Jane and the Barque of Frailty (32 page)

The room was such as any respectable inn might offer, as private accommodation for a member of the Quality: the sort of parlour that should be hired for dining, by a gentleman in Town on a matter of business. It offered a round deal table and the aforementioned settee by way of furnishing; but there was also a hearth in which a fire was burning, and a window, draped in tarnished silk. I went to this window, and lifted the drapery from its place, to reveal—as I had expected—one William Skroggs, Bow Street Runner.

“Miss Austen.” He saluted me with a leer.

“You encountered no difficulty in entering the premises?” I enquired.

“None.” The contempt of his tone must suggest that no Runner should be barred from as respectable an amusement as the Cyprians Ball. “But if you mean for me to stand all hours behind a smoky curtain, while light o’ loves plies their trades under my very nose—”

“Do be quiet,” I said crossly. “I have done the better part of your work for you. Someone is coming.”

I hid myself behind the opposite drapery, the far edge drawn sufficiently back for me to observe the centre of the room, and waited for the door to open.

As I had suspected, Charles Malverley was first to enter the room, followed by Sylvester Chizzlewit, who took up a position by the doors.

“—for the same reason, I collect, that you would bring me here,” Malverley was saying carelessly as he entered. He held a wine glass in his hand, and the beauty of his countenance was flushed. “I must thank you for your solicitude—my tortured heart is warmed by your amiable concerns—and there is at least this to applaud: You have thrown women my way, rather than the boys old Castlereagh is partial to. The man studied too much of the Greeks, during his time at Eton.”

“Some of these girls are devilish pretty,” Chizzlewit observed mildly, “and High Flyers too. I wonder you aren’t susceptible. Has no lady ever touched your heart?”

“Lady?” Malverley returned contemptuously. “There is not a lady among the lot, thank Heaven! I have had my fill of your ladies. Give me a Barque any day, and I’ll sail her straight into harbour! The Muslin Company! Long may they prosper, and empty men’s purses!” He raised his glass in a mocking toast.

I wondered whether Chizzlewit had divined what he must do—whether my terse missive of the morning had been explicit enough. But I should not have doubted him; he was ever his grandfather’s heir. “Not all of these women are lowborn,” he said reasonably. “Miss Radcliffe, for example. Family’s devilish high in the instep. Some sort of relation of yours, is she not?”

For an instant, I feared Malverley might strike his friend. He stood rigid, his hands clenching about his wine glass so that the frail crystal stem snapped.

“I ought to draw your cork,” he said evenly as he tossed the shards of glass into the fire, “or demand satisfaction for such an insult, Sylvester—but we’ll agree that you’re foxed, and have no idea what you’re saying. Don’t ever mention that jade’s name in my presence, damn you.”

Chizzlewit reached behind him, and thrust open the door into the passage. Julia Radcliffe was outlined in candlelight, divinely fair and effortlessly tempting.

“Why should he not mention my name, Charles?” she enquired, her voice low. “Why should it be my name that distresses you so, when it was you who sullied it?”

“I!” he retorted, his countenance flaming. “Look at yourself, Julia! Always desperate to excite admiration—tormenting decent men with your looks, your bearing, your refusal to submit—but now the whole world knows you for what you are—what you always were: a whore. You may cut me direct in the middle of Hyde Park—you may refuse me admittance to Russell Square—you may flaunt your wares before every rogue in London—but the world should never reproach me for serving you a lesson. The world knows me to be right—for disciplining you, for teaching you conduct—for breaking you to bridle—”

The nastiness of the words was like a lash. I found that I had closed my eyes tight, so as to avoid the spectre of Malverley’s face, unmanned by passion, violent with hatred. But a sound brought my eyes flying open again. Julien, Comte d’Entraigues, stood between Julia Radcliffe and Charles Malverley with his hereditary sword unsheathed—and the point was at Malverley’s throat.

“Put it away, my son,” said a lazy voice behind him.

Chizzlewit moved to one side of the door, and Emmanuel d’Entraigues entered the room. Eliza was with him, her mask discarded.

“Mon dieu, ”Julien whispered. “These Austens!”

“I have nothing more to say to you,” Julia Radcliffe told Malverley. “You have insulted me in every possible way, from the first moment of our acquaintance. I say nothing of the outrage you visited upon my person; of the deplorable want of feeling and all decency you then exhibited, and forever after. In my infancy I knew you for a man to be feared— one whose honour is as hollow as his title. The world shall soon know you for a blackguard.”

“Fine words, Julia,” Malverley said, “but my world does not regard the calumnies of a doxy! You can do nothing to me!”

“I might accuse you of murder,” she returned quietly.

Malverley threw back his head and laughed.

“When that poor creature came to me last Monday night, and begged me to listen to her, I could not turn her away,” the Barque continued. “I knew your violence of old. She told me how you had made love to her—charming her in Paris, squiring and cajoling her—from a belief that her husband might be persuaded to pay you off. When you returned to England and discovered your mistake, you cut her utterly from your life.”

“A moving story,” Malverley said. “Would that I knew to whom you referred!”

“Princess Tscholikova. She showed me your letters.” Julia moved towards her cousin, her eyes fixed unflinchingly on his face, and Julien d’Entraigues let his sword fall to his side.

“She begged me to have nothing to do with you. She claimed that I was first in your heart—that you had abandoned her love for pursuit of me—and I laughed in her face. I knew, as Tscholikova could not, why you were in Paris—where no proper Englishman should be in these days, paying court to Buonaparte. I knew why you were banished from Oxford in your final year—why your father the Earl nearly cut you off without a cent. Because you had tampered with me. Because you had got me with child.”

“I was sent off in disgrace, my cunning jade, because you refused to marry as your father bid,” Malverley shot back through bitten lips.

“I should sooner have died—and very nearly did die, rather than accept Tanborough charity. Thank God I may still command my own fortune; it is a preservative against torture.”

Malverley moved, swift as an adder, and struck her a vicious blow across the cheek. Her head snapped sideways with such violence I thought her neck must have been broken, but she did not utter a sound.

“Is that how you served your mistress?” she asked steadily, her palm nursing her cheek. “Is that how you killed Tscholikova?”

“Julia,” said the old Comte d’Entraigues warningly.

“I will not be silenced—and never by you,” she exclaimed, rounding on the Frenchman. “You promised to escort her, drunk with sorrow and self-pity as she was, back to Hans Town—and you carried her instead to Berkeley Square!”

D’Entraigues smiled faintly. “That was a matter of politics,” he said. “I have never loved Lord Castlereagh—he would see me ruined if he could— and my loyalties are wholly Mr. Canning’s. Somewhere between Russell Square and Hans Town I saw my way clear to rendering George Canning a service—a way to ensure Castlereagh should never enter the Regent’s Cabinet. And so, yes, I gave way to politics. I left her on his doorstep, with her precious box of letters by her side. I thought it might amuse the oh-so-respectable Viscount to learn that he was betrayed to the Post by his own secretary—by that godlike young man for whom Lord Castlereagh has conceived, shall we say, a less than decent passion—”

“That is a lie,” Malverley choked. “By God, sir, if I could get near you—”

“But my son has a sword, voyez-vous,” d’Entraigues observed, “and this is not yet the night when my throat shall be slit. As no doubt you slit the poor Princess’s.”

Malverley’s eyes widened. “Upon my honour, I did not!”

D’Entraigues shrugged. “Your honour is not worth a sou in this room, monsieur. The Princess yet breathed when I left her at your door. She was found, perhaps a quarter-hour later, her ragged throat wet with blood. You alone were awake, of all the household. What is one to think, mon vieux? That she killed herself?”

Malverley looked wildly around the room. “Sylvester!” he cried. “Youknow I should never—that I am innocent! For the love of Christ, man—tell them how it was!”

Sylvester Chizzlewit did not reply, but put his back to the doors.

Quite near me, behind the protective shield of the drape, Bill Skroggs shifted restlessly in hiding, on the point, as I guessed, of springing his trap—and taking Malverley in bonds.

I thrust aside the drapery, and looked out at the astonished faces before me.

Charles Malverley stared at me uncomprehend-ingly. “Who the Devil are you?”

“Consider me a friend of the Princess,” I said gently. “I think it is time, Mr. Malverley, that you told us all about the box.”

“The box?” he repeated, as tho’ stunned.

“The porcelain box, which the Comte d’Entraigues left by the Princess’s side, and which La Tscholikova had filled with your letters—the box that was not retrieved by the charley, or mentioned as evidence at the inquest. The Princess gave it into your keeping, did she not?”

“Yes,” he muttered, running a hand through his hair. “I have it still. I suppose I must explain how it was.”

“S
HE RANG THE BELL OF
L
ORD
C
ASTLEREAGH’S
residence a little before five o’clock,” Malverley told us, sitting like one beaten in battle on the settee before the fire, “and I answered the summons. I thought it was his lordship, returned from a debauch without his key, and I did not wish the porter to find him thus—I had become accustomed to waiting up for his lordship, long after the household was gone to bed, in order to preserve his reputation as much as possible. There was no saying in what state Castlereagh might return—not even his valet should be allowed to see him, on such occasions.

“I went to the door, and discovered—when the bolts were thrown back—that I had erred, and my own indiscretion awaited me.”

“Princess Tscholikova.”

Malverley nodded. “She was thoroughly foxed— swaying as she stood—and she looked as tho’ she had traversed most of London in the interval between the Theatre Royal, where I had previously observed her, and this moment in Berkeley Square. ‘I loved you,’ she said. ‘I loved you. I would have died for you. And you regard me no more than a bit of refuse beneath a carriage wheel.’

“I feared she might set up a screeching in the street—that she would rouse the household, if not the entire square—and so I urged her to hush, and said I should be happy to discuss our acquaintance in my rooms at the Albany, if she would but call there in a few hours’ time—but she refused. She was quite resolute, quite calm; but she told me she had been to Russell Square—that she had learned everything of my sordid past I had not told her, and from the very one I should have wished none of my friends to know—Miss Radcliffe.”

Malverley’s eyes lifted malevolently. “Was it d’Entraigues who told the Princess your name, Julia? He bears the distinction of having enjoyed you both, I believe.”

“I shall worship the Fair Julia to my grave,” the Frenchman said simply. “But it is my son who has won the lady’s heart. Wisdom and experience, vous savez, must always give place to youth and beauty.”

Malverley smirked unpleasantly. “I fear that most of us must give way, where Julia is concerned; she has a habit of displacing one man for another—don’t you, my pet?”

Julien surged violently towards the Earl’s son, but Sylvester Chizzlewit seized his arm, and held him back.

“The porcelain box,” I reminded Malverley.

“She was clutching it,” Malverley went on. “When I told her I would see her that very day, at a proper hour, at the Albany or anywhere else she could name, she said—and I shall never forget the sound of her voice—It is too late. You have broken my heart before the world. You published my letters—sold them for a lie. Why, Charles? Why?”

“You could not explain, I imagine, that you hated Lord Castlereagh,” I observed in a matter-of-fact tone, “as much for his treatment of you—his lascivious nature—as for his policy. Was it in Paris you became a Buonapartist?”

Malverley regarded me steadily. “What kind of witch are you? How have you divined so much of my life, when I do not even know your name?”

“What did the Princess do then?”

“She threw the porcelain box at my feet. It shattered, of course. I was terrified of the noise—that she might rouse the household—and so I gathered up the wretched letters and slammed the door.”

“We discovered a fragment of one of them in the hackney that carried d’Entraigues and the Princess to Berkeley Square. But I wonder, Mr. Malverley, why you did not simply quit the Castlereagh household immediately, and escort Princess Tscholikova home? That should certainly have been one way of silencing her.”

The godlike countenance flushed. Malverley’s eyes darted towards the old Comte d’Entraigues, then to Sylvester Chizzlewit, but he did not answer. It was Eliza, oddly enough, who tumbled to the truth.

“Of course!” she said brightly, as tho’ a clever child at a parlour game on a winter’s evening. “The business that kept you in his lordship’s study for so many hours of the morning! Were you copying his private papers, perhaps? Perusing his memoranda— his letters—his despatches from the Regent? I must imagine he is a gentleman often consulted on government policy, for all that he is not yet returned to Cabinet. An excellent patron for a spy … such as yourself.”

Malverley rose, his eyes glittering. “I fear we are unacquainted, madam, and I will not even deign to answer you. Your insinuations are as false as they are impertinent; but happily, they do not bear on the matter at hand. I returned to pack up the necessary papers I had employed in answering his lordship’s correspondence, and threw my own—which Tscholikova had returned to me—on the study fire. It was then I heard the charley, old Bends, shouting murder from the street—and went to see what was amiss. I found her dead, as I have already told the coroner’s panel; and so I shall maintain to my final breath.”