by Alys Clare
Table of Contents
Cover
Also by Alys Clare From Severn House
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prelude
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Also by Alys Clare from Severn House
A World’s End Bureau mystery
THE WOMAN WHO SPOKE TO SPIRITS
The Gabriel Taverner series
A RUSTLE OF SILK
THE ANGEL IN THE GLASS
THE INDIGO GHOSTS
The Aelf Fen series
OUT OF THE DAWN LIGHT
MIST OVER THE WATER
MUSIC OF THE DISTANT STARS
THE WAY BETWEEN THE WORLDS
LAND OF THE SILVER DRAGON
BLOOD OF THE SOUTH
THE NIGHT WANDERER
THE RUFUS SPY
CITY OF PEARL
The Hawkenlye series
THE PATHS OF THE AIR
THE JOYS OF MY LIFE
THE ROSE OF THE WORLD
THE SONG OF THE NIGHTINGALE
THE WINTER KING
A SHADOWED EVIL
THE DEVIL’S CUP
THE OUTCAST GIRLS
Alys Clare
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
This first world edition published 2020
in Great Britain and the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.
Trade paperback edition first published
in Great Britain and the USA 2021 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.
eBook edition first published in 2020 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2020 by Alys Clare.
The right of Alys Clare to be identified as
the author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs &
Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-9045-0 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-733-0 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0455-4 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents
are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described
for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are
fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,
Stirlingshire, Scotland.
In memory of my great-great-grandmother
Mary Leghorn Sutherland née Lea,
born Portsmouth, 13th July 1828,
who went to India.
PRELUDE
Lucknow, India, early autumn 1872
He lies back on the bank of pillows, inhaling the mixed smells, his heart hammering. After a few moments he gently peels his flesh free; sweat has made a temporary but fragile bond.
He hears her breathing deepen as she slips into sleep. It is a common occurrence, for she who is so elegant, detached and collected in everyday life gives way to gloriously enthusiastic abandon in bed and, in this heat, the expending of all that energy is utterly exhausting and wipes her out for a spell.
He turns his head fractionally, careful not to move too quickly and waken her, and looks down at her. Her thick strawberry blonde hair is spread across his chest, making him too hot. Her breasts crush against him, full and luxurious and his delight when he is full of desire and hungry for her. Now he is sated and her flesh on his is just one more source of heat.
Damnable heat. Blasted, bloody heat.
After the years he has spent in India he ought to be used to it. He knows he has the appearance of a confident, successful man who does not permit such minor irritations as the devastating climate of the subcontinent to disturb his English composure, but at times the illusion is difficult to maintain. At times such as this, he reflects sourly, when he wishes that, instead of a tumble of damp bedding in a room like an oven, he was lying in a shady patch of woodland in the cool green English countryside, a little stream bubbling close by and the soft cooing of wood pigeons in the trees, with the prospect of returning soon to some pleasant country house with well-tended flower borders, clipped hedges and emerald grass where there will be a discreet manservant awaiting his return to help him off with his boots and hand him a glass of straw-pale sherry at precisely the right temperature …
She stirs, mutters something incomprehensible, clutches at him with the hand that still rests deep down in his groin. He waits, barely breathing, but she sighs and sleeps again.
He has responded, despite his mood, to the brief clench of her hand, but as she relaxes back into sleep, he feels himself slacken again. And, in that instant, he experiences a stab of violent revulsion for the whole business. For the clamours of the flesh, for the grasping hands, the hungry mouths, the blind thrusting of his body that will not be denied, the desperate sucking-in of him and what spills out of him into that wet, dark, secret part of her …
I am exhausted, he tells himself soothingly. That is what is to blame for this despondency; that’s all it is. I work far too hard, I am beset with worries and problems and anxieties that only I can resolve, and I must face up to decisions that I am loath to take.
His mind sheers away from one of those decisions, for he never allows himself to dwell upon it until he has had at least two drinks, and now it is mid-afternoon and the last alcohol he touched was late last night …
But he must not think about last night either.
He looks down at her again. She really is glorious, utterly his favourite type, and her beauty – her appearance in general – is a major factor in this delicate business. She—
But that, too, is not a thought for now.
He sighs, slowly, deeply, and her head rises on his chest with his ribs’ expansion.
He realizes miserably that there is virtually nothing in his present situation that bears thinking about. And so he lets his mind turn back into the safer country of the past; specifically, to the knife-edge tension of that home leave when he first met Mary Featherwood. She was eighteen, coming into the flowering of her young beauty, he was eight years older and in need of a wife: indeed, a wife with prospects, for any other sort would only serve to exacerbate his … his challenges.
Even in the safety of his own thoughts
, he will not use a stronger word.
He had been invited to a dinner party given by the very wealthy old lady who was Mary’s grandmother. She had looked at him with suspicious eyes as if she mistrusted flashily handsome men with shiny hair and well-trimmed moustaches on sight. Mary had regarded him with very different eyes, and he had wooed her with all the weapons in his considerable arsenal: the little presents so tentatively given (‘Oh, I do understand, Miss Featherwood, that such a gift is not at all appropriate when we have but recently met, but I could not help myself!’); the careful advances (‘I have shocked you, dearest Mary, and I loathe myself for the insensitive rotter I am, but I could not resist a tiny kiss on that peachy cheek!’); the steady advancing of his suit (‘Yes, India is indeed hot, but we Europeans have found ways to cope with it, and many of us retreat to the hills in summer’); the subtle implications that what is happening to them is somehow inevitable (‘I knew, my Mary, the moment I set eyes on you, that fate had destined us for each other and I would venture to say that it was the same for you?’).
And what a triumph it was when she accepted his proposal! The marriage hastily arranged, for home leave does not last long. The splendid ceremony, his bride like an angel in her frills and flounces of white, her late mother’s veil upon her head and her grandmother’s diamond tiara holding it in place (taken back, incidentally – the sour note intrudes on his reverie – the following morning). The sumptuous wedding breakfast, the sideboards groaning with extravagant presents, the delicious food so discreetly presented, the vintage champagne.
His wedding night, and Mary the eager virgin bride of his dreams, he the considerate, careful, tender husband …
And now, five years later, here I am, he thinks.
The reverie has worked too well, for it has taken him back to a time when life was perfect. Coming back to reality is consequently all the harder.
For life is very far from perfect now.
The woman lying across his chest stirs and quickly he soothes her. ‘Hush, Mary, sleep now,’ he murmurs. How strange, he thinks, that she too should be called Mary; how strange, how convenient and how oddly prophetic.
He feels his mood slip further down from the comfort of memory and the heights of his recent sexual delight, for in truth the problems that beset him can never be held at bay for long. He sighs, a long, slow exhalation. At least, he thinks, trying to cheer himself up, the infant clearly likes her nanny. Nanny Dora to the baby (no, not a baby, she will be four early next year), Nurse Tewk to him. Odd surname, odd-looking woman, with that tall, board-flat body under the severe navy uniform and those clear light-brown eyes that seem to see straight into him …
‘Christ,’ he murmurs very quietly, ‘I bloody well hope they can’t.’
He forces his mind away from dwelling on his little daughter’s nanny, for he can hardly bear to think about his child. As for looking at her, listening to those awful, agonizing attempts to form comprehensible words, watching that stumbling progress as she tries again and again to walk and always fails—
No, he resolves, I cannot think about her now.
And there is a fresh anxiety, for Mary – the other one, his wife, the child’s mother – is sick. Sick, and daily becoming weaker, and if the worst happens and she dies, then—
But that truly is unthinkable.
‘God,’ he says.
The woman stirs again, so before she wakes and starts on her pleadings and her cajolings, he slips out from under her, carefully lays her head on the pillow, kisses her lightly and mutters, ‘Goodbye for now, my dearest. Until tomorrow.’
He creeps out of the room and firmly closes the door.
ONE
It is January, and the year is 1881. It is cold. Snow lies ankle-deep in Hob’s Court, virtually undisturbed except for Felix Wilbraham’s footprints, deposited as he arrived an hour ago and already frosting at the edges.
Felix is at his desk in the outer office. Lily Raynor, the proprietor of the World’s End Bureau (Private Enquiry Agency, as it is described on the stationery), is in her inner sanctum. She is apparently absorbed in some papers she is reading. Felix shoots her the occasional glance, trying to determine if she is as cold as he is. She has a heavy black wool shawl around her shoulders, she wears fingerless mittens and her nose – bright red at the tip – appears to be running, to judge by the regular little sniffs, so he concludes that she probably is.
He stands up and positions himself in her open doorway.
‘Lily?’ he says after a few moments, during which she is either ignoring him or genuinely hasn’t noticed him.
She looks up, frowning. ‘Hm?’
‘Is it all right if I fetch some more coal?’ He nods towards the paltry little fires burning in the two hearths in their offices.
‘Oh …’ Her frown deepens.
Felix could have written out precisely what is running through her mind: it is very cold, the fires are giving out so little warmth that we may as well not bother, coal is terribly costly and, after a great flurry of new business following our successful solving of last autumn’s multiple murder case, now everything has gone rather quiet.
She looks up, the frown clearing.
‘Of course,’ she says. ‘But, Felix, I propose we build up just the one fire, and you move in here. If that is acceptable?’ she adds.
He is grinning in relief. ‘Yes, yes, good idea,’ he says. Before she can change her mind, he grabs the coal scuttle from beside the hearth in the front office and hurries out through the office door, along the passage to the back of the house, through the kitchen and the scullery, into the yard and past the outside lavatory. The coal hole is at the rear of the yard, where – not nearly often enough – it is filled by men carrying heavy sacks on their shoulders from the narrow alley that runs behind the houses.
He fills the scuttle, balancing a particularly large lump of coal on the top, then hurries back inside.
It is colder than ever out in the still, blueish air.
‘Where’s Mrs Clapper?’ Felix asks as he kneels before Lily’s hearth, coaxing wonderfully warm flames from the newly mended fire.
Mrs Clapper, inherited, like the house, from Lily’s grandparents, comes in three times a week to do the heavy work. She is a small but powerful force of nature, and it has taken Felix some time to work out how to keep on her right side. Even now, after nine months of working at the World’s End Bureau, he doesn’t always manage it.
‘Not coming in.’ Lily, still enthralled, doesn’t look up from her papers. ‘According to her, Clapper’s “bronicles” are misbehaving. He’s bad with them.’
‘She’s deserted you to look after him?’ Felix is surprised. ‘I hadn’t realized she was such a devoted wife.’
Lily smiles rather sadly. ‘I don’t think she is. But poor Mr Clapper coughs so hard that he stops breathing, and she has to thump him on the back until he brings up the gouts of phlegm that are obstructing his breathing, and then—’
‘Yes, thank you, I understand,’ Felix interrupts hastily. Lily, who before she opened a private enquiry agency used to be a nurse (she has packed quite a lot into her thirty-odd years upon Earth), is comfortable with the more repulsive aspects of the human body. Felix (four years her junior and experienced in very different ways) is not.
He was about to make a joke about Clapper’s misbehaving bronicles sounding like a flock of unruly racing pigeons or a cage full of disobedient ferrets, but in the face of what sounds like a rather serious illness, he keeps quiet.
Lily returns to her absorbing papers. Felix, satisfied the fire is now as bright as he can make it, fetches his chair from the outer office and the books he is working on, and settles opposite Lily.
He is engaged upon the dispiriting task of writing up their current cases. Since there are only two, he realizes with a sinking of the spirits that the job will take him barely another quarter of an hour. The husband who went missing on New Year’s Day, reported by his harassed wife (and her seven children) wit
h a mixture of irritation, a sprinkle of anxiety and a very detectable hope that the bugger might never come back, thus sparing her any additions to the large family, turned up four days later in hospital in Deptford (‘Bloody Deptford?’ his wife shrieked. ‘What the hell was he doing in Deptford?’) with a broken leg, a black eye and concussion. The innocent expression he had presented to Felix as he swore blind he couldn’t remember a thing after he set out at six in the evening for ‘a swift half with me mates’ was so patently false that Felix didn’t even bother to say so, contenting himself with raising a sceptical eyebrow and turning away. The over-indulged young lady who arrived in a state of near hysteria two days after Boxing Day, claiming that the man she hoped to marry was involved in the running of an opium den, later confessed she had made it up; she had observed her fiancé kissing her sister under the mistletoe and wanted to give him a week or so’s unease to punish him.
Now that, Felix reflects as he enters details of the young lady’s payment in the big ledger, is unlikely to be a marriage made in heaven …
He completes the task, puts the heavy books back in their accustomed places and resumes his seat. Lily is still reading. After perhaps two or three minutes, he says quietly, ‘Lily?’
She looks up. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I have nothing to do.’
The brief and mildly spoken sentence has a disproportionate effect upon his employer, but then of course it says so much more.
Lily throws aside her papers, sighs heavily, glances wildly around the office and then, her light green eyes on Felix, says plaintively, ‘I thought we would be inundated with work just now!’
He thinks he understands, but nevertheless says enquiringly, ‘Yes?’
