by Lynn Messina
As sincerely affecting as Bea considered the scene between the duke and his employee, she found this announcement to be a little too heartfelt for her cynical bent and a giggle rose in her throat. She quickly turned it into a cough, which drew the attention of Stephens, who had been too upset to notice her before. Now he glared at her with a mixture of abhorrence and triumph.
Kesgrave also turned to her. “Mr. Wright, I believe I may dispense with your services in the future.”
He spoke so seriously, as if Mr. Wright actually existed. Beatrice felt the laughter well up again, and it was all she could do to squelch it. After a few calming breaths, she said in her practiced tenor. “Of course, your grace. I understand.”
Stephens grinned widely at his rival’s misfortune and said, in an attempt to be gracious in victory, that he hoped his grace would provide the other man with a letter of recommendation. “Leave off mention, of course, of his ability to inspect a house, for if he had any skills in identifying what suited a duke’s dignity, you would never have set foot in this residence.”
“I shall do exactly that, Stephens,” Kesgrave said. “Thank you for the advice.”
The older man made no attempt to hide his delight and stared at his employer worshipfully as he said, “Of course, your grace. Of course.”
Bea had witnessed the way society bowed and scraped at the duke, including, most intimately, her aunt, but that deference paled in comparison to the way his own employee treated him. No wonder the man was insufferable.
“In fact, Stephens, why don’t you return to Berkeley Square right now and write the reference for me?” he asked. “Be as generous with the complimentary adjectives as you feel appropriate. I will deposit Mr. Wright at the employment agency where I found him.”
Although Stephens was clearly reluctant to leave Kesgrave alone with the other steward in case he tried to worm his way back into the duke’s good graces, he could not argue with his employer. “Very good, your grace,” he said.
His tone was mild, but the warning glance he sent Bea on his way out of the room seethed with menace. If she were truly a steward looking for a position, she would have been quaking silently. Since she was not, she turned to Kesgrave and said with disapproval tempered with wonder, “You lied to your own staff rather than risk riling his temper again.”
“Of course,” he said briskly. “You may think we rule the servants, but it’s very much the other way around. If belowstairs is unhappy nothing in the household runs smoothly. I’m terrified of Stephens and my butler, and surely I don’t have to tell you the havoc an angry cook can wreak on one’s domestic tranquility. You may call it cowardice—and given your consistent lack of regard for my dignity, I can only assume you will—but I’ll lie to them every time if it will spare me days of discomfort.”
Bea, shaking her head, did not disappoint. “You are a true profile in courage, your grace.”
“Quite,” he said, gesturing to the doorway that led back to the staircase. “Now, do you want to continue to mock me or should we pay a call on Mr. Cornyn?”
She laughed at the naïveté of the question, and as she crossed the floor, assured him she could quite easily do both.
CHAPTER TEN
The proprietor of the Sylvan Press was so determined to avoid an interview with the Duke of Kesgrave, he insisted that Mr. Cornyn was away from the office and would not return for the rest of the day. Unperturbed by this development, Kesgrave calmly announced he would try again on the morrow. Flinching, the clerk in the brown waistcoat brushed a stray lock of hair off his forehead and amended his statement to include the rest of the week. The duke remained placid in the wake of the updated information and insisted he could come back the following Monday with little trouble. Now the gentleman laughed nervously as little beads of sweat began to form at his temples.
“Forgive me, your grace, but I am a complete ninny,” he said, pressing his hand against his forehead to discreetly dab at the perspiration. Then he tugged at the left sleeve of his shirt, alternatively raising it and lowering it as his jittery fingers seemed to move of their own volition. A tattoo of a sea turtle on his forearm peeked out and then quickly disappeared. “Mr. Cornyn will be away for the rest of the month. I don’t know how I got the timing confused.”
Before Kesgrave could open his mouth to frustrate him further, the clerk tilted his head toward the back of the office and said, as if unable to maintain the ruse a moment longer, “To be completely candid, your grace, Mr. Cornyn is away for the rest of the year but wishes to keep the matter secret, as publishing is a very competitive business and he doesn’t want his colleagues in the other companies to know he’s pursuing exciting new options. You are, of course, encouraged to return in January. Shall we arrange a date and time now or would you rather drop by at the moment most convenient to you as it presents itself?”
The clerk blinked his eyes nervously as he looked at Kesgrave to see how this development had been received, then glanced away just as quickly. He seemed incapable of staring directly at the duke, as if, like the sun, his magnificence would burn his eyes. The condition of the office did little to mitigate this impression, for the small, shabby room, with its excess of ragged furniture—desks, bookshelves, storage cabinets, an armchair that was clearly never used for sitting, as it was stacked high with documents—gave Kesgrave a sort of pristine glow.
Bea wasn’t surprised in the least that Mr. Cornyn would lie to evade the duke’s attention, and although she found this act cowardly, she sympathized with the impulse. He could not be the first man to try to evade his notice with an increasingly elaborate fiction. Her compassion, however, was undermined by his inability to accomplish the thing with any skill or conviction. People were free to invent all the stories they wanted, but they owed their audience the courtesy of imbuing the tales with certainty. Either act as if the invention were wholly true or tell the whole truth. Bea firmly believed those were the only two options available, and watching Mr. Cornyn fail so egregiously at the former made her annoyed that he hadn’t simply employed the latter.
Kesgrave, who seemed unbothered by the man’s inability to lie convincingly, insisted that the clerk reveal the proprietor’s direction so that he may address him directly in his current location. “Do not trouble yourself with the inconvenience to me. I have concerns in many parts of the country and can assuredly combine my visit with Mr. Cornyn with an estate matter that needs attending to regardless. Now do, my good man, tell me where I may find your employer so that we can conclude our business here swiftly.”
The clerk’s eyes fluttered up at Kesgrave as the beads of sweat began to trickle down the side of his face and his fingers fiddled with his sleeve. Then he glanced down at the counter he was standing before, then over at the front door with a trapped looked on his face. Seemingly unimpressed by his prospects, he rested his elbows on the counter, laughed awkwardly and said, “Goodness gracious, I perceive the problem now. It seems that I’ve made a rather shocking mistake, your grace, and must now correct it. When you said Mr. Cornyn, I naturally assumed you meant my father, as he had been the proprietor of this company for more than forty years. He only recently ceded control to me so that he may devote himself fully to discovering talented new authors. The mix-up was entirely my fault, and I truly do regret it.”
Hearing the note of sincere remorse in his tone, Bea smiled with approval, for that was how you told a whisker. Of course she didn’t believe for a second that his father was out and about, for, based on Mr. Cornyn’s age of fifty or so years, the elder Mr. Cornyn was far too old to be gamboling around the countryside interviewing writers. But she appreciated his progress as a fabulist.
Kesgrave appeared satisfied as well and graciously congratulated the man on his recent promotion. “I’m sure your father’s faith in you is well-deserved. Now, as my steward had explained to you previously, I’m interested in seeing the manuscript submitted by Robert Hanson Crestwell, Earl of Fazeley. On that occasion you denied knowledge of
the work, but presumably that was another misunderstanding. Perhaps you thought he was referring to a work by another gentleman called Fazeley.”
“No, that wasn’t a mistake,” Mr. Cornyn said, surprising Bea with his sudden sharp swerve into honest dealing. “I denied all knowledge of the manuscript to your man in hopes that your interest in the manuscript would subside and the matter would quietly go away.”
“Quietly go away until you print it, so that you may create a very large stir?” Bea asked, remembering to use Mr. Wright’s tenor. Next to the duke’s fine tailoring, she felt as shabby as the office and it was little wonder the owner of the firm had paid her scant attention until she asked the question.
“Good God, no,” he said, visibly shuddering at the idea. “That book must never come to light!”
His vehemence delighted Bea, for it validated her theory that something in the manuscript was so shocking it had led to his lordship’s vicious slaying. “Why?” she asked as she leaned forward on the counter. “Is it too salacious?”
He stiffened his posture, as if offended by the notion. “Sylvan Press is a respectable establishment that prides itself on its enthusiastic treatment of all things salacious,” he explained tightly. “We have a reputation for finely wrought sensationalist stories to uphold. Consider, I beg you, what we’ve published to great success: The Monk’s Vendetta, The Widow’s Revenge and Moll Sawney’s Terrible True Tales of Newgate, which was written by an actual prisoner of Newgate. These titles are magnificent examples of our aesthetic, of which the Earl of Fazeley’s submission fell well short. It was, in a word, dull.”
This pronouncement was the last thing Bea had expected to hear. “Dull?” she repeated, as if unable to comprehend the word.
“Dull,” he confirmed, shaking his head sadly. “As dull as ditchwater. A work with so much potential to stun and amaze was merely a tedious catalog of Lord Fazeley’s personal habits and concerns. On and on it went, listing the drams of port he’d consumed, the number of minutes he spent straightening his hair, the number of strokes he used to shine his Hessians. I couldn’t possibly foist such a stultifying chronicle on the public. My readership would be appalled!”
“And your father,” Kesgrave said.
“My father…” Mr. Cornyn said, faltering in confusion. But it lasted only a moment, for he immediately insisted with alarming vehemence, “Indeed, yes, my father! He entrusted me with the business he’d built, and I could not let him down by publishing a book that fell so far below his standards for interest and relevance. There were a few bright spots among the dross, anecdotes that I felt could be expanded into engrossing stories, but Lord Fazeley resented any implication that his writing required improving. I am, as you probably realize, an experienced editor and have helped many fine authors produce final works that are substantially better than the initial manuscript they submitted. Publishing is a process of collaboration, which Lord Fazeley considered beneath him. He insisted his book was already perfect and demanded its prompt return so that he might seek another publisher.”
Bea had little trouble believing the publisher’s description of events, for she could not imagine the earl calmly submitting to the notion of imperfection in any matter. As a self-proclaimed arbiter of fashion, he’d taken far too much joy in ridiculing the failings of others to readily admit to any of his own. “Did you give it back?”
Mr. Cornyn glanced briefly at the door along the back wall before answering. “Naturally, I said he could have it just as soon as he returned the fee I had advanced him in expectation of its publication, per the agreement in the contract he’d signed, by which I expected him to abide.”
“And he did not?” Kesgrave asked.
The publisher pressed his lips together in a display of anger and disgust. “He did not think it was incumbent upon him to follow the terms of the contract when I was the one who had found fault with the book. The money I paid him might not have seemed like a very great sum to him, but it was, I assure you, a significant amount to me,” he explained, his tone defensive as if he expected his august visitor to trivialize the expenditure. “I could not on principle simply hand over the manuscript without getting something in return.”
“Of course not,” the duke said, calming his concerns. “You’re a businessman, after all. And how did Fazeley receive this news?”
A gentle flushed crept up his neck. “A small tussle might have ensued,” he said. “His lordship felt that he had the right to search the premises for his property and I disagreed. I merely tried to constrain him to the other side of the counter, and it lasted only a moment because he feared snagging his waistcoat on the wood. After straightening his clothes, which had gotten quite mussed in the struggle, he promised to send his solicitor to deal with me, as I did not deserve the honor of his disagreement, and marched out of the building.”
The memory of the event agitated him so much that he began to fiddle again with his sleeve. Bea, observing his anxiety, sought to establish the date of the exchange. “That was Tuesday, correct?” she said, her tone firm, although she was in fact making an educated guess.
Responding as she’d hoped to the confidence in her tone, Mr. Cornyn immediately agreed to the date and then, realizing the timing aligned inauspiciously with the earl’s death, tried to amend his statement by stammering that he couldn’t be quite sure what day of the week it had been. “Perhaps Monday? Could it have been Saturday? I would need to consult my calendar to be sure.”
But he’d reverted to the uncertainty with which he’d proclaimed his own absence upon their arrival and, as if discerning the difference in his tone himself, gamely conceded that it had indeed been Tuesday.
“You are on Catherine Street,” Bea pointed out.
Mr. Cornyn lowered his head, as if the observation were also an indictment. “I know.”
“The Strand, where the London Daily Gazette is located and Fazeley died, is only a block away,” she added, although it was entirely unnecessary. Mr. Cornyn knew exactly how unfortunate the situation appeared: the dispute over the contract, the ensuing tussle, the publishing office’s close proximity to the place where the victim fell.
“I understand your concern and in no way resent the implication that I was somehow involved,” he said with such calm that Bea felt inclined to believe him. “We exchanged words, to be sure, but I did not wish him ill or grievous harm over a publishing contract. Indeed, I cannot believe anyone would be so depraved. We left the matter civilly, with the earl determined to refer the matter to his solicitors. I cannot imagine what happened so soon after he departed this office that caused him to end up with his own knife in his back, but it had nothing to do with the Sylvan Press. As I said, he was peeved when he departed but resolved on a course of action that he felt confident would ultimately deliver satisfaction. I returned to my usual business of running a publishing company, which is a consuming occupation. In fact, we had a book due to the printer that day and it required all my attention. If you don’t believe me, my daughter and my associate were here and can attest to my description of events. Would you like to talk to them?”
Bea thought this suggestion was a fine idea, for she was not inclined to take at his word a man who had already told them several lies. At the same time, she was at a loss to ascribe to him a motive for ending Fazeley’s life. If Mr. Cornyn truly wanted to recoup his investment, he stood a far greater chance of getting his money back while the earl was still alive. Killing him accomplished nothing, and as the publisher had observed, he would have to be quite depraved to murder someone over a contract disagreement.
“Yes,” she said, glancing at the pair of empty desks pressed between the wall and two squat storage cabinets. “Where is your associate now?”
“At the printing house delivering a manuscript. We are a small concern and cannot afford to own a press ourselves, so we contract with one nearby,” he explained, his manner calmer now that he had been granted permission to provide corroborating evidence of his innocence.
“It’s also on the Strand, so he should be back in a few minutes. And my daughter is just upstairs. She and I live together above the office with my sister. As you can imagine, the space is somewhat tight with so many people and Esther enjoys spending time down here, observing the business. If you’ll excuse me, I will fetch her now.”
But Bea did not want to excuse him, for she feared any time spent alone with his daughter would provide him with an opportunity to ensure her version of events aligned perfectly with his. Instead, she offered up herself as messenger and found herself the object of the publisher’s horrified gaze. It was only then that she remembered she was dressed as a young man. She’d grown so accustomed to speaking as Mr. Wright, she had completely forgotten she wasn’t herself.
Was an apology in order?
Did young men apologize?
She thought of her cousin Russell, who rarely, if ever, admitted to any wrongdoing. Should she emulate his stubbornness or show contrition at her inappropriately bold suggestion?
Kesgrave, mildly amused by her predicament, pointed to a bell pull on the wall near the counter and asked if perhaps Mr. Cornyn could ring for her.
“Yes, of course,” he said, shuffling over to tug the cord at once. “I’m sure she will be down momentarily.”
“While we are waiting,” Kesgrave said, “tell us about the knife.”
Bea and Mr. Cornyn looked at the duke in surprise, although only the latter repeated the word knife with a vaguely trapped expression on his face.
“You mentioned that Fazeley had been stabbed with his own knife, which means you recognized it from the description in the newspaper,” Kesgrave explained logically. “Tell us about the knife.”
As Bea had missed that piece of information herself, she regarded the duke with respect and murmured, “Well done, your grace.”
