The Dark Enquiry (33 page)

Of course, Sir Morgan would never be an easy person to know, and this was borne home when, some weeks after the incident in the graveyard, Brisbane took me for a ride in the carriage. It had turned cold, and I was carefully bundled in furs, a heater at my feet. Brisbane would say nothing of where we were bound, but I was glad to be out and about. My excursions thus far had been to Portia’s or to March House or to do a little shopping, and I was astonishingly bored of it all.

In a short time, we found ourselves in the mews behind Sir Morgan’s house in St. John’s Wood, and I watched in astonishment as Brisbane tried the garden door. It was a stout affair of good oak, but it yielded to his touch. He took a quick glance to make sure we were not observed and opened it.

“Brisbane, what are we doing here?” I whispered.

He put a finger over my lips and beckoned me to follow. We crept through the garden like thieves, and the metaphor was an apt one, for no sooner had we reached the house than Brisbane extracted a set of objects that made his intention instantly clear.

“No lockpicks?” I mouthed.

He shook his head and pointed to the complexity of the lock on the French doors. But while it was a good lock, it was poorly sited, and this made Brisbane’s entry quite easy. I stood aside, plucking idly at a flower whilst he worked.

He took a piece of brown paper that had been liberally spread with glue and unfolded it carefully. He moistened it with his own saliva and pressed it to the glass pane of the door. Then he took the end of his walking stick and gave a single sharp tap. The glass shattered, but silently, and the glue ensured that the pieces came away in one tidy sheet. I stared in admiration as he reached in and turned the lock from the inside. We moved into the house, our feet soundless on the thick carpets. The crescent moon provided illumination, and a moment after we entered we were at the tea caddy.

Just as Brisbane reached for his lockpicks to work the little lock, there was a hiss from the corner. I peered into the gloom to see Nin advancing slowly, whipping her tail back and forth like a cobra.

“This could be very bad,” I muttered to Brisbane. “Siamese can be very loud if the mood strikes them.”

“Well, you are her favourite, according to Morgan. Attend to her,” he ordered, applying himself to the lock. I suppressed a sigh and reached to my reticule to rip a peacock feather free.

I dandled it in front of her, and just as the little lock sprang open, I dropped the feather. Nin pounced upon it, snatching it up in her jaws and trotting off as contentedly as any retriever with her prize.

I turned my attention to Brisbane and the tea caddy that he had opened. Inside was a packet of tea, and below that a false bottom that he pried loose. Underneath lay another packet, this one flat and bound with tape.

Brisbane replaced the caddy and gestured for us to leave. We retraced our steps through the rooms, Brisbane shutting the door carefully behind us. He did not bother to lock it, for the missing pane would reveal soon enough that the residence had been breached. We moved through the garden and back to the carriage, and once there, Brisbane rapped sharply for the driver to move on. It was several minutes before he turned up the lamp and handed me the packet.

“Bellmont’s letters,” I breathed. “Sir Morgan had them the whole time.”

“Very likely,” Brisbane said. “I suspect he took them the very night Madame died. Everything else was so much smoke and mirrors.”

“Then why not tell you?” I demanded. “Why let you continue to chase down that monstrous woman?”

“Because Morgan needed to flush her like a pheasant and he was using me as his beater,” he said, his face expressionless.

“That is a vile thing to do! You might have been killed! How dare he show such a lack of respect for an innocent citizen,” I raged. “What gives him the right to treat you so?”

“He is my employer,” Brisbane said softly.

There was silence between us, and in that silence a world of things unsaid. I clutched the letters. “Sir Morgan is your employer? That would make you…”

“Upon occasion.”

“How long?”

“Since I was eighteen. It was during my involvement with Fleur. She was suspected of being an agent of Napoléon III. They recruited me to discover what I could about her.”

I shook my head. “No, it is too much. Not you. Not Fleur. Tell me she was not a spy.”

“Only of the most innocuous variety and quite accidentally,” he said by way of consolation.

“But you have not known Fleur intimately in over twenty years,” I said, trying to make sense of it all. “Why are you still working for Sir Morgan?”

“Because I am rather good at it,” he said simply. “My detective business gives me ample opportunity to poke into the affairs of others, and anything I find out of note, I pass to Morgan. I am not so active as I once was,” he promised. “More often now, I simply relay information he might require.”

It was a clever version of the truth, I knew instantly, and had been heavily edited to allay my fears. But I was not to be put off. “It is not always so simple, is it?”

He opened his mouth to give me an easy answer, then snapped his teeth together. “No,” he said finally. “Sometimes it is considerably more.”

I said nothing for a long moment, realising that Brisbane had just done the unthinkable: he had trusted me enough to tell me that which he ought never to have revealed. He had, quite literally, trusted me with his life.

“You work for Sir Morgan,” I began slowly. “For whom does he work?”

“The Prime Minister’s office. He reports directly to the sitting Prime Minister, and he has a weekly, highly secret meeting with Her Majesty. I believe he is smuggled in and out of the palace in a laundry hamper.”

The thought of the dapper and elegant Morgan Fielding stowed away in a basket of laundry boggled the mind, perhaps more than anything else about this entire matter.

“I cannot believe it,” I murmured. “It never occurred to me that there might be clandestine agencies of which the average British citizen has no inkling.”

“It is better that way,” Brisbane said flatly. “And it will be better still when a proper bureau is established and Morgan can see to it that he has the manpower he needs.”

“He doesn’t now?”

“Do you really think he would have set up that elaborate farce at the Spirit Club if he had alternatives? He is given a handful of men and a budget that would scarcely keep you in slippers and fans. What he accomplishes is largely due to the force of his own personality and the loyalty of his friends.”

“He will know the letters are gone,” I pointed out.

“And he will know I took them. I rather think he intended I should,” he said. “Otherwise he would not have left them in the tea caddy. He mentioned once that it was a useful piece, and he would know I remembered it.”

“Intended? If he wanted you to have them, why not just give them to you?”

“Because Morgan would never take a straight path if the twisty one will do. He is as slippery a devil as I have ever met, but I would trust him with my life if the occasion demanded and, from time to time, it has. We understand each other.”

“Do you think he would mind that you have told me?”

“I think Morgan would be distinctly surprised if I had not.”

I nodded. “He knows you so well then.”

“He does. And he knows you. And no man who has met you could fail to respect your single-minded determination to put your nose into anything that does not concern you.”

I ought to have been insulted, I told myself, but instead I was conscious only of a deep satisfaction. Brisbane had confided to me the most dangerous secret, and he had done it of his own volition.

“And why tell me now? You had the chance, right at the beginning of the investigation when I noticed that you spoke with some familiarity of the Spirit Club. You said you could not explain then. What has changed?”

He turned away from me, and when he spoke, his voice was low. “Because I am selfish. I wanted just one person in this world to know me for everything I am. And because sometimes I find it difficult to believe that you could love me if you knew the whole of it. So I give you bits and pieces of myself, a mosaic of the man I am, and I lie awake at night and wonder which of them will cause you to leave me.”

His voice was cold and bleak as a moorland wind, and I wiped the tears from my cheeks before I put my hand in his.

“Is there more? Things you have not told me?”

He said nothing, but he nodded. I took a deep breath of resignation.

“Well, you have told me this and I am still here. Leave the rest for another time.”

I put my head upon his shoulder and rested it there. He crushed my hand in his, and I looked down to see the bruised petals of the flower peeping between our gloved hands.

“Brisbane, does it not strike you as odd that in the cemetery, Morgan said he would see Felicity charged with my attempted murder and the murder of Agathe LeBrun? He said nothing of Madame’s murder.” I dropped the broken bloom of monkshood into his hand.

“Aconitum napellus,”
he murmured.

“Would Morgan have done such a thing?”

“Madame Séraphine had become a liability,” he said simply. “Felicity knew she had been followed once to Highgate and that her identity had nearly been compromised. I suspect that Felicity was growing desperate and showed up at the séance in order to force Madame’s hand and induce her to hand over the letters once and for all. Madame improvised with a message that Felicity would understand, a plea for time and money, and a message that was most definitely not of Morgan’s construction. That proved she was playing at her own game and had established contacts of her own with the enemy. There is only one remedy for a spymaster when one of his operatives has decided to follow a different course.”

“I do not think I care for the notion of you working for someone so reckless. He might have poisoned the entire club with that horseradish.”

“Not likely. It would not be in keeping with Morgan’s character to be quite so careless. I suspect the poison was never in the horseradish, but was in Madame’s face crème instead. Remember, aconite is absorbed through the skin.”

I plucked the poisonous flower from his hand and flung it from the window. “How could he have got the stuff into her room without detection?” I wondered aloud.

Brisbane pondered this a moment, then shook his head. “He must have been there before either of us arrived. I was on the area steps, and I watched everyone who came after me. Morgan did not.”

“But he entered the public rooms of the club after I did,” I recalled. “He must have been upstairs then. It would have been an easy thing to slip into Madame’s rooms and poison the face crème.” I shuddered at the idea. I had quite liked Morgan.

“I just thought of something. Sir Morgan knew Edward and the manner of his death. I wonder if it gave him the idea of how to dispose of Madame.”

“We will likely never know,” Brisbane said. “But Morgan forgets nothing. I would not be surprised if he filed away that particularly nasty bit of business with an eye to using it someday.”

I gave Brisbane a severe look. “I do not care for the notion of your working quite so closely with a man capable of such things. And I ought to be entirely put out with you for not telling about your employment sooner. A lady should never marry a man without knowing he is a spy.”

“Does it make a difference?” he asked, and I knew he held his breath as I pondered my reply.

I put my hand to his cheek. “Of course it does,” I said softly. “Now I can really be involved in your work.”

“Bloody hell,” Brisbane said.

“And I just remembered the terms of our wager. Madame was murdered by someone at the séance,” I said with satisfaction. “You owe me one hundred pounds.”

Naturally, Brisbane saw no reason at all that I should aid in his efforts to protect the security of crown and country, and I knew the process of convincing him otherwise would take some time. No matter, I decided. I could wait. He also refused to settle the wager, arguing that as we had no actual proof of Sir Morgan’s culpability, the case could not be considered closed. I accused him of pedantry and we agreed to double or nothing as terms for the next investigation that I took a hand in.

We worked at Brisbane’s various cases and I continued to pursue my photography. Naturally, it was not until some weeks after the accident that I ventured back into my little studio at the top of the house on Chapel Street, but I was happy that I did. I had missed the cosy rooms devoted to my hobby, and I puttered away for some hours until Plum called to me that Mrs. Lawson had just brought up the tea and the post.

I made my way down to tea, relaxing as soon as I saw the cosy scene. Brisbane was at his desk, legs crossed at the ankles upon his blotter as he perused his post. He had a cup of tea at his elbow, and a plate of warm muffins with the butter melting in. Plum, freshly released from the splints of his broken arm, was toasting up a few for me, and I munched contentedly as Plum stroked Rook and sipped at his own tea. I applied myself to my letters, sorting the various notes and bills until I came to one in a familiar hand. I felt a rush of excitement.

“Bloody hell,” I said. Plum blinked and Brisbane roused himself.

“What is it, my dear?”

I tore open the letter and skimmed it quickly. I brandished it at Brisbane. “We are going to Italy,” I said. I gave him the letter to read, hopping from foot to foot as he came to the end.

“Bloody hell,” he agreed.

“We must go,” I insisted.

“We must not,” was his equally firm reply.

I smiled, knowing that a battle would ensue, and equally confident I would win. I was already planning what to pack as we left for Rome and the new adventure that beckoned.

But that is a tale as yet untold.

Tremendous thanks to my readers! You make me grateful every day, and I am so happy to share my stories with you. And heartfelt thanks to the booksellers and librarians who share my stories with others.

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As ever, many thanks to my editor, the stylish and exacting Valerie Gray, whose commitment to my writing has been truly humbling in the best possible way. My life and my work are the better for knowing you.

And thanks most of all to my family—thanks to my mother for endless support and faultless proofreading, to my daughter and my father for their many kindnesses large and small, and to my husband, for everything and for always.