by Edith Layton
When he finally did, he said thoughtfully, “This is a very large house, Mr. Logan. Ten bedrooms in the heart of London, imagine. But then, I inherited it. It gets quite lonely sometimes. I’m very glad my friend’s come to visit, but as he’ll be recuperating, I imagine things will get very dull for him around here. I cannot sit at his side all day, you know. Your sister has a respectable chaperon, I imagine?”
“Of the first stare,” his guest agreed, sitting forward on his chair. “I’ve engaged the lady Mrs. Anderson had with her. She’s no relative of mine, but we could say a ‘connection’ by marriage. She’s of good family and married some frog or such who lost it all in the revolution, so she’s a bona fide contessa too.”
“Ah,” Mr. Jones said thoughtfully.
It wasn’t entirely proper, he mused, there’d be a great many who’d wonder at a young woman not related to him staying on in his home, even if she were not as beautiful as her brother believed, even if she were adequately chaperoned. But then, with her breeding, she was scarcely likely to ever sit well, if at all, with them anyway. But she might, he thought, she very well might engage Julian’s interest if she were half so bright or pretty as claimed, and then she’d be in a position to do more than merely get him to forget his “lady” for a few hours. She was obviously half in love with Julian already; as ever, his face alone had done that. If he could be brought to exert his considerable charm, even battered as he was, the thing could be accomplished. If, he thought restlessly, remembering his friend’s obsession.
Or, Mr. Jones thought more deeply, for his, he was pleased to think, was a devious mind, if her staying should eventually be construed as ruinous to her reputation, Julian’s noble nature might be prevailed upon to make him do the right thing by her. That dowry would more than make up for the loss of his impossible dream of winning Lady Marianna. At the least he could use the diversion, poor boy, Warwick concluded, and at the most, he could certainly use the money. And as for the girl, as she had no place in society, she’d nothing to risk. In fact, whatever transpired, he thought, she couldn’t lose anything but a few months of her time, and might gain a great deal more.
“Mr. Logan,” he said after a time in which his guest had scarcely dared to breathe, “do you think your sister would consider staying on at my humble home until matters are settled with you?”
“Why, thank you, Mr. Jones,” his guest said as he silently thanked a greater personage besides, “I do believe she would.”
When they shook hands good-bye, Mr. Logan, feeling greatly daring with all his great fortune, said lightly, “You know, Mr. Jones, this is well done, for there was a time when I wanted you to meet my sister very much. I thought she’d suit you right down to the ground.”
“Be grateful that I likely wouldn’t suit her, not only not half so well as Viscount Hazelton does, but at all,” Warwick replied gently, “for I’m an odd, cold sort of fellow, Mr. Logan, and so, if only in the interest of human rights, am not at all in the marriage market myself.”
But as this was very close to actually verbalizing an agreement that had been made without a mention that could incriminate him in his sister’s eyes if she ever found it out, Mr. Logan only shook his head as he shook his host’s hand, and then was shown out, rubbing his hands together over his turn of luck as he hurried back to his hotel.
*
Charlie Logan wore the broadest grin when Susannah admitted him to her room. And though the contessa looked up from her embroidery with pleased anticipation when she saw him, Susannah’s face showed only the deepest foreboding. Her brother, she thought, looked entirely too happy.
“Ladies,” he said with great smugness, “I’m pleased to tell you that though I can remain in London only for another day, you’ll be staying on until my return with my great good friend Mr. Warwick Jones, and,” he added smugly, “his great good friend the Viscount Hazelton, who is presently recuperating from an accident at his house. No, nothing serious, else you’d not have been asked to visit,” he added hastily, seeing his sister’s immediate dismay.
But even thus reassured, she continued to look downcast.
“Charlie,” she replied on a sigh as she sat down in despair, “your Mr. Jones is a bachelor. The viscount is a bachelor. Unless I stay on as a housemaid, it will never, ever do. I’m coming home with you now, Charlie, and there’s an end to it.”
The contessa stirred and gazed at Susannah in mild surprise. “Mr. Jones is, I believe,” she said, “related to the Gloucestershire Joneses, quite an old, accepted family.”
“It doesn’t matter. We’re not related,” Susannah said sadly.
“But I may be,” the contessa replied softly. “I believe my great-grandmother on my father’s side is a connection there. It would not at all surprise me. And the Dylans are a very old line. The Hazelton title, though English, may well be the family that my poor late husband was connected to, through the Hapsburgs. No matter, most titled persons claim relationships there. It will do.” She nodded. “And when do we go there?” she asked Charlie.
“Oh,” Susannah said, abashed, “pardon me, Contessa, I’d no idea you knew them or were related to them.”
“I don’t, and I’m not sure,” the contessa replied patiently, “but it doesn’t matter, my dear. It will suffice for a brief visit.”
“I see,” Susannah said. “Your word is enough for people in society, and they’ll believe what you tell them.”
“I mean,” the contessa said gently, “that persons in society will believe whatever they wish, whatever I tell them. So it scarcely matters if some think I’m related to the Joneses, and others think it’s the Hazelton line I claim kinship with. What matters is that it’s creditable and can be carried off, and therefore, is acceptable. A great many things can be done if they are done with certitude.
“We can say our visit began as an obligation,” the contessa went on thoughtfully, “but as there are so many people involved now, it begins to take on all the earmarks of a house party, and so, less formal rules apply. Yes. It will certainly do for a space. The words are right. If the right words can be put to a thing, it may be considered correct,” she explained. “I can be ready at ten, and you, Susannah?” she asked calmly.
And though she doubted she’d ever be ready, Susannah nodded mutely, as her brother, for once speechless, gazed at the contessa with sincere admiration.
*
Although Warwick Jones was smiling to himself as Mr. Logan left, he soon forgot the incident, he was so busy writing and sending out notes via several footmen in his employ. By the time he’d received some answers, and not received certain others, the afternoon was advanced. Then he went above stairs to check upon his sleeping guest once more, and after standing silently and observing the ruined face turning in troubled sleep upon its pillow, he left and closeted himself with his valet. Then he rang for his butler.
“I’ll be going out this evening, Mr. Fox,” he said simply. “Have a footman continue to watch the viscount. Mr. Epford has volunteered to attend to him, but a valet is scarcely able to run a sickroom alone.”
But, the butler thought later, as Mr. Jones descended the stair with the first evening shadows, it looked as though it was his master that the valet was unable to manage alone. For his employer scarcely seemed dressed for an evening out on the town. Although he wore dark breeches and jacket, he wore high top boots, not slippers, so he would hardly be going to a dance or a social evening, and yet he went hatless and his white shirt and neckcloth were covered overall by a dark, voluminous cape of the sort a gentleman might wear out for a visit to the opera.
The butler stared in fascination as Warwick Jones left the town house to slip out of the door and blend in with the shadows of night. He started when Mr. Epford, his master’s excellent valet, who moved with the same quiet grace as his employer, said softly at his shoulder, “A singular costume, yes, I agree. But he said it was a hunting outfit. ‘Hunting?’ I asked, laughing. ‘In the night, sir?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, gr
inning in the most unsettling way, ‘because what I hunt comes out only at night.’ Just like the old days when he was a youth. It gave me a turn, it did, Mr. Fox,” he admitted on a sigh.
The butler closed the door firmly on the night, and said nothing further, for not only was it in poor taste to criticize his master’s apparel, it was decidedly unpleasant to think of the wild hunt he was engaged in. And from the expression upon his face as he’d left, distinctly unnerving to consider the fate of his prey.
6
There were places in London that a gentleman might visit if he were bored with his life; the Broken Bucket was where he’d go only if he were careless of it. The gentleman seated at the rear table didn’t look as though he’d ever been careless of anything. He was, however, the only breathing being in the pothouse who remotely resembled a gentleman, and so the thin fellow who’d sidled into the room knew immediately that he was the cove he’d been sent to find.
It was late in the evening, so there were few females left in the room. Those few who claimed that beneath their grime they were of that gender who weren’t sleeping on the tables or the floor, having also been unsuccessful at finding trade to occupy their whole night, now joined some other ragged creatures of indeterminate sex squabbling over the last of a glass they shared. There were a few rough-looking men whispering in a corner, and a few sullenly drinking themselves into oblivion at their separate table or already half-sprawled upon the floor that would be their bed.
There were no riotous young blades down here slumming as there’d been at The Cock and the Cross or The Bells, nor any roaring young apprentices making merry such as there’d been at the Grapes, nor were there packs of dangerous children here such as frequented The Waltzing Mouse, nor hordes of available females as The Queen’s Garter boasted. The gentleman had visited all these lively places this long evening, gliding from one to another, seeking out certain barkeeps, other select patrons, and asking the same question everywhere. The answers had finally led him to this most abject of places.
It had been a long night because there’d been so much ground to cover. It was a sprawling district, and even though the poor dwelt in tight huddles, there were so many of them that it made no matter if they’d lived stacked together like firewood, they’d still swallow up a huge share of the city. But not all the places he’d visited this evening were so dismal as the area around this decaying taproom where he waited. If poverty were to be compared to a disease, as the reformers would have it, then this would be the terminal stage of it. Only a few streets away there were noisy, colorful striving crowds at almost every hour of the day or night, buying, selling, maneuvering for a little extra room in the sun or moonlight. There, poverty might be a condition of life, but at least it was leavened with hope and laced with laughter. Here, the bankrupt were hopeless, and life itself was too tenuous and brutal to celebrate with anything but oblivion.
The gentleman sat quietly, but his eyes were so alert that the thin man became even more nervous as he approached him and whispered (an unfortunate accident with a knife, or a fortunate escape from one, depending on how one looked at it, had arranged it so that he could speak in no other fashion), “’Ere, you the cove what’s lookin’ for the Lion?”
Warwick Jones fixed him with an appraising stare which made the man shift from foot to foot, before he answered: “Yes.”
It was only one word, but it made the fellow dance in distress.
“’Ere, well,” he whispered, “yer t’come wiv me now.”
He said no other word, but only looked about himself anxiously, as though he expected a pack of Bow Street runners to rush from out the greasy corners of the Broken Bucket to nab him, and without waiting to see if the gentleman obliged him, he turned and ducked out of the tavern to evaporate into the night. And Warwick Jones, a gentleman with a reputation of being a very knowing fellow, yet still rose immediately and followed him.
It was precisely because he was knowing that he did so. This was the lowest part of a slum, so low that even Bow Street hesitated to enter it; it was such a wretched district that although the gentleman knew that everything and everyone he saw as he followed the little nervous man was for sale, there was no sane man who’d buy any of it. But the gentleman knew what he was about, and so he followed, expecting to find what he’d been looking for at the end of his journey but prepared for anything from attempted murder to random mayhem awaiting him as well. He knew all of the district very well.
Other young men on the town had frequented the general area in their youth as a rite of passage, a coming-of-age ritual. They’d sampled the beverages, the females, had a dust-up or two, and then counted themselves men of the world forever after. Warwick Jones had come down to the area, as he’d put it when he cared to explain himself, to “research the family tree.” Whatever his motives had been, he’d been amused and delighted to discover that even as his noble friend’s ancestors names’ could open the doors to the ton, Almack’s, and the House of Lords, the notorious “Gentleman Jones” was still a name to be reckoned with in less exalted but no less exclusive society, so was a password to a new and fascinating world for him. He’d been welcomed here, and at that time it had been important for him to have found such a place. He’d not been back for several years, but still he’d known whom to ask his questions of, and more important, how to ask them, and perhaps more important still, how to cope with whatever answer he received, whether it was given in whispers in a thieves’ ken or in a back alley with a blade.
They were simple enough questions. He wanted to know who controlled the area now, and who’d hired out bravos to teach a young gentleman a lesson last night. It was, he’d said, without being asked, a matter of some importance to him. And at his voice when he’d said it, the bravest of them shuddered even as they’d accepted his quest, if not his gold, for few would take payment from the great Gentleman Jones’s own descendant.
He followed the thin man as he slipped around corners and eeled through narrow alleys, and if in his travels he saw men, women, and children dead or dying, ill or drunken, stealing or fornicating, all in the open and in the plain sight of the Lord who’d seemed to cease to watch over those that lived here, he said nothing, nor did he pause. There were no surprises here for him; those had come earlier in the night when he’d discovered how many persons he’d known when he was young had never reached the age that he was now. Even that hadn’t shocked him much after he’d thought on it, and soon he’d accepted it with the same sad resignation with which he took all in his life. Warwick Jones was not an easy gentleman to surprise.
And so he did not blink when—after his guide had led him round about a tenement a treble time to finally climb a stair, and walked about and then hauled down a ladder to scale another height, and then down a hall and thence, after a succession of guard points passed and permitted, to a door that opened after a complex tattoo had been performed upon it—he discovered himself standing in large, airy, well-appointed apartments such as any decent gentleman might be expected to lodge in. It was a well-lit chamber, but even the glow from the handsome chandeliers and lamps didn’t betray a muscle that moved in his lean face, except those necessary to open his mouth and form his greeting to his host, as he bowed slightly, and said, “Good evening, I assume it is the Lion I address?”
The man who took his greeting seemed more amazed than his guest, for few men, evidently, took his measure with such apparent grace. There were others in the room, two dangerous-looking men guarding the door and a few others lounging about, but it was to him that the eye went first, and not only because his physical presence dwarfed all the others. He sat at a deal table, obviously interrupted at playing cards with the only overly ornate bit of decor in the tasteful room, an overpainted young woman.
He was, as Warwick had noted but not allowed himself to so much as widen his eyes at, as tall and broad as a door, and shaped almost exactly like one too. He was dressed well, but it had taken a skillful tailor to cover that barrel chest so nea
tly, and a deft valet to swathe that bull neck in a fashionable neckcloth. He was not fat in the least, but nothing about him was in the least narrow or lean. Although everything he wore was correct, there was no way such a figure could ever be fashionable, it was far too formidable. And although the broad, genial face above that snowy neckcloth could never be called handsome, being too blunt-featured, the twinkling hazel eyes which assessed his guest from beneath sandy brows were oddly engaging. The mane of coarse sandy hair, of course, accounted for the name, Warwick thought, but when the man spoke, the gleaming white teeth gave him second thoughts about its origin.
“Lion it is,” he said in a deep smooth voice, “and this must be Gentleman Jones himself, and not his kin at all, as I was told. It must be him, returned from the grave, because he seems to fear nothing and no one, possibly because he’s already met his Maker, and has nothing more to lose,” he explained pleasantly to the young woman who sat at his side.
“Do only the dead not fear you?” Warwick asked coolly.
“Why, yes, as a matter of fact,” the man answered with great pleasure, “and even some of them do too, since one of my sidelines is the resurrection game. Some of the recently deceased, you understand, don’t wish to be disturbed, evicted from their family plots at midnight, and carted off to become toys for eager little surgical students. Sometimes, too,” he added ruminatively, “such as now, when there’s such a demand, possibly because of exams the eager laddies have coming up, we can’t be too picky and have to employ more recently created corpses to our purposes.”
