Caro breathed deeply – what Lucia proposed was a very different matter to hot baths and gin. ‘I still have time, I think. I expect Harry home any day now.’
‘A contingency, then,’ Lucia said. ‘In case of disaster.’
Disaster was what she feared, every minute of every day. And yet here was Lucia, offering a glimmer of hope. ‘I’ll be at Vauxhall Gardens,’ Caro said hurriedly. ‘I could meet you in the Rotunda at ten o’clock?’
‘Not the Rotunda,’ Lucia said. ‘Meet me in the bowers. It will be more private there. We can share our troubles.’
She had argued a little, but Lucia had been insistent, and fearing to annoy her, Caro had agreed. Now she wondered why Lucy Loveless, a prostitute, had taken the trouble to help her at all? An act of kindness – one woman to another facing ruin – which had taken Lucy to the bower where she’d lost her life.
She remembered the dying woman’s bone-white face, their mutual desperation. He knows. For a brief time, on the night of the murder, Caro had been gripped by a terrible fear that those words had referred to her own secret. Yet in day’s rational light, recalling the scene so very vividly, she had discounted this theory. Lucy’s words, she felt certain, hadn’t been uttered in a spirit of warning, but as a last desperate struggle to convey information about her killer. Caro’s secret was safe – for the moment, at least – but every tick of the clock brought her closer to despair.
Lord knows, Harry had few illusions left about their marriage, but whatever unspoken conventions governed their troubled union, this was surely in breach of them? Even thinking about the consequences of divorce made her throat close up and her stomach lurch. Losing her home. The money from her trust in Mordechai’s hands. Her brother wouldn’t let her starve, but he’d want her gone, banished from London. Locked up in the country for the rest of her days, her name unspoken in society, erased from existence.
Taking a ring of keys from her panniers, she unlocked one of the escritoire’s upper drawers. Sliding it all the way out, she placed it upon the desktop. Reaching inside the drawer’s cavity, she found the oak fillet tucked flush with the side. She pulled it out, and, with it, came a second, secret drawer. In this latter compartment lay a tiny glass bottle. Caro had found it in Lucy’s panniers, snatched it from her dying body – even in the midst of her horror, even as she’d used her cloak to staunch Lucy’s lifeblood.
Her salvation or her executioner? There was no way to be certain. Lucy had spoken baldly of the risks: jaundice, tremors – both could last a lifetime; other liver troubles; haemorrhage; death. Potentially an act of suicide, as well as murder.
Then there was the moral question. The Church claimed it was the gravest sin. But then the church said a lot of things, not all of them clever. It was a question of survival, she told herself. A necessity, not a choice. A woman had to be ruthless in defence of herself.
Yet Harry might still return in time. Babies came early and often survived. The timing might raise eyebrows, but if it was possible, it was deniable.
One week, she decided. No longer. Dropping the bottle into the compartment, she pushed it shut, and replaced the outer drawer. Gabriel was chewing on one of his bricks, and she crouched down to prise it from his mouth. ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘when I am dead, will my eyes be shutted?’
His face was brown as a plum stone. He had her husband’s colouring and the Corsham smile. Harry won’t want to take you from me, she thought, but he won’t ever let you go. The thought of losing her son on top of everything else was too much to bear. She clutched him to her breast, her cheek pressed into his soft black hair.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHILD SPENT THE rest of that night visiting the Covent Garden taverns, coffeehouses and jelly-shops. He asked around about Lucy Loveless, and many people were eager to claim an acquaintance with the sensationally murdered whore. Child bought and drunk many toasts to her memory, but nobody could tell him anything useful. The gentlemen were of the opinion that it was a crying shame that a beautiful doxy had gone to waste. The girls either wept or seemed pleased to have less competition. Child recognized several of the harlots from the Whores’ Club, but when he approached them they turned away, refusing to talk to him.
He also asked around about the soldier with the scar, and here he had more luck. The owner of a supper house on Chandos Street started nodding even before Child had finished his description. ‘Lieutenant Edward Dodd-Bellingham. Neddy to his friends, beshittened arsehole to those of us who have to clean up his mess. He and his friends come here to dine, drowning their sorrows after they’ve lost at hazard over at the Golden Pear Tree. They like to break things, sometimes tables, sometimes heads. My serving maids are often reduced to tears by their advances. They think every working woman’s for sale, and they won’t take no for an answer. Bow Street comes when I call for them, but they never lock them up. Friends in the right places, I suppose. I forbid them entry from time to time, but they only stand outside abusing my customers.’
‘Did you ever see the lieutenant in the company of a prostitute named Lucy Loveless?’ Child described her.
‘I knew Lucy. Don’t think I ever saw them together, but Dodd-Bellingham’s always got women in tow. Don’t ask me how he affords them. I hear he’s up to his eyes in debt. But then the rules never seem to apply to men like him.’
The doormen wouldn’t let Child into the Bedford Coffeehouse, where the girls were actresses and courtesans, their keepers earls and dukes. A small crowd of onlookers and journalists stood around outside, hoping to learn a salacious story or to catch a glimpse of a celebrated beauty. Child wound up in the Lamb and Flag, where he watched a puppet show as he drank: George Washington buggering King George, while the Queen looked on.
He made short work of his wine, and signalled to the tap-man to bring another jug. Reaching into his pocket for his purse, he discovered a piece of card, about three inches by four. Black with a gold border, it resembled an announcement card or an invitation, except there was no writing – only the gold silhouette of a man with the horns of a goat. Child had no memory of ever having seen it before.
Had he picked it up whilst drunk one night? He didn’t think so. Or had someone slipped it into his pocket? Child remembered his collision with Hector in the Whores’ Club. But why would he have put it there?
A satyr, Child thought. Half-man, half-goat. He struggled to remember his rudimentary classical education. Companions of Bacchus, infamous for drunken revels – and the ravishment of women, both willing and unwilling.
PAMELA
10 January 1782
After the performance, came the private audiences.
It cost the gentlemen a guinea to examine Pamela at close quarters – for signs of disease or bad skin or anything else that didn’t take their fancy. Clothes on. Three minutes by Mrs Havilland’s watch. Keep them wanting more.
As set out in the contract she’d signed that first day in Mrs Havilland’s parlour, Pamela received half. She’d already bought herself a new dress of pink silk, the bodice embroidered with leaves and silver flowers. She was permitted to shop, as long as one of Mrs Havilland’s footmen went with her – the watchers, the other girls called them; there not to protect her, but to keep an eye on Mrs Havilland’s investment. Left to their own devices, young girls might fall in love, or sell themselves cheap.
Here nothing was cheap. Not even time.
Pamela barely had a moment to catch her breath off-stage, before one of the footmen whisked her off to the audience room. So far the gentlemen had proved a disappointment. Brandy-nosed or corpulent or grey or cadaverous, barely a man under forty, some with false teeth, reeking of port and snuff and old man’s sweat. It’s just a job, she told herself, as their eyes roamed her body. Like emptying a chamber pot. Except this chamber pot will stand you in good stead for life.
She walked through the curtain into the little cell of red velvet. One of the other girls had told her it was supposed to make the men think of virginal blood, and Pame
la had laughed uneasily, unsure whether she was joking. The lamps made it glow like the inside of a jewel box. Mrs Havilland waited inside, foot tapping. Two gentlemen tonight, the first not more than twenty-five, but bespectacled and plump. The other a little older . . . Her breath caught, and her stomach turned over.
It was the soldier. Her smiling Adonis.
Some men looked worse in the lamplight, but not him. He had a square jaw and a dimpled chin. Thick blond hair, only lightly powdered. A cool blue gaze, and that scar through his eyebrow, like a buccaneer. And if he smelled a little of port beneath his civet scent, she found she didn’t much care.
Mrs Havilland was looking at her, stony-eyed, and Pamela realized she’d missed her prompt. Stepping forward, peeping at them between the strands of her hair, she spread her hands as if to make an offer of herself. ‘Good evening, sirs,’ she said softly. ‘I am glad to know you.’
‘And I you,’ the Adonis in the redcoat said. His voice was deep, the vowels rich. She could have listened to it all day.
‘Well,’ Mrs Havilland said. ‘Do you like what you see?’
His eyes swept over her. ‘I like it very much.’
The plump gentleman sitting next to him shifted on his velvet stool. He had a round, freckled face beneath a yellowed periwig, and pale eyes that blinked at her behind his horn-rimmed spectacles.
‘She’s too young, Neddy,’ he said. ‘Just look at her.’
Fat ninny, she thought. Glass eyes. She wasn’t supposed to say anything more, but she didn’t want her soldier to walk away. Unbidden, her hip jutted out. ‘Old enough to know my own mind, sir. Old enough to please.’
The soldier laughed richly. ‘So you are. Don’t listen to my brother.’
The pair were brothers? She must have looked astonished, for he laughed again.
Mrs Havilland poked her sharply in the back with her silver scratcher, and Pamela cast her eyes down demurely. The soldier asked her a few questions, like the other gentlemen who had viewed her. About her parents. About her life as a maid in the house in Cheapside. Whether she’d ever had a sweetheart, or kissed a boy. She’d rehearsed the answers to all these questions with Mrs Havilland.
When the three minutes were up, Mrs Havilland held up her watch. ‘Her auction will be held at the end of next month. Bids will start at a hundred guineas. Will I see you there?’
The soldier gave Pamela that look again, the one that made her skin burn. ‘Certainly you will. She’s a rare treasure.’
They rose from their stools, and the soldier kissed Mrs Havilland’s hand. Then he lifted the curtain, giving Pamela a grin as he went. His fat frog of a brother barely looked at her. The curtain fell back and Mrs Havilland gave her another poke. Pamela realized she was still smiling.
‘I told you no sauce.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Lieutenant Edward Dodd-Bellingham. Don’t go getting any ideas, child. He might be handsome as sin, but he’s also poor as Job. The Dodd-Bellinghams have had more Jews through their parlour than the Great Synagogue. If he has a hundred guineas to spare, then I’m the Duchess of Devonshire.’
Mrs Havilland might be a nasty old bigot, Pamela thought, but that didn’t make her wrong about the lieutenant’s debts. Yet that night, as she lay in her feather bed, his smile was her constant companion.
She is a rare treasure. She played the scene many times in her mind. The Pamela in the book would have had strong views about that. What were her words? Don’t let people’s telling you you are pretty, puff you up.
Sound advice. But then the maid in the book had never met a man like Lieutenant Dodd-Bellingham. The girl reminded herself that she was not Pamela. Not really.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE AIR AROUND the Bevis Marks Synagogue was thick with the smells of the Jewish Quarter: baking bread, exotic spices, thick black coffee. Caro walked along the street, Miles at her side, a babel of languages swelling and dipping in their wake: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and the more mysterious tongues of the German and Iberian Jews. Many of the men sported neat, clipped beards.
They turned off Bevis Marks into a crooked row of shops that had been colonized by men of the jewellery trade: goldsmiths, silversmiths, watchmakers, amber-cutters, diamond-polishers and other dealers in gemstones. Halfway along it, she found the shop she was looking for: Solomon Loredo’s Emporium of Heirloom Jewellery and Modern Pieces. According to her own jeweller, whom she had visited a little earlier that morning, the maker’s mark on the ring she had found in the bower was Loredo’s. The shop’s interior resembled a box of confectionary: pale green and gold, fitted out with shelves, cases and compartments displaying the jeweller’s wares. Necklaces and bracelets; dress-swords and snuffboxes; cravat, hat and hair pins; rings, charms and combs. The jeweller came out from behind his counter to give Caro a sweeping bow. ‘Good day to you, madam. Solomon Loredo at your service. What is it that you are looking for this day?’
He was a big, thickset man in a red-and-yellow-striped suit; his large hands glittered with gold rings. His skull was bald and brown, shiny as a hen’s egg, resting upon a thick neck that seemed to flow from his ears. His English was lightly accented, his black eyes lively.
‘I have a sapphire choker that would set off your eyes perfectly, madam. Or perhaps something more discreet? A cameo?’
‘As it happens, I have a piece to show you, Mr Loredo.’
‘You wish to make a sale, madam?’
‘Not exactly. I found this signet ring yesterday and I wish to reunite it with its owner. My own jeweller tells me that it was made in this shop. As it is such a distinctive piece, I am hoping you will remember the person who bought it.’
Loredo held the ring up to the light. ‘How could I forget? It was made to order, a copy of a much older piece.’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it before.’
‘The original is extremely rare and extremely valuable. It is Roman in origin, found in Italy by an antiquarian of my acquaintance, Mr Simon Dodd-Bellingham.’
‘I know Mr Dodd-Bellingham.’ Caro remembered seeing Simon and his brother, Neddy, at Vauxhall on the night of the murder.
‘He sold the ring to a private collector, who wished to have three copies made, each identical to the original piece. Mr Dodd-Bellingham was kind enough to recommend my services.’
‘Why did his client want four identical rings?’
‘You would have to ask him that, madam. I only fulfilled the commission.’
‘May I ask his name, sir? I am sure he would like his ring back.’
‘Alas, I make it a rule never to discuss my customers’ private business. If you would entrust me to return the ring, I will happily do so. Otherwise, you could speak to Mr Dodd-
Bellingham?’
Caro would certainly do so, if necessary, but she wasn’t giving up on Loredo yet. ‘I confess it is a matter of some delicacy, sir. I recovered this ring at the scene of a murder. The prostitute killed at Vauxhall Gardens – perhaps you read about it?’
Loredo frowned. ‘Yes, I did. That poor girl. A shocking thing.’
‘By rights, I suppose, I should take this ring to the magistrate. It is possible your client witnessed something that could aid the investigation. But it occurs to me that he might not want people knowing he had visited the bowers. Especially Bow Street – who, regrettably, aren’t always as discreet as one might like. I would hate to damage a gentleman’s reputation unnecessarily.’
Loredo nodded thoughtfully. ‘I do see your dilemma.’
‘Which is why I thought we could handle this matter between ourselves. I could return the ring to your client, and at the same time ask him if he saw anything pertinent to the murder. If he did, then I could pass this along to the magistrate without revealing his name.’
Loredo passed a hand across his chin, clearly anxious about his client’s reaction.
‘But if you feel honour-bound to refuse,’ Caro said, ‘I will simply take it to the magistrate. I imagine h
e will then come to see you and compel you to reveal the name. I am sure your client will understand that you had little choice.’
Loredo eyed the ring a moment longer. ‘Under the circumstances, I believe your way is best, madam. The name of my client is Mr Jonathan Stone.’
‘The moneylender?’
‘The same. He lives some way north of London, near the village of Muswell Hill.’
Often to be glimpsed hovering in the background at balls and assemblies, Jonathan Stone had originally made his fortune in India, Caro recalled. Subsequently, he had grown much richer, lending money to young gentlemen against their expectations. Hence he was invited everywhere, mingling with the beau monde, but not truly one of them – standing aloof, usually smiling as if at some private joke. A great sponsor of the arts, he was one of Jacobus Agnetti’s patrons. Caro recalled him giving a speech in the Rotunda on the night of the murder.
She thanked Loredo, returning the ring to her panniers. ‘I will be sure to explain to Mr Stone that you only had his interests at heart when you provided me with his name.’
Loredo inclined his head, but he still looked nervous. Caro wondered if it had anything to do with the rumours that swirled around Stone. He was said to have mysterious antecedents on whom no one could shed light, though many had tried. Some claimed he was a secret Jew, others that he’d killed a man and had changed his name. He was a notorious libertine, Mordechai said, with a string of country houses, each containing a mistress and by-blow children. But then Mordechai disapproved of anyone and everything.
Yet the fact remained, if you were to pick a gentleman of London society as a potential suspect in a salacious murder, Jonathan Stone would be at the top of everyone’s list.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FELIX QUI POTUIT rerum cognoscere causas. Happy is he who can ascertain the causes of things.
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