His At Night

Chapter Nine

Elissande packed, first in her own room, then in her aunt’s. Aunt Rachel sometimes woke up in the middle of the night and took another dose of laudanum—which made her difficult to awaken in the morning—and Elissande needed to prevent that.

She finished packing at quarter to five. At five o’clock she began to rouse her aunt. Aunt Rachel was confused and sluggish. But Elissande was determined. She finished Aunt Rachel’s usual morning ablutions, fed her a good portion of arrowroot pudding, and brushed her teeth.

It was not until she brought out actual clothes that Aunt Rachel first realized this was not to be another ordinary day in the Douglas household.

“We are leaving,” Elissande said to Aunt Rachel’s unspoken question.

“We?” Aunt Rachel croaked.

“Yes, you and I. I’m getting married and I need your help in setting up my new household.”

Aunt Rachel clenched Elissande’s hand in hers. “Married? To whom?”

“If you wish to meet him, dress and come with me.”

“Where—where are we going?”

“London.” Lady Kingsley had told her that she would help Elissande obtain a special license from the bishop of London.

“Does—does your uncle know?”

“No.”

Aunt Rachel trembled. “What if—what will happen when he finds out?”

Elissande took Aunt Rachel into her arms. “My fiancé is a marquess. My uncle cannot harm me once I’m married. You come with me now and you need never see him again either: Lord Vere will protect us.”

Aunt Rachel shook harder. “Are you—are you sure, Ellie?”

“Yes.” She was a terrific liar: Her smiles were her best lies, but she was no slouch with words. “We may put our absolute confidence in Lord Vere. He is a prince among men.”

She did not know whether she convinced Aunt Rachel completely. But Aunt Rachel became pliant enough that Elissande had no trouble dressing her in a pale green silk morning gown trimmed in white chiffon, and a hat of green velvet to match.

Unfortunately, real clothes only emphasized her aunt’s grayish pallor, stick-thinness, and that particular shrinking quality she had, as if she yearned at all times toward invisibility—but she looked presentable enough. For Aunt Rachel’s sake, Elissande could only pray that Lord Vere would appear half as formidable as she’d made him out to be.

Aunt Rachel started upon meeting her soon-to-be nephew-in-law. Elissande could well relate to that sense of delightful surprise. Inspecting him from the point of view of a stranger, she could not deny that he was a very impressive-looking man.

He was beautifully attired: all buttons properly aligned with their intended buttonholes, trousers free from food stains, and necktie not the least bit crooked. He spoke minimally—stunned into near silence by the enormity of the situation, she didn’t doubt. And he dutifully proclaimed himself honored and delighted at the “bestowal of Miss Edgerton’s hand.”

When she had shoved that hand deep down his esophagus.

He gave her one look, a quick scan of her person. She was dressed demurely in gray chiffon broadcloth—not that she could fool Lord Vere anymore as to what kind of woman she was. The thought suddenly came to her that perhaps she hadn’t needed to be entirely naked, that it might have been good enough to have been caught in his arms in her combination undergarment.

Instead he’d seen all of her.

She swallowed, looked down, and was glad when Lady Kingsley ordered everyone into the carriage.

Vere made sure he and Freddie traveled in a separate train compartment, away from the women. He slept while Freddie sketched next to him. Upon reaching London, Lady Kingsley warned him not to stray too far from his house, so she could inform him of the hour and location of his wedding.

The women left to do what women did when faced with imminent nuptials. Vere declined Freddie’s offer of company and sent a note for Holbrook to meet him in the same hidey-hole where they’d last met.

The whorehouse—their sobriquet for this particular hidey-hole—had always amused Vere with its indelicate colors and its clumsy but wholehearted attempts at elegance. But today its faux tiger-skin rug and its purple lamp shades chafed his vision and chafed it badly.

Holbrook arrived in short order. Vere tossed down the coded dossier. “From Douglas’s safe. It’s yours for the day.”

“Thank you, my lord. Well done, as always,” said Holbrook. “I shall have it duplicated in no time.”

He handed Vere a glass of Poire Williams—fruit brandies of all types fascinated Holbrook. “I understand that congratulations are in order.”

Vere refrained from mentioning that Holbrook hardly had cause to offer another man matrimonial felicitations, since the late Lady Holbrook had once stuck a knife in him. “Thank you, sir.”

“What happened?”

Vere lit a cigarette, took a drag, and shrugged.

“Not the proudest moment in an otherwise distinguished career, was it?” Holbrook commented lazily.

Vere flicked the barely forming ashes from his cigarette.

Holbrook played with the bead fringes of an antimacassar. “The suspect’s niece, no less.”

“My appeal is universal.” Vere drained his glass. Enough chitchat. “There was a relative with whom Douglas lived for a while in London, wasn’t there?”

“There was. Mrs. John Watts. London Street, Jacob’s Island.” Holbrook possessed an unerring memory. “But she’s been dead a long time.”

“Thank you.” Vere rose from his seat. “I’ll see myself out.”

“Are you sure, sir? On your wedding day?”

What else was he to do on this day? Whore and carouse? Drink himself into a ditch? Form an opium habit?

“But of course,” he said softly. “How better to enjoy this day and all that shall come with it?”

“I still can’t believe it. Penny, getting married,” said Angelica Carlisle, Freddie’s oldest friend, chortling.

She and Freddie were taking coffee—her new continental habit—in the drawing room of the town house that had once belonged to her mother.

Freddie had attended many a tea and dinner party here, read most of the books in the study, and regularly visited on Sundays, the day of the week strictly reserved for family and closest friends. Angelica had already mentioned the changes she intended to make to the interior of the house. But she was still settling in—she’d been back in England only a month. The house remained unaltered. And the very familiarity of the setting—comfortably faded rose-and-ivy wallpaper, lovingly preserved watercolors by long-perished spinster aunts, commemorative plates from Her Majesty’s Silver Jubilee, thirty-five years ago—made the difference in her person all the more startling.

He’d always thought her handsome, strong boned and strong featured, remarkable rather than pretty. But during the years of her brief marriage and widowhood, she’d acquired a certain seductiveness to her person. Her eyes, instead of the wide-open alertness he recalled, were now heavy lidded and mysterious. Her smiles, usually just a slight upturn of one corner of her lips, somehow also radiated sultriness, as if while she conducted herself with perfect decorum, she’d been harboring very naughty thoughts beneath that façade of propriety.

And he, to his own dismay, began thinking of her as an object of desire for the first time in his life. Angelica, who’d always been like a sister to him, a pesky, too-honest, merciless younger sister who told him that his tailor was blind and incompetent, that he needed to brush his teeth at least three minutes longer, and that if he’d had more than two drops of champagne, he was not allowed to dance the waltz for the sake of public safety.

She took a sip of her coffee, chuckled again, and shook her head. One coil of her hair, artfully loose, stroked the edge of her jaw, lending a new softness to the angularity of her features. As if aware of the fascination that one curl held over him, she pulled it straight between two fingers, then let go.

Somehow she imbued even such a minor motion with the full potency of her new powers, with the seduction of Eve.

He realized he hadn’t answered and hastened to speak. “Penny is twenty-nine. He has to marry at some point.”

“Of course that is the case. It’s the scandal that shocks me. As much as I might roll my eyes at some of his antics, Penny isn’t one to get himself into serious trouble.”

“I know,” said Freddie. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have let my guard down.”

He’d been fifteen when Penny’s riding accident happened. It had been the rare summer week they’d spent apart: he with their late mother’s cousin in Biarritz, Penny in Aberdeenshire with Lady Jane, their paternal great-aunt.

For the first few months after Penny’s accident, Freddie had been worried sick. But after a while, it became clear that while Penny would never again lucidly trace the history of the Plebeian Council or make a devilishly persuasive case for granting women the right to vote, he also did not need a nursemaid all hours of the day. It had been a small mercy in a devastating turn of events, the unfairness of which still haunted Freddie. His brilliant, brave brother, who had claimed Freddie’s mistakes as his own before their unkind father, and who could have had a significant career in Parliament, reduced to an expert in little more than his own daily schedule.

“You did say you didn’t think Miss Edgerton was after Penny merely for his title and fortune.”

“Her uncle has a diamond mine in South Africa and no children of his own. I don’t think she is after him for his fortune, at least.”

Angelica took a bite of her Madeira cake. He watched her absently wiping away the butter the rich cake left on her fingers, almost as if she were caressing the napkin. He imagined her fingers caressing him instead.

“So what do you think of this Miss Edgerton?” she asked.

He had to reel his mind back from the sensual, and sometimes shockingly explicit, thoughts it had a tendency to engage in these days—thoughts that never failed to involve Angelica in some state of undress. “Miss Edgerton, ah, well, she is very pretty, amiable, smiling. Doesn’t have much to say, though, except to agree with whoever is speaking.”

“That should suit Penny. He likes it when people agree with him.”

What neither of them said, out of loyalty to Penny, was that a girl of middling intelligence and not many original thoughts was probably the most Penny could hope for.

“It’s been thirteen years since his accident,” said Angelica. “He has managed remarkably well. He will manage this too.”

Freddie smiled at her. “You are right. I should have more faith.”

They said nothing for a minute or so, she nibbling on another piece of Madeira cake, he turning an almond biscuit in his fingers.

“Well,” they said at nearly the same time.

“You first,” he offered.

“No, no, you first. You are my visitor; I insist.”

“I—I’d like to ask you for a favor,” he said.

“In all my years of knowing you I don’t remember a single instance of your ever asking me for favors. I will admit it might have had something to do with the fact that I was constantly thrusting my opinions and wishes on you.” Her eyes twinkled. “But please, go ahead; I am resolutely intrigued.”

He loved the shape of her mouth when she almost smiled. Why had he never noticed before the magnetic pull of her near-smile?

“I saw an interesting painting at Miss Edgerton’s house. No one knows the identity of the artist. I believe I’ve seen a work in a similar style and vein. But I can’t remember when or where,” he said. “Your memory is far superior for such things, as is your knowledge.”

“Hmm, compliments. I adore compliments—flattery will get you far, young man.”

“You know I don’t know how to flatter.” Ten years ago Angelica had already been a singular connoisseur of art. These days she was formidable in her erudition. “I’ve taken some photographs of the painting. May I show them to you once they have been developed?”

She tilted her head to one side and played with the coil of hair at her jaw again. “But I have not agreed to help you yet. First, I think, I’d like to hear your answer to my request for a favor. I have been waiting on an answer for weeks, if you will recall.”

And he’d been able to think of nothing else, for weeks.

He flushed despite his intention not to. “You speak of the portrait?”

The nude portrait she would like of herself. When he’d insisted to Penny that there was nothing prurient about a study of the female form, his head had been filled with the most carnal visions of Angelica.

“Yes, that’s it.”

She was direct and almost nonchalant, while he felt gauche, out of his element, and much too warm.

“You know I’m not an expert at the human form.”

“You’ve always been too modest, Freddie dearest. I wouldn’t have asked you if I didn’t have faith in your abilities. I’ve seen the studies you’ve done: You do very well at the human form.”

She was right, though it was his preference not to paint the human form very often. He had been a clumsy child prone to injuring himself, and as such was kept indoors when he most wished to be outside, running, spinning around and around, or simply lying in the grass and observing the changing color of the sky. Painting the human form meant his studio, when he’d much rather be en plein air, capturing the effusive pink cream of a cherry tree in blossom or the undercurrents of a tête-à-tête at a picnic party.

Yet as he looked at her, he already measured in his mind the proportion of Naples ochre and vermilion that he should add to silver-white to approximate the warm, healthy tone of her skin.

“You said it is for your private collection.”

“That is my intention.”

“So you won’t have it exhibited?”

“So much concern for my modesty.” She smiled teasingly. “Why can’t I display half as much decorum?”

“I need a promise.”

For the most part, he was an easygoing man. But he would not yield on this matter.

“I want it for a record of my youth, so that I may one day look back upon it and sigh over my own lost beauty. I promise you solemnly that not only will I not exhibit it anywhere, I will not even display it in my own house. Instead, it will go into a crate, and not be opened again until I see a hag in the mirror.” She smiled again. “Will that satisfy you?”

He swallowed. “All right then. I’ll do it.”

She set down her teacup and gazed directly at him. “In that case, I find myself quite willing to help you track down the provenance of your mysterious painting.”

Mrs. Watts had been dead a quarter of a century. Vere considered himself quite lucky to locate, in only a few hours, someone who had once known her.

His search took him from Bermondsey to Seven Dials. Barely a mile away from the spacious squares of Mayfair, Seven Dials had been notorious for its crime and poverty earlier in the century. In recent years, the character of the district had improved, although Vere was still disinclined to venture into its side streets alone at night.

But at the moment it was broad daylight. St. Martin’s Lane, which led into the district, was raucous with birds, for it was here that London’s bird fanciers gathered. He passed a shop full of songbirds in cages: bullfinches, larks, and starlings, all nervously twittering and chirping. Another shop brimmed with crates upon crates of plump, cooing pigeons. Hawks and owls and parrots amplified the cacophony. He was grateful to pass an occasional establishment specializing in aquatic creatures or rabbits, both blessedly silent.

Jacob Dooley lived on Little Earl Street, where crowds milled about a lively outdoor market, though Vere could not see much for sale that wasn’t second- or third-hand goods. What use could any woman make of a set of crinoline hoops in this day and age, he did not know, but he saw not one, not two, but three being hawked as “Height o’ fashion!”

Dooley’s flat was on the top floor of a four-story building. The front of the building, grandly lettered, advertised the grocer on the ground floor—Dairy Farmer, Family Butcher, Milk Contractor, Large Consumers Supplied. The narrow, dark staircase inside smelled intermittently of urine.

Vere’s knock summoned a man in his mid-sixties, broad and hirsute, with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and a beard of equally mixed shades. He stood behind his partially open door, warily examining Vere. Vere had changed into costume. He was now a burly drayman with a beard that almost rivaled Dooley’s in luxuriance. His rough work clothes smelled as they ought: equal parts horse and brewery.

“Who are you? And why are you asking after Mrs. Watts?” Dooley’s Irish origin was evident in his speech.

Vere had his answer and his Scouse accent ready. “Mrs. Watts was me dad’s auntie, she was. That’s how me mum told me. Me dad ran away to London to live with Mrs. Watts.”

Dooley’s eyes widened. “But Ned was only a lad when he came to live with her, sure he was. Me, I never saw him at all. But Mag—Mrs. Watts—she said he was fourteen when he came and sixteen when he left.”

“Well, he had me in me mum before he left Liverpool. Least he had me mum fink so.”

Dooley stepped back. “Come in then. I’ll give you a cup of tea.”

The flat consisted of only one room with a thin yellow curtain in the middle to separate the sitting and the sleeping areas. Dooley had a surprisingly heavy-looking table, two chairs, and a homemade set of shelves on which rested neat piles of newspapers and two large books—one of which looked to be a Bible, the other perhaps a devotional.

Dooley put water from a pitcher and a handful of tea leaves together into a pot and hooked the makeshift kettle over a spirit lamp. “You still have your mum?”

“Lost her December last. She told me before she died about me real dad. I been asking ’bout him since I buried her.”

“You are in luck, lad,” said Dooley, standing by the spirit lamp. “Last I heard of him, himself was a rich man in South Africa. Diamonds.”

Vere stopped breathing for several seconds. He looked at Dooley with eyes full of hope. “You ain’t funning me, are you, Mr. Dooley?”

“No. The last time I saw Maggie—your Mrs. Watts—she was after having a cable from him. He was stinking rich and coming home to make her a grand lady. Mind you, I was happy for her, but I was mighty sorry for myself. I was wanting her to marry me. She had a few years on me but she was a good woman, Maggie Watts, and sang real pretty, sure she did. But she wouldn’t want a poor sailor like me when her nephew was going to build her a grand place in the country and have her presented to the queen, would she?

“I left on a steamer to San Francisco. And when I came back—” Dooley’s jaw tightened. “When I came back she was already in the ground.”

“I’m awful sorry.” Vere did not need to manufacture his sympathy. He knew it all too well, the grief and bewilderment of loss.

Dooley did not answer for a while, but laid out two cups—the unchipped one for Vere—and sliced half a loaf of dark bread. Although the tea leaves had been boiled with the water, the tea Dooley poured was hardly darker than lemonade—like everything else for sale on the street below, the tea leaves too were secondhand.

“Thank you, sir,” said Vere for his tea.

Dooley sat down heavily. “It bothered me all these years how she died—bothers me to this day.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, sir, how did she die?”

“The coroner’s report said she died of too much chloral. Fell asleep and never woke up again. I tried to tell the coroner that she never had any such thing about. She was a hardworking woman who slept like the dead at night—you should have heard her snoring. ’Course, it didn’t help me any that I said that, made her sound like a loose woman. The coroner—that fool—said that a woman would put that sort of thing away before she entertained a man in her ‘place of domicile,’ and I should leave the cause of death to men of science.”

“You don’t fink it was chloral?”

Dooley’s face was troubled. “I asked all her neighbors. There were two young girls. They said she was cold—not stone-cold but real cool—and still breathing when they found her. They called for a doctor, but the doctor was a quack and didn’t know anything.”

He left his seat again and retrieved the book Vere had thought a devotional from the shelves. It was in fact titled Poisons: Their Effect and Detection—A Manual for the Use of Analytical Chemists and Experts. Dooley opened the book to a much dog-eared portion. “The way she was sleeping, going colder and colder, that was chloral. And if the doctor was himself a proper doctor, some strychnine could have saved her.”

Strychnine caused otherwise deadly muscular convulsions. Yet it was for precisely that reason it was an antidote to an overdose of chloral, aiding the heart’s function and putting a halt to the dangerous slide of body temperature. A shot of strychnine had been what the physician had administered in the Haysleigh case—for which Vere had needed much help from Lady Kingsley—to successfully save Lady Haysleigh.

“So it was chloral after all?”

“It was. I’d have sworn before a judge she never used any. But the coroner said she had a good thirty grams, even showed me the bottle.” Dooley closed the book, his neck bent. “Maybe I didn’t know her as well as I s’posed.”

“I’m sorry,” Vere said again.

As he took a sip of his hot but largely flavorless tea, he was suddenly reminded of a long dormant case concerning a man named Stephen Delaney. Delaney, too, had died from an overdose of chloral. But as Delaney had not been a poor woman carrying on an affair the coroner found distasteful, but an ascetic man of science—not to mention brother to a bishop—his death had received much more attention from the law when his family had strenuously protested that he had never kept any chloral.

Nothing had come of the investigation. By the time Vere had read the file, seven years ago, it had been thick with a decade of undisturbed dust. And even he had to concede, when he finished his reading, that there was nothing for anyone to go on.

“Here I go again,” said Dooley, “getting caught up talking about my poor Maggie when you wanted to hear about your dad.”

“If he’s me dad, then she was me auntie too—me great-grandauntie.”

“There’s that. There’s that.” Dooley set his thick, calloused hands on the book of poisons. “But I can’t tell you much more.”

“Didn’t you say he was going to come and see her and make her a grand lady?”

“He never did. His secretary came, but he never did.”

Vere had to fight to make himself sound deflated. “His secretary?”

“That’s what Fanny Nobb said. She said a real fine gentleman came to see Maggie a few days before she died. Your dad had to stay behind in Kimberley, in the diamond fields, so he sent his secretary to take care of things in London. The secretary was to look for a fancy house for Maggie and take her to buy everything she wanted. Maybe that was why she needed the chloral—too wound up to sleep.”

Vere’s heart thumped. Instead of the brawler Edmund Douglas, “a real fine gentleman” had come in his stead. And shortly afterward Mrs. Watts had died of a substance her lover was certain she had never used.

If his suspicions were right, if Douglas had not even come by the diamond mine by his own luck, then in a twisted way, his hunger for success in other arenas of business made sense. He was trying to prove that he did have what it took to thrive without the help of his criminality—except he didn’t.

“Me dad, did he come for Mrs. Watts’s funeral then?” Vere asked.

“Not enough time, was there? She died in July; had to put her underground real fast. But he did wire the money for her funeral expenses, Fanny said.”

“The secretary, he didn’t come to the funeral either?”

“I can’t tell you. I was in San Francisco, drunk as a skunk. Sure I was.” The old man sighed. “I thought about it a few times—looking up your dad and maybe telling him about my Maggie. But I never did. Never helped him any, and didn’t want him to think I was after his money.”

Vere nodded and came to his feet. “Thank you, Mr. Dooley.”

“Sorry I couldn’t tell you more.”

“It was plenty what you did tell me, sir.”

Dooley offered Vere his hand. “Good luck to you, young man.”

Vere shook Dooley’s rough hand, aware that this was where his disguise might fall apart: He didn’t have the hands of a workingman. But Dooley, still in the grips of the past, did not notice.

For Dooley there would never be justice enough: He had already lost the woman he loved. But Vere might yet uncover the whole truth of what had happened to Mrs. Watts.

And that was what he would do.