Child spent the next few hours touring the Covent Garden fleshpots, buying drinks, talking to whores and their clients. He never stopped watching out for Finn Daley, still baffled that the moneylender hadn’t yet paid him a visit. Was it too much to hope that he’d dropped dead?
In the course of his tavern travels, he discovered that Kitty was well known and well liked, the toast of the Bedford Coffeehouse in her youth, her past a long trail of titled gentlemen and wealthy merchants who’d loved her then discarded her when they’d grown bored. Nobody could tell him who was keeping her now, only that she’d not been seen out on the town since the spring, which was when the footman at the brothel in Soho had said she’d moved out.
‘Kitty Carefree?’ one young gentleman said, lifting his head from his tankard just long enough to squint at Child. ‘Girl has a cunt like a split fig.’
Which sadly wasn’t going to help Child find her.
Pamela: missing, presumed dead. Kitty Carefree: missing, presumed alive. Theresa Agnetti: missing, presumed alive, murdered, dead by suicide – depending on who was doing the presuming.
Too many missing women to Child’s mind. They’d all known one another, all spent time in Agnetti’s house – just like Lucy Loveless. He was convinced that the fates of those four women were connected.
As day slid into dusk, and he was walking past a jelly-house in Maiden Lane, he glimpsed a familiar face through the curved window. Pushing open the door, he squeezed past the counter of blancmanges and jellies, sparkling like jewels in the candlelight.
‘Remember me?’
Hector grinned. ‘How could I forget?’ His pert, knowing voice was all at odds with his downy cheeks, expressive eyes and tousled blond hair. The boy dipped his spoon into his glass – a ribbon jelly set in coloured layers – and sucked on it suggestively.
Child took out the invitation. ‘Did you put this in my pocket?’
‘Felt sorry for you, didn’t I? Blundering around like that. Inspire pity in a Puritan, you would.’
Child sat down at the table, lowering his voice. ‘Lucy believed a girl named Pamela had been murdered. She thought Jonathan Stone or one of his friends might have been responsible. Is that why the Whores’ Club wouldn’t help me? Because the girls risk losing their money from his masquerades?’
‘You learned something then.’ Hector gave Child a round of mocking applause.
‘Do you know anything about Lucy’s inquiry? From your time working for Kitty?’
He took another mouthful of jelly. ‘I might do.’
‘I take it you didn’t put this in my pocket out of civic duty?’
‘Now you come to mention it, I do like a present, sir. A silver nutmeg, a golden pear.’
‘The King of Spain’s daughter?’
‘I’d rather have the King.’
‘I’ll give you five shillings – but only if I consider your information worth it.’
‘Oh, I’m always worth it. I’ll take a golden guinea in lieu of that golden pear.’
‘Half a guinea. Take it or leave it. Your choice.’
‘You old skinflint.’ But he was smiling. ‘Meet me by the entrance to the King’s Mews in half an hour.’
‘Why can’t we talk here?’
‘Because I have no great desire to have my belly cut open at Vauxhall Gardens. Never know who’s watching, do we?’ Hector scraped back his chair, raising his voice: ‘No, I won’t talk to you, you dirty old goat. Stop touching me.’
People looked round. ‘Nasty pederast,’ someone said.
Flushing, Child turned an indignant face on Hector, but he’d already danced out the door, laughing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
DEFINE PURGATORY. FOR Caro, it was time spent in the company of her sister-in-law, Louisa, and her friends.
It being a remarkably fine evening, their hostess, the Duchess of Shropshire, had announced that badminton would replace cards as the game of choice. Her footmen had set up a net in the half-acre of private garden to the rear of her Piccadilly mansion, and brought chairs, sofas, and tables out onto the grass. Caro, lying on a Chippendale daybed, watched Clemency Howard and another girl bat a shuttlecock back and forth in the golden sunlight.
Around her, the duchess, Louisa, and half a dozen other ladies sipped bergamot punch and nibbled cheese wigs and other pastries. The moment Caro had arrived, she had been besieged with questions, everyone wanting to know about her brush with death outside Carlisle House. The ladies laboured under the misapprehension that the near-miss had been a dreadful accident, and Caro said nothing to disabuse them. Only Louisa, who would have had the real story from Mordechai, raised the occasional eyebrow. Eventually, they tired of the topic, and the conversation moved on to indolent servants and inattentive husbands.
‘I’m having my portrait painted by Jacobus Agnetti,’ Caro said, during a suitable pause in these discussions.
‘Is that wise?’ Louisa asked. ‘All things considered?’
The women exchanged glances, all doubtless having read The London Hermes. ‘I meant Agnetti’s scandals,’ Louisa said hurriedly.
Pregnant again, her sister-in-law sat proud and pink and placid in a pale-blue bergère hat and a sack-back gown let out in front. Caro would have to tread carefully if she didn’t want the conversation getting back to Mordechai. Louisa was one of those calm, sensible women who rarely contradicted their husbands, but behind her round blue eyes was a mind ticking away like a Janvier clock.
‘Agnetti is a perfect poppet,’ the duchess declared from beneath her wide straw hat. ‘Oh, he’s a little stiff at first, I grant you, but when you sit for him, you’ll find him really quite charming. He opens up about himself, and really sees the person one is. He says a good artist has to – see into the mind of his sitter, I mean. He painted me as Aphrodite and we hung the portrait in the red dining room. We’re to use him again, to paint the ceilings at Stonelands.’
The duchess had false teeth of mottled jasper that clattered when she talked, an old-fashioned fondness for white French wigs, and a penchant for bees. Occasionally one would drift over from the hives at the bottom of the garden and everyone would pretend not to mind.
‘Have you met her yet?’ Lottie Heneker asked. ‘The assistant?’
Caro had known someone would ask, and she might have guessed it would be Lottie. A silly, dimpled creature, wife of the Solicitor General, you could always count on her to cheat at cards and spread slanderous gossip.
‘Miss Willoughby brought my contract over earlier today,’ Caro said. ‘I’m not sure there’s any truth in the rumours.’
Sally Carmichael gave a cynical smile. ‘Why would Agnetti invite scandal if it wasn’t in some way to his benefit? A man doesn’t take a woman half his age into his house unless he wants one thing.’
A penniless cousin of the duchess, Sally often took her resentment at her situation out on others with a brutal bluntness. I would too, Caro thought, if I was forced to traipse around as a companion, condemned to read novels aloud and collect honey dressed in rural costume.
‘She assists him with his work,’ Caro said. ‘Even paints the scenery in his portraits.’
‘Just because she’s deft with a brush, doesn’t mean she’s devoid of other talents.’ Lottie said.
‘I am with Caro,’ the duchess declared. ‘Nor did I ever give any credence to those stories about him and his sitters. Agnetti loved his wife and misses her dreadfully.’ She broke off to applaud. ‘Oh, good hit, Clemency.’
‘Evelina Missingham met someone who knows the Willoughbys,’ Sally said. ‘They’re old Northumberland gentry. Evelina says the mother died, and the father doted upon the girl. Perhaps too much. The foolish child should have waited and got herself married off. Instead she eloped with her father’s secretary.’
They had all heard variations upon the tale. ‘After they married, the money soon ran out,’ Lottie said. ‘First the secretary abandoned her. Then it turned out they weren’t really married after all. He’
d simply got a friend of his to dress up like a parson. I’ve heard she lived for a time at a boarding house in Paddington, earning money from her painting – if you believe that, which nobody does. Agnetti met her in Leicester Fields and admired her work.’
‘He admired something,’ Sally observed dryly.
‘Perhaps Agnetti was lonely,’ Louisa said. ‘Without Theresa, without children, in that big house all by himself. He still hopes Theresa will come back to him, I’ve heard.’
The duchess reddened. ‘He should take a horsewhip to her if she does. I never liked her from the first. There was something dark and cold and secretive about that woman.’
‘She could be warm enough when she wanted to be,’ Sally remarked slyly. ‘Remember that time you caught her flirting with His Grace?’
‘I’ve heard, on occasion, she did rather more than flirt.’ Lottie smiled, with an arch of an eyebrow.
They turned as one. ‘What?’ ‘Do tell?’
Lottie took her time, enjoying the attention. ‘Christopher Whitaker tells a story of a ball at Spencer House last year. He was looking for the cloakroom, and walked into the billiard room by mistake. He found it already occupied – by Theresa and a certain gentleman of our acquaintance. He wasn’t teaching her how to pot the balls either.’
‘Good heavens.’ ‘Who?’ ‘You must say!’
‘Lieutenant Edward Dodd-Bellingham,’ Lottie pronounced with satisfaction.
Well now, Caro thought, amidst the murmurs. Even for the lieutenant this was swift work. First, he’d seduced Agnetti’s wife – then with her out of the picture, he’d moved on to his assistant. She wondered if Agnetti had heard the rumours about the lieutenant and his wife – it might explain why he’d been so angry with Miss Willoughby. And presumably Theresa was the rival whom Pamela had mentioned to her friend, Cecily.
‘Now that’s a pretty revenge,’ Sally said. ‘For Agnetti’s dalliances with his sitters, I mean.’
‘Theresa told me she didn’t believe the stories about his sitters.’ Louisa sounded distressed. ‘And I always thought, beneath the flirting, that she loved her husband very much.’
‘Come now, Louisa,’ the duchess said sternly. ‘You know how you always think the best of everyone.’
Louisa sighed. ‘She wanted a child, that much was obvious. I saw the way she looked at mine. And do you remember the time Imogen Chandos-Murray said she was expecting, and Theresa made her cry? I think that was the cause of the unhappiness between her and Mr Agnetti. Perhaps Theresa felt the fault of their barren marriage was not her own? Women in such situations have been known to resort to desperate measures. It’s the only explanation I’ll entertain.’
‘She’d never have got a baby this way . . .’ Lottie glanced over at the younger girls playing badminton, and dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Christopher says Theresa was on her knees and she had the lieutenant’s member in her mouth.’
Sally gasped. Louisa blanched. ‘You should not say such things, Lottie.’
‘I’m only saying what I heard. Christopher swears it is true.’
‘I wonder if we ever really knew Theresa at all.’ Louisa sighed.
‘Could the lieutenant be keeping her somewhere, do you think?’ Caro said.
‘Of course not,’ Sally said. ‘He has no money for a start. He was sniffing around Emily Chandos-Murray for a time, until Imogen told her she couldn’t possibly afford him.’
A collective sigh arose as the women ruminated upon the tragedy of penniless men with faces like Lieutenant Dodd-
Bellingham’s.
‘He is certainly his father’s son,’ the duchess said, and there was a chorus of agreement, every woman present having a story about the time the colonel tried to kiss her in a cupboard.
‘Poor Neddy,’ Lottie said. ‘He returns from the colonies a hero, only to find a rather unattractive cuckoo in the family nest. I wonder, having seen Simon, that the colonel owned him at all. Not a bit of the old man there.’
‘What do you make of him?’ Caro asked. ‘Simon Dodd-
Bellingham?’
‘Mordechai says he is a fine scholar,’ Louisa said. ‘He’s thinking about getting him in to take a look at our library.’
‘I wouldn’t, if I were you,’ the duchess said.
‘Why ever not?’
‘I was going to get him in too. Thought he could help Freddie start a collection: engraved gemstones or fossils. He needs something to fill his evenings now he’s given up politics. I had our steward make inquiries and he heard a troubling rumour about wandering hands. Not up ladies’ skirts like his father, but into his clients’ pockets.’
‘Good Lord.’ Louisa frowned. ‘How very shocking.’
Mr Child had said that Stone liked to deal in his clients’ secrets, Caro recalled. She wondered if he could be blackmailing Simon? Yet how much of a secret could it be, if the duchess knew it?
‘Simon has never struck me as dishonest,’ she said. ‘Who is he supposed to have stolen from?’
‘Ansell Ward, the City alderman. You know how merchants like to try it on with a library of Latin – well, Simon was employed to catalogue his books. And apparently Ward is convinced that he stole from him. There wasn’t enough evidence for an arrest, but he was summarily dismissed. Freddy thought we shouldn’t run the risk.’ She raised her voice to a boom. ‘Very well done, Clemency.’
They applauded as the players walked back to join them. Miss Howard’s face was flushed and smiling. ‘I do like to win. I know I shouldn’t.’
Caro moved up to make space for her, and Clemency smiled her thanks. ‘Will you play, Mrs Corsham?’
‘Not today. I don’t much like to run around. Did anyone ever hear a suggestion that Theresa’s disappearance was not as voluntary as we all thought?’
Lottie looked up, eyes shining. ‘Foul play?’
‘Well, why not? It wouldn’t be the first unhappy marriage to end that way.’
‘An outrageous suggestion,’ the duchess said. ‘Agnetti hired the best thief-takers in the kingdom to find his wife.’
‘Not just here in England,’ Louisa said. ‘Mordechai says he has an agent in Naples looking for her right now. And he has written to India to engage a man there. Whatever Agnetti’s deficiencies as a husband, he can’t be faulted in his efforts to find her.’
‘What good would it have done him to murder her anyway?’ Sally Carmichael asked. ‘If he wanted to be rid of her, he could have put her in the country – he’s rich enough. Without a funeral, he can’t remarry, so what’s in it for him?’
‘Who is to say it was planned?’ Caro said. ‘People say he has a temper. Perhaps he found out about Theresa and the lieutenant?’
‘I never heard him speak unkindly to her – even when her behaviour warranted it,’ the duchess said. ‘He was always gentle and kind, and Freddie says he is fierce in her defence at the club.’
‘The lieutenant, then?’
‘Neddy Dodd-Bellingham would sooner kill for a beefsteak than for love,’ Lottie declared. ‘I doubt this amour with Theresa was a matter of the heart. On his side, at least.’
‘What then, suicide?’
‘Oh, Caro. Surely not.’
‘Then where is she?’
Answer came there none, and signalling her boredom with the topic, the duchess remarked upon Clemency’s gown. That sparked a debate upon India cotton versus lawn, with one daring voice speaking up for tamboured muslin.
Was Theresa Agnetti even relevant to their inquiry? Caro could not help but think that she was. Mr Child was right. Her disappearance so close to Pamela’s own did raise troubling questions – especially if both women were rivals over Lieutenant Dodd-Bellingham. Did this mean that their inquiry had grown again: three murders, rather than two? Or had Theresa Agnetti played a darker, more active role in this strange story?
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHILD FOUND HECTOR leaning against the gatepost of the King’s Mews, watching the cavalry officers riding in and
out. Lights wove around Charing Cross: footmen with torches leading sedan chairs; carriage lamps bouncing with the movement of the horses; link-boys escorting whores from job to job. Hector held his own torch in front of him suggestively, reminding Child of Simon’s statue of Priapus.
‘That wasn’t funny back there.’
‘A little bit, it was. You follow me and we’ll talk. Agreed?’
Child took an uneasy glance around, thinking about Finn Daley again. The boy might be leading him into a trap. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Got to look the part, sir. Anyone sees us together, I don’t want them thinking it’s information you’re buying.’
Reluctantly, Child followed him down Cockspur Street. ‘Lucy thought it was all odd from the start,’ Hector said softly, his words drifting back to Child. ‘The girls who are usually invited to the Priapus Club are women of the town: young and beautiful, but experienced. This particular night, they wanted a virgin and Lucy wanted to know why. It wasn’t usual for them to meet like that either, just a few of them. The masquerades are normally held at full moon, a dozen or more gentlemen, perhaps two dozen whores. This night, Lucy suspected they were up to something they didn’t want the rest of the club to see.’
‘Something involving Pamela.’ Child’s face was grim.
Hector nodded. ‘Lucy said Stone trusted the others, the Dodd-Bellinghams and Lord March, because they owed him money and he knew their secrets.’
‘I heard there was a fifth man. Did you ever hear anything about that?’
‘Lucy asked me about him too. She was trying to find out who he was.’
‘When was this?’
‘A little while after Kitty moved out.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘That the girls talked about a fifth man the morning after the masquerade.’
‘Go on.’
‘The lieutenant dropped the girls off at Kitty’s rooms at about nine. It was earlier than I was expecting – I wasn’t long in bed. Kitty had twisted her ankle and the others helped her up the stairs. They were acting strange, quiet, like something was up. While I was making them tea, I heard them talking. One of the girls, I think it was Rosy Sims, asked the others about the fifth man – “the one with Pamela”. Well, everyone got angry then, and Ceylon Sally said that Rosy should never speak of it again. Then Kitty saw that I was listening, and told me to go and buy more tea, though we didn’t need any. When I came back, the girls were gone and she gave me a hug, a little tearful. Told me she’d buy me a present for being so good, but she never did.’
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