The Usual Santas

by Peter Lovesey

  “I do not know how to account for such an honour! The Dowager Duchess—condescending to Green Park Buildings!”

  “I begged Lord Harold to bring her to me, when I wrote to him this morning.”

  “You wrote to him?” my mother gasped incredulously. “To Lord Harold? My dear, when am I to wish you joy? —Although I cannot believe him deserving of you, and must advise your father against the engagement.”

  “There is no engagement,” I told her patiently. “A note of thanks, merely, for my entertainment last evening.”

  Her face fell. “Then it was decidedly improper of you, Jane, and more than the tedious man deserved . Had you written to Lady Desdemona—”

  She broke off as our maid hurried past in attendance upon the door.

  “You must leave me, ma’am,” I said. “His lordship is come on a private matter.”

  “Does he mean to ask for your hand today?” She looked all her bewilderment. “And your father not even at home!”

  “Please, Mamma,” I said gently. “I beg of you—”

  “Very well.” She sighed—at the waywardness of daughters, or her disappointment in a duchess, I could not tell; and hurried herself from the room.

  The Dowager Duchess swept upon me first, and accepted a chair, her aged face very small and porcelain-skinned beneath a monumental hat. Her son did not sit, but stood with one booted foot upon the brass fireplace surround. He appeared to be studying the flames; but I knew from the composure of his looks that he merely awaited an outcome he had foreseen long since.

  “Your Grace is very kind to wait upon me here,” I stammered. “I regret that the exertion was required.”

  “I ought to have paid this call long before,” Eugènie said dismissively. “You have come so often to Laura Place.”

  I bowed my head, then reached for my needlework. Concealed within its folds were the Wilborough diamonds, cleansed of their ashes. “I did not think it right to disturb Your Grace’s peace, by presenting these in your drawing room.”

  She stared wordlessly at the necklace for an instant, her figure immobile. Then her eyes lifted to mine with the faintest smile. “A more brazen woman would demand to know how you came by these—and what moved you to repent of the theft.”

  “Miss Austen did not steal your diamonds,” Lord Harold said tiredly.

  I set them on the Dowager’s lap. She put aside her fine Malacca cane and lifted them to the light in her gloved hands.

  “It was foolish of me to subject my guests to such suspicion,” she sighed, “and my servants, too. I regretted both as soon as I had time to think. This was the act of an instant, you understand--but an instant, as all of you trooped to the entry in search of the Dark Man, and I was left behind with my jewels. I dropped them in the embers of the fire, and made sure they were well covered with ash. When poor John Footman shoveled them out—”

  “I can imagine it was painful to part with the late duke’s gift,” I suggested. “Desdemona has no need of your diamonds now; the Earl has given her a better necklet, in being a token of love. You hoped the loss of these gems would be ascribed to chance—the passage of an unknown street urchin through your house.”

  “But unfortunately, your meddlesome son and the keen-eyed Miss Austen were present,” Lord Harold broke in. “And when you went to retrieve the diamonds from the rubbish heap this morning, you were disappointed.”

  “I? Retrieve this abomination of stones?” Eugènie’s eyes flashed all her indignation. She set the Wilborough diamonds on the little table beside her. “I hoped they would be carted away by the dustmen. They have caused me nothing but sorrow, these forty years at least!”

  Lord Harold carried the necklace into the full light of the window. I waited while he studied it.

  “Paste, Mama,” he said.

  “Paste,” she agreed.

  “You sold the real stones years ago?” His narrow gaze was fixed upon her now like a hawk.

  “Needs must, Harry.”

  “Gambling debts? —Or blackmail?”

  The Dowager Duchess reared a little, her dignity foremost. “I do not think I shall answer that question. You were not used to be impertinent, Harry. You are too much my son.”

  “You could not allow Mona to learn the piece was trumpery,” he suggested. “As she was bound to do, the first time she sent the diamonds out to be cleaned.”

  “And yet, my trustees required me to present them to her,” the Dowager said. “I had no choice but to do so at her engagement, under the terms of your father’s will.”

  “That must have been excessively provoking.”

  “I was enragée, I assure you.”

  Eugènie’s beautifully gowned form was rigid in her chair. To suffer such a catechism in the presence of a mere acquaintance cannot have been comfortable. Every one of Lord Harold’s words seemed a whip, and the barbed ends stung.

  “These were your jewels, were they not?” I cried. “Given to you personally by the duke? You said they formed no part of the Wilborough estate. You had every right to exchange them for paste, years since, if you so chose. It was only the late duke’s will that made the difficulty.”

  Eugènie leaned toward me gratefully. “How did you suspect me, my dear Miss Austen?” she enquired. “What made you search in my rubbish pile?”

  “Your performance was flawless,” I assured her. “But you were the only person alone in the drawing-room when we all went to meet the Dark Man. In the end, however—I must credit the moonlight.”

  “Moonlight?” she repeated.

  “On a midnight so clear, the Wilborough diamonds shone dull. The Swithin necklet flared gloriously! All that was required was to have seen them both, to apprehend the difference. One was paste, the other real.”

  “I wonder if Lady Fane knows,” Eugènie mused. “I cannot like her little quizzing glass. And she is a ruthless gossip.”

  “She would never offer the house of Wilborough such an insult, as to voice her doubts,” I replied. “Your Grace is unassailable.”

  Eugènie crowed with sudden laughter. “If only that were so! One may dress the Paris Opera girl in a duchess’s clothes, Miss Austen, but one cannot change her essence. That is what my Harry is thinking. He knows I am paste tricked out as carbon.”

  “I should never regard you with such contempt, ma’am,” Lord Harold interjected. “I am, as you say—too much your son.”

  She held out her hand to him, charming as ever.

  “You cannot know the desperation I felt—the ends to which I was driven—the secrecy to which all women are put, dependent upon men and powerless as we are—before I sold my jewels. Even the grandest of ladies, who believe they may summon every comfort, cannot escape their own lies! Mona will learn this with time—but who am I to enlighten her now? She is in love with Swithin; and happiness is fleeting.”

  “It is much the same with clergymen’s daughters as with duchesses,” I said. “I would not lessen an iota of Mona’s joy, by telling her the truth.”

  A look of relief passed over the porcelain countenance, and Eugènie closed her eyes.

  “It is time we took our leave.”

  Lord Harold bowed over my hand. With his other, he pressed the Wilborough diamonds—the Wilborough paste—into my palm. “Get rid of this for me, will you, Jane?”

  It was perhaps a day or two later that the curious notice appeared in the Bath Chronicle, regarding the recent theft in Laura Place:

  outrage committed upon the dowager duchess of w—, whose new year’s eve revels were put to flight by a treacherous dark man, who absconded with the famous w— diamonds. nothing is known of the miscreant, and no trace of the diamonds is found. the duchess is said to be prostrate. perhaps the impending nuptials of her granddaughter and the earl of s— will console her. the earl has diamonds to spare.

  * * *

 
* See Jane and the Wandering Eye, Bantam Books, 1998.

  ** Diamonds were known to be formed of carbon as early as 1772, when Antoine Lavoisier, a French nobleman generally acknowledged as the father of modern chemistry, who was guillotined in 1794, established their chemical basis. – Editor’s note.

  Supper with Miss Shivers

  By Peter Lovesey

  Peter Lovesey submitted his first short story, “The Bathroom,” to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in 1973 and had it rejected. After sober consideration, he didn’t blow his brains out in despair and ultimately won the Ellery Queen Readers’ Award for “The Crime of Miss Oyster Brown.” He has written more than a hundred stories, including five collections, and would cheerfully make a living at it if they paid better. In the meantime, he has written more than thirty novels, including the Peter Diamond series, set in modern-day Bath, England, and the Sergeant Cribb mysteries, set in Victorian London. In 1995, he won the Golden Mysteries competition staged by the Mystery Writers of America to mark its fiftieth year. He won the Crime Writers Association Short Story Dagger in 2007 and was insufferably proud when his son Phil won the same honor in 2011. As a footnote to the Ellery Queen rejection, “The Bathroom” was eventually published by the magazine with a different title, and this year Peter was invited to contribute a story to the 75th anniversary issue.

  The door was stuck. Something inside was stopping it from opening, and Fran was numb with cold. School had broken up for Christmas that afternoon—“Lord dismiss us with Thy blessing”—and the jubilant kids had given her a blinding headache. She’d wobbled on her bike through the London traffic, two carriers filled with books suspended from the handlebars. She’d endured exhaust fumes and maniac motorists, and now she couldn’t get into her own flat. She cursed, let the bike rest against her hip and attacked the door with both hands.

  “It was quite scary actually,” she told Jim when he got in later. “I mean the door opened perfectly well when we left this morning. We could have been burgled. Or it could have been a body lying in the hall.”

  Jim, who worked as a systems analyst, didn’t have the kind of imagination that expected bodies behind doors. “So what was it—the doormat?”

  “Get knotted. It was a great bundle of Christmas cards wedged under the door. Look at them. I blame you for this, James Palmer.”

  “Me?”

  Now that she was over the headache and warm again, she enjoyed poking gentle fun at Jim. “Putting our address book on your computer and running the envelopes through the printer. This is the result. We’re going to be up to our eyeballs in cards. I don’t know how many you sent, but we’ve heard from the plumber, the dentist, the television repairman and the people who moved us in, apart from family and friends. You must have gone straight through the address book. I won’t even ask how many stamps you used.”

  “What an idiot,” Jim admitted. “I forgot to use the sorting function.”

  “I left some for you to open.”

  “I bet you’ve opened all the ones with checks inside,” said Jim. “I’d rather eat first.”

  “I’m slightly mystified by one,” said Fran. “Do you remember sending to someone called Miss Shivers?”

  “No. I’ll check if you like. Curious name.”

  “It means nothing to me, but she’s invited us to a meal.”

  Fran handed him the card—one of those desolate, old-fashioned snow-scenes of someone dragging home a log. Inside, under the printed greetings, was the signature E. Shivers (Miss), followed by Please make my Christmas—come for supper 7pm next Sunday, 23rd. In the corner was an address label.

  “Never heard of her,” said Jim. “Must be a mistake.”

  “Maybe she sends her cards by computer,” said Fran, and added, before he waded in, “I don’t think it’s a mistake, Jim. She named us on the envelope. I’d like to go.”

  “For crying out loud—Didmarsh is miles away, Berkshire or somewhere. We’re far too busy.”

  “Thanks to your computer, we’ve got time in hand,” Fran told him with a smile.

  The moment she’d seen the invitation, she’d known she would accept. Three or four times in her life she’d felt a similar impulse and each time she had been right. She didn’t think of herself as psychic or telepathic, but sometimes she felt guided by some force that couldn’t be explained scientifically. A good force, she was certain. It had convinced her that she should marry no one else but Jim, and after three years together she had no doubts. Their love was unshakable. And because he loved her, he would take her to supper with Miss Shivers. He wouldn’t understand why she was so keen to go, but he would see that she was in earnest, and that would be enough.

  “By the way, I checked the computer,” he told her in front of the destinations board on Paddington Station next Sunday. “We definitely didn’t send a card to anyone called Shivers.”

  “Makes it all the more exciting, doesn’t it?” Fran said, squeezing his arm.

  Jim was the first man she had trusted. Trust was her top requirement of the opposite sex. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t particularly tall and that his nose came to a point. He was loyal. And didn’t Clint Eastwood have a pointed nose?

  She’d learned from her mother’s three disastrous marriages to be ultra-wary of men. The first—Fran’s father, Harry—had started the rot. He’d died in a train crash just a few days before Fran was born. You’d think he couldn’t be blamed for that, but he could. Fran’s mother had been admitted to hospital with complications in the eighth month, and Harry, the rat, had found someone else in a week. On the night of the crash he’d been in London with his mistress, buying her expensive clothes. He’d even lied to his pregnant wife, stuck in hospital, about working overtime.

  For years Fran’s mother had fended off the questions any child asks about a father she had never seen, telling Fran to forget him and love her stepfather instead. Stepfather the First had turned into a violent alcoholic. The divorce had taken nine years to achieve. Stepfather the Second—a Finn called Bengt (Fran called him Bent)—had treated their Wimbledon terraced house as if it were a sauna, insisting on communal baths and parading naked around the place. When Fran was reaching puberty there were terrible rows because she wanted privacy. Her mother had sided with Bengt until one terrible night when he’d crept into Fran’s bedroom and groped her. Bengt walked out of their lives the next day, but, incredibly to Fran, a lot of the blame seemed to be heaped on her, and her relationship with her mother had been damaged forever. At forty-three, her mother, deeply depressed, had taken a fatal overdose.

  The hurts and horrors of those years had not disappeared, but marriage to Jim had provided a fresh start. Fran nestled against him in the carriage and he fingered a strand of her dark hair. It was supposed to be an Intercity train, but BR were using old rolling-stock for some of the Christmas period and Fran and Jim had this compartment to themselves.

  “Did you let this Shivers woman know we’re coming?”

  She nodded. “I phoned. She’s over the moon that I answered. She’s going to meet us at the station.”

  “What’s it all about, then?”

  “She didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.”

  “You didn’t? Why not, for God’s sake?”

  “It’s a mystery trip—a Christmas mystery. I’d rather keep it that way.”

  “Sometimes, Fran, you leave me speechless.”

  “Kiss me instead, then.”

  A whistle blew somewhere and the line of taxis beside the platform appeared to be moving forward. Fran saw no more of the illusion because Jim had put his lips to hers.

  Somewhere beyond Westbourne Park Station they noticed how foggy the late afternoon had become. After days of mild, damp weather, a proper December chill had set in. The heating in the carriage was working only in fits and starts and Fran was beginning to wish she�
��d worn trousers instead of opting decorously for her corduroy skirt and boots.

  “Do you think it’s warmer further up the train?”

  “Want me to look?”

  Jim slid aside the door. Before starting along the corridor, he joked, “If I’m not back in half an hour, send for Miss Marple.”

  “No need,” said Fran. “I’ll find you in the bar and mine’s a hot cuppa.”

  She pressed herself into the warm space Jim had left in the corner and rubbed a spy-hole in the condensation. There wasn’t anything to spy. She shivered and wondered if she’d been right to trust her hunch and come on this trip. It was more than a hunch, she told herself. It was intuition.

  It wasn’t long before she heard the door pulled back. She expected to see Jim, or perhaps the man who checked the tickets. Instead there was a fellow about her own age, twenty-five, with a pink carrier bag containing something about the size of a briefcase. “Do you mind?” he asked. “The heating’s given up altogether next door.”

  Fran gave a shrug. “I’ve got my doubts about the whole carriage.”

  He took the corner seat by the door and placed the bag beside him. Fran took stock of him rapidly, hoping Jim would soon return. She didn’t feel threatened, but she wasn’t used to those old-fashioned compartments. She rarely used the trains these days except occasionally the Tube.

  She decided the young man must have kitted himself in an Oxfam shop. He had a dark blue car coat, black trousers with flares and crêpe-soled ankle boots. Around his neck was one of those striped scarves that college students wore in the sixties, one end slung over his left shoulder. And his thick dark hair matched the image. Fran guessed he was unemployed. She wondered if he was going to ask her for money.

  But he said, “Been up to town for the day?”

  “I live there.” She added quickly, “With my husband. He’ll be back presently.”

  “I’m married, too,” he said, and there was a chink of amusement in his eyes that Fran found reassuring. “I’m up from the country, smelling of wellies and cow-dung. Don’t care much for London. It’s crazy in Bond Street this time of year.”