The Bride Wore Pearls

by Liz Carlyle

  “Yes?” Anisha’s odd feeling shifted.

  Again, Lady Bessett snared her lip. “You mightn’t like this,” she went on, “but Madeleine—I mean Mamma—told her that perhaps you might be persuaded to do it . . . with palms, I mean. Not the crystal ball.”

  “Good heavens!” Anisha set her teacup down with a discordant clatter. “Surely not?”

  Lady Bessett winced. “Geoff must have told her you study palmistry,” she answered. “I think, honestly, that even after all these years of struggling to raise him, she does not quite understand the Gift. She knows, of course, that it is not a parlor trick, but she cannot quite grasp—”

  Anisha threw up a hand. “I don’t have any sort of Gift,” she swiftly interjected. “My mother was skilled in certain arts, and yes, she and my aunt taught me much. But hasta samudrika shastra is based on science, and ideally used in concert with Jyotish. Neither is a trivial thing. And done properly, they take hours.”

  “I know—!” Lady Bessett wailed. “But Hannah’s face just lit up! And I couldn’t think what to tell Mamma. So I thought, you see, I’d best come round myself so she didn’t spring it on you tomorrow.” She stopped and sighed deeply. “You might just say you’ve the headache,” she advised. “Or perhaps you could just pretend to read palms?”

  Anisha sighed. “I’m not sure that would be ethical,” she said, almost to herself.

  Still, it was for a worthy cause. Moreover, there were always a few basic things one could honestly tell a person without a great deal of analysis. Just a little something—the sort of thing she’d done in the garden that afternoon for Lady Bessett.

  But the thought left her a little breathless. The awful truth was, Anisha had studied no one’s hand seriously since that frightful day so many months ago when she had looked at Grace’s. Grace had not been Anisha’s sister-in-law then but rather Tom and Teddy’s governess—and, Anisha had correctly guessed, Raju’s lover. But Grace had also been Anisha’s dear friend. And she had been in terrible trouble.

  With Grace, Anisha had been most thorough, beginning by charting her stars in detail. Then one day she had come upon Grace in the schoolroom as Luc had been taking the boys out for cricket. Anisha had rung for tea and had all but forced Grace to submit her hands.

  Grace, ever good-natured, had done so.

  It had begun innocently enough. Anisha had been curious about the prospects for marriage and children; she had hoped for both between Grace and her brother. But despite her benign intentions, a strange and horrible thing had happened. Anisha had had a vision; an almost out-of-body experience. It was as if the blood had drained from her extremities and her mind had gone to another place. With horrific, bone-chilling clarity, she had seen the danger Grace had faced.

  And yet, as so often was the case, it had been a symbolic sort of clarity; one she had struggled mightily to interpret.

  Her mother would not have struggled. Her mother had had no fear of trances or deep meditation, or even of visions. She had known their value, their interpretations, and how to use them all as the tools they’d been, with great skill and calm.

  Anisha had not been calm. She had been terrified. And when she had come out of it—whatever it had been—it had been to find she’d still held Grace’s hands across the schoolroom table. It had seemed like mere moments, but it had been . . . only God knew how long. But the tea had gone stone-cold, and neither she nor Grace had felt the time pass.

  And then Anisha had done the worst thing of all. By misinterpreting the signs, she had very nearly sent Grace to her death.

  Afterward—after Raju and Mr. Napier had saved Grace and put everything to rights again—it had quickly dawned on Anisha that she would never be what her mother had been, a gifted rishika. Her mother was gone and Anisha was here, left like some inadequate chef-in-training, with too many sharp knives in her kitchen block and not nearly enough real knowledge. She had studied just long enough to be dangerous.

  “You aren’t going to do it, are you?” Lady Bessett’s voice cut into her thoughts.

  Anisha lifted her eyes to her guest’s earnest gaze, and thought of all that Geoff’s mother had done for her—and all that she had been willing to do. To accept her warmly into the MacLachlan family as Geoff’s bride. To help her make her way in polite society. And the latter she was doing anyway, despite the fact that her son had married elsewhere.

  Anisha lowered her hands into her lap, crushing her skirts. “How could I disappoint Lady Madeleine?” she finally said. “Giving a little advice would do no harm, I daresay. But I cannot draw any real conclusions. They mightn’t be accurate.”

  But the warning was muffled, for Lady Bessett had already leapt up and rushed across the room to hug her.

  “Oh, Anisha, thank you!” she cried.

  “You’re welcome,” said Anisha into a crush of blue muslin.

  As the terminus of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, Brighton Station was a wide and soaring temple of modernity, with every imaginable convenience within. At an hour fast approaching nightfall, the gaslight had been fired, casting the capacious space in a ghostly glow as the last train from London Bridge came clattering in amidst a shriek of metal and a haze of smoke.

  Rance stepped down onto the platform as passengers and porters surged round the cast-iron columns like froth, washed past him, then branched into streams and rivulets as they trickled toward exits, vendors, and ticket windows. Portmanteau in hand, Rance moved with more deliberation, his eyes scanning the crowd ahead.

  As he strode past, a locomotive on the opposite platform sounded a shrill whistle, blasting smoke into the air. In response, a few black-suited businessmen began to toss aside newspapers and drift toward the platform, intent on boarding the last train back to London. Ahead, toddling toward the exit, a gaggle of children followed their nanny, the latter waving for a porter to bear their trunks away, most probably down the hill to one of the many guesthouses that lined the seashore.

  Seeing no one familiar, Rance wove his way toward a wide portal marked Trafalgar Street. After passing beneath an elegant colonnade, he emerged into a broad, carriage-filled lane bounded on one side by a massive wall, passing between a pair of hawking newsboys as he did so.

  “ ’Earld! Get yer ’Earld ’ere!” bellowed the first.

  The second, more resourceful, drowned him out with, “Clipper sinks off Ivory Coast! Brighton Gazette! Survivors speak!”

  Just then, a gig with a gray horse set off from the curb in a clatter, and beyond the first lad’s shoulder, Rance saw Samir Belkadi uncross his arms and come away from a sputtering lamppost. His stride long and sure, the young man dashed between drays and carriages to meet him on the pavement, pressing a slip of paper into Rance’s palm as he did so.

  “You found Blevins?” Rance kept his voice low.

  “Oui, at home,” said Belkadi. “The good doctor knew all the hotels—and, more importantly, all the lodging houses. It required us but one day’s searching to find your Mr. Hedge.”

  Rance unfolded the paper. It was an address in George Street.

  “A lodging house catering to invalids,” said Belkadi. “Retired sea captains and the like. Run by a woman named Ford. The street is just past the Royal York, not far from here. I booked you a suite of rooms and bespoke dinner.”

  Rance shook his head. “I’ve no appetite,” he said. “I should rather go straight to this fellow.”

  “Non.” Belkadi set a restraining hand on his sleeve. “Blevins knows the proprietor and made inquiries. Hedge is old, frail, and requires much laudanum to sleep at night. He will be of no use to you until morning—if then.”

  After tugging out his pocket watch for one last, hopeful glance, Rance sighed. “Aye, you’re right, Sam,” he said. “Look, hurry on now. That’s the last train.”

  “You do not need me?”

  Rance managed a weak grin. “To manage a laudanum-addled old man?” he said. “God, I hope not.”

  With a flash of his brillian
t white teeth, Belkadi gave a curt bow and vanished into the terminal’s yawning entrance.

  After finding the hotel with little difficulty, Rance ordered himself a rare beefsteak and a bottle of their best wine, then went promptly to bed in the hope of speeding the day’s arrival. Perhaps it was just the exquisite night spent in Anisha’s arms, or his newfound sense of hope propelling him forward ever faster, but he could not escape the sense that time was of the essence. And now this Hedge fellow was on his deathbed.

  He rose at dawn having slept little, and spent the early morning strolling the long promenade that stretched between the King’s Road and the seafront. The air coming off the Channel was sharp, the skies a reflection of the watery gray-blue below, and filled with the cry of wheeling gulls. Rance drew the sea air deep into his lungs—the smell of freedom, it still seemed to him, for the sea was something an Englishman sorely missed when trapped in the gloom of a prison, or the grit and heat of the desert.

  Attired as he was in a dark suit of finest worsted, along with his tall beaver hat and brass-knobbed walking stick, he apparently looked the part of a rich and respectable aristocrat taking the air, for here—unlike much of London—most of the gentlemen tipped their hats and bid him good morning, while a few of the ladies cut him lingering, sidelong looks as they promenaded past.

  But none of it was sufficient to distract him from the press of time, and impatience had begun to bite at him when Rance tugged out his pocket watch for perhaps the third time in as many hours, only to hear the bells at St. Nicholas toll ten o’clock. It was as close to a respectable hour as he could manage. Turning on his heel, he retraced his steps past his hotel and into the maze of streets that lay east of it.

  The address was easily found, the lodging house large and fronted with bow windows around which the paint had begun to peel; perhaps from proximity to the sea, or more likely from neglect. The steps, too, were unswept.

  He rang the bell and was shown in by a gray-garbed maid who seemed not to care who he was. “Visitors from twelve ’til three only, sir,” said the girl. “Come back then, and we’ll have all the lodgers dressed and down.”

  Gritting his teeth against the impatience, Rance nodded curtly and went back down the steps. The delay was understandable, he supposed. The house was obviously a place of business; one of those vile, pathetic lodgings just one step from the workhouse, and reserved for the last days of the reduced and dying; those with no family who would take them, but just enough money to get by. He envied neither them, nor Mrs. Ford, truth to tell.

  At one o’clock, the girl was back, this time with a smut on her nose and an enquiring look on her face.

  “Mr. Alfred Hedge?” he prompted.

  “Ooh, right! ’E’s been put in the garden for the afternoon,” she said. “But another gent was here to see him before you. If you might just wait in the back parlor?”

  Rance reluctantly agreed and handed the girl his stick.

  He passed through the house to see something less than a dozen elderly men dotting the front reception rooms, most drowsing in chairs, but there were two fellows sitting at a chess board, and another being fussed over by a rotund lady in black; the proprietress, no doubt.

  The back parlor was a shabby room dripping in chintz and overlooking a large, unkempt garden. Through the cloud of dust motes that danced in the morning sun, Rance could see a pale, hook-nosed man slumped in a sort of Bath chair, a blanket laid over his knees. On a stone bench beside him sat a white-haired fellow in a cleric’s collar and black coat. The latter was leaning forward, a black book clutched loosely between his hands.

  Though Rance was too far from either to sense any sort of intent, the aim of the priest was clear. Their conversation became increasingly heated, if gestures could be depended upon—until at last the old man lifted his fist in the air and shook it in obvious threat.

  The priest jerked at once to his feet and came striding up the garden path, letting himself in and slamming the door behind. Rance waited a full minute before deciding the maid did not mean to reappear, then went round the corner and let himself into the garden. The skies, he noticed, had suddenly darkened—portentously, perhaps.

  The man ignored, or perhaps could not hear, his approach.

  “Alfred Hedge?” Rance said, standing over him.

  The old man crooked his head to look up. His profile was harsh, his eyes small and sharp like a crow’s, but one could still see shades of blonde in his hair and handsomeness in his face—the source of Ned Quartermaine’s golden good looks, perhaps.

  “Are you Alfred Hedge?” Rance demanded.

  “Who wants to know?” Hedge said disdainfully. “If you’re another prosy, do-good moralizer, you can just take yourself off with the last.”

  “I believe I can safely attest those are adjectives never once applied to me,” said Rance. “But you might ask your son. I’m an acquaintance of Quartermaine’s.”

  At that, the old man wheezed with laughter. “Little Ned, eh?” he chortled. “Surprised the bastard remembered where to find his dear old papa.”

  “Oh, he remembered,” Rance bluffed. “And, with the right motivation, he was eager to tell me.”

  For an instant, the old man hitched. “Well, give the lad my best, won’t you?” he croaked. “My best wishes, I mean to say, that he rots in hell. It must cost him all of—what, two shillings a quarter?—to keep me in such rarified luxury.”

  Rance cut another glance at the sky, then sat down uninvited. “I daresay I can return his same kind regards to you,” he said, tossing aside his hat. “My name, you see, is Welham. I suspect that will ring a bell or two.”

  At last there came a solid reaction, the old man flinching as if struck. But like any hardened gamester, he swiftly recovered himself. “Rance Welham, eh?” he sneered. “Still alive, then, you card-sharping upstart?”

  “Oh, still very much alive.” Rance stretched one arm along the back of the bench. “And very much wishing to taste revenge, since, I’m reliably informed, it’s best when served up cold—and mine will be frigid indeed.”

  The old man cackled, then dragged a hand beneath his nose. “Well, if that’s what you’re after, you’ve come to the wrong place,” he said. “I can do nothing for you, Welham. And should you choose to put a bullet through me for it, I might say you’d done me a favor.”

  Rance regarded him with unassailable calm; he had waited for this moment nearly half his life. “Killing would be far too merciful, sir,” he said coolly. “Besides, I am entirely unarmed—and quite deliberately, for I came here certain in the knowledge you would sorely tempt me.”

  This time Hedge did not laugh. “Get out,” he snapped. “I’m an old man. I’ve nothing to say to you.”

  “Have you not?” Rance regarded him calmly. “Perhaps you think, Hedge, that I will feel some sympathy for you—old, ill, and diminished as you are. But I can assure you that is not the case. I am quite as cruel and callous as I have been painted.”

  “You ever were a cold-handed son of a bitch,” the old man retorted, settling back into his chair. “Go on, then. Rail to your heart’s content. I don’t give a damn for your censure.”

  “I won’t waste my breath,” said Rance. “Tell me about the Black Horse syndicate.”

  Hedge narrowed one eye, but his breath was roughening. “A fantasy, that,” he wheezed. “Who told you such a tale?”

  “The Duke of Gravenel’s cousin,” said Rance, “George Kemble. I believe you may once have done business with him.”

  “Hmph!” But Rance could see a shiver of fear go through him. “And why should I care what that vicious, light-footed little Lucifer has to say, eh? What’s he going to do to me now?”

  Rance turned his hat round and round by its brim, carefully weighing his next words and hoping his assessment of Kemble had been accurate. “I couldn’t say; he seems a nasty piece of work,” he said lightly. “I heard he once ripped out a chap’s fingernails with a pair of rusty pliers.”

&nbs
p; The old man shrugged. “Not this decade, for Kemble’s gone honest,” he said. “Had to, didn’t he, once his sister married up?”

  “And what about little Ned?” asked Rance, forcing a bitter smile. “Is he capable of ripping out fingernails? Or turning his dear papa off entirely?”

  “I’m not afraid of Ned,” the old man blustered. “But what’s it to me? I can tell you what you want to know, I reckon. It’s no skin off my nose. Nothing can be proven. Not now.”

  “Excellent.” Rance relaxed against the bench and prepared to play his greatest bluff ever. “Begin at the beginning, won’t you? The syndicate. I want names.”

  Hedge seemed to stiffen with pride. “There were eleven of us, and bloody enterprising chaps we were, too,” he said. “But all gone or dead now. And it wasn’t just gaming; we had nunneries, doss-houses—Billy Boyton once had a promise of some fine Herati opium. Wonder what the lads of London would have thought of that, eh?” Suddenly, his face fell. “Sank though, the whole bloody ship.”

  “A leveling blow indeed,” said Rance dryly. “Now which of those eleven ordered me framed for killing Peveril? Or was it the lot of you?”

  Here, the old man began to pick almost absently at the lint on his blanket.

  “I think, sir, you waste your time,” said Rance. “You might better concern yourself with what Ned might do if you lie to me.”

  “Ned hasn’t the bollocks to do a damned thing.” The old man curled his lip. “The better part of that boy ran down my leg when I fucked his mother.”

  “He seems to have managed well enough.” Rance lifted a hand and waved it at the house and garden. “And you, sir, are insolvent—or something near it, else you would not be living on your son’s charity.”

  Lamely, Hedge shrugged. “And so?”

  “And so what if he should cast you off?” Rance threatened. “I’ll tell you what: eventually, if you live long enough, you’ll end up on the parish dole—”

  The old man made a strained, choking sound.

  “—assuming, of course, you don’t end your days in Coldbath Fields, picking oakum from your fine”—Rance paused to wave a hand at the Bath chair—“wheeled conveyance.”