Elisabeth Fairchild (5 page)

The ministers tut-tutted the threat of jobs gone to the fairer sex. The only women who wandered the Lobby were occasional sight-seers, minister’s wives or daughters and the sort of female who became part of the background until one needed their wares and waved them close. Mother Drybutter’s cheerful troupe of buxom orange girls, baskets on their heads, and over their arms, the rich smell of citrus their only perfume, were certainly no threat to the government. To the contrary, they offered the very sweetest of wares with bright-eyed enthusiasm.

Roger nodded to each in turn as he passed. He knew them by name. They knew him, too, in the sober-clothed, blond haired, mustachioed guise in which he always met Lord Sidmouth.

“Mr. Castle!” Plump, rosy-cheeked Mary Mullins called out with saucy good cheer and a twitch of pink silk petticoats. A stockinged ankle gleamed white. She wore eye-catching, high-heeled shoes. “Care for something sweet and juicy?”

The subtle, come-hither nuance of her voice promised cheerful delivery of hothouse fruits more passionate than oranges.

“Catch me on the way out,” he suggested, thinking of Dulcie, contrasting her innocence to Mary’s bold worldliness.

He was a steady customer, not so much of fruit, or orange girls, but in collecting juicy gossip. One might overhear much in the busy, echoing Lobby. Who better to learn secrets from, than the fruit vendors?

As John Castle, informant to the king, he arrived to brief the secret committee. As agent provocateur he wore many faces. John Castle wallowed in the thick of the growing unrest in the manufacturing districts. He helped to lighten the government’s burdens, kept the country safe, innocent--like Dulcie. Better, for all concerned, the innocent knew not what he did, or who he was. Dangerous, in this line of work, to be well known.

The hearing of his report concluded at five, to the tune of a great deal of grumbling, his news depressing. Drained, weary, hungry, those who had gathered to listen passed through the darkened Lobby. Members, shedding their concerns, along with the day, called out to one another in farewell.

Roger strolled toward the outer door, mind teaming as he touched hat brim to Spencer Perceval and two secretaries. Ebbing daylight pierced the doorway--momentarily blinding him to a tradesman who lurked in the shadows, feet planted firmly, hands buried in his pockets, eyes fever bright. Thin-faced, beaky-nosed. Not a Member.

His hand rose. A pistol barrel glinted, a black hole to Eternity.

“No!” Roger shouted too late. In a suspended heartbeat, Gunblast! Loud as cannonfire.

The world whirled. Too fast. Too noisy.

Mary Mullins dropped her basket of oranges.

Too late, Roger made jolting contact with the assassin’s knees, took him down in a bruising mill of arms and legs. A pistol went flying, clattered loudly amidst a scuffle of running feet, slid across the hardwood floor, a glossy black beetle among fallen fruit.

Perceval Spenser, Prime Minister of England, alone, stood still, golden oranges rolling toward him, movement contrary to that of all else. His aids scattered and ran, fearful of their own mortality. Members sank to their knees, dove for cover.

Surprise written plain on every feature, Spencer staggered across the Lobby, crashed into a table. His hand, painted scarlet, fell away from the neat, wet hole in his chest. “Oh!” His baffled voice echoed in the chapel’s ceiling. “I am murdered!”

From a dark corner rushed a wide-eyed secretary, hair glowing golden in the light from doors flung wide. Frightened angel, he flew, to catch the Prime Minister as he collapsed.

Panicked cries rose, echoing. “Radicals! Assassins.”

Eyes burning, cordite strong in his nostrils, Roger relieved the shooter of his second weapon. No fight the assassin gave up without. Hands limp between his legs, he stared at the beamed ceiling, at the rood screen where the ghost of a chapel cross hung.

A half dozen unnecessary heroes, desperate to involve themselves, single-minded in the undoing of their horror, pinned the killer to the pew.

“Are you the villain who has shot the prime minister?”

Sallow faced, eyes etched in misery, the assassin admitted, “I am that unfortunate man.”

His admission shocked them into silence. Roughly, they dragged him away,

promising, “You shall hang.”

The Prime Minister languished in a place beyond promises. Lord Arden, weeping uncontrollably, his grief painful to witness, lifted his brother from the floor. 

Good English oak, a sturdy bit of craftsmanship, the table easily bore the weight of the man whose hand swung down limply, blood dripping from senseless fingertips.

Roger could not take his eyes off of the beautifully carved table legs. Lion’s heads. His mind did not want to make sense of it, did not want to remember the divinations of a madwoman.

Blood, death, a doorway and lions
.

Chapter Seven

Wellclose Square, London

Roger tracked down Dulcie Selwyn’s address the following day, determined to understand if what he had considered madness, might be extraordinary brilliance of mind.

Wellclose Square presented a pleasant if none too fashionable array of cheek-by-jowl townhouses built within walking distance of the Thames. Roger observed the place from all angles, ghosting about the square, hanging about the nearby docks.

He spent hours dressed in footman’s livery, talking up the servants in a local pub. A “talent” the maids said she had, for finding what was lost, for guessing the future, for “knowing when a body was ailing.”

“An excellent judge of character, she is, innocent lamb,” the Selwyn’s footman confided. “Knows right off them that’s worth trusting and them that’s not.”

They regarded her with awed respect. None of them considered her touched in the head.

“Has the sight, like me old nanny,” the housekeeper tapped her forehead.

Intrigued by the notion Miss Selwyn’s “sight” might help him in his work, Roger spent a week following Mr. Selwyn, in the guise of a sailor.

As a chimney sweep he entered the house by way of a blackened face and Scottish brogue. As window washer he got a good gander of the dwelling’s layout, sketched a map, ghosted about the kitchen. When cook turned his back, Roger discovered an easy climb to the second floor bedchambers.

There was no Mrs. Selwyn. He had not realized his moonling motherless. His heart went out to Dulcie because of it.

Her room smelled as she did--of almonds, peaches and cloves. He visited it in her absence on more than one occasion, snuck up the drainpipe and between the drapes, day and night--a step into the sort of world he began to forget. A sweeter, less complicated world.

An odd inclination possessed him, to gaze upon Dulcie as she dreamed, to study her face, unguarded, in repose--the face of a mystery. Who was this odd, motherless moonling child, hair dark as soot upon the pillow? Her mouth soft, plush as satin, blush as her cheek? With her all too seeing eyes shut away from him, he found her more childlike than he remembered. Innocence personified. An innocence he loathed to compromise.

He--but six years older--could claim himself in no way innocent, in no way childlike.

She knew things, saw things, and yet she remained in some way untouched by the world. He considered and reconsidered exploiting her prophetic talents, drawing her into the web of intrigue that ruled his every waking moment, and found he could not. She affected him as no other female. They shared an elusive bond.

Both were imposters. Both hid from the world their greatest strengths. The heart of who and what they were slept in the whisper-plagued silence of secrets. Their greatest difference lay in her innocence, his absence of it.

He knew his world could not but color hers if he pursued the matter. And so, he bent, on the last night he visited her room and breathing in the clean, almond and peaches scent of her hair, lightly kissed her forehead. He savored the soft, unblemished heat of her skin, wanting her, for several reasons, and yet glad she did not waken to his presence, to his ugly reality.

An agent provocateur’s life left little room for the unexplained, little space for innocence wrapped in mystery. She was pristine, untouched, unviolated. He left her as he found her, withdrawing from her life, vowing to leave her in enviable, ignorant bliss.

As spring warmed to summer, the smell of the Thames thick, ripening with each passing day, Roger questioned his own memory of events, of how it all fit together. He still heard echoes of the fatal shot, whenever he smelled cordite or oranges. His dreams were haunted by lions, and Dulcie Selwyn. He found all of the women he encountered in some way less than her--baser, more flawed. He found himself hungry for peaches, their smell, their taste, sweet juices running down his chin. He found himself drawn time and again to Wellclose Square. Just to walk through it on a moonlit night brought him a strange sense of peace. All was right with the world if Dulcie Selwyn was safely cloistered there.  

Fall took him elsewhere. Winter filled his eyes and mind with the cold sight of starving countrymen. Trapped by spring’s mud-bound roads in the north country, he thought of her often, her memory a comfort, no matter how distasteful or bloody his work. She offered respite. Innocent lamb or mad moonling--he might so easily have shattered the peace of her world, and had chosen not to. He had walked away. There was salvation in that, a salvation that soothed him every night, as he slipped into sleep, and the memory of his lips on her peach and vanilla forehead, rose, taunting and sweet.

For months his presence had shadowed her steps, her thoughts. An elusive blueness hung about her father’s house, heaviest in her room, as if the spirit of Ramsay visited in all but corporeal form, a constant in Dulcie’s thoughts and dreams.

And then, inexplicably, his color faded. Her sense that he was near diminished. Dulcie wondered if the sense she harbored of unfinished business between them had not so much to do with knowing, as with wanting. She wanted to know him better, wanted him to know her. She wanted--the wanting nameless and immeasurable, a soundless depth of wanting, a need that transcended time. Days became weeks, which bled into months that gathered in number until a full year had passed, then two, and still she wanted him. No other would do.

They walked different worlds, a shipbuilder’s daughter and the third son of an earl. She knew her desire unfounded in anything sensible, illogical, and yet still she still believed they were meant to meet again--to marry.

Had she wanted to forget him, it would have proved an impossibility. Lydia kept him alive. He and his family were a fecund source of gossip, Lydia’s favorite examples of moral turpitude. “Our errant Casanova has returned from his wanderings,” she announced one afternoon as they stood before full-length peer glasses in their favorite dressmaker’s fitting room.

Lydia took joy in dressing Dulcie. She had no children of her own. Since Dulcie had no mother she believed their relationship pre-ordained. They had been meant to meet at Carlton House. Dulcie enjoyed Lydia’s mothering, gossipy ways. A dull and closely boundaried life was enlivened enormously by such a companion.

“He is in London?” Stirred by the smell of new fabric and fresh dye, spirits lifted by mention of Roger Ramsay, Dulcie, just turned twenty and in danger of soon being considered an old maid, stepped into rustling half-finished skirting. “Oh dear!” she murmured.

Lydia nodded.

Madame Aber glanced up as she plucked a pin from the bodice. “Mademoiselle finds the fit too tight, non?”

Dulcie sighed heavily, shoving aside the images of the guillotine that bled from the seamstresses’ fingers. “No. The fit is fine.”

Innocent of cares, of history, Lydia concerned herself with simpler things. “The Baroness, like every other hostess in London, is hoping the gentleman will make an appearance. I do not understand why anyone vies for his attendance. He has no fortune, no known occupation and little to recommend him save good looks, a vast knowledge of the world and a charming manner.”

Dulcie’s pulse quickened, stirred by past tragedy and future’s promise.

Lydia observed with critical interest the dress the seamstress pinned Dulcie into. Current fashion insisted upon lace--lace aprons over dinner dresses--lace dresses with the “Princess Charlotte of Wales body”--a bodice of colored crepe laced across the front. Lydia had decided Dulcie must wear lace to the Preston ball, cut very low and in the color, Russian Flame, a pale, yellowish-red rosin hue.

Dulcie allowed Lydia to decide. Lydia did much to present her to society, to improve her sense of style and fashion. She had excellent taste. The scratch of lace on arms, back and abdomen reminded her of Ramsay’s coat, of the moment in which he had enwrapped her. Five years ago he had unwittingly touched gloved fingers against her bared breast. The memory of it still marked her. What would Roger Ramsay think of her now, a woman, not a girl, in lace?

Dulcie had grown accustomed to attending balls, to the touch of a man’s gloved hand. With Lydia’s numerous connections they received invitations by the score, none of them peopled by the top of the trees in the bewildering forest of London’s elite, but gentle folk a branch or two lower. None of the men moved her as had the dangerous “Rogering” Ramsay. None gave her glimpses of her future.

“Do you think he will come to the ball?”

“This mushroom’s debut? Never! More’s the pity.” Lydia had the bit between her teeth, her tongue at full gallop. “Mere hint of his attendance would bring the brightest birds of the beau monde flocking.” Her expression softened. “That dress becomes you very well, my dear.”

“Where has he been all this time?”

Madame Aber rose to throw a ‘corset frock’ in blue leno over Lydia’s head.

Lydia smoothed the shockingly transparent fabric in the radical new style that made fashionable females appear to have dressed inside out, corset lacings running the length of their backs atop their gown rather than beneath.

Lydia leaned close to whisper, “No one knows. The man is a mystery. There are those who swear he appeared at the Peace Congress in Vienna. Others claim to have met him in Paris, Portugal, and Spain. What is certain--he has adopted an odd conceit.”