised Sophie I would have her apron finished by the time we returned home,” said Miranda as she sat on the sofa to take the weight off her aching feet. “You needn’t have brought the tray in yourself,” she added, watching the girl pouring out tea into a porcelain dish. “There are the hotel servants to do such tasks, even for you.”

  Janie Rumble recalled the lewd sidelong glances exchanged between two nose-in-the-air maids who had curtseyed to them in the corridor on their return from their shopping expedition. It had decided Janie then and there to forbid the hotel servants access to their rooms.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Janie answered, handing over the dish of tea and a plate of thinly sliced bread and butter. “But they wouldn’t have made the tea just the way you like it.”

  Upon their arrival at Barr’s of Trim Street, the most exclusive small lodgings establishment in Bath, the haughty proprietor had put up his brows as if openly questioning the correctness of two young females travelling without a male chaperone. Janie had felt her cheeks flame as she stood on the thick Turkey rug at her mistress’s shoulder, uncomfortable amongst such luxurious surroundings. The rooms were all together too grandly furnished and the persons who came and went in the time they stood in the foyer were all dressed in what she assumed must be the first style of fashion. But Miranda showed no signs of embarrassment or irritation at this affront and had calmly signed the register, paying for their suite of rooms in advance. This barely thawed the proprietor’s long features as he scrutinized Miranda’s signature with a deliberate slowness bordering on insolence.

  But this morning, after three days of freezing looks and barely a civil word, to Janie’s amazement the proprietor was transformed from ice block to grinning idiot when he had deliberately stopped Miranda in the foyer. The transformation was so great that Janie had blinked and blinked again to recognize him.

  It was only when they were half way up the staircase, following a footmen ordered to relieve them of their parcels, that Janie realized the reason for the change in the proprietor. He had handed Miranda a sealed parchment with a little bow saying his lordship was desirous of a reply at Mrs. Bourdon’s earliest convenience.

  Janie had never heard of Lord Halsey and she would stake her Aunt Rumble’s life upon it that neither had Mrs. Bourdon.

  “Are you certain you wouldn’t care for some soup or a slice of pie, ma’am?” Janie asked as she propped a cushion behind Miranda’s back and drew up a padded stool to allow the young woman to rest her stockinged feet. “If you don’t put up your feet they’ll swell.”

  “You must stop fussing over me,” Miranda said kindly. “My condition doesn’t make me an invalid.”

  Janie looked away, instantly uncomfortable and equally annoyed at herself for this feeling. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know how matters stood. After all, she was Miranda’s personal maid. Besides, she was secretly happy about the baby. But how very different would everyone view her mistress’s pregnancy if there truly was a Mr. Ninian Bourdon.

  “I’m pleased you came with me, Janie.”

  “Let you come to town at such a time without me to look after you?” Janie blustered, unnecessarily repositioning the tea things. “I’d not’ve slept a wink at the farm. I had to come.”

  “I wish… I wish I could confide in you. You’ve been such a support, sometimes my only support.” Miranda looked up from the pale liquid in her dish. “Until certain particulars are finalized I’m not at liberty to confide in anyone. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Janie answered, not understanding at all.

  “Thank you, Janie.

  Miranda drank the remainder of her tea in silence, while Janie fussed about the room, the attendant sounds of carriage wheels and town visitors walking along the cobbled pavement under the arch below their windows filling the silence in the prettily furnished sitting room. Janie cleared away the tea things, a glance at her young mistress, and wondered for the thousandth time the true extent of this young woman’s sad history.

  Sharing a dilapidated and draughty limestone manor house with only her four-year-old daughter and the servants for company was no life for such a beautiful creature. The girl’s patrician features, graceful manners and fluency in two languages were a testament to her careful upbringing, but Janie guessed why her family would not own her. Having a child out of wedlock had brought shame on her family; a family that had wealth and connections and thus would not tolerate a daughter’s wanton mistake. And now another bastard child was due any day. At first Janie had refused to believe the servant gossip about the mistress until the inevitable changes in the girl’s body confirmed the malicious whisperings. Miranda had managed to keep her swelling belly well corseted for the first six months of the pregnancy but now no amount of lacings could conceal the result of her wickedness.

  Gossip said her lover and the father of this child was the gentleman painter, brother of the fashionable and very rich London lady, Mrs. Selina Jamison-Lewis, who made yearly visits to the farm. Returned from the Continent only a twelvemonth, the painter lived in Bath but regularly visited the farm to make drawings and paintings of Mrs. Bourdon and her daughter, the servants and the wild scenery of the Mendip hills. It saddened Janie to think the painter had not taken the honorable course and married the girl before tumbling into bed with her.

  Distant shouts brought Janie out of her thoughts and she looked up from the tray to find Miranda peering out the window. “I’ll take the tray back to the kitchen,” she said brightly, “and then I’ll make a start on knitting that shawl I promised you.”

  Miranda turned away from the view of the street with an uncustomary frown. “Shawl?”

  “Yes, ma’am. While you were purchasing thread yesterday I bought woolen yarn for Aunt Rumble’s knitting needles.”

  “Woolen yarn?” Miranda repeated distractedly.

  “I’m knitting a shawl for the babe, ma’am. But perhaps you wish to use Miss Sophie’s birth shawl?” Janie asked hesitantly.

  “Sophie’s shawl? No. No,” Miranda responded quickly and forced herself to smile. “A shawl would be lovely, Janie. Thank you,” and turned away from the girl’s questioning look to draw on her soft kid gloves. It made her chest ache to think about Sophie’s shawl. It had disappeared the day of her birth. “There is an eleven o’clock service at the Abbey,” she managed to say lightly, despite a feeling of panic that threatened to overwhelm her. “While I’m away, you can see to the rest of the parcels.”

  Janie was surprised. “Shouldn’t you rest awhile, ma’am?”

  “I’m very well, Janie.”

  “You don’t wish me to accompany you, ma’am?”

  “I’ll take a chair.”

  Miranda scooped up her straw bonnet and was out the door before Janie could protest further. Half way down the main staircase the pressure on her chest lifted enough for her to breathe without effort. Why, after all these years, did the mention of a baby shawl still affect her so deeply? She had painstakingly knitted a shawl in the lonely months of the first confinement. After a long, painful labor in which she had passed out several times, the apothecary had presented Sophie to her, not wrapped in the shawl she had knitted but bundled up in a torn sheet. No one could tell her, not the vicar, the apothecary or his boy-assistant, what had happened to the baby shawl she had knitted.

  In those first few weeks after Sophie’s birth, when she and the baby had been bundled out of the city, it became an obsession to know the whereabouts of that shawl. It almost unbalanced her mind, convinced that the loss of the shawl was the reason her dearest cousin Miriam had died and that if she had taken better care of the shawl her dearest dear may have lived. Only the repeated reassurances of the vicar, that there was nothing she could have done to prevent her cousin’s death and that her obsession with the shawl was the result of the traumatic events of the birth and the consequent sleepless nights looking after
a newborn. It had taken a long time for her mind to finally settle. But what had happened to the shawl? Four years on, she did not want to think about the lost shawl, or about Sophie’s birth and the loss of her dearest most beloved cousin. In losing Miriam she had lost part of herself.

  She placed a protective hand on her swollen belly. Soon this baby would be born and he had promised her that the birth of this child would be so very different from Sophie’s entrance into the world.

  Then why had he thought it necessary for her to come to Bath to have the baby? They had agreed the baby would be born at Ellick Farm. He had promised to be there as soon as he could quit London. But she had not had a letter in over a month. Then a week ago a letter had arrived so unlike his previous letters that it made her sick with worry. It contained none of his usual assurances about the future and looked to have been written in haste. He told her to leave Sophie at the farm and come to Bath, to Barr’s where he kept rooms. He would alert the proprietor, a very discreet fellow, of her impending arrival. Under no circumstances was she to tell anyone of her whereabouts and she was to come alone.

  She had disobeyed him, but for good reason. She could not give birth without Janie being present. She trusted Janie. Janie was her insurance that her baby would be safe. Janie would look after the baby if she fell into a fever or, worse, died. Janie wouldn’t let anyone take the baby from her. She had made Janie swear on the Holy Bible that if anything happened to her, if she died, she was to give the baby to no one but Mrs. Jamison-Lewis, with the letter she had sewn into her stays.

  Men could be so unthinking.

  What if he was delayed? How long was she supposed to wait? What if business kept him in London? Was Lord Halsey his friend? His lordship’s note was certainly welcoming and written in such a way that she had to assume that he knew all about her. Was it a mere coincidence that Lord Halsey happened to be staying at Barr’s at the same time as she or had he been asked to keep a watchful eye on her? But he had never mentioned his lordship. What if he failed to be with her for the birth? Now that was an even sillier notion. Of course he would be there. He had given his word. She must remember that. She couldn’t afford to have doubts. Doubts would weaken her resolve. The birth of this baby was going to be so very different from Sophie’s birth: abandoned, alone and so very, very frightened. If only she knew who to trust…

  So deep in thought was she, and eager to get out of doors to breathe fresh air, that on the staircase she collided with an elderly gentleman and his youthful companion who were making their way slowly down the carpeted stairs. In the confusion that followed, Miranda knocked the Malacca cane out from under the old man’s gloved hand, sending it and her straw bonnet tumbling to the bottom of the stairs. She lost her footing on the carpet covering the steps, but the old gentleman, who had instinctively hard-gripped the banister rail to stop himself pitching forward, caught her to him and steadied them both, assuring her in a kind voice that he was entirely to blame. His companion, a young man with carrot-colored hair, darted down the stairs and retrieved the cane and bonnet from the middle of the passage where a couple of newly arrived travelers stood gawping up at the activity on the staircase.

  Miranda was shaking so much she continued to grip the old gentleman’s coat sleeve as she descended the rest of the stairs and walked slowly across the foyer and out the front door. They were under the brick arch that led to Queen Street before the old gentleman put out a gloved hand for his cane.

  “Thank you, Tam,” Plantagenet Halsey said and turned a friendly eye on Miranda. “Your bonnet, madam.” He wasn’t surprised when his voice brought the girl to her senses. She had been staring at Tam while still hard-gripping his frail arm but quickly disentangled herself and hurriedly tied on the bonnet with a lopsided bow that brought a smile to his eyes. “Ha! Madam: it’s a fusty word for such a lovely young butterfly. Now I’ve made you blush and it wasn’t my intention to make you uncomfortable. Is this your first outing to this watering hole?” When the girl glanced up at him and then around at her surroundings, as if to see if their conversation was being overheard, he added, “You must forgive the ravings of an old gent. We’ve just arrived ourselves. The carriage ride from London must’ve addled me brain. Ain’t that so, my boy?”

  Tam grinned but Miranda was so taken aback by the old gentleman’s forwardness that she stammered an incoherent reply in French, adding in English that she was late for the Abbey service. She would have walked off but the old man detained her.

  “Just the place we’re headin’,” he said good-humouredly and bowed, making a mental note of her French tongue and cultivated voice. “The name’s Plantagenet Halsey. This here is Thomas Fisher, apothecary. You may have met my nephew Lord Halsey…?”

  “Lord Halsey is your nephew?” Miranda replied and added when the old man nodded and smiled, “I have yet to make his lordship’s acquaintance but he wrote me a very civil letter of introduction.” She glanced at Tam again, at his freckled face framed by a mop of carrot colored hair; he looked far too young to be an apothecary. Inexplicably, the knot in her chest returned. There was something about the young man that made her uneasy. She swallowed for breath. “Are—are you all staying at Barr’s?” she heard herself say.

  “Just so, Ma’am. Call it a family holiday of sorts,” Plantagenet Halsey said with a laugh, though his keen eyes saw her distress. He offered her the crook of his arm. “May this old gentleman have the pleasure of your company to the Abbey? I’ve no wish to be roped into a circle of old dowagers or pounced on by wounded relics of the Seven Years War. When last I frequented this waterin’ hole I never met a more lemon-faced bunch of old fusties in m’life!” Her hesitation made him remark, “My dear, there ain’t any harm in m’company. I don’t bite. I might very well be your grandfather.”

  At this Miranda did smile and she obliged him by taking his arm. “Forgive me, Mr. Halsey. I would be honored to have your company.” She glanced up at his lined face. “And thank you for saving me from a fall on the stairs. I hate to think what might have happened…”

  “You’re safe. There’s no need to think on it, ma’am,” Plantagenet Halsey said quickly, indication enough he was aware of her advanced state of pregnancy.

  She lowered her long black lashes, grateful for his understanding, and they walked along Queen Street in the mute light of an overcast day, Tam following at a discreet distance. They had crossed Upper Borough Walls when Miranda abruptly stopped in the middle of the cobbled pavement.

  “Oh! How rude of me not to have introduced myself.” She turned and offered Plantagenet Halsey her gloved hand. “It’s Bourdon; Mrs. Bourdon.”

  Plantagenet Halsey’s keen grey eyes blinked but his voice remained level. He knew exactly who she was; knew what rooms she was occupying and that a young woman servant had accompanied her. The hotel proprietor had obliged his nephew and they had been on the alert for when just such an opportunity as this would arise. A pity Alec had felt obliged to run back to Marlborough to play knight-errant to his virago ladylove and her sickly brother. Still, the old man was pleased to have the upper hand at something.

  “Will you indulge an old man by permitting me to know your Christian name, Mrs. Bourdon?”

  “How can I refuse you, sir, after your kindness to me on the stair? It’s Miranda.”

  “Ah! And here was I thinkin’ you might be a Catherine. But don’t get me wrong. Miranda suits you very well. Very well indeed.”

  “Catherine? How strange of you to say so, Mr. Halsey,” she answered with surprise as they crossed Cheap Street. “My daughter’s name is Catherine.”

  “Is that so?” replied the old man with enthusiasm. “In my day little Catherines were blessed with a string of pretty names. Is that still the fashion, Mrs. Bourdon?”

  Tam gaped openly at Plantagenet Halsey’s straight back. When had the old man ever been interested in conducting small talk with young mothers about their offspring? He wondered if the hit to his head had done more than leave a dent in his
skull.

  “I don’t know anything about the fashion, Mr. Halsey,” Miranda was saying, now completely at ease with her elderly companion. “But she does indeed have a string of pretty names: Catherine Sophia Elisabeth; after my husband’s mother. It’s rather a mouthful for a four year old, isn’t it? We’ve always called her Sophie.”

  “Sophie? How delightful!” Plantagenet Halsey said with a satisfied smile and a jaunty spring in his step that closed Tam’s mouth and narrowed his eyes, wondering at the real meaning behind such seemingly inane questions. There had to be more to this pleasant walk to the Abbey than what met the eye and Tam was going to find out what it was. He was not the least surprised when the old man abruptly turned the conversation into a lesson on the town’s historic past, in particular the Roman occupation of Bath, keeping his young companion enthralled until they reached the imposing West front of the Abbey.

  Tam politely declined to join the service with Plantagenet Halsey, Miranda Bourdon and the rest of Bath’s elite who were filing into the Abbey. He excused himself saying he had errands to run. His decision had little to do with his duties or his religious beliefs and everything to do with knowing his proper place. The old man might disregard, even openly ridicule, the social order, but as son of an earl and uncle to a Marquess, he could say and do as he pleased; his radical opinions excused away by his own kind as mere eccentricity. Tam could not afford to step outside the boundaries of what was expected of him as valet to a peer of the realm and sit shoulder to shoulder with the old man and his social equals.

  So he went for a stroll along North Parade to the river Avon and sat on the grassy embankment to admire the view. He still had no idea if he had passed his apothecary’s examination. He was confident he had provided more than adequate responses to satisfy the detailed questions put to him by the somber-faced examiners in the Great Hall. He had correctly identified, classified and offered uses for any number of plants put in front of him. He had spoken with knowledge on simples and provided answers, almost word for word, from passages in the Pharmacopeia. Not even the last question of the morning had shaken his self-confidence. He knew the answer well enough, could recite the response in his sleep, and he rattled on without thinking very hard about it at all. The preparation and application of tinctures containing Monkshood; more specifically, what would be the most likely outcome should such a preparation be ingested, particularly in its powdered form, was more than satisfactorily answered.