14

NOTORIOUS BORES

IT WASN’T NECESSARY TO read Lord Melton’s letters, but she couldn’t possibly have stopped herself from doing so, and she picked one up as though it were a lit grenade that might go off in her hand.

It did. She read the five letters through without stopping. None were dated, and there was no way of telling the order in which they had been written; time had plainly been of no consequence to the writer—and yet it had meant everything. This was the voice of a man pushed off a cliff into the abyss of eternity and documenting his fall.

I will love you forever, I cannot do otherwise, but by God, Esmé, I will hate you forever, with all the power of my soul, and had I you before me and your long white neck in my hands I would strangle you like a fucking swan and fuck you as you died, you…

He might as well have picked up the inkwell and flung it at the page. The words were scrawled and blotted, big and black, and there were ragged holes torn through the paper where here and there he had stabbed the page with his quill.

She took a deep, gasping breath when she came to the end, feeling as though she hadn’t breathed once in the reading. She didn’t weep, but her hands were shaking, and the last letter slipped from her fingers and floated to the floor. Weighted with loss and a grief that didn’t cut but clawed and, merciless, tore its prey to bloody ribbons.

SHE DIDN’T READ the letters again. It would have felt like a desecration. As it was, there was no need to read them over; she thought she would never forget a word of any of them.

She had to leave her rooms and walk for some time to regain any sense of composure. Now and then she felt tears run down her cheeks and hastily blotted them before any passerby should notice and ask her trouble. She felt as though she’d wept for days or as though someone had beaten her. And yet it was nothing to do with her.

She felt one of the O’Higgins brothers following somewhere behind her, but he tactfully hung back. She walked from one end to the other of St. James’s Park, and all the way around the lake, but finally sat down on a bench near a flotilla of swans, exhausted in mind and body both. Someone sat down on the other end of the bench—Mick, she saw, from the corner of her eye.

It was teatime; the bustle of the streets was dying down as people hurried home or dropped into a tavern or an ordinary to refresh themselves after a long day’s labor. Mick coughed in a meaning manner.

“I’m not hungry,” she said. “You go on, if you like.”

“Now, Bedelia. Ye know fine I’m not goin’ anywhere you don’t go.” He’d scooted along the bench and sat at her elbow, slouched and companionable. “Shall I be fetchin’ ye a pie, now? Whatever’s the trouble, it’ll seem better on a full belly.”

She wasn’t hungry, but she was empty and, after a moment’s indecision, gave in and let him buy her a meat pie from a pie man. The smell of it was so strong and good that she felt somewhat restored just from holding it. She nibbled the crust, felt the rich flood of juice and flavor in her mouth, and, closing her eyes, gave herself over to the pie.

“There, now.” Mick, having long since finished his own pie, sat gazing benevolently at her. “Better, is it not?”

“Yes,” she admitted. At least she could now think about the matter, rather than drowning in it. And while she hadn’t been conscious of actually thinking at any time since leaving her rooms, evidently some back chamber of her mind had been turning things over.

Esmé and Nathaniel were dead. Harold, theoretical Duke of Pardloe, wasn’t. That’s what it came down to. She could do something about him. And she found that she was determined to do it.

“What, though?” she asked, having explained the matter to Mick in general terms. “I can’t send those letters to the secretary at war—there’s no way His Grace wouldn’t find out, and I think it would kill him to know anyone had read them, let alone people who…who had any power over him, you know.”

Mick pulled a face but allowed that this might be so.

“So what is it ye want to happen, Lady Bedelia?” he asked. “There’s maybe another way of it?”

She drew a breath that went down to her shoes and let it out slowly.

“I suppose I want what Captain Quarry wants: to scotch the notion that His Grace is insane and to get his regiment re-commissioned. I think I have to do both those things. But how?”

“And ye can’t—or ye won’t—do it with the letters….” He eyed her sideways, to see if she might be convinced otherwise, but she shook her head at him.

“Get a false witness?” he suggested. “Bribe someone to say there was an affair betwixt the countess and the poet?”

Minnie shook her head dubiously.

“I’m not saying I couldn’t find someone who would take a bribe,” she said. “But not one who’d be believed. Most young women aren’t good liars at all.”

“No,” he agreed. “You’re one of a kind, so ye are.” It was said with admiration, and she nodded briefly at the compliment but went on with her train of thought.

“The other thing is that it’s easy enough to start a rumor, but once it’s started, it’s quite likely to take on a life of its own. You can’t control it, I mean. If I got someone—man or woman—to say he or she knew about the affair, it wouldn’t stop there. And because it wouldn’t be the truth to start with, there’s no telling where it might go. You don’t set light to a fuse without knowing where it’s laid,” she added, raising a brow at him. “My father always told me that.”

“A wise man, your father.” Mick touched the brim of his hat in respect. “If it’s not to be bribery and false witness, then…what might his honor, your da, recommend?”

“Well…forgery, most likely,” she said with a shrug. “But I don’t think writing a false version of those letters would be a great deal better than showing the originals, in terms of effect.” She rubbed her thumb across her fingers, feeling the faint slick of lard from the piecrust. “Get me another pie, will you, Mick? Thinking is hungry work.”

She finished the second pie and, thus fortified, reluctantly began to mentally revisit Esmé’s letters. It was, after all, Countess Melton who was the fons et origo of all this misery.

Would you think it was worth it, I wonder? she thought toward the absent Esmé. Likely the woman had only wanted to make her husband jealous; she probably hadn’t had the slightest intent of causing her husband to shoot one of his friends; most certainly she hadn’t had any intent of dying, along with her child. That circumstance struck Minnie with a particular poignancy and, for some odd reason, made her think of her mother.

I don’t suppose you intended anything that happened, either, she thought with compassion. You certainly didn’t intend me. Still, she thought her mother’s situation, while very regrettable, wasn’t the theatrical tragedy that Esmé’s had been. I mean, we both survived.

And speaking only for myself, she added, I’m quite glad to be here. I’m reasonably sure that Father’s pleased about that, too.

A slight sound pulled her from her thoughts, and she perceived that Mick had adjusted his position, indicating silently that he thought it was getting late and best they begin walking back to Great Ryder Street.

He was right; the shadows of the huge trees had begun to edge across the path like a seeping stain of spilled tea. And the sounds had changed, too: the cawing laughter of the society women with their parasols had mostly vanished, replaced by the male voices of soldiers and businessmen and clerks, all heading for their tea with the single-mindedness of donkeys headed for their mangers.

She stood up and shook her skirts back into place, retrieved her hat and pinned it firmly to her hair. She nodded to Mick and indicated with a small movement of the hand that he should walk with her, rather than follow. She was wearing a decent but very demure blue gingham with a plain straw hat; she might easily pass for an upper housemaid walking out with an admirer, as long as they didn’t meet anyone she knew—and that wasn’t likely at this hour.

“This chap what his lordship shot,” Mick said, after half a block. “They say he was a poet, was he?”

“So I’m told.”

“Have ye maybe read any of his poems, like?”

She glanced at him, surprised.

“No. Why?”

“Well, it was just ye mentioned your da thinkin’ highly o’ forgery in some situations. I was wonderin’ what ye might forge that would help, and it struck me—what if your man Twelvetrees had written a poem of an incriminatin’ nature about the countess? Or, rather,” he added, in case she was missing his point, which she wasn’t, “what if ye were to write one for him?”

“It’s a thought,” she said slowly. “Perhaps quite a good thought, too—but let’s turn it over for a bit, shall we?”

“Aye,” said Mick, beginning to grow enthused. “Well, first off, o’ course: what class of a forger might ye be, at all?”

“Not inspired,” she admitted. “I mean, no hope of me doing a proper banknote. And I’ve really not done much in the way of true forgery, either—copying the writing of a real person, I mean. It’s mostly writing a false letter but one that’s meant for a person who doesn’t know the sender. And only now and then, not often.”

Mick emitted a low humming noise.

“Still, ye have got some of the man’s letters to work from,” he pointed out. “Could ye maybe trace a few words here and there and add in, between-like?”

“Maybe,” she said dubiously. “But there’s more to a good forgery than only the handwriting, you know. If it’s going to a person who knows the sender, then the style needs to be a decent facsimile—has to resemble the real person’s, I mean,” she added quickly, seeing his lips start to shape “facsimile.”

“And his style writing a poem could be different to what he’d do writing a letter?” Mick turned that over for a moment, considering.

“Yes. What if he was only known to write sonnets, I mean, and I wrote a sestina? Someone might smell a rat.”

“I’ll take yer word for it. Though I shouldn’t think your man was in the habit of writin’ love poems to the secretary at war, eh?”

“No,” she said, a little tersely. “But if I wrote something shocking enough to justify his lordship shooting the man who wrote it, what are the chances that the secretary would show it to somebody else? Who might tell somebody else, and…and so on.” She flipped a hand. “If it got to someone who could tell that Nathaniel Twelvetrees didn’t write it, then what?”

Mick nodded soberly. “Then they’d maybe think your lordship did it himself, ye mean?”

“That’s one possibility.” On the other hand, the other possibility was undeniably fascinating.

They had reached Great Ryder Street and the scrubbed white steps that led up to her door. The scent of brewing tea floated up from the servants’ areaway beside the steps, and her stomach curled in a pleasantly anticipatory fashion.

“It’s a good idea, Mick,” she said, and touched his hand lightly. “Thank you. I’ll ask Lady Buford whether Nathaniel published any of his poetry. If I could read a bit of it, just to see…”

“Me money’s on you, Lady Bedelia,” Mick said, and, smiling at her, raised her hand and kissed it.

“NATHANIEL TWELVETREES?” Lady Buford was surprised and peered closely at Minnie through her quizzing glass. “I don’t believe so. He was much given to declaiming his poetry at salons and I believe went so far as to give a theatrical reading at one point, but from what little I heard of his poetry—well, what little I hear of what people said of his poetry—I doubt that most printers would have considered it a promising financial venture.”

She resumed watching the stage, this presently featuring a mediocre performance of “Charming Country Songs, by a Duette of Two Ladies,” but tapped her closed fan now and then against her closed lips, an indication of continued thought.

“I believe,” she said at once, when the next pause in the entertainment came, “that Nathaniel did have some of his poems privately printed. For the edification of his friends,” she added, with a delicate lift of one strong gray brow. “Why do you ask?”

Fortunately the pause had given Minnie time enough to foresee that one, and she answered readily enough.

“Sir Robert Abdy was speaking of Mr. Twelvetrees at Lady Scroggs’s rout the other night—rather scornfully,” she added, with her own delicacy. “But as Sir Robert has his own pretensions in that line…”

Lady Buford laughed, a deep, engaging laugh that made people in the box next them turn round to look, and proceeded to say a few scornful—and deeply amusing—things of her own about Sir Robert.

But Minnie continued to think, through the appearances of a pair of Italian fire-eaters, a dancing pig (which disgraced itself onstage, to the delight of the audience), two purportedly Chinese gentlemen who sang a purportedly comic song, and several more acts of a similar ilk.

Privately printed. For the edification of his friends. There were at least two poems, written expressly for the edification of Esmé, Countess Melton. Where were they?

“I wonder,” she said quite casually, as they began to make their way out through the throngs of theatergoers, “if Countess Melton was fond of poetry?”

Lady Buford was only half attending, being occupied in trying to catch the eye of an acquaintance on the far side of the theater, and replied absently, “Oh, I don’t think so. Woman never read a book in her life, save the Bible.”

“The Bible?” Minnie asked, incredulous. “I wouldn’t have thought her a…a religious person.” Lady Buford had succeeded in attracting the friend, who was wading forcefully toward them through the crowd, and spared a cynic smile for Minnie.

“She wasn’t. But she did like to read the Bible and make fun of it to shock people. Only too easy to do, I’m afraid.”

“SHE WOULDN’T HAVE thrown the poems away,” Minnie argued to Rafe, who was disposed to be dubious. “They were to her, about her. No woman would throw away a poem that a man she cared for wrote about her—and most especially not a woman like Esmé.”

“Has any man ever written you a love poem, Lady Bedelia?” he asked, teasing.

“No,” she said primly, but felt herself blushing. A few men had done just that—and she’d kept the poems, even though she didn’t care all that much for the men who’d written them. Still…

“Mmm,” Rafe conceded, with a waggle of his head. “But maybe your man Melton burnt them. I would, if some smellsmock had been sending my wife that class of thing.”

“If he didn’t burn the letters,” Minnie said, “he wouldn’t have burnt the poems, either. The poems couldn’t possibly have contained anything worse.”

Why didn’t he burn the letters? she wondered, for at least the hundredth time. And to have kept all the letters—Esmé’s, Nathaniel’s…and his own.

Perhaps it was guilt, the need to suffer for what he’d done, obsessively reading them over. Perhaps it was confusion—some need or hope of making sense of what had happened, what they’d all done, in making this tragedy. He was the only one left to do it, after all.

Or…perhaps it was only that he still loved his wife and his friend, mourned them both, and couldn’t bear to part with these last personal relics. His own letters were certainly filled with a heartbreaking grief, easily visible amongst the blots of rage.

“I think that she deliberately left the letters where her husband would find them,” Minnie said slowly, watching a line of half-grown cygnets sailing after their mother. “But the poems…maybe those didn’t have any pointed references to Lord Melton in them. If they were only about her, she might have kept them private, put them away somewhere safe, I mean.”

“So?” Rafe was beginning to look wary. “We’ll not get back in Argus House, ye know. Every servant in the place saw us last time.”

“Ye-es.” She stretched out a leg, considering her new calf-leather court shoes. “But I was wondering…might you have a…a sister, say, or perhaps a cousin, who wouldn’t mind earning…say…five pounds?” Five pounds was half a year’s pay for a house servant.

Rafe stopped dead and stared at her.

“Are ye wanting us to burgle the house or burn it down, for all love?”

“Nothing at all dangerous,” she assured him, and batted her eyes, just once. “I just want you—or, rather, your female accomplice—to steal the countess’s Bible.”

IN THE END, stealing the book hadn’t been necessary. Cousin Aoife, in her guise as a newly hired chambermaid, had simply gone through the Bible, this still resting chastely on the night table beside the countess’s bereft bed, removed from it a handful of folded papers, pocketed these, walked down the stairs and out to the privy behind the house, from whence she had modestly disappeared through a hole in the hedge, never to return.

“Anything ye can use, Lady Bedelia?” Mick and Rafe had both come up to her rooms the day after they’d delivered their prize and collected Aoife’s wages.

“Yes.” She hadn’t slept at all the night before, and everything around her had a slightly dream-like quality, including the two Irishmen. She yawned, spreading her fan just in time, and blinked at them, then reached into her pocket and drew out a parchment cover, sealed with black wax and addressed to Sir William Yonge, Secretary at War.

“Can you ensure—and I do mean make sure—that Sir William will get this? I know,” she said dryly, seeing Rafe make doe’s eyes at her, “I wound you. Do it, though.”

They laughed and went, leaving her to the silence of her room and the company of paper. Small barricades of books protected the table on which she’d made her magic, summoning the shade of her father with half a glass of Madeira, crossing herself and asking the blessing of her mother’s prayers before picking up her quill.

Nathaniel Twelvetrees, bless his erotically inclined heart, had waxed lascivious in describing his mistress’s charms. He had also, in one of the poems, mentioned various aspects of the place in which the lovers had disported themselves. He hadn’t signed that one—but he had written Yours forever, darling—Nathaniel at the bottom of the other.

After some dithering, she had at last decided to take the risk in order to put the matter beyond doubt and, after filling two foolscap pages with practice attempts, had cut a fresh quill and written—in what she thought was a decent version of Nathaniel’s hand and style—a title for his untitled poem: Love’s Constant Flowering: in Celebration of the Seventh of April. And at the bottom—after a lot more practice: Yours, in the flesh and in the spirit, darling Esmé—Nathaniel.

If she was lucky, no one would ever think to investigate where Esmé, Countess Melton, had been on the seventh of April, but one of said countess’s letters had made an assignation for that date, and the details of the place given in Nathaniel’s poem matched what Minnie knew of the spot chosen for said assignation.

The poem made it clear, at least, that the Duke of Pardloe would have had more than adequate grounds for challenging Nathaniel Twelvetrees to a duel. And it certainly suggested that the countess had encouraged Twelvetrees’s attentions, if not more—but it didn’t disclose the true heart of the matter, let alone reveal Esmé’s character or the painful intimacies of her husband.

So. Now it was done.

The letters—all of them—were still arrayed on the table in their tarot spread before her, silent witnesses.

“And what am I to do with you?” she said to them. She filled up her glass of wine and drank it slowly, contemplating.

The simplest thing—and by far the safest—was to burn them. Two considerations stopped her, though.

One. If the poem didn’t work, the letters were the only evidence of the affair. In the last resort, she could give them to Harry Quarry and let him make what use he could—or would—of them.

Two. That final thought lingered in her mind, nibbled at her heart. Why did he keep them? Whether for guilt, grief, repentance, solace, or reminder—His Grace had kept them. They had value to him.

It was just past Midsummer’s Day; the sun still hung in the sky, though it was past eight o’clock. She heard the bells of St. James’s strike the hour and, draining her glass, made up her mind.

She’d have to put them back.

WHETHER IT WAS the influence of her mother’s prayers or a benign intercession by Mother María Anna Águeda de San Ignacio, it was only three days following this rash decision that the opportunity to carry it out was put into Minnie’s hands.

“Such news, my dear!” Lady Buford was quite flushed, from either heat or excitement, and fanned herself rapidly. “Earl Melton is holding a ball, in honor of his mother’s birthday.”

“What? I didn’t know he had a mother. Er…I mean—”

Lady Buford laughed, growing noticeably pinker.

“Even that villain Diderot has a mother, my dear. But it’s true that the dowager Countess of Melton is not strongly in evidence. She wisely decamped to France following her husband’s suicide and has been living very quietly there ever since.”

“But…she’s coming back?”

“Oh, I doubt it extremely,” Lady Buford said, and took out a rather worn lace handkerchief, with which she dabbed her forehead. “Is there tea, my dear? I find myself in dire need of a cup; summer air is so drying.”

Eliza hadn’t waited for a summons. Knowing Lady Buford’s attitude toward tea, she had begun brewing a pot the moment Lady B’s knock was heard at the door and now came trundling down the hall with a rattling tray.

Minnie waited with what patience she could summon for the necessary ceremony of pouring: the administration of three sugar lumps—Lady Buford had very few teeth left, and no wonder—a large dollop of cream, and the acquisition of exactly two ginger biscuits. Finally restored, Lady Buford patted her lips, stifled a soft belch, and sat up straight, ready for business.

“There’s tremendous talk about it, of course,” she said. “It’s not even four months since the countess’s death. And while I’m sure his mother is not planning to appear at this affair, choosing to celebrate her birthday is…audacious, but audacious without committing open scandal.”

“I should think the…er…his lordship has had quite enough of that,” Minnie murmured. “Um…what do you mean by ‘audacious,’ though?”

Lady Buford looked pleased; she enjoyed displaying her skills.

“Well. When someone—especially a man—does something unusual, you must always ask what it was they intended by the action. Whether or not that effect is achieved, the intent usually explains much.

“And in this instance,” she said, plucking another biscuit delicately from the plate and dunking it into her tea to soften, “I think that his lordship means to put himself on display, in order to prove to society at large that he is not insane—whatever else he might be,” she added thoughtfully.

Minnie wasn’t so sure about Lord Melton’s mental state but nodded obligingly.

“You see…” Lady Buford paused to nibble the edge of her softened biscuit, made an approving face, and swallowed. “You see, were he simply to host a rout or ball of the normal sort, he would seem light-minded and frivolous at best, cold and unfeeling at worst. He would also expose himself to considerable risk that no one would accept an invitation.”

“But as it is?” Minnie prompted.

“Well, there’s the factor of curiosity, which can never be overlooked.” Lady Buford’s rather pointed tongue darted out to capture a stray crumb, which was whisked out of sight. “But by making the occasion in honor of his mother, he more or less commands the loyalty of her friends—who are many—and also those who were friends of his late father but who couldn’t openly support him. And,” she added, leaning forward portentously, “there are the Armstrongs.”

“Who?” Minnie asked blankly. By this time she had quite an extensive social index of London but recognized no prominent person therein named Armstrong.

“The duke’s mother is an Armstrong by birth,” Lady Buford explained, “though her mother was English. But the Armstrongs are a very powerful Scottish family, from the Borders. And the rumor is that Lord Fairbairn—that’s the duke’s maternal grandfather, only a baron but very rich—is in London and will attend the…er…function.”

Minnie was beginning to think tea inadequate to the occasion and rose to fetch the decanter of Madeira from the sideboard. Lady Buford made no demur.

“Of course you must go,” Lady Buford said, having downed half a glassful at one gulp.

“Really?” Minnie was experiencing that sudden visceral emptiness that attends excitement, anticipation, and panic.

“Yes,” Lady Buford said, with determination, and downed the rest, setting her glass down with a thump. “Almost all of your choicest prospects will be there, and there is nothing like competition to make a gentleman declare himself.”

Now the sensation was one of unalloyed panic. What with one thing and another, Minnie had quite forgotten that she was meant to be husband-hunting. Just last week, she’d had two proposals, though luckily from fairly undistinguished suitors, and Lady Buford hadn’t objected to her refusing them.

She finished her own Madeira and poured another for them both.

“All right,” she said, feeling a slight spinning sensation. “What do you think I should wear?”

“Your very best, my dear.” Lady Buford raised her refilled glass in a sort of toast. “Lord Fairbairn is a widower.”