Sheri Cobb South (20 page)

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Having been ejected from Sir Archibald’s domicile in none too gentle a manner, Pickett was more than ever convinced of the significance of the disappearing letter. Having encountered a brick wall at the diplomat’s residence, it remained only for him to go over Sir Archibald’s head—to the Foreign Office, in fact, where there might be those (Foreign Secretary Canning, for one) who would take no little interest in the knowledge that Sir Archibald Stanton had taken from the late Viscount Fieldhurst a letter written in the language of Britain’s mortal enemy.

Upon being set down in Downing Street, where the Foreign Office had been headquartered for the last fifteen years, Pickett was surprised to discover that the corridors of power were not so very different from the environs of Bow Street. The street itself was narrow and cramped, with government offices both major and minor competing for space with pubs, livery stables, and cheap boardinghouses. Emboldened by this realization, he took the front stairs two at a time and entered the edifice that had once been the town residence of Lord Sheffield.

At Pickett’s entrance, a clerk looked up from a desk littered with papers. This individual, although underpaid and overworked, was nonetheless a junior member of an ancient (albeit impoverished) family, and knew his place in the hierarchy of British society. He took one look at Pickett, assessing at a glance his shabby clothing and unfashionable queue, and dismissed him as a creature of no importance.

“May I help you?” he inquired in bored accents.

“I’d like to see Mr. Canning,” said Pickett.

The clerk’s bored expression vanished. “My good fellow, there is a war on,” he protested, torn between exasperation and amusement. “One can’t just stroll in off the street and demand to see the Foreign Secretary.”

“Then who can I see?” asked Pickett, undaunted.

“I should say that depends upon the nature of your business.”

“My ‘business’ is the murder of Viscount Fieldhurst,” stated Pickett, presenting his card. “John Pickett, of the Bow Street police office. I have some questions to ask regarding the viscount and Sir Archibald Stanton.”

At this revelation, the clerk’s face grew pale. “One moment, please. If you will—excuse me—” He crossed the hall with a carefully measured tread, but his inner turmoil was betrayed by the furtive glances he cast over his shoulder at Pickett.

As the clerk disappeared behind a closed door at the opposite end of the hall, Pickett could not but wonder whether it was the viscount’s name or Sir Archibald Stanton’s that provoked such a pronounced reaction. He was sorely tempted to press his ear to the door, but even as he pondered this course of action, the door opened and the clerk reappeared. His manner was calmer now, but beads of perspiration shone on his forehead.

“If you will come with me, Mr. Pickett,” he said, sweeping his arm in the direction of that half-closed door.

Pickett followed and was shown into a room embellished with fine linen-fold paneling and tall windows which reached from floor to ceiling. Positioned before the windows was a massive oak desk, behind which sat a distinguished-looking man with silver-streaked hair and rather cold blue eyes.

“Ah, Mr. Pickett. Come in and sit down.”

As Pickett advanced into the room, hat in hand, he heard the click of the door as the clerk shut it behind him and realized he was being granted a private interview—although it seemed more like an inquisition. All at once he felt nine years old again, a charity school pupil called on the carpet for some long-forgotten misdemeanor. Repressing the old feeling of inferiority, he lifted his chin, looked the older man squarely in the eye, and demanded with well-feigned bravado, “And your name is—?”

The man shook his head. “Not important. Mr. Pickett, you are no doubt aware that the viscount was highly placed within the Foreign Office. We regret his passing, and are naturally shocked at the violent manner in which he died, but we have nothing more to say to the matter.”

“But an innocent woman’s life may be at stake!” insisted Pickett.

“You refer, I presume, to Lady Fieldhurst. Her ladyship’s involvement is unfortunate, but there is nothing we can do.”

Pickett placed both hands on the desk and leaned across it, towering over his cold-blooded adversary. “You would let her hang for a murder she never committed?”

“Regrettable, of course, if such a thing were to come to pass, but in matters of national security, it is sometimes necessary to place the good of the many over the good of the individual.”

Pickett felt a sudden chill in spite of the sunlight streaming through the windows. “Do you mean to say—?”

“To be blunt, Mr. Pickett, better men than Lady Fieldhurst have died for the sake of their country.”

Pickett could only stare in mounting horror.

“I realize this must sound harsh,” continued the man in placating tones, “but someday you will understand. You are very young—”

“I’m old enough to know when I’m being patronized,” retorted Pickett, finding his tongue at last. “Who is it you are so determined to protect? Is it Sir Archibald Stanton? Or perhaps Fieldhurst himself?”

“I have said all I intend to say on the subject,” the man said brusquely, ringing for the clerk. “Now, if you will excuse me, there is a war on, and I am very busy. Good day, sir.”

“You haven’t seen the last of me,” Pickett vowed, his voice rising in helpless fury. “I’m going to find out who killed Lord Fieldhurst, and I don’t care who I have to bring down in the process!”

“Good day, sir,” said the man again, as the clerk opened the door and very pointedly held it open.

Finding himself expelled from the premises for the second time in less than two hours, Pickett was forced to concede defeat and turn his steps eastward. It was now obvious that he could expect no help from the Foreign Office. He must return to Upper Well Alley, where he hoped to find Jane Mudge returned to roost. Several of her modest possessions had been strewn about the untidy room; surely she must come back for them. And when she did, he would have a sworn statement from her, if he had to drag her all the way to Bow Street by her heels.

“Not you again!” exclaimed the matron as he entered the boardinghouse.

“I was wondering if I might see Jane,” he said. “Has she come back?”

“Aye, for all the good it’ll do you. She come back an hour ago and paid me what she owed, then packed up her gewgaws and cleared out.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“No—leastways, nothing that made no sense. Some rubbish about her and her Davey going to ride a dolphin. Faugh! As if anyone could!”

“A dolphin, did you say?”

Without waiting for a reply, Pickett ran out of the house and back down the street toward the river. The tide was going out, and the Dolphin, her sails billowing, glided on the ebbing waters toward the Thames estuary and the open sea beyond.

“You, there,” Pickett called to one of a group of brawny men coiling up the heavy cables that had tethered the ship to the dock. “Where’s she bound?” A jerk of his thumb indicated the departing Dolphin.

“New South Wales,” came the reply. “It’ll be three months or more ere she makes port there.”

Pickett’s heart fell to his boots. Even if the treacherous maid survived the voyage around the Cape of Good Hope—by no means a certainty even in times of peace, let alone now, when the French navy prowled the coasts—Lady Fieldhurst might well be brought to trial long before Jane’s feet once more touched solid ground.

* * * *

It was past seven o’clock by the time he reached Bow Street and the sun was beginning to set. Clearly there was no point in stopping by the police office to report this unwelcome turn of events to Mr. Colquhoun, as even that most diligent of magistrates would by this time have sought the comforts of hearth and home. Deciding to do likewise, Pickett made his way to Drury Lane and his hired lodgings.

As he fitted an iron key into the lock, he wondered what it might be like to come home to a woman every night, a woman who would welcome one with a warm smile and a hot meal. He shook his head as if to clear it. His solitary state had never bothered him before; perhaps it was the thought of Mr. Colquhoun surrounded by family that made him feel uncharacteristically lonely by comparison. Or, whispered a little voice somewhere inside his head, perhaps it had more to do with an afternoon spent with Lady Fieldhurst in her modest Queens Gardens house, apart from the army of servants and the other trappings of aristocracy which emphasized the difference in their stations.

As he turned the key and opened the door, an odor wafting within drove these unprofitable thoughts from his head. He glanced around the empty room, noting that the candles had been lit, and spied a steaming meat pie in the center of the plain deal table.

“Mrs. Catchpole?” he called.

“Aye, Johnny, here I am,” she returned, waddling out of the bedchamber. “I brung up your clean linen, along with a bite for your supper.”

“More than a bite, I’d say,” said Pickett, eyeing the pie with anticipation as he seated himself at the table. “And a good thing, too! I’m hungry enough to eat a horse.”

She chuckled richly at this not very original witticism. “No horse here, ducky, just a good English kidney pie and a mug of ale to wash it down.”

“You’re an angel!” declared Pickett around a mouthful of pie.

“Lawks, no!” protested Mrs. Catchpole, blushing rosily all the same. “I didn’t do nothing a good wife wouldn’t do. Now, my niece Alice is in service to Lady Dalrymple, and she can make a black pudding that will melt in your mouth!”

“Who, Lady Dalrymple?” asked Pickett, seeing what was in the wind.

“Lawks, no! Who’d expect a lady to do her own—” Mrs. Catchpole broke off abruptly, returning Pickett’s limpid gaze with eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Oh, I see what you’re about, Johnny! You’re trying to pull my leg!”

Pickett, who could think of few pastimes which held less appeal, suppressed a shudder at the mental image which rose to his brain. Alas, Mrs. Catchpole, having determined that her niece would make the perfect wife for her handsome young boarder, would not be so easily distracted. Fortunately for Pickett, her catalog of Alice’s numerous charms was interrupted by a knock on the door. Mrs. Catchpole, abandoning the subject with considerable regret, said with a sigh, “You go ahead and eat, Johnny. I’ll get it.”

She bustled over to the door and opened it. After exchanging a few curt words with the person on the other side, she turned back toward Pickett, disapproval writ large upon her usually cheerful countenance.

“Female says she has to see you, Johnny.”

Pickett choked on his ale, and leaped to his feet so quickly he knocked the chair to the floor. At that moment, Lucy breezed into the room with some light-colored garment draped over her arm and a purple bonnet of surpassing ugliness adorning her head.

“About time you were coming home, John Pickett,” she scolded. “How’s a girl to make an honest living going around carrying a man’s breeches? Makes it look like she’s spoken for, it does, and that’s bad for business!”

“Lucy! You found them!” he exclaimed, firmly tamping down the pang of disappointment he’d felt when he realized that his caller was not, in fact, Lady Fieldhurst. For why would her ladyship come looking for him, even if she had known where to find him?

“Aye, I found ‘em, and bought ‘em, and had enough left over for this bonnet,” she declared proudly. “Can’t imagine why anyone would want to get rid of it, but then, there’s no understanding the nobs, is there?”

“None at all,” agreed Pickett, although he was no longer paying attention. Instead, he spread Lord Rupert’s pantaloons out on the table and held the candle aloft, the better to examine them. Apparently his lordship’s tale of spilled champagne had been the truth, or near enough as made no odds. There were no telltale bloodstains marring the finely tailored garment. “Good job, Lucy.”

Lucy, elbows on the table, leaned forward until her bosom threatened to tumble out of her bodice and into his kidney pie. “Is that all you have to say, John Pickett?” she pouted. “Just ‘good job’?”

Pickett bundled up the breeches and stuffed them into her gaping neckline. “How about, ‘You can keep these for your troubles’?”

“And what, pray, am I going to do with a man’s breeches? Didn’t I just say—”

“Sell them to another rag shop,” suggested Pickett. “Or give them to your Frog.”

The reminder of her Frenchman had the happy effect of making Lucy forget her grievances. “Aye, I’ll do that this very night! I wonder what he’ll think of my new chap-o?” she said, patting the crown of her hideous bonnet. “Good evening to you, John Pickett—or should I say, ‘Bone sewer’!”

After Lucy had gone, Pickett turned back to the kidney pie and found Mrs. Catchpole quivering with righteous indignation. “Well! That you would allow a creature like that under my roof—”

“Mine is not a pretty business, Mrs. Catchpole, and sometimes I have to take help wherever I can find it,” he said, hiding a smile as he addressed himself to the kidney pie. “But you were about to tell me about your niece—Alice, I think it was?”

“Never mind!” cried Mrs. Catchpole, her large, square hands fluttering, as if to brush away such an abhorrent suggestion. “Now that I think on it, it wouldn’t be such a good idea, after all. I wouldn’t have my Alice exposed to such as that creature; no, not for love nor money I wouldn’t!”

“I was afraid of that,” said Pickett mournfully. “Now you see why I have no wife.”

“Indeed, I do, Johnny, and I’m sorry for it, but I can’t have Alice rubbing shoulders with women of that stamp, even for—well, I just can’t, and that’s all there is to it! Good night, Johnny. Just leave the dirty dishes there on the table and I’ll get them in the morning.”

“Good night, Mrs. Catchpole,” Pickett said with deceptive meekness as the door closed behind her.

I can’t have Alice rubbing shoulders with women of that stamp... Nor could he imagine Lady Fieldhurst doing so, even if everything else were equal, which it most emphatically was not. And yet, when presented with that painting in her house, the viscountess had shown herself to be surprisingly resilient. She had been embarrassed, naturally, but she had not fallen into hysterics nor had a fit of the vapors. As he turned his attention back to the cooling kidney pie, Pickett had to smile. He had gotten his wish, after a fashion. He’d been welcomed home by both a hot meal and a warm smile, although neither had come from the source he might have chosen.