Alas, the poet failed to take the bait. “That might work in Paris or Rome, but not here,” he said sullenly. “The English are too fond of dull propriety to embrace scandal, no matter how gifted its subject.”
Julia, recalling the readiness with which Society had seized upon the scandal of her first husband’s murder, could not agree. “Oh, they might express shock, even revulsion, but depend upon it, they will clamor to hear more. Believe me, I know whereof I speak: when my husband—my first husband, that is—died under mysterious circumstances, it was not long before my name was on everyone’s lips. Be careful of what you wish for, Mr. Hartsong. You may find that fame is not so pleasant as you might suppose.”
“Oh, I’m sure it would be worth any—”
He was interrupted at this point by Lizzie, who had escaped Pickett and came hurrying forward to reclaim her poet. “Oh, Mr. Hartsong! I’m sure your poem was very clever, but—well, for it to be all about Papa, it didn’t really talk about him very much, did it?”
“I’m afraid you don’t understand poetry,” its author told her with a condescending smile. “Your father was not only your father, you know. He was a metaphor.”
“A what?” asked the innkeeper’s daughter.
“A metaphor,” the poet said again. “A symbol of Life, Death, and Mortality.”
“Oh,” said Lizzie, clearly still baffled.
Seeing Mr. Hartsong preparing to launch into lengthy explanation, Julia made her excuses and escaped with her husband up the stairs to their room.
“Well?” Pickett prompted once they were alone. “What did you think of our cultural experience?”
“I think Mr. Hartsong is the most egotistical young man I have ever met!” Julia declared with feeling. “No compliment was too blatant for him to swallow, no praise too fulsome for him to accept as anything more than his due. You’d best keep a safe distance from me, for I should not be at all surprised if a bolt of lightning strikes me down for telling such taradiddles!”
But the attack, when it came, proved to be from a very different source.
9
In Which Mr. and Mrs. Pickett Find Themselves
between a Rock and a Hard Place
THE CRASH OF SPLINTERING glass shattered the silence of the room where Pickett and Julia lay sleeping.
“What the—?” Awakened abruptly from a sound slumber, it took Pickett’s sleep-fogged brain a moment to identify the noise even as he threw back the covers and leapt from the bed. The chill that struck his bare legs was enough to inform him, even without the moonlight streaming through the gaping hole that had once been the window, of its source. “Julia? Are you all right?”
“Yes, but—John, what was that?”
“The window. No, don’t get up—there’s broken glass everywhere.” He thrust his feet into his shoes and crossed the room to the window, the crunching sound underfoot lending proof to his warning. Bracing himself on the wooden window frame, he stuck his head through the opening and leaned out. Neither man nor beast stirred below, and no wind blew—there was nothing, in fact, that might account for the breakage. He groped on the writing table for the candlestick, and finally located it lying on its side; apparently it had been knocked over by whatever had shattered the window. He fumbled with the flint until the spark caught and the wick flared to life, then lifted the candlestick and turned toward the center of the room. The bare boards of the floor sparkled with a thousand tiny points of light as the flame was reflected in each shard of glass. It might have been a beautiful sight had its cause been less ominous. For there in the middle of the wreckage lay a rock about the size of Pickett’s clenched fist, a rock partially covered with a narrow strip of paper which had been wrapped around it and tied in place with string.
“John?” Following his example, Julia slipped her feet into the shoes she’d worn to dinner earlier that evening, and came to stand beside him. “What is that?”
“I don’t know, but I’m about to find out.”
He picked up the coat he had discarded when he’d changed for dinner, and groped in it for the pocketknife he carried there. He slashed through the string that held the paper to the rock. The note contained only half a dozen words, but their meaning was plain:
Go back where you came from was scrawled in ink across the torn foolscap.
“Who would do such a thing?” Julia asked, staring in shocked disbelief at the paper in his hand.
“I think it’s safe to say it isn’t Mr. Colquhoun ordering me back to Bow Street.”
“It isn’t funny!”
“Believe me, I’m not laughing,” he said, tight-lipped. “Julia—”
He got no further, for a clatter of footsteps sounded on the stairs, and a moment later someone pounded on the door.
“Mrs. Pickett?” a female voice called through the thick wooden panel. “Mr. Pickett? Are you all right?”
Man and wife hastily donned their dressing gowns, then Pickett opened the door to reveal the innkeeper’s widow, also clad in a dressing gown and with her graying hair in a thick braid down her back, holding a brass candlestick in her hand.
“We’re unharmed, Mrs. Hawkins,” he assured her. “Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for your window.”
Her gaze shifted past them to take in the gaping window and the fragments of glass littering the floor. “Oh, my! Who could have done such a wicked thing?”
“Someone who doesn’t like tourists, apparently,” Pickett suggested, offering her the note.
“Well, I won’t deny there are some folk who feel that way, but you can be sure I’m not one of them!” declared Mrs. Hawkins. “You’re welcome to stay at the Hart and Hound for as long as you please, but although I’ll sweep up the glass first thing in the morning, I don’t know when I can have the glazier in to replace it. Of course, in the meantime, you’ll want a different room. I’m afraid that poet has the second-best, but the room down the corridor has the same view as this, although it’s a mite smaller. The room, that is, not the view. Oh dear, oh dear, I’m that sorry! I wouldn’t have had this happen for anything!”
The next few minutes were busy ones, as Pickett and Julia gathered their belongings and followed their apologetic hostess down the corridor to a much smaller room that nevertheless had the advantage of an intact window.
“She wasn’t lying when she said it was smaller,” Julia observed, after Mrs. Hawkins had left them, with still more apologies and a not very confidently expressed hope that they would sleep soundly for what remained of the night. “Still, I suppose it will have to do.”
“It’s plenty large enough for one.” Seeing her puzzled expression, Pickett added, “Julia, you’re going back home first thing in the morning.”
At any other time, in any other circumstances, her heart would have rejoiced to hear him refer to her house in Curzon Street as “home,” for he had not always felt that way about it. Now, however, all she could think was that he intended to send her back to London without him.
“Pray don’t make me,” she pleaded. “John, don’t—”
“Sweetheart, hear me out. Self-absorbed poets and bucolic love triangles are all very amusing in their way, but there’s something more sinister at work here. Someone wants you gone—one way or the other.”
“How do you know it was meant for me?” she challenged. “Perhaps he—assuming it is a ‘he’—has discovered your connection with Bow Street, and wants you gone?”
“Who saw Ned Hawkins pushed off a cliff?”
“Yes, but I couldn’t tell who did it!”
“But he doesn’t know that, does he? He’s tried to kill you once already, and now—this.” He made a vague gesture in the direction of the ruined room at the other end of the corridor. “What if that rock had struck you? What if it had been intended to do exactly that? Please, Julia, if you love me, go back to London.”
Put that way, of course, there was only one thing she could do.
IT WAS A WAN AND HEAVY-eyed pair who waited for the R
oyal Mail coach to depart the next morning, for neither of them had slept much, having spent most of the night in the rather desperate lovemaking of two people who didn’t know when, or if, they would have the chance again. In that regard, it reminded Julia of the night they had consummated their accidental marriage as Pickett had lain on what they both had feared might be his deathbed. The memory brought tears to Julia’s eyes, and she fumbled in her reticule for a handkerchief.
“Please, pay me no heed,” Julia said, seeing Pickett regarding her in some alarm. “I’ve become a veritable watering pot of late.”
Privately, Pickett wondered how any man could “pay no heed” to a woman—particularly this woman—sobbing her heart out at the prospect of separation from him. “Julia—sweetheart—”
“I know,” she assured him, stanching the flow of tears with an effort. “I don’t like it, I don’t want to go, but I do understand. You will write to me, will you not?”
He nodded. “I promise.”
“Every day?”
“I don’t know that I’ll have anything to say every day,” he confessed, somewhat taken aback by this request, “except to tell you how much I love you and miss you.” He immediately wished the words unsaid, for they set off her tears again.
At last the Royal Mail coach drew into the yard, its maroon and black body gleaming in the morning sun. As the sweating horses were unhitched and a fresh team led out, the sack of incoming mail was tossed down and the mail bound for London and points south was lashed to the baggage platform in its place—an operation that, in the opinion of at least two of its observers, was accomplished far too quickly. Pickett handed up Julia’s considerable luggage, and this too was tied fast.
They had said their goodbyes earlier, and in private, so when the step was lowered and the passengers began to board, Pickett merely took her gloved hands and pressed first one and then the other to his lips. “Take good care of these hands,” he told her. “You hold my heart in them, you know.”
“I’ll take very good care of it,” she whispered, and allowed him to hand her up into the vehicle.
The door was closed, the coachman touched the whip to the horses’ flanks, and the carriage lurched slowly forward. Julia, seated against the window, gave Pickett a brave little smile and wiggled her fingers in farewell.
It was the smile, and the effort it obviously cost her, that undid him. Suddenly he was moving across the stable yard in the coach’s wake, walking faster and faster until he drew abreast of the carriage at a dead run. In the meantime, Julia had disappeared from the window, and a moment the carriage door swung open and she leaped out of the vehicle and into his arms.
The coachman sawed on the reins, cursing fluently. “Damn fool woman, jumping from a moving carriage!” Still muttering imprecations under his breath, he untied the rope holding Julia’s bags and threw them down, then secured the rope once more, whipped up his horses, and was once again on his way, albeit not without one last, disgusted glare for the couple whose antics had put him almost three minutes behind schedule.
Neither Julia nor Pickett, kissing passionately in the middle of the yard in full view of half a dozen grinning stable hands, paid him the slightest heed.
“ALL RIGHT, THEN,” PICKETT said as he returned with Julia to the inn, holding her tightly to his side as if he feared the Royal Mail coach might return and attempt to carry her off by force, “the first thing we’re going to do is find out who threw that rock.”
“So how do we do that?”
“I want to take a closer look at that paper. Not at the words written on it, but the paper itself. If we’re lucky, it will give us some clue as to who wrote it.”
“And if we’re not?”
He sighed. “If we’re not, then it’s back to trying to find a match for the handwriting. It won’t be easy,” he added hastily, before she could point out his lack of success in this area thus far. “I’m going to have to search farther afield than just the inn’s guest register.”
“Where, then?” she asked. They had entered the inn by this time, and she had to raise her voice slightly to be heard over the two indignant middle-aged women at the counter.
“—won’t stay another minute in an establishment where we might be murdered in our beds!” one of them railed at Mrs. Hawkins, who tried without success to sooth her ruffled feathers.
“I’m sure no one is going to be murdered, Miss Featherstone,” she said placatingly, although Pickett might have disabused her of this notion, had he been so inclined. “My poor Ned’s death was a tragic accident—”
“She is Miss Edith Featherstone; I am Miss Featherstone,” the elder of the two ladies put in. “And say what you will about your husband, that commotion last night was no accident!”
“No, it was a cruel prank. But no one was hurt,” the innkeeper’s widow insisted.
Julia regarded Pickett with eyes wide, but he silenced her with a look and gestured with a nod of his head toward the stairs. They would have made a discreet escape to their own room, but alas, discretion was difficult to achieve while burdened down with two portmanteaux and a couple of bandboxes. Pickett accidentally bumped one of the latter against the newel post.
“Why, look here!” Mrs. Hawkins exclaimed eagerly. “Here’s Mrs. Pickett deciding to stay after all, and if she has no fears of remaining under my roof, I’m sure you can have no cause for worry! It was her window that was broken, you know.”
“What Mrs. Pickett does is entirely beside the point,” returned Miss Featherstone, unimpressed. “She may do as she pleases, for she has a Man to protect her. But as for my sister and me, traveling without the Protection of a Man’s Presence, we intend to remove to the Golden Feather for the remainder of our holiday. Pray send someone up to fetch our things.”
Having no other choice, Miss Hawkins summoned her stepson and gave him the necessary orders. He obeyed with obvious reluctance, but not before making a point of relieving Pickett of Julia’s bags and carrying them up the stairs.
“Poor Mrs. Hawkins!" Julia exclaimed once Jem had left them for the far more disagreeable task of fetching the bags of the departing guests. “I had never considered that her other guests might be frightened off.”
“It’s interesting that their imaginations should leap to murder,” Pickett said thoughtfully. “Or perhaps not their imaginations, after all. I couldn’t help remembering all those capital letters and thinking here was a person who spoke that way.”
“That in itself doesn’t mean anything. I write with a fair amount of capitals myself,” Julia said, thinking rather guiltily of her own letter, which was even now on its way to her sister in Somersetshire. “It was the fashion when my governess was young, and so that was the way she taught Claudia and me. But as for the Misses Featherstone, I should think their mention of murder was no more than the megrims of a pair of spinster ladies traveling alone,” Julia said. “Although it would seem to suggest that they suspect Ned’s death was something more than the accident the coroner’s jury ruled it.”
“If that were the case, they would be wise to keep their suspicions to themselves, else they might find a rock thrown through their own window,” Pickett said. “Although it’s not a bad idea, moving across the street to the Golden Feather. I’m tied to the Hart and Hound for the duration, since my instructions specified it, but if you would prefer to—”
“I’m staying with you,” Julia said, tugging on the lapel of his coat in a gesture half possessive and half protective. “Whatever is happening here, we’ll see it through together.”
Pickett could find nothing to dispute in this very admirable sentiment, so after sealing this pact with a kiss, he turned his attention to the writing table (considerably smaller than the one positioned beneath the window of their previous room) and the three missives that sat on it, weighted down by the rock that had been the means of delivery for the most recent one. As he had expected, the one summoning him to Bow Street was written in a very different hand, but as for the ot
her two—
“It’s a match,” he told Julia, holding them side by side for her inspection. “The note tied to the rock and the long letter, the one to James Sullivan of Dublin from the mysterious E.G.B. Look at the capital ‘G’s and the lowercase ‘m’s and ‘a’s.”
She leaned closer for a better look, then nodded. “They’re the same, or very similar.”
“Too similar to be a coincidence, I think,” he agreed. “Then, too, the paper is the same. Hold it up to the window, and you can see the watermark. There’s just a bit of that same mark on the note, where the scrap of paper was torn from a larger sheet.
“John, you don’t suppose we might find the rest of this sheet of paper lying about somewhere, do you? After all, the note didn’t require much, and paper is too expensive to waste.”
He shook his head. “Expensive or not, if I were going to tear off a strip, write a threatening note on it, tie it to a rock, and throw it through a window, I would consign the rest of that sheet to the fire at the earliest opportunity, and never mind the cost.”
“Yes, but not everyone is as clever as you, darling.”
“If I were as clever as all that, you would be on a mail coach halfway to Penrith by now,” he grumbled. “Still, searching for a torn piece of paper that might belong to anyone would be a bit like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.”
“I suppose so,” she conceded with a sigh. “All right, then, what do we do next?”
“We try to determine whose paper this is.”
“But you just said—”
“I said it would likely be a waste of time trying to find the sheet of paper that the note was torn from,” Pickett reminded her. “But it has a watermark, and watermarks can be traced.”
“And there’s a stationer’s shop just down the street!" exclaimed Julia, getting into the spirit of the thing.
“Exactly! All we need is an excuse to call there.”
Peril by Post Page 13
