“I could show you a woman who regularly sends a blank sheet of paper through the Royal Mail to her brother who lives in another part of the country, and frequently receives the same from him. When this letter—if one may call it that—is delivered, he declines to pay the postage to receive it, and she does the same. In this manner, each can be assured that the other is well, without being obliged to pay for the letter. I ask you, is a system fair when it forces honest citizens to commit what a strict interpretation of the law must consider mail fraud? If it is not—if it is in fact unfair—does it deserve obedience?”
“Mr. Hetherington, I’m afraid you’re asking the wrong person,” Pickett confessed, thinking quickly. “I have no interest in what you choose to do, beyond warning you of the risk should you be discovered. But I wonder if you would be willing to give me some information in return for my silence.”
“What is it you wish to know?”
“I believe—that is, I have reason to suspect—that Ned Hawkins’s death was not an accident, regardless of the inquest’s findings to the contrary. Have you any idea why someone might wish him dead?”
“Other than those two bellicose young men with designs on his daughter’s virtue, you mean?” He shook his head. “No, I can’t say that I do.”
“I saw you with your Bible at the Hart and Hound the day I arrived,” Pickett reminded him. “I expect the inn makes a good point from which to collect and distribute letters.”
“Ah yes, my Bible.” With a flick of his wrist, Hetherington flipped the worn leather cover open. The insides of the pages had been cut completely away, leaving a hollow cavity. “Country folk bring their letters directly to the cave, but it can be inconvenient for those who live in the village. I arrange to be at the Hart and Hound three days a week to receive any letters they might wish to add to the bag.” He gave the drawstring a jerk, hefting his burden higher onto his back.
“Did Ned Hawkins know?” Pickett asked.
“Of course.”
“Is it possible that he took exception to his establishment being used for such a purpose, and that someone deemed it necessary to, er, remove the impediment?”
The older man bristled. “We are not the Hawkhurst Gang, Mr. Pickett!”
“No, of course not,” Pickett assured him hastily, aware of having offended. “I only meant—”
“Few men had as much reason to wish the scheme to continue as Ned Hawkins did,” Hetherington pointed out in a more moderate tone. “It brought him a steady supply of customers, for anyone hoping to submit letters for delivery would not wish to call attention to himself by visiting a public house and failing to purchase so much as a single pint of ale.”
“No, I suppose not,” Pickett said, conceding the point.
“Depend upon it, Ned Hawkins stepped too near the edge of the cliff and, in a moment of carelessness, he fell. Tragic, of course, but no need to make a mystery of it. Now, if you will excuse me, I must be off if I’m to reach Penrith before the fellow I’m to meet there sets out for London. Perhaps you and your charming bride can join us for dinner again soon, say, tomorrow night? Until then, I’m sure I can rely on your discretion.”
Pickett assured him that he might, but remained in the cave pondering this new and unexpected development for some time after the older man had gone. At length, he shook his head as if to clear it, then exited the cave, dragged the boat from its hiding place, and began the long row back.
JULIA, IN THE MEANTIME, had gone back to bed after his departure, but it was some time before she drifted off to sleep. Consequently, the morning was far advanced by the time she awoke again, dressed, and went downstairs in search of breakfast. She felt a bit guilty, feasting on buttered eggs and bacon when her husband had been obliged to set out on an empty stomach, but reasoned that he would hardly be surprised; as he himself had remarked, she was always hungry these days—the result, no doubt, of Little Pickett demanding its own morning meal.
The thought of Pickett reminded her of the liniment she’d promised him, so when Mrs. Hawkins emerged from the kitchen to replenish her coffee, Julia asked if there were any to be had.
“Aye, that there is, Mrs. Pickett,” the innkeeper’s widow assured her. “I believe there’s a letter come for you, too. If you won’t mind waiting a bit, I’ll fetch them for you in a trice.”
These assurances proved to be overly optimistic, for Mrs. Hawkins had not yet returned by the time Julia had finished her breakfast; she wondered if the woman was quarreling with her stepdaughter again. Julia rose from the table, of two minds as to whether she should wait for her hostess or go back to her room and let Mrs. Hawkins or Lizzie bring it up to her, when the bone of contention between the two women, the poet himself, entered the public room, apparently in search of his own breakfast.
“Good morning, Mr. Hartsong,” Julia said, making up her mind to wait, since the poet’s arrival would very likely hasten Mrs. Hawkins’s return. “It promises to be a fine day, does it not? Thank goodness yesterday’s rain did not decide to linger!”
The poet, it soon transpired, had other things on his mind. Resolutely, he crossed the room to stand before her. “I have been thinking about what you said, Mrs. Pickett.”
“Oh?” Julia could not for the life of her imagine what he was talking about. “And what was that?”
“Your suggestion that I find some way to shock Society as a means of gaining the audience my talent deserves.”
Julia was fairly certain she had made no observations regarding the audience his talent deserved, but she did recall making certain remarks concerning shocking behavior, in the hope—a futile one, as it had turned out—of provoking a confession. “And have you thought of some appropriately shocking action to take?”
“I have,” he announced. “I shall take a mistress.”
Julia frowned. “I think it would be very wrong of you to behave so shabbily toward one who is surely your greatest admirer, and an unpardonable insult to her father’s memory for you to seduce his daughter while enjoying the hospitality of his establishment.”
“Oh, Lizzie”—he dismissed his erstwhile muse with a wave of one slightly ink-stained hand—“why should anyone care if I gave some village wench a slip on the shoulder? No, I have in mind a lady—a married lady, in fact, and one rendered slightly scandalous by the fact that she was only recently suspected of having murdered her first husband—”
As Julia stared at him in speechless indignation, the poet (no doubt supposing her to be overwhelmed by the honor that was soon to be hers) seized her in his arms. “Only say you will be mine, and we shall set all of literary London abuzz!”
“Mr. Hartsong!” Julia exclaimed, struggling to free herself from a wiry but surprisingly strong young man who seemed determined to cover her face with kisses. “Release me at once, or I shall box your ears!” She tried to suit the word to the deed, but it proved an empty threat, as he held her arms pinioned to her sides. She glanced wildly about the room for assistance, but the public room was empty of all other guests at this time of the morning.
“Why so coy, Mrs. Pickett? You would not have made such a suggestion if you were not already entertaining thoughts in that direction.”
“I never”—here she was obliged to pause long enough to wrench her mouth away from his—“I never suggested any such—”
“Excuse me, Mr. Gape?”
A surprisingly meek voice interrupted her protestations, and a corresponding hand tapped him on the shoulder. The poet turned to glare at the intruder, and when he did, John Pickett’s left fist met his nose with what to was, Julia’s ears, a very gratifying crunch.
15
In Which a Great Light Dawns
ANY OF THE ARISTOCRATIC gentlemen who honed their skills at Gentleman Jackson’s Boxing Saloon in Bond Street would no doubt have deplored Pickett’s technique, but not even the most exacting of them, or even England’s Champion himself, could have argued with the results.
“My nose!” shrieked the poet
, releasing Julia abruptly and clasping both hands to his abused proboscis. Within seconds, bright red blood welled up between his fingers and ran down his hand to disappear into the sleeves of his coat. “Oh, my nose!”
“Find yourself another woman,” said Pickett without sympathy, pulling Julia up against his side. “This one is already taken.”
“Here now, what’s all this?” demanded Mrs. Hawkins, emerging from the kitchen with a jar of the requested liniment and a folded sheet of foolscap in her hand. “I never heard such a—oh, my stars and garters! Mr. Hartsong, what happened?”
“Percival?” cried Lizzie, entering the public room hard on her stepmother’s heels. She stopped cold at the sight of her bloodied and disheveled lover. “Percival! What—? Who—?”
The answer to these disjointed queries should have been clear. Pickett had by this time released Julia, but he still glared at the poet, and with his right hand he rubbed the bruised knuckles of his left.
“Mr. Pickett!” Lizzie exclaimed, drawing the obvious conclusion. “For shame!”
“The only one who should be ashamed of himself is Mr. Gape,” Julia retorted. She had been careful in the past to avoid offending the poet, using his preferred name for himself rather than the one bequeathed to him by his parents, but now felt no such scruples. To the object of this denunciation, she added, “The next time you feel inclined to honor a female with your attentions, I suggest you first be very certain she is amenable to receiving them.”
Thinking to stanch the flow of blood, Lizzie snatched up Julia’s discarded serviette and pressed it to her lover’s nose, causing him to howl anew. “I’m sure Percival would never—you must have misunderstood,” she insisted, casting a disapproving glance at Pickett over her shoulder.
Pickett took instant exception to this justification of his adversary. “It’s hard to ‘misunderstand’ a lady struggling in the arms of a man determined to kiss her against her will—especially when the lady in question happens to be your wife.”
Lizzie would have urged Mr. Hartsong to defend himself against so blatantly false a charge, had not his abused face (or what could be seen of it above the blood-soaked serviette) assumed so hangdog an expression that the poet’s perfidy could no longer be denied.
“Percival!” she cried. “Oh, how could you? When you told me I was your Muse!”
Pickett, feeling a bit as if he had accidentally walked into a Drury Lane farce, might have felt a pang of sympathy for Mr. Hartsong/Gape, had any other woman but Julia been the recipient of that gentleman’s unwanted advances. As if anything else were needed to make the melodrama complete, the door opened and Ben Wilson entered the public room.
“What the—Lizzie!” The blond giant crossed the room in three strides. “What’s happened?”
“I have been Cruelly Deceived!” announced Lizzie, obviously a lover of the more lurid sort of novels.
“No wonder she took such a fancy to Hartsong,” was Pickett’s sotto voce observation to Julia.
Ben Wilson glanced from Lizzie’s tearstained face to his rival’s bloodied one. “Oh?”
“Percival—Mr. Hartsong, I mean—has been making Amorous Advances to Mrs. Pickett!” She cast herself onto the farmer’s broad chest. “Oh, Ben! You tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen. Can you ever forgive me?”
Ben Wilson was a man of few words, but if the willingness with which he received her were anything to judge by, he not only could forgive her, but had already done so. “If it’s agreeable to you, Lizzie, I’ll go to the vicarage and see the parson about having the banns read starting this Sunday.” It was the longest sentence Pickett had ever heard him speak. “Something I have to do first, though.”
“Anything you wish,” Lizzie declared fervently. “What is it?”
He seized Pickett’s hand and pumped it vigorously, then nodded in the direction of the poet’s rapidly swelling nose. “Been wanting to do that myself for the last fortnight.”
THE LITTLE COMPANY broke up soon afterwards. Lizzie and her intended set out arm in arm for the vicarage, while Mrs. Hawkins returned to the back bedroom she had once shared with her husband, to communicate to her departed spouse an outcome which she knew he would heartily approve. Mr. Hartsong, for his part, sought refuge in his own room, where he unburdened himself of an impassioned and embittered diatribe in iambic pentameter against the inconstant nature of the fairer sex, a work which (although he could not yet know it) would in a scant two months’ time be praised by the Edinburgh Review (laboring under the mistaken impression that any poem of such exquisite awfulness could only be a deliberate parody, and therefore a work of genius), and one whose overwrought lines would soon be on the lips of every buck of fashion in the Metropolis.
Julia’s own sentiments were most closely aligned with those of Ben Wilson, although hers assumed a rather warmer expression. As soon as the door to their room was closed behind them, she flung herself at her husband and kissed him with a passion that made Lizzie’s newly discovered enthusiasm for her sheep farmer seem tepid by comparison.
“What’s this for?” Pickett asked breathlessly, emerging from an assault that set his senses reeling.
“I’m trying to wipe off that horrid poet’s kisses,” Julia said, reaching for him again.
He seized her by the shoulders and held her firmly at arm’s length. “Well, don’t wipe them on me! I don’t want them any more than you do.”
“In all seriousness, John, your timing was sublime. I was never more pleased to see anyone in my life!”
Thus mollified, Pickett submitted to being kissed. “Sweetheart,” he said at last, “I trust you implicitly, but I have to ask: What gave that fellow the idea that you would welcome his attentions?”
“Other than sheer narcissism, you mean? I’m afraid I did suggest that he might attract attention for his poetry by doing something that Society might find shocking. Not that, of course,” she added quickly. “Truth to tell, I thought if he was involved in anything nefarious, he might be inclined to confide in me. I could not have been more mistaken!”
“Oh, if it’s nefarious you want, I can give it to you in plenty.”
“John! Someone came for the letters!”
“Yes—and a very good thing, too, or I would still be sitting in a cave while my wife fended off randy rhymesters.”
“But who was it?”
“Not so fast! Didn’t you say something about liniment?”
“Oh, dear! There was a letter too, now that I think of it. I’m afraid I left them both downstairs in all the hullabaloo. If you’ll take off your shirt, I’ll go down and fetch them.”
She returned a few minutes later to find Pickett naked from the waist up and sitting in the chair beneath the writing table. Apparently he had found his exposed state somewhat chilly, for not only had he lit the fire, but also the single candle that stood nearer at hand on the writing table. She laid the letter on the table, then opened the jar of liniment and began rubbing the salve, which smelled strongly of mint, into his shoulders. Pickett closed his eyes and emitted a moan that was half pain and half pure bliss.
“Keep your voice down,” she admonished him in an undertone. “Whoever is in the next room will have entirely the wrong idea about what we’re doing in here!”
“That didn’t bother you last night,” Pickett said, and received a sharp whack across his shoulder blades.
“You were going to tell me who came for the letters,” she reminded him.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“It must have been Mr. Hetherington, then.”
“Julia!” He wheeled about in his chair, giving her a very pleasing view of bare chest. “How did you guess?”
“You said I wouldn’t believe you, so I just named the least likely person I could think of. Although not so unlikely, now that I think of it,” she added. “After all, he knew about the smugglers, for he warned us about them.”
“He warned us about a smuggler’s moon—that is, no m
oon at all—no doubt to distract our attention from the fact that the letters are removed in broad daylight.”
“Still, if he hadn’t brought up the subject, we might never have known anything about it.”
“Oh, he was convinced I would tumble to it eventually—me being so brilliant, and all. Emptying the butter boat over my head, as Mr. Colquhoun would say.”
“So what will you do now?”
“Do?”
“Darling, how can I rub liniment into your back when you will persist in turning around? Yes, I asked what will you do. It is illegal, you know, and you are a Bow Street Runner.”
“I’m not going to ‘do’ anything! He’s a friend of Mr. Colquhoun, sweetheart, and he’s invited us for dinner tomorrow night. Should I arrest him in the middle of the fish course, do you think, or can I wait until after the sweet is served?”
“Very funny,” she chided, working the liniment into his upper arms with perhaps more force than was strictly necessary.
“Besides, I’m not sure he isn’t right when he claims he’s doing a public service,” Pickett continued. “It does seem a pity that mail between Banfell and London is so expensive—and as he said, it puts an undue burden on families like the Hawkinses and the Wilsons, if they have business dealings or family members farther south.”
“On the subject of letters,” Julia said, “one came for us this morning. It’s on the table there, if you’d like to read it.”
As she continued to work her magic on Pickett’s aching shoulders, he picked up the letter and broke the seal. “It’s from Mrs. Hetherington,” he remarked, unfolding the single sheet of foolscap. “I’ll wager this didn’t come through the Royal Mail.”
“Very likely not,” she agreed before adding, conscience-stricken, “But I should have written to her the day after we dined with them, to thank her for her hospitality. She must think me shockingly rag-mannered! I daresay this is her way of giving me a gentle reminder.”
Pickett read through the usual social platitudes, which he was beginning to recognize as the common language of his wife’s class, regarding Mrs. Hetherington’s “sincerest gratitude” for “the pleasure of your company.”
Peril by Post Page 20
