Lord John and the Private Matter (3 page)

“Her husband, eh?” Stubbs, no fool, for all his geniality, reached out and seized the apothecary’s hands, turning the knuckles to the light. The man suffered the inspection calmly enough, then pulled his unmarred hands back from Stubbs’s grip. As though the action granted him license, he crossed to the woman and stood beside her, radiating subdued defiance.

“True it is,” he said, still outwardly calm. “Tim O’Connell was a fine man when sober, but when the drink was on him . . . a fiend in human form, no less.” He shook his head, tight-lipped.

Grey exchanged a glance with Stubbs. This was true; they shared a memory of extricating O’Connell from a gaol in Richmond, following a riotous night’s leave. The constable and the gaoler had both borne the marks of the arrest, though neither had been as badly off as O’Connell’s wife.

“And what is your relation to Mrs. O’Connell, if I might ask?” Grey inquired politely. It was hardly necessary to ask; he could see the woman’s body sway toward the apothecary, like a twining vine deprived of its trellis.

“I am her landlord, to be sure,” the man replied blandly, putting a hand on Mrs. O’Connell’s elbow. “And a friend of the family.”

“A friend of the family,” Stubbs echoed. “Quite.” His wide blue gaze descended, resting deliberately on the woman’s midsection, where her apron bulged with a pregnancy of five or six months’ progress. The regiment—and Sergeant O’Connell—had returned to London a scant six weeks before.

Stubbs glanced at Grey, a question in his eyes. Grey lifted one shoulder slightly, then gave the faintest of nods. Whoever had done for Sergeant O’Connell, it was plainly not his wife—and the money was not theirs to withhold, in any case.

Stubbs gave a small growl, but reached into his coat and drew out a purse, which he tossed onto the table.

“A small token of remembrance and esteem,” he said, hostility plain in his voice. “From your husband’s comrades.”

“Shroud money, is it? I don’t want it.” The woman no longer leaned on Scanlon, but drew herself upright. She was pale beneath the bruises, but her voice was strong. “Take it back. I’ll bury me husband meself.”

“One might wonder,” Grey said politely, “why a soldier’s wife should wish to reject assistance from his fellows. Conscience, do you think?”

The apothecary’s face darkened at that, and his fists closed at his sides.

“What d’ye say?” he demanded. “That she did him to death, and ’tis the guilt of the knowledge causes her to spurn your coin? Show ’em your hands, Francie!”

He reached down and seized the woman’s hands, jerking them up to display. The little finger of one hand was bandaged to a splint of wood; otherwise, her hands bore no marks save the scars of healed burns and the roughened knuckles of daily work—the hands of any housewife too poor to afford a drudge.

“I do not suppose that Mrs. O’Connell beat her husband to death personally, no,” Grey replied, still polite. “But the question of conscience need not apply only to her own deeds, need it? It might also apply to deeds performed on her behalf—or at her behest.”

“Not conscience.” The woman pulled her hands away from Scanlon with sudden violence, the wreck of her face quivering. Emotions shifted like sea currents beneath the blotched skin as she glanced from one man to the other.

“I will tell ye why I spurn your gift, sirs. And that is not conscience, but pride.” The slit eyes rested on Grey, hard and bright as diamonds. “Or do you think a poor woman such as meself is not entitled to her pride?”

“Pride in what?” Stubbs demanded. He looked pointedly again at her belly. “Adultery?”

To Stubbs’s displeased surprise, she laughed.

“Adultery, is it? Well, and if it is, I’m not the first to be after doing it. Tim O’Connell left me last year in the spring; took up with a doxy from the stews, he did, and took what money we had to buy her gauds. When he came here two days ago, ’twas the first time I’d seen him in near on a year. If it were not for Mr. Scanlon offerin’ me shelter and work, I should no doubt have become the whore ye think me.”

“Better a whore to one man than to many, I suppose,” Grey said under his breath, putting a hand on Stubbs’s arm to prevent further intemperate remarks.

“Still, madam,” he went on, raising his voice, “I do not quite see why you object to accepting a gift from your husband’s fellows to help bury him—if indeed you have no sense of guilt over his demise.”

The woman drew herself up, crossing her arms beneath her bosom.

“Will I take yon purse and use it to have fine words said over the stinkin’ corpse of the man? Or worse, light candles and buy Masses for a soul that’s flamin’ now in the pits of hell, if there is justice in the Lord? That I will not, sir!”

Grey eyed her with interest—and a certain amount of admiration—then glanced at the apothecary, to see how he took this speech. Scanlon had dropped back a step; his eyes were fixed on the woman’s bruised face, a slight frown between the heavy brows.

Grey settled the silver gorget that hung at his neck, then leaned forward and picked up the purse from the table, jingling it gently in his palm.

“As you will, madam. Do you wish also to reject the pension to which you are entitled, as a sergeant’s widow?” Such a pension was little enough; but given the woman’s situation . . .

She stood for a moment, undecided, then her head lifted again.

“That, I’ll take,” she said, giving him a glittering look through one slitted eye. “I’ve earned it.”

Chapter 3

O What a Tangled Web
We Weave

T
here was nothing for it but report the matter. Finding someone to report to was more difficult; with the regiment refitting and furbishing for a new posting, there were constant comings and goings. The usual parade had been temporarily discontinued, and no one was where he ought to be. It was just past sunset of the following day when Grey eventually ran Quarry to earth, in the smoking room at the Beefsteak.

“Were they telling the truth, d’ye think?” Quarry pursed his lips, and blew a thoughtful smoke ring. “Scanlon and the woman?”

Grey shook his head, concentrating on getting his fresh cheroot to draw. Once it seemed well alight, he took it from his lips long enough to answer.

“She was—mostly. He wasn’t.”

Quarry’s brows lifted, then dropped in a frown.

“Sure of it? You said he was nervous; might that be only because he didn’t want you to discover Mrs. O’Connell, and thus his relations with her?”

“Yes,” Grey said. “But even after we’d spoken with her . . . I can’t say precisely what it was that Scanlon was lying
about
—or even that he lied, specifically. But he knew something about O’Connell’s death that he wasn’t telling straight, or I’m a Dutchman.”

Quarry grunted in response to this, and lay back in his chair, smoking fiercely and scowling at the ceiling in concentration. Indolent by nature, Harry Quarry disliked thinking, but he could do it when obliged to.

Respecting the labor involved, Grey said nothing, taking an occasional pull from the Spanish cigar that had been pressed upon him by Quarry, who fancied the exotic weed. He himself normally drank tobacco smoke only medicinally, when suffering from a heavy rheum, but the smoking room at the Beefsteak offered the best chance of private conversation at this time of day, most members being at their suppers.

Grey’s stomach growled at the thought of supper, but he ignored it. Time enough for food later.

Quarry removed the cigar from his lips long enough to say, “Damn your brother,” then replaced it and resumed his contemplation of the pastoral frolic taking place on the gessoed ceiling above.

Grey nodded, in substantial agreement with this sentiment. Hal was Colonel of the Regiment, as well as the head of Grey’s family. Hal was presently in France—had been for a month—and his temporary absence was creating an uncomfortable burden on those required to shoulder those responsibilities that were rightfully his. Nothing to be done about it, though; duty was duty.

In Hal’s absence, command of the regiment devolved upon its two regular Colonels, Harry Quarry and Bernard Sydell. Grey had had not the slightest hesitation in choosing to whom to make his report. Sydell was an elderly man, crotchety and strict, with little knowledge of his troops and less interest in them.

Observing the inferno in progress, one of the ever-watchful servants came silently forward to place a small porcelain dish on Quarry’s chest, lest the fuming ashes of his cigar set his waistcoat on fire. Quarry ignored this, puffing rhythmically and making occasional small growling noises between his teeth.

Grey’s cheroot had burnt itself out by the time Quarry removed the porcelain dish from his chest and the soggy remains of his own cigar from his mouth. He sat up and sighed deeply.

“No help for it,” he said. “You’ll have to know.”

“Know what?”

“We think O’Connell was a spy.”

Astonishment and dismay vied for place in Grey’s bosom with a certain feeling of satisfaction. He’d known there was something fishy about the situation in Brewster’s Alley—and it wasn’t codfish.

“A spy for whom?” They were alone; the ubiquitous servant had disappeared momentarily, but Grey nonetheless glanced round and lowered his voice.

“We don’t know.” Quarry squashed the stump of his cigar into the dish and set it aside. “That was why your brother decided to leave him be for a bit after we began to suspect him—in hopes of discovering his paymaster, once the regiment was back in London.”

That made sense; while O’Connell might have gathered useful military information in the field, he would have found it infinitely easier to pass it on in the seething anthill of London—where men of every nation on earth mingled daily in the streams of commerce that flowed up the Thames—than in the shoulder-rubbing confines of a military camp.

“Oh, I see,” Grey said, shooting a sharp glance at Quarry as the light dawned. “Hal took advantage of the gossip regarding the regimental posting, didn’t he? Stubbs told me after luncheon that he’d heard from DeVries that we were definitely set for France again—likely Calais. I take it that was misdirection, for O’Connell’s benefit?”

Quarry regarded him blandly. “Wasn’t announced officially, was it?”

“No. And we take it that the coincidence of such an unofficial decision and the sudden demise of Sergeant O’Connell is sufficient to be . . . interesting?”

“Depends on your tastes, I s’pose,” Quarry said, heaving a deep sigh. “Damn nuisance, I call it.”

The servant came quietly back into the room, bearing a humidor in one hand, a rack of pipes in the other. The supper hour was drawing to a close, and those members who liked a smoke to settle their digestions would be coming down the hallway shortly, each to claim his own pipe and his preferred chair.

Grey sat frowning for a moment.

“Why was . . . the gentleman in question . . . suspected?”

“Can’t tell you that.” Quarry lifted one shoulder, leaving it unclear as to whether his reticence was a matter of ignorance or of official discretion.

“I see. So perhaps my brother is in France—and perhaps he isn’t?”

A slight smile twitched the white scar on Quarry’s cheek.

“You’d know better than I would, Grey.”

The servant had gone out again, to fetch the other humidors; several members kept their personal blends of tobacco and snuff at the club. He could already hear the stir from the dining room, of scraping chairs and postprandial conversation. Grey leaned forward, ready to rise.

“But you had him followed, of course—O’Connell. Someone must have kept a close eye on him in London.”

“Oh, yes.” Quarry shook himself into rough order, brushing ash from the knees of his breeches and pulling down his rumpled waistcoat. “Hal found a man. Very discreet, well-placed. A footman employed by a friend of the family—your family, that is.”

“And that friend would be . . .”

“The Honorable Joseph Trevelyan.” Heaving himself to his feet, Quarry led the way out of the smoking room, leaving Grey to follow as he might, senses reeling from more than tobacco smoke.

It all made a horrid sense, though, he thought, following Quarry toward the door. Trevelyan’s family and Grey’s had been associated for the last couple of centuries, and it was in some part Joseph Trevelyan’s friendship with Hal that had led to his betrothal to Olivia in the first place.

It wasn’t a close friendship; one founded on a commonality of association, clubs, and political interests, rather than on personal affection. Still, if Hal had been looking for a discreet man to put on O’Connell’s trail, it would have been necessary to look outside the army—for who knew what alliances O’Connell had formed, both within the regiment and outside it? And so, evidently, Hal had spoken to his friend Trevelyan, who had recommended his own footman . . . and it was simply a matter of dreadful irony that he, Grey, should now be obliged to interfere in Trevelyan’s personal life.

Outside the Beefsteak, the doorman had procured a commercial carriage; Quarry was already into it, beckoning Grey impatiently.

“Come along, come along! I’m starving. We’ll go up to Kettrick’s, shall we? They do an excellent eel pie there. I could relish an eel pie, and perhaps a bucket or two of stout to go along. Wash the smoke down, what?”

Grey nodded, setting his hat on the seat beside him where it wouldn’t be crushed. Quarry stuck his head out the window and shouted up to the driver, then pulled it in and relapsed back onto the grimy squabs with a sigh.

“So,” Quarry went on, raising his voice slightly to be heard over the rattle and squeak of the carriage, “this man, Trevelyan’s footman—Byrd, his name is, Jack Byrd—he took up rooms across from the slammerkin O’Connell lived with. Been following the Sergeant to and fro, up and down London, for the past six weeks.”

Grey glanced out of the window; the weather had kept fine for several days, but was about to break. Thunder growled in the distance, and he could feel the coming rain in the air that chilled his face and freshened his lungs.

“What does this Byrd say occurred, then, the night that O’Connell was killed?”

“Nothing.” Quarry settled his wig more firmly on his head as a gust of moisture-laden wind swept through the carriage.

“He lost O’Connell?”

Quarry’s blunt features twisted wryly.

“No, we’ve lost Jack Byrd. Man hasn’t been seen or heard of since the night O’Connell was killed.”

The carriage was slowing, the driver chirruping to his team as they made the turn into the Strand. Grey settled his cloak about his shoulders and picked up his hat, in anticipation of their arrival.

“No sign of his body?”

“None. Which rather suggests that whatever happened to O’Connell, it wasn’t a simple brawl.”

Grey rubbed at his face, rasping the bristles on his jaw. He was hungry, and his linen was grimy after the day’s exertions. The clammy feel of it made him feel seedy and irritable.

“Which rather suggests that whatever happened wasn’t the fault of Scanlon, then—for why should he be concerned with Byrd?” He wasn’t sure whether to be pleased at this deduction or not. He
knew
the apothecary had been lying to him in some way—but at the same time, he felt some sympathy for Mrs. O’Connell. She would be in a bad way if Scanlon was taken up for murder and hanged or transported—and a worse one, were she to be accused of conspiracy in the affair.

The opposite bench was harlequined with light and shadow as they clopped slowly past a group of flambeaux-men, lighting a party home. He saw Quarry shrug, obviously as irritable as he was himself from lack of food.

“If Scanlon had spotted Byrd following O’Connell, he might have put Byrd out of the way, as well—but why bother to hide it? A brawl might produce multiple bodies, easy as one. They often do, God knows.”

“But if it was someone else,” Grey said slowly, “someone who wanted O’Connell out of the way, either because he asked too much or because they feared he might give them away? . . .”

“The spymaster? Or his representative, at least. Could be. Again, though—why hide the body, if he did for Byrd, too?”

The alternative was obvious.

“He didn’t kill Byrd. He bought him off.”

“Damn likely. Directly I heard of O’Connell’s death, I sent a man to search the place he was living, but he didn’t find a thing. And Stubbs had a good look round the widow’s place, as well, while you were there—but not a bean, he says. Not a paper in the place.”

He’d seen Stubbs poking round as he made arrangements for the payment of O’Connell’s pension to his widow, but had paid no particular attention at the time. It was true, though; Mrs. O’Connell’s room was spartan in its furnishing, completely lacking in books or papers of any kind.

“What were they searching for?”

The bearlike growl that emerged from the shadows in reply might have been Quarry, or merely his stomach giving voice to its hunger.

“Don’t know for sure what it might look like,” Quarry admitted reluctantly. “It will be writing of some kind, though.”

“You don’t know? What sort of thing is it—or am I not allowed to know that?”

Quarry eyed him, fingers drumming slowly on the seat beside him. Then he shrugged; official discretion be damned, evidently.

“Just before we came back from France, O’Connell took the ordnance requisitions into Calais. He was late—all the other regiments had turned in their papers days before. The damn fool clerk had left the lot just sitting on his desk, if you can believe it! Granted, the office was locked, but still . . .”

Returning from a leisurely luncheon, the clerk had discovered the door forced, the desk ransacked—and every scrap of paper in the office gone.

“I shouldn’t have thought one man could carry the amount of paper to be found in an office of that sort,” Grey said, half-joking.

Quarry flipped one hand, impatient.

“It was a clerk’s hole, not the office proper. Nothing else there was important—but the quarterly ordnance requisitions for every British regiment between Calais and Prague! . . .”

Grey pursed his lips, nodding in acknowledgment. It was a serious matter. Information on troop movements and disposition was highly sensitive, but such plans could be changed, if it became known that the intelligence had fallen into the wrong hands. The munitions requirements for a regiment could not be altered—and the sum total of that information would tell an enemy almost to the gun what strength and what weaponry each regiment possessed.

“Even so,” he objected. “It must have been a massive amount of paper. Not the sort of thing a man could easily conceal about his person.”