Chapter Two
The future is nigh.
Penrose Manor, Treloor, Cornwall.
“I see a man. A man polishing…silver.”
“Ooohhh.” Lowdy’s mouth gaped like a freshly caught pilchard, fingers knocking over the teacup. “Am I coming into riches?”
Rolling her eyes, Tamsyn reached across the kitchen table to filch another slice of hevva cake. Sweet and crumbly with huge currants, it dried the inside of one’s cheeks, preventing sceptical smirks.
Her paid companion, and Tamsyn liked to think unpaid friend, sat rapt, gawking into the blackness of old Mrs Mildern’s scrying mirror.
“Do you thin–”
“Shush,” shushed Mrs Mildern. “The spirits do not like to be disturbed. And pass me another lump of cake, dearie, my bones are playing up.”
The butler’s grandmother had a keen habit of sitting in the Penrose kitchen with her mirror and terrifying the maids with predictions of wicked downfall if they didn’t maintain their petticoats firmly about their ankles. Footmen never fared much better, with dire warnings of hideous deformities if they loosened their breeches, and many a man had stumbled away, clutching himself.
If ever there was a deterrent to indulging in activities of a carnal nature, it was Mrs Mildern and her readings.
As fortune would have it, this day marked three sennights before the autumnal equinox with a waxing moon and the seagulls flying east – which meant, according to Mrs Mildern, that the gentlewomen of Penrose Manor were due their turn.
Pursing her lips and ignoring Albert, the grinning butler, Tamsyn broke off a hefty chunk of the flat cake and slid it over. Perchance the old lady’s tongue would be too occupied by currants to predict Tamsyn’s lot.
Besides, she knew what the future days, months and years held for her – nondescript serenity and quiet solitude with no carnal activity whatsoever.
Mrs Mildern turned to Lowdy once more. “Now, my pretty Miss Treherne, let us see.”
Tamsyn’s companion frowned at the endearment and she wondered why because Miss Lowdy Treherne was pretty. Blond with huge brown eyes and a curvy figure, most of the footmen, village boys and gentlemen of the area became puppies in her presence – eyes eager, paws impatient, and as for their drool…
Thrice a year, Tamsyn’s father travelled to London on business and had oft brought back presents – ribbons, silk cloth or earnest doctors – and two years past, he’d brought back…Lowdy, having seen her request for employment pinned up in a draper’s shop near Greenwich.
No doubt her time-honoured Cornish name of Loveday Treherne had caught Papa’s eye, although Lowdy herself had no ancestral family in the area.
They’d become firm friends despite Tamsyn’s inability to speak in those dismal days, and now Lowdy was one of the family.
A seagull squawked at the wide-open window, causing Tamsyn to leap like a mackerel.
Unseasonably dry for nigh two weeks, today’s sultry west wind stole one’s wits, and she pulled at her cotton sleeves and flapped cook’s dinner menu about.
Mrs Mildern was now muttering about overly starched neckcloths, but even Lowdy had lost interest, staring at the hevva cake instead with unmitigated longing.
∞∞∞
The Winterbourne residence. No. 6 Berkeley Square, London.
“Have you packed my peridot stickpin, Hamilton?”
“No, my lord,” answered the apprentice valet as he attempted to shove another sapphire tailcoat into the third leather portmanteau.
Jack raised his booted feet to the desk and perused the notes from Rainham whilst keeping an eye out for further packing oversights.
The report from Carlsbrook was fairly detailed, remarking that the French smuggling ring had disbanded, or at least moved on after the attention drawn by the Lowarn Cove inciden–
The bedchamber door was flung open. “Tea and biscuits for sustenance, my lord.”
“Tea, Mrs Shepherd?” he queried, having requested ale and a slice of pork pie from the housekeeper.
“Don’t want you ending up like your father, do we, Lord Winterbourne? Pickled in claret then marinated in whisky.”
“No indeed, Mrs Shepherd.”
He sipped as a breeze filtered through the open window, bringing scents of muggy London, and even the sweet tea couldn’t disguise the waft of river. At least the countryside would smell fresh and…fresh.
Which reminded him. “What about my sky-blue waistcoat, Hamilton? Can’t travel without that.” A certain sartorial sophistication would be required to entice this innocent miss.
“Er…”
Peeking up, Jack noticed the beleaguered fellow riffling through the already packed second portmanteau.
These preparations would go without a hitch if head valet Miggens were here but he’d popped to Bond Street in search of what he’d deemed “appropriate attire for the country”.
The fusty fellow would probably return with a humdrum mud-brown jacket and concealing moor-green waistcoat, matched by a pair of no doubt practical but nevertheless unembellished boots. Useful for tramping the woods, hopeless for wooing.
Back to Rainham’s notes: Miss Tamsyn Penrose. Found delirious in a cave at Lowarn Cove with dead boy six years ago. Now with twenty-two years – so not such a child – she’d been struck silent for five years and had never spoken or written of the incident. Details on how she’d regained her voice were lacking.
Fragile girl. He would need to treat her with the utmost gentleness.
Infiltrating experienced society ladies held no trepidation, yet the notion of this mission left a peculiarly bad taste in his mouth, rather like Almack’s lemonade. She was innocent, young, wretched and…innocent – had he mentioned that?
This would also require… “Have you packed my coquelicot waistcoat?”
“No, my lord, Mr Miggens said to leave–”
“Don’t listen to that stuffy fusspot. I pay the wages, so please pack the coquelicot, the sparkish jonquil and the striped one. I’ll need to impress.”
Young Hamilton hastened to the wardrobe with a despairing glance at the portmanteau.
Lord Rainham’s scrawled additional notes outlined his interest in this case, having always suspected the hand of La Chauve-Souris. But if so, why leave the girl alive? What did she know? Carlsbrook, it appeared, had been more than a little heavy-handed and the girl’s father had sent him packing with a… Jack re-read Carlsbrook’s words in disbelief.
…upon which I was shot at by Sir Jago and told never to venture past the River Tamar again unless I wished to sing castrato.
Thunder and turf, Rainham never mentioned that.
“Hamilton? Best pack my three-inch stiletto boot blade, both pairs of silver knuckle punchers, the fencing paraphernalia and my Manton pistols.”
A whimper and Jack glanced up. The apprentice valet held a bottle-green tailcoat and brush in one hand, with a single boot and stocking in the other, an expression of muddle marking his young brow.
“Never mind. I’ll do it myself.”
Trailing a finger down the report, he searched for anything essential… Jibber-jabber. Twaddle. Uninteresting. Pettifogging detail to fill the page… Ah, Sir Jago’s business interests – owns two china clay pits providing raw material for the finest porcelain.
Shame, he’d been expecting tin mines and all that usual Cornish rigmarole.
A package accompanied the folder. And a card:
Since you are staying under the guise of business, I thought this might be useful. R
The book weighed at least a stone and the leather spine remained unbroken – a sure mark of its tediousness.
China Clay – The Geology, Geography and Industry by Doctor Tuffle.
Faugh, no time for that, he’d have to brazen it out…or give it to Miggens for the coach journey – his studious valet would read seating plans for pleasure.
Which reminded him…
Lowering his boots to the floor, he shuffled the papers together. “And my deck of cards, the miniature chess set and three bottles of brandy.”
Hamilton groaned, dropping the shaving kit, but Jack merely gathered up the irksome tome and surveyed the bursting portmanteau for a gap.
Gads, packing was such a chore.
∞∞∞
Penrose Manor, Treloor, Cornwall.
“I see a man.”
Not again.
But this time, Mrs Mildern’s bony finger pointed straight at Tamsyn.
“Me?” she squeaked.
The old lady’s brow creased, eyes misting as she bowed to the obsidian mirror once more. “I see a man, a man as dark as the devil.”
Tentatively, and so as not to disturb the spirits, the snoozing butler, or the scavenging seagull nibbling crumbs of hevva cake from the floor, Tamsyn shifted her chair closer. She gazed into the blackness of the scrying mirror but could see no image that Mrs Mildern described.
No man. No dark devil. Just her own blurred grey shape and the silhouette of her neatly bound hair.
But Mrs Mildern peered closer.
“Devil and angel. Shadow and light. Sorrow and joy,” she mumbled. “He comes for you!” she suddenly cried, wrinkled hands aloft, gold rings glinting.
Tamsyn stumbled to stand, heart skittering, feathers flying as the gull departed.
“Who?” she rasped, raw and low.
Tendrils of the dark past crept over this bright day, causing her throat to clench and voice to fail. For so long, she’d fought to put that fiend’s whispered words behind her, of fearing every movement, every shadow. He’d never come back. He was dead.
He had to be dead.
Mrs Mildern smiled as she squinted up, all the ancient crags of her sun-beaten skin curving with the movement.
“Why, the man with two faces, dearie.”