The Usual Santas

by Peter Lovesey

  I had been invited to accompany the Trowbridge Set to the Upper Rooms, and return with them to the Dowager Duchess’s establishment in Laura Place to see in the New Year. At Lord Harold’s behest, I had scraped acquaintance with young Lady Desdemona some three weeks before. An unfortunate murder threw us much together and deepened our bond.* My regard for Lord Harold—Gentleman Rogue, Man About Town, and Government spy—is of longer duration, however. We met two years previous over another dead body, and have been firm friends ever since. There are few gentlemen, indeed, I regard with greater respect—and none with whom I should so readily trust my person.

  My heart, of course, is another matter. The Rogue is everywhere known for a hardened rake.

  I was permitted a parting glimpse of his silver head and dashing tricorn as our carriage rolled off, but was returned to an awareness of my companions by Lady Fane’s elbow, which dug sharply into my corseted ribs. She had raised her quizzing glass and was staring avidly at Mona’s throat. Her la’ship is a sharp, hectic woman much given over to gossip; her husband, Sir Ambrose Fane, is a Whig Member who is by way of being a Trowbridge cousin. This family connexion encourages his lady in every sort of impertinence.

  “My dear girl,” she exclaimed, “are those the Wilborough diamonds? I have not seen them this age!” The full moon was high and brilliant in the winter sky, and a shaft of light had found its way through the carriage window, picking out the quaint stones that encircled Mona’s neck. The settings were old-fashioned and heavy, and the gems gleamed dully. “I had thought your mother to have hidden them away. How do they come to be in Bath, and not at Wilborough House?”

  “You mistake, Amelia,” the Dowager Duchess said. “The diamonds were never part of the family jewels. My husband presented them to me in his youth. He directed that they pass directly to Mona upon her betrothal—and so they have.”

  Lady Fane craned to study the gems more closely, but the Duchess’s skirts defeated her. She dropped her quizzing glass and toyed with the chain, turning the polished lens in her gloved fingers. I thought for an instant she intended to question Eugènie further, but wisdom forestalled her. The Dowager Duchess was once an actress on the Paris Opera stage, and from her delicacy in speaking of the diamonds it seemed probable they had been given her before her marriage—when she was merely the late duke’s mistress.

  It did not do to talk of such things before Lady Desdemona. Tho’ Mona may be Her Grace’s granddaughter, and possessed of all the family secrets, she is as yet unmarried. A nod to Innocence must quell Lady Fane’s desire for gossip; and the remainder of our journey passed in blessed silence.

  We had not been arrived in Laura Place a quarter-hour, and Her Grace’s footmen were busy about the supper tables, when the five gentlemen made their appearance. The Earl of Swithin; Sir Ambrose Fane; Lord Harold; his nephew Lord Kinsfell, Mona’s elder brother and heir to the Duke of Wilborough; and Kinny’s intimate friend Mr. Mortimer, a young gentleman lately sent down from Oxford for setting a bear on his Proctor. He is a fresh-faced youth of one-and-twenty, with a passion for cards and little conversation.

  Instantly all was animation. Bonaparte’s latest outrage was canvassed by Lord Harold and Sir Ambrose; Mr. Mortimer taxed Lord Kinsfell to hunt this winter with the Quorn; Lady Fane attempted to gain Lord Harold’s notice, her jeweled fingers grasping his sleeve, as she asserted that Josephine should never be crowned Empress—the Consort was barren, and must be Divorced in time. Glasses of claret were passed before the roaring fire, and trays of lobster patties offered, and of a sudden, the Earl of Swithin tapped his crystal with a silver fork.

  The elegant drawing room fell silent.

  “It is a custom at the turning of the year to offer gifts of a humble order,” Swithin observed. “--Talismans of happiness for the year to come. The Dark Man brings bread and greenery, gold coins and coal. I am neither dark nor humble—” at this, Desdemona laughed—“but I have a talisman to offer all the same. A bit of coal for you, my dearest Mona, a transmutation of carbon—a charm toward your future happiness.”

  He bowed, and drew a velvet box from within his coat.

  Desdemona’s easy looks were fled; all the uncertainty of youth was writ plainly on her countenance; she had not expected this, and was almost unequal to answering it. She extended a trembling hand.

  Lady Fane drew a sharp breath as the box was opened, and a thousand fires seemed to leap before our eyes. Mona lifted Swithin’s carbon—a simple necklet of graduated diamonds—from their velvet bed. Her mouth formed in a soundless O.**

  “Should you like to wear it?” he asked.

  “Above all things,” she replied.

  He went to her and gently unhooked the Wilborough gems, placing them carefully on the fireplace mantle behind him. Then he draped his own exquisite offering around Mona’s neck and fixed the clasp. I saw her cheeks flush at the touch of his fingers at her nape; she looked, for an instant, as though she might swoon.

  “Delightful,” Miss Wren observed flatly. “A very pretty offering, to be sure. A trifle showy for a girl of your years, perhaps—”

  Eugènie swept by and grasped her granddaughter’s shoulders. “I wish you great joy, ma chère,” she said. “Swithin! We must have champagne!”

  Lord Harold was suddenly at my side. He drew me slightly away from the rest of the party under cover of the general excitement. We had not yet had a moment to converse in all the bustle of the evening. With a satiric glance at Lady Fane, his lordship enquired, “And what do you think of our friends, my dear?”

  “It is a delightful grouping.”

  “You are polite to a fault, and suppress all judgment. Sir Ambrose is fatuous, his lady a Harpie; my nephew is weak, and his friend Mortimer a tedious influence. He lost half his father’s fortune in an hour at the card tables this evening—or should have done, had I taken up his debts of honour. I shall burn his vowels, of course. One cannot dun a guest.”

  “But the Earl and your niece are paragons of happiness,” I retorted. “At least there you must declare yourself satisfied.”

  “Certainly. They shall be either the ruin or the making of each other.”

  “I refuse to credit the former.”

  “You have not lived so long as I.” He took a glass of champagne from a passing footman and offered it to me. “It is nearly midnight, Jane. I could stand to bid this year farewell—could not you?”

  I reflected that we had recently endured an inquiry into murder; that I had lost Madame Lefroy, my oldest friend; that my father was aging and my naval brothers exposed to all the vicious schemes of the French Monster. But the year had not been unalloyed with sweetness. There was this shrewd and intriguing silver-haired Rogue, for instance, who never failed to bring novelty into my life.

  I raised my glass. “To happiness, my lord.”

  “Very well. You shall inspire me.” He touched his crystal to mine. “To happiness, Jane.”

  Clear through the midnight came the sound of the Abbey’s bells, tolling the hour and the death of the old year.

  The Earl of Swithin raised his glass—but at that moment there was a loud and formal knock upon the front door. From the sound, someone was striking it with a heavy wooden stave.

  “The Dark Man!” Mona cried, and tripped gaily off in the wake of Her Grace’s butler.

  The portals of the Dowager’s home were thrown open, and there—lit by flaming torches on either side—stood a figure of caprice and foreboding: The Dark Man, emissary of the coming year. This particular fellow was not above twenty, I should judge: a lad from the poorer hovels by the river, decked out in borrowed finery, with a black beaver on his sooty curls and a high courage in his youthful face. His shoulders were squared and his gaze was brilliant, as he surveyed the privileged party in the entry before him.

  “What business have you here, sirrah?” the butler demanded.

  The lad
stomped his heavy oak stave three times on the Dowager’s marble. “I come to bear away the Old, and herald the New!” he cried. “Welcome me to your health and good fortune! Shun me at your loss and peril!”

  The butler glanced around for his mistress, but being advanced in age and unsteady on her feet, Eugènie had not yet achieved the entry. Lord Harold gave a nod in his mother’s stead. The butler bowed to the Dark Man, pressed a guinea into his palm, and fell back from the threshold.

  All over Bath, I should judge, a similar scene was enacted in prosperous squares, before brilliantly-lit houses, filled with self-satisfied and comfortable folk. Our particular Dark Man swept into the Dowager Duchess of Wilborough’s drawing room, and we hastened behind. He halted dramatically before the hearth.

  “It is the custom on New Year’s Eve for tidings of hope to enter the house,” he declared. “Therefore I present you—” he turned to Lord Kinsfell—“with green branches of spruce to ensure health and long life. To you, ma’am,” he said to Lady Fane, “I offer bread against hunger.”

  Her la’ship took the hard crust he offered her with a sneering look.

  “To you, sir, I give base coin, that you might never be in want of gold,” the Dark Man told Mr. Mortimer—who flushed deeply and thrust his hands in his pockets. Coppers rained at his feet.

  “And to you, my lady,” the Dark Man said, as he turned to the Dowager, “I offer coal—that you might never suffer from the chill North Wind, nor fear the cold of the grave.”

  This was a sombre ending enough; but Eugènie offered her best curtsey to the Dark Man. —One great performer, I surmised, acknowledging another.

  He swept off his hat in a general salute. “And now I must carry away the ashes of the Old Year, so that no taint of past suffering might remain in this house!”

  The Dowager’s footman stood ready with a shovel. He thrust it deep into the embers beneath the firedogs. Then he offered the still-glowing ashes to the Dark Man, who seized the shovel’s shaft and followed the footman from the room. We listened to their footsteps dwindle, toward the rear of the Dowager’s house. The door to the kitchens would already be flung open, so that the Dark Man might toss the Old Year’s ashes on the Dowager’s rubbish heap, and depart by the mews.

  But for those of us who remained in the drawing room, fresh amusement was already offered: a fiery bowl of Snapdragon. We took turns at snatching the brandied fruit from the flames’ blue glow. Every manner of sweetmeats had been set out on the supper table, along with syllabub and cakes, and for full half an hour we moved about the room, content to converse and admire Lady Desdemona’s glorious gift.

  I was conscious, however, that chairmen willing to adventure to Green Park Buildings after one o’clock, on behalf of a clergyman’s daughter, should be increasingly rare. I therefore made my adieux to Lord Harold and his mother, and set my face to the door.

  “Swithin shall summon a chair for you, Miss Austen,” Mona cried, “as he must also depart. Won’t you, Swithin?”

  But to my surprise, the Earl was fixed before the fire, his puzzled gaze on the empty mantle. “I beg your pardon, my dear,” he said. “I was not attending.”

  “What is it?” Lord Harold demanded roughly. “Why do you look so, Swithin?”

  “The jewels. The Wilborough diamonds. They are gone,” he said.

  For the next quarter-hour, each of us searched the carpets and cushions of the Dowager’s drawing-room as thoroughly as it is possible for ten decorous people to do. The butler and footmen who had attended us that evening were summoned, and when questioned about the matter, expressed all their bewilderment. None had noted the presence of the Dowager’s diamonds on the fireplace mantle. Only one of the servants had approached it, and that with an iron shovel already grasped in his hands. We each of us had observed him to draw out the embers, but not one could say whether the Wilborough diamonds were then still in their place on the mantel above. Our eyes had been fixed on the shovel and the Dark Man, who had stayed only long enough to take the ashes from the room.

  “A conjuring trick,” Lord Kinsfell muttered.

  Desdemona’s hands were at her neck, as tho’ she feared her own gift might be torn from her at any moment. “It is too absurd,” she said. “Who would steal Grandmère’s diamonds?”

  “Any man in need, and cool enough to brave it out,” declared Mr. Mortimer. —Then, as tho’ conscious of a solecism, he turned rapidly away and made a study of one of the portraits on the walls.

  “With your permission, Your Grace, I shall examine John Footman’s person,” the butler said gravely, “and require him to turn over his clothes.”

  “It must be done, I suppose,” Eugènie returned, “but I cannot like it. I am sure none in my employ had a part in the loss.”

  “You’d better watch, Harry,” Sir Ambrose whispered to Lord Harold, “lest the butler be another in the conspiracy.”

  “I shall do so,” his lordship replied clearly, “if you will consent to search my pockets, Fane, and let me turn out yours. We are none of us in this room immune from suspicion.”

  Sir Ambrose flushed darkly. His wife uttered a snort of contempt.

  “Indeed,” Swithin said gravely. “May I be the first to submit to scrutiny? I suggest all the gentlemen retire to one end of the room, and the ladies to the other. The Duchess’s painted screen might be usefully employed.”

  And so it was done; and some thirty minutes later we reconvened, not one of us the wiser.

  The Wilborough Diamonds had vanished into air.

  It was half-past two in the morning when at last a chair was summoned, and the Trowbridge family saw me wearily to the door. Lord Harold leaned close as he helped me into my seat and said, “When you have slept, Jane, and risen, send me a line. We have matters to discuss.”

  I nodded. I had been given furiously to think while I submitted to Miss Wren’s search of my person, and subjected her to my own. She had approached her task with the brisk efficiency native to a former governess, betraying not the slightest qualm as she ran her fingers over the whalebone of my corset. We were social equals, after all—both aging females of respectable birth and dependent status, whose prospects should never equal those of the ladies surrounding us. I was less sanguine as I patted her bodice; I did not like to think of poor Miss Wren as a possible thief, a cuckoo in the Wilborough nest. Her slight figure could hardly disguise the bulk of the Dowager’s jewels. But suspicion must be faced: Wren endured a position of subjection in Laura Place, and perhaps one of gnawing envy, that might make theft a mad impulse of the moment. Mona should leave her behind upon her marriage, and Wren’s future means were slim. Perhaps the discarded necklace beckoned with the promise of security?

  And what of Lady Fane? Her dress and air appeared prosperous enough, but what did any of us know of private circumstances? Her ladyship was acquainted with the history of the Wilborough diamonds and seemed irresistibly drawn to them. From the instant of espying the necklace around Mona’s throat, she had been as one mesmerized. Had she determined even in the carriage to make the jewels her own?

  Lady Desdemona, on the other hand, could have no reason to steal her own property—nor, indeed, could her grandmother. That both ladies submitted with grace to a search of their persons was testament to their good breeding.

  On the gentleman’s end of the drawing-room, I could not credit either Swithin or Lord Harold with coveting the Dowager’s necklace. Lord Kinsfell, too, was a son of the house—heir to a dukedom that should throw mere diamonds into the shade. It was possible, I supposed, that debts of honour might pinch his purse—but if such were the case he should be more likely to appeal to his uncle Lord Harold for a loan, than he should be to steal his sister’s inheritance. . Of Sir Ambrose Fane, however, I could surmise nothing. He appeared a gentleman of Fashion; but such men were notoriously loath to settle so much as a tailor’s bill. Fane might appear a prince, bu
t in fact be a pauper. The same might be said of young Mr. Mortimer, late of Balliol. Lord Harold had suggested he was frequently dipped at cards. And Oxford youths were such creatures of impulse! But the Dowager’s diamonds had not been discovered in Mr. Mortimer’s pockets.

  Indeed, they had been discovered nowhere.The linkboy raised his lantern, and the chair lurched as the Irish bearers lifted their poles. I inclined my head to Lady Desdemona as she bade me farewell. She seemed impossibly delicate between her affianced lover and the swirling skirts of her glorious grandmother—a sprite indeed, as Swithin had called her. His talisman blazed coldly at her neck in the waning moonlight, as tho’ shards of ice were heaped there.

  I narrowed my gaze as the chair moved off, and glanced over my shoulder for a last glimpse of the diamonds. Such brilliance! The modern cut and setting of the gems framed their beauty as the old Wilborough piece could not.

  As the doors closed behind the Trowbridge party and the lights of Laura Place dwindled, I leaned forward and called to the chairman.

  “Pray, sirrah, will you go round to the mews behind Laura Place, and tarry there a moment? I neglected to leave a token with the housekeeper.”

  He complied, and within seconds I had breached the service entrance to the Dowager’s garden. The rubbish heap was apparent under the moonlight, the footman’s shovel laid down beside it. I had only to lift the thing in my gloved hands and stir the ashes to find what I sought.

  I wrapped the filthy Wilborough necklace in my best dress handkerchief, and carried it home in my reticule.

  “Jane!” my mother hissed from her position by the parlor window, “you will never guess who has come to pay us a call! You must change your gown at once and prepare to receive a duchess! Make haste, my dear—make haste!”

  I carefully set aside my needlework and joined her at the window. “It is the Wilborough arms on the carriage.”