The Dorset House Affair

Prologue

Murder in Prospect

A
lain de Bellefort stood on the eastern terrace of his ancient manor-house, and waited for the sun to rise. Whenever he returned to Normandy from his necessary travels abroad, he yielded to the embrace of his ancestral lands, and wished that he could remain there, at the Manoir de Saint-Louis, for ever.

It was the dawn of Friday, 31 August, 1894, and the sky already quivered with light. In a few moments it would be sunrise. His family, the De Belleforts, had dwelt on this estate since 1400, but their ancestry reached back to the days of the Merovingian kings of the Franks, where one of his forebears had been a chamberlain to the deposed and doomed Childeric. Thus they were of more ancient lineage than the Capetian kings, the House of Valois, or the Bourbons.

The brilliant sun burst in splendour above the circle of hills to the east, and its rays slid like so many golden darts through the branches of the stately elms bordering the demesne. Now he could see his own lands, the rich fields ripe for harvest, the woods of oak and beech clinging to the western slopes of the low flanking hills. It was just after six o’clock, but some of the peasants were already at their labours in the fields.

Beyond the elms lay the village of Rouvrai. Beyond the demesne lay the little town of Saint-Martin de Fontenay. And looking north towards ancient Caen, where William the Conqueror lay in his
tomb, you could sense the winds blowing off the English Channel. Though deep in the Norman countryside, the
manoir
and its surrounding villages were only thirty miles from the Baie de la Seine.

Alain de Bellefort, Chevalier de Saint-Louis, left the terrace and entered the little stone chamber where
le
petit
déjeuner
was always served. Above the fireplace a huge painted coat of arms had been affixed in the olden days, but the colours and the gilding had faded, and parts of the achievement had been hacked and defaced in the time of the Revolution. What animals!

And yet, the De Belleforts had kept their heads: the estate had been pillaged, but none of them, family or servants, had gone to the guillotine. They had survived the subsequent revolutions, and the empires of the two Napoleons, and lived now under the mean and dishonourable Third Republic. One day, perhaps, the oriflamme, proud banner of the Bourbon kings, would fly from the towers and pinnacles of Paris.

Maître Flambard, the sallow-faced, cynical family lawyer at Rouen, persisted in telling him that the Manoir de Saint-Louis was not his, and that it was owned by a certain very prominent banker in Paris. ‘Until you redeem the mortgages, and pay off the loans,’ he had said, ‘your inheritance is nothing more than rotten parchment.’ Flambard was a savage, and so was the
arriviste
banker in Paris.

A door at the far end of the room opened, and an old woman in peasant black enlightened by an elaborate Breton headdress, entered. She carried a tray laden with a steaming pot of coffee, a basket of bread rolls, and a dish of unsalted butter. She delivered a ghost of a curtsy, and deposited De Bellefort’s breakfast on the table.

‘Is
mademoiselle
stirring yet?’ asked De Bellefort.

‘She is,’ the old woman replied. ‘I have served her coffee and rolls in
la
grande
chambre
.’ She poured out coffee for her master, at the same time regarding him with an unmistakable air of disfavour. She put the steaming pot down on the table.

‘
Mademoiselle
should not be going back to that cursed place,’ she said. ‘It almost destroyed her last time, and now, who knows?’

De Bellefort looked at her. Her old face was tanned and
wrinkled
from years of work in the fields, but her labouring days were done, and she served him now in the house. She had known him from his birth, and had a way of speaking her mind without giving offence to a proud man.

‘Nevertheless, Anna, she will go. And so shall I. There are certain reasons for our accepting that invitation which are not your business to know. Go now, and tell
mademoiselle
that I will be with her presently. Is the coach ready?’

‘It is,’ said the old woman. ‘All your luggage is already stowed away, and at midday Gaston will convey you safely to the railway station. After that, it is as the good God wills. You will take the ferry across the Channel, and set foot once again in that perfidious country. They have left their bones, and their armour here, in Normandy, and the farmers turn them up in the fields around Agincourt. English neighbours of that kind are neighbours enough.’

‘I am tired of all this croaking, Anna,’ said De Bellefort. ‘No more, do you hear? We shall be gone for a week or so. I leave you and Gaston to hold the fort here until we return. Meanwhile, do as I say: tell
mademoiselle
that I will come to her within the hour. I will receive Monsieur Delagardie at ten, and he and I will have our usual fencing-practice on the terrace. Go, now.’

The old woman smiled, and her master thought he heard her mutter, ‘Games for boys.’ But when she spoke aloud it was with the kind of deference that he loved to hear.

‘All shall be done as you have said,
monseigneur
,’
said Anna, and left the room.

Monseigneur
!
Yes, that title was his by right, as he was
un
gentil
,
a nobleman by birth. Anna always used it. Gaston preferred plain ‘
monsieur
’,
and that was right, too. He was by rank a
chevalier
,
a member of the old noble caste of France, and
no circumstances could change that – not even those loans and mortgages which old Flambard claimed made him a mere vassal of a Paris banker. Because his family had held these lands since 1400, he was described in legal documents as
haut
et
puissant
seigneur
–
high and mighty lord….

De Bellefort stirred, as though waking from a dream, and rose from the table. It was time to see whether or not Elizabeth remained true to her oath. He opened a drawer in the massive oak sideboard that almost filled one wall of the little room, and
withdrew
a varnished wooden chest, some twelve inches long. Glancing round to make sure that he was not overlooked, he took from the chest a heavy army pistol.

This, he ascertained, was a Webley Mk II .455 revolver, weighing well over two pounds, and nearly a foot long. Hardly an ornament for a lady’s reticule, but then, his sister Elizabeth de Bellefort was no ordinary lady. This revolver was a top-breaker: when you broke it open to reload it, it automatically rejected the spent cartridges. It contained a six-round cylinder, and its effective range was fifty yards.

What a magnificent instrument of vengeance! More to the point, it was the standard issue service pistol for the armed forces of the United Kingdom and its Empire. He had insisted on Webleys because they appealed to his sense of irony: his English prey would be felled by an English weapon. He had handsomely rewarded the dealer at Le Havre who had obtained two such pistols for him earlier in the week.

It was time to visit Elizabeth in the great chamber. Still holding the revolver, Alain de Bellefort left the room where his breakfast had been served, and walked slowly through a fine but faded gallery lined with dim old mirrors. He stopped for a moment and surveyed his own reflection.

He saw a powerful, majestic man looking back at him, a man in his mid-thirties with a shock of dark hair worn long over the collar, and with very deep-set eyes, which showed like two
patches of darkness in his pale and heavily pockmarked face. Was it true, as some said, that his mouth had a cruel twist? Perhaps, but it showed determination too, and it was his own kind of resolve and courage that would be called into use over the coming weeks.

He continued his slow walk through the mirrored room,
imagining
as he glimpsed his moving reflection that he was accompanied by men in splendid embroidered coats and white wigs, and ladies in the elegant but rather childish dresses made popular by Marie-Antoinette. The images faded, and he saw once again his own black-clad form, pistol in hand, on his way to talk of vengeance and victory to his wronged sister.

While Alain de Bellefort was taking breakfast, his sister Elizabeth sat at a writing table near a window, looking out on to a rural vignette that might have served as an illustration for a medieval Book of Hours. Neatly ploughed fields ascended to an eminence, upon which rose a white crenelated tower. A peasant man was stooping to the fertile earth, engaged in some task of husbandry. She had drunk some coffee, and was waiting now for Alain. The open drawer of the desk was waiting, too: waiting to receive what Alain was going to bring to her when he had finished his morning worship of their ancestors on the eastern terrace.

Elizabeth de Bellefort sat as motionless at her desk as her brother had stood on the terrace. Part of her mind was in the present, but her inner recollection was engaged in recalling the past year of her life. She and her brother were orphans. Her pious mother had died when she was six years old, and they had been reared by their father, and a succession of lady guardians. When she was twenty-eight, her father had arranged for her to be married to the wealthy son of a distinguished English military family with great influence at the English Court. The marriage would give them entrée to a powerful political circle, and also sufficient money to wrest the
manoir
back from the grasping
moneylenders who held it in thrall. It would have been a
mariage
de
raison
– a useful convenience, but what of that?

Elizabeth had moved to England, where she had lodged with a French family connected with the embassy, who lived in a
picturesque
rustic villa at Richmond. Her prospective father-in-law, Field Marshal Sir John Claygate, had arranged a reception at his great London town house on the day that his younger son, Maurice, returned to England from Jamaica.

Maurice, she knew, had followed his father and brother into the army, but the military life had proved irksome, and he had bought himself out in order to supervise his father’s West Indian
plantation
. Maurice, known to his intimate friends as Moggie, had the reputation of being an amiable man-about-town. He also had a private income of
£
10,000 a year.

The dinner had been held on the 25 August, just over a year ago. She had been led into the dining saloon by Maurice Claygate’s elder brother Edwin, a captain in the 17th Lancers. She had sensed at once that this handsome, haughty man would always hold himself aloof from her: his evident distaste for the match with his brother was displayed, paradoxically enough, in his careful and frigid
politesse.

How nervous she had been on that hot August evening! Edwin’s wife, Sarah, a strikingly handsome, dark-haired young lady in her late twenties, seemed to share her husband’s contempt for the idea of an arranged marriage. The father and mother were kind and affable; but then, this projected marriage had presumably been their idea, so it was incumbent upon them to behave with
something
approaching civility. The father was a knight, the sons were commoners. None of them equalled the De Belleforts in rank or dignity. In these days, though, money talked.

Maurice had arrived late, muttering excuses, and had taken his place at the table in the seat reserved for him on her right. She had immediately fallen violently in love with him. Her devotion was total and unconditional from that moment, and she saw the spark
of interest kindled in his fine grey eyes as he looked at her for the first time.

Dare she think now of what had come of that relationship? Could she recall without qualms the agony of her betrayal, its appalling consequences, and the blood, pain and despair that had accompanied her ultimate disgrace? Yes, those things needed to be kept constantly in the forefront of her memory, if she and Alain were to succeed in redeeming the honour of the De Bellefort family.

Her brother came into the great chamber, the dereliction of which echoed the desperate penury of their position as manorial lords. Without speaking, he placed the heavy revolver on the desk beside her right hand. She, for her part, picked it up, and put it away in the drawer that she had opened ready to receive it.

‘You are still determined to pursue the matter?’ he asked.

‘I am,’ she replied. ‘You need fear no diminution of courage on my part, Alain.’

‘Good. Then I will leave you, now. We depart for England at midday. Have no fear, Elizabeth, all is going to be well.’

When he had gone, Elizabeth de Bellefort sat gazing unseeingly at the medieval vignette beyond the window. The fine modern pistol, she mused, held more real menace than the ancient rusting duelling-pistols and flintlocks hanging here, on the walls of the great chamber. How fortunate she had been to have a father so steeped in honour, and a brother to whom honour was more
valuable
than life! She would prove, in England, that she was every whit their equal.