by Issy Brooke
“He is my cousin-in-law, and the head of the household.”
“You ... live with him? Your household?”
“Yes. He was kind enough to take my father in when he became ill. And as I am unmarried, I live there as well ... it is not so unusual,” she added. “Why do you look so? Does this make any difference to your immoral actions?”
“It ... does,” Anna said slowly. She was pale of skin anyway, but to Marianne’s eyes, she seemed even more strained. She let her hand drop from the door handle. “Miss Starr, I have to tell you that you are here under quite false information. There is not a hint of an affair between Mr Claverdon and myself. There, I said it. The word itself. There is no criminal conversation happening. As far as I know, he is a loyal man to his wife. Your sister?”
“My cousin. But he came here...”
“I respect you and your education, Miss Starr. I am telling you the truth. It was a business matter only.”
“What business have you with him?”
“An arrangement, only. Oh, this does not make sense to you, does it? I find myself alone here, in London, Miss Starr, and in need of all the friends that I can get. I cannot tell you why, but I am an outcast, and I must find a way to survive. If you knew, you would understand and perhaps even forgive me. But Mr Claverdon is nothing but a businessman to me.”
Marianne opened her mouth to say, Then you are the blackmailer, but the door was flung open, inwards, with such force that it struck Anna and sent her tumbling to the carpet, her robe fluttering, exposing her long white nightdress. Marianne rushed to help her up, out of sheer instinct, and both women were standing together when the intruder strode into the middle of the room.
He was a tall and broad man with a large bushy beard, unkempt and sorely in need of a trim, though his clothes were very fine and well-cut. There was a military air to his jacket but the insignia on his epaulettes were unfamiliar to Marianne.
As was his language.
He barked something out to Anna, very roughly, and she shrank back against Marianne. She shouted back at him, in the same language, a guttural one with rolling r’s.
Marianne’s hand slipped into her handbag which hung from her arm. Her fingers touched the hilt of her pistol and it gave her strength, tinged with the fear that she might have to finally use it, and she did not know how she would manage that. She could not kill a man. She would aim for his legs, she decided.
The man was shouting again, and he gesticulated to the clothes on the bed. Anna was shouting back, their words tumbling over each other, and pointing to the door. She clearly wanted him to leave.
Marianne stepped to one side and pulled her gun out. She held it straight, with her other arm bent to make a kind of rest. She pointed it at his chest, and slowly cocked it.
The man opened and closed his mouth, but this time no sound was coming out.
Anna squeaked.
“Get out,” Marianne said, pitching her voice low to avoid any hint of a wobble. “You won’t be the first man that I have shot,” she added.
The look of fear in his eyes was gratifying. He snarled one more thing at Anna, and fled from the room.
Anna collapsed to her knees. “Lock it! Lock the door!”
Marianne looked down at her. “I do not know what trouble you are mixed up in, but I am warning you, that you are to have nothing more to do with Price Claverdon.” She went to the door, and pulled it open dramatically, jumping out into the corridor with her gun still raised, in case the man was still in the corridor. He was not, but a maid squealed and ran away.
“Lock the door yourself,” Marianne said, and shoved the gun back into her bag as she walked away.
THE LANGUAGE HAD BEEN unfamiliar to Marianne, who was schooled in Italian and French, and quite a bit of schoolboy Latin, due to her studies. She had never made any grand tour, nor even visited anywhere further afield than the Isle of Wight. Still she had heard every language of the world spoken at some time or another in the streets of London – the whole globe passed through the greatest trading city on earth, after all. She rolled the accent around in her memory. It had seemed very close to what she knew of German. It was a dialect of that language, or Russian, perhaps, or something similar from that part of the world.
And Anna had spoken it too, without hesitation. Marianne had wondered before if she had the trace of an accent, and now she knew: Anna was definitely not an Englishwoman born, though she might have spent much of her life here. The comment about her education at Cheltenham might have been true.
So what was going on? Marianne made her way back to Woodfurlong quickly. She had promised to help Claverdon, but how could she do that if he would not tell her the whole truth? But then, the help that he wanted from her amounted to nothing more than money.
If he was having an affair, rather than being blackmailed, she could understand now why he didn’t want to tell her any more.
It was not impossible, Marianne thought, for him to be doing both – having an affair and being blackmailed. The question then became, was Anna the other party in both of those situations? Or should Marianne be looking for yet another player in this sorry game?
At any rate, Claverdon was lying, and he was risking Phoebe’s good reputation. Marianne would not have him make a fool out of her cousin.
He was also risking losing everything. And that included Woodfurlong, and then where would Marianne and her father live?
SHE ASKED MR BARRINGTON, the butler, if Mr Claverdon was still at home, and he said yes, but he was in the morning room with his wife. Marianne sighed with frustration. She went upstairs and changed her clothes, which took up a good half an hour, and then prowled around the public rooms downstairs, awaiting the emergence of her cousin and her husband.
She could hear no raised voices so they were not arguing. Marianne hoped that Emilia had not said anything to Phoebe. She stalked up and down the hallway, and her ceaseless aimless movements unsettled Ann who was polishing the wooden bannisters.
Marianne eventually went outside, intending on taking a turn around the gardens, as it was a dry day with a light breeze and not too hot. She took a newspaper with her. She scoured the foreign pages for anything to do with Prussia.
It was the link, she was sure of it. Anna was either from that region or had lived there; she had met George Bartholomew there. Something had happened – an affair, most likely – and he had been dismissed. So he had come home, and she had ... what, followed him?
Then there were missing pieces. Marianne tried to fit together Jack Monahan’s pursuit of her, Price Claverdon’s affair with Anna, and the strange antics of Edgar Bartholomew and his ultimate death.
There was nothing in the newspaper. She folded it up and tucked it under her arm. She had just completed a circuit of the house and was heading across the wide front lawns when she noticed a man striding up towards the house, with a dark blue top hat, and a cane swinging jauntily at his side.
She knew that manner of confident walking.
She ran down the steps to intercept him before he reached the house.
“You should not be calling here!” she told him angrily. “Were you not warned off before? Come away. Come down to the road. If anyone should look out of the windows...”
Jack Monahan grinned at her. She could have slapped that toothy smile right off his face. “I am only calling to ask when the dinner party is to be held. There is a matter of some urgency. Now we are friends, you may tell the butler that I am welcome here, surely?”
“I am waiting for my cousin to set the date. She is awfully busy, you know.”
“I hardly think so.”
“Why are you so frantic? Why here? Why me?” she demanded. “I really haven’t believed a word you’ve said.” The experience of the previous few days had left Marianne feeling frazzled. She almost didn’t care that she was coming across as a strident harpy. She had no need to impress this man, anyway. He had shown himself to be a liar.
“I helped you,” he remind
ed her.
That was true.
“Come away from the view of the house.”
Monahan allowed himself to be led. She walked quickly but he kept pace with her easily. “I need to get to know Price Claverdon,” he said at last. “I know of him. But I need to get much, much closer to him.”
Claverdon, again. Just what was her cousin-in-law doing?
“But why?”
“I cannot say. I would not want to prejudice the investigation that I am involved in. You understand that, don’t you?”
She stopped walking. He spun around to face her. She was at the very end of her patience. She said, with tones of doom in her voice, “Mr Monahan, I have had enough. I have made a promise to a dead man to discover the truth about his father. I have a business that I am neglecting, which bodes ill for my future. I have a father who needs me, and a good friend in difficult circumstances who likewise demands my time. Your ridiculous and childish attempts at seeming to be intriguingly mysterious are simply tiresome. You are wasting my time. Speak plainly, or go away. I know you worked for Lord Hazelstone and I know you were dismissed. I know you are up to something. Now, will you tell me who you are and why you are doing this? For I have a busy day ahead of me.”
Monahan sighed. He had lost his cocky attitude. He leaned his hands on his cane in front of him, and mulled her words over.
“As you wish. But I must warn you, that this knowledge comes with a price.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. She really could not care any less.
“If you know who I really work for, it puts you in danger,” he went on. “Are you sure?”
“Danger?” she said, almost laughing at him. “You have no idea of my past few days. Go on.”
“I work for the government,” he said.
“And...?” It’s another lie, she thought. How utterly tedious. And I’ve promised to get this man invited here to a dinner party!
“That’s it,” he said.
“Well, I am not terribly impressed. I have met government men,” she said. “All it seems to mean is that you like long dinners and even longer words.”
“I am employed in a clandestine capacity,” he said. “I undertake necessary but unpleasant tasks that would not do to be revealed in public.”
She shrugged. “You are some sort of spy, then.”
“In a sense, yes. A domestic one. Amongst other things.”
“Jolly good,” she commented blandly. “I do not know what Claverdon is to do with this.”
But she did know. It was now becoming more obvious even to her.
He had given away his company’s secrets, he had said. And now he was being blackmailed.
If Monahan was telling her the truth, then the authorities already knew what he had done.
And he was going to be dealt with – secretly.
She shivered. That could mean anything, but certainly nothing good. She had to cancel the dinner party invite. Surely Monahan was going to cause a scene: she could not allow that.
She trudged back up to the house, and was apprehended by Phoebe in the hallway.
“We have set the date for the dinner and the invitations are all sent out,” she said. “Including to your Mr Monahan. Isn’t that good news?”
Sixteen
Marianne wanted to get out of Phoebe’s company as quickly as possible. She claimed there was a crisis with her father, and that it was time for his next bout of medication, and fled away to the garden wing. When she got to their own rooms, she found that her father was dressed – for the first time in a few weeks – and tidying up the laboratory. He held up a round-bottomed flask as she came in.
“What were you boiling in this?” he asked.
“I cannot remember. Was it not one of your experiments? What does it smell like?”
“Death and beetles.”
“Lovely. It is definitely not mine. Are you going out? Are you sure that you are quite well?”
“I have never been better,” he said. “Apart from my eyes. And the headaches. And the strange feelings that I am swimming in a choppy sea. And my sore neck. Oh, and the itching. I shan’t describe that. But yes, I am perfectly well. You, however, are not. You look as if you have found lice where there ought not to be lice.”
“Father, that’s awful.”
“Yes, lice in one’s bedclothes are horrible.”
“Oh. Yes, they are.” She trailed up and down the long benches and stared despondently at the random articles – a stack of galvanic plates, an earthenware jar that once housed leeches, a tangle of copper wire – and sighed heavily.
“Tell me what bothers you. I am your father, and I command it. Speak!”
“I think we are a little beyond such paternal demands,” Marianne said, but she slid onto a rickety stool and rested her elbows on the bench.
“It must be to do with Phoebe,” he said, and he took a seat opposite her, and knitted his knobbly fingers together. “Otherwise you would have spoken to her about it, and you would not be here looking like a well-slapped fish.”
“Thank you, father, for your astute comment and helpful, supportive advice.”
“I haven’t started on the advice yet. Tell me what is wrong, and I will tell you how to solve it. It is simple.”
His current period of lucidity was lasting longer than usual. His illness came in peaks and troughs. She was reminded of the brilliant scientist that he had once been, and felt a pang of loss for the man that had gone. But that man was back, at least for a little while, and she had to enjoy the relationship while she could. So she began to confide in him.
She told him about Jack Monahan. It was easier than trying to explain what was happening with Phoebe, Price and Anna, and she didn’t want to cause him concern about the possible loss of his home. She outlined everything about the strange man – what he claimed to be, what she knew he actually was, and what he wanted from her.
Her father was immediately suspicious.
“This man sounds like a chancer, a cad and a thoroughly untrustworthy sort. And Phoebe has really invited him to dinner?”
“She has. I felt obliged to him, as he helped me get back into the room to find evidence about how poor George Bartholomew died. But that evidence has done little good; I feel I am stuck, now. I must find a way of linking it to Edgar Bartholomew. Meanwhile I am plagued by this Monahan and I agreed to help him to make him stop following me. What else could I have done?”
“Shot him.”
“That was a consideration.” Marianne rubbed her temples. “Anyway, I changed my mind but it was too late. The invitations have gone out. So, he will be coming to dinner. That, then, should be an end of it. That was all he wanted.”
“To come to dinner here? Marianne, that is madness. What does he want to do?”
“He wants to speak to Mr Claverdon.”
“Why? He can speak to the fellow anywhere.”
“I don’t know.” She could not tell him her other suspicions. She did not want to drag Price Claverdon into this, for various reasons. She was not sure what he was up to, for one thing. And she was afraid that the threat of losing their home would unhinge her father’s mind once more. So she stayed quiet, and hoped that he would not notice.
Russell was too wrapped up in contemplation to spot her reticence. “We need to find out about this Monahan fellow.”
“I have tried, father. Phoebe has been making enquiries all over town. I’ve even asked Simeon.”
Russell snorted with pure derision, and slid off the stool to stand squarely on the floor. He was as straight as a rake, and he said, firmly, “No one can do what I can do. I am still known in this damned town. You will see.”
He turned and walked out of the room, stiff-backed and proud, and she would have laughed, if she had not been so concerned about what he was about to do.
THE PROBLEM OF EDGAR Bartholomew was weighing on her mind. Now that her father was unleashed onto the Jack Monahan issue, and she had warned Anna off from Price, she felt sh
e only had one thing left to do.
She had to uncover the truth, one way or the other. She had to get proof that Edgar was the father of George – or proof that he was not. If he was not, then that opened up the problem of George’s death, and that was something she could then take to the police.
As to why he might be, or not be, the father was a different matter and not one that she was concerned with.
She only had to prove identity, produce it for Mr Harcourt, collect the rest of the money, and rest easy that she had done the right thing for a dead man. Evidence could go to the police for them to deal with as they saw fit.
It would be simple.
Then she could publicise her success, and drum up a little more business, though she had to admit it had been getting harder of late. There were fewer mediums on the circuit around London, and more stage magicians. The world was growing cynical, which warmed her logical scientific heart but did nothing for her bank balance.
She headed to see Simeon. His madness always made her feel like her own wild schemes were actually quite sane.
He opened the door cautiously but when he saw it was her, he flung it wide and hauled her inside. “Aha! I knew you would be back!”
It was at that point she remember that she had promised to call on him again, and help him with his own issue. She tried not to groan. She did not have time to run around after fantasy thieves. “Good day, Simeon, I wonder if ...”
“Let’s get a pot of tea going while we work out our plan,” he said happily, bouncing around the workshop. “Oh! I have made a new device that can hide a live bird in my sleeve. Do you want to see it?”
She threw herself into an easy chair. He had a little arrangement of comfortable furniture around the range at one end, where he was making the tea, and she settled into the soft cushions. “Let’s have tea first,” she said. “Simeon, what do you hope to achieve? Are you wanting to simply prove to yourself that someone has stolen your design, or do you want to make them stop, and if so, how will you do that?”
