The Mayfair Affair (32 page)

"My dear girl. I'll own I'm surprised by recent revelations. But I'm the last to cast blame."

"Isn't that your job?"

"No. It's my job to try to learn the truth of what happened."

Louisa held his gaze. "And, despite everything, I really do want to know."

Malcolm nodded. He got to his feet, and when she rose to see him to the door, he touched her arm again. He knew more about her than at any point in their twenty-some-year acquaintance. And he had never felt more awkward in her presence.

But at the door, he turned back. "Louisa? How did Craven come to be assigned to work with Trenchard? Did he request it?"

"Oh, no," Louisa said. "He wouldn't have been able to make it happen, in any case. It was Father who arranged it."

Malcolm slammed shut the door of Carfax's study. "Damn it, sir, how much else are you hiding?"

Carfax looked up from his newspaper. "I wasn't aware that I was hiding anything."

"You had Craven spying on Trenchard."

Carfax set the newspaper on the table beside his chair. "Who told you that?"

"No one. I know the way you work."

"You're inclined to credit me with being entirely too devious, Malcolm."

"Sir." Malcolm strode to the other matched Sheraton armchair and gripped its oak back. "What's the point of having me investigate at all if you won't be honest with me?"

Carfax smoothed the newspaper. "You seem to do very well ferreting things out on your own. I'm hardly necessary at all."

"You underrate yourself, sir," Malcolm said in a tight voice. "Do you really want me blundering about your family?"

"You don't blunder, Malcolm. But you have a point. The situation in India was delicate seven years ago. The East India Company were running amok as usual, but they had too much support in Parliament to rein them in completely. And we relied on saltpeter from India for the war again Napoleon."

"You didn't trust Trenchard."

"I knew he was an Elsinore League member." Carfax said it as though it was explanation enough, which, in a way, perhaps it was.

"So you set your other son-in-law to spy on him."

"I wanted someone assigned to the mission whom I knew I could count on for honest reports. Craven was ambitious, and unlike Trenchard he needed my support to achieve his ambitions."

"Did Trenchard know?"

Carfax tilted his head back and regarded Malcolm over his spectacles. "My dear boy. What do you take me for?"

"I think it's more a question of what I take Trenchard for."

"A point. Trenchard had no inkling, to my knowledge. And my knowledge is, needless to say, extensive."

"Did Craven give you any useful intelligence?"

"His reports were thorough. As it happened, Trenchard managed things capably enough, though in the end it was a damned mess anyway."

"The East Adilabad/West Basmat dispute?"

Carfax grimaced. "The Rajah of West Basmat surprised our troops, who were supporting the Rajah of East Adilabad. It was a private contest between the two men, but we threw our support behind East Adilabad because the East India Company were trying to negotiate a treaty with the rajah."

"Reggie Hallam and Archie Grandison were both killed." They had been at Harrow with Malcolm and David.

Carfax nodded. "As was Teddy Caruthers."

"Hetty Tarrington's first husband?"

"Quite. Incompetence, though I can't blame it on Trenchard or Craven." Carfax looked as though he almost wished he could. He liked explanations.

"Was Craven still gathering intelligence for you?"

Carfax picked up a penknife from the table. "Here and there."

"Here and where?"

"Undersecretary to the Board of Control is a dull job—which made Craven well suited for it—but useful information crossed his desk from time to time. Of course I wanted to take advantage of it."

"And Craven was your creature."

"Craven was in my debt."

"Aren't we all," Malcolm muttered under his breath.

"I heard that, Malcolm. You know how intelligence works."

Malcolm released the chairback and walked round to the front of the chair. "Did you have Craven spying on me?"

"If I wanted reports on you, I wouldn't have turned to Craven."

Malcolm dropped into the chair. This same pair of Sheraton armchairs had been in the study when Carfax first called him and David in here as boys to give them a look at his extensive collection of maps. Malcolm leaned forwards and regarded his spymaster. Father to Mary, Louisa, David, Bel, Georgiana, and Lucinda. "Tell me something, sir. Even as a callow, obtuse young man, it was plain to me that you loved Lady Carfax, and she you. Didn't you want that happiness for your children?"

For an instant, he saw his shot hit home in the hard depths of Carfax's eyes. "You assume it is a happiness."

"I think it is for you and Lady Carfax."

"But there are no guarantees, in any sort of marriage. I don't believe your own marriage precisely began as a love match."

Malcolm wasn't sure if Carfax meant that as praise or censure of his and Suzanne's marriage, and wasn't sure he wanted to find out. "All the same—"

"The alternative hasn't worked out so very well?" Carfax wiped his handkerchief over the blade of the penknife. "Mary was set on what she wanted in a husband. There isn't exactly a wealth of ducal coronets. She's fortunate she found one. No lecture from me on the joys of connubial bliss would have changed her mind."

"And you liked being close to Trenchard."

"That was a side benefit."

"And Louisa?"

Carfax aligned the penknife at a precise angle on the newspaper. "To own the truth, I'd have preferred it if Amelia's ridiculous schemes had come to fruition and Louisa had married you. Not that I ever had much hope of it. Or that I think it would have turned out so very well. I suspect you'd have been bored."

"Perhaps you underestimate Louisa."

"My dear Malcolm, I've known you since you were eight. I think there are very few women you would have allowed yourself to fall in love with. I don't believe my daughter was one of them. Suzanne has a rare ability to slip under your guard."

Malcolm swallowed. He was keenly aware of Carfax's seeming omniscience in intelligence matters, but he wasn't used to his mentor showing the same abilities when it came to the intricacies of human relationships. "And David?" he asked. It was, he later acknowledged, an attempt to divert the conversation from himself, perhaps unwisely. He generally avoided any discussion of David's matrimonial future with Carfax.

Carfax's gaze hardened against intrusion. "David will do what is expected of him. I have no doubt of it."

And yet for once, Malcolm suspected that Carfax, who was in general supremely confident, was attempting to reassure himself.

Malcolm braced his hands on the chair. It was the investigation that mattered now. "Was Craven working on anything for you that might have got him killed?"

"The last intelligence I got from Craven was convoluted details about a tea shipment that didn't even seem important enough for me to try to make sense of it."

"Suppose Trenchard and Craven had had a falling out."

"Why would they have done?"

"Supposition." Malcolm wasn't going to betray Louisa's affair to her father unless he absolutely had to. "I'm trying to find a way to connect the two murders. What if, instead of the same person killing both of them, Craven killed Trenchard. We know the Elsinore League are tightly knit. Might they have killed Craven in revenge?"

"I should very much like to know why you think Trenchard and Craven might have fallen out," Carfax said. "But if Craven killed Trenchard—yes, it's entirely possible the Elsinore League sought revenge."

Frederick Hampson hesitated on the threshold. His gaze took in every detail of his daughter's face. Suzanne, standing behind Hampson with Raoul, was suddenly and acutely aware that he was seeing the baby he had once held in his arms, the toddler taking her first steps, the little girl he had taught to ride a pony, the young woman he had given away at her wedding.

He stepped forwards as though to embrace Laura, and then checked himself, showing keener instincts and more sharply attuned sensibilities than Suzanne would have expected. "Jane. Or should I call you Laura?"

"I answer to both." Laura was on her feet as well, with the table between her and her father. "Though in truth, it's so long since I've been called Jane that it seems like another person. It is another person."

Hampson's mouth twisted. To Suzanne it appeared he was trying to control tears. "Odd. When I look at you I still see my daughter."

"Papa—" Laura hesitated, swallowed, drew a breath. "I made my own choices. Bad choices. It isn't your responsibility to deal with the consequences."

"Dear God, Jane." The sob Hampson was trying to control broke through in his voice. "It isn't a question of responsibilities. I love you."

For a moment, the articulate Laura seemed to be robbed of speech. Suzanne swallowed and heard a hitch in Raoul's breath.

"If I didn't make that clear enough—and I fear I didn't—that's my fault," Hampson said. "A sin for which I'll never forgive myself. That you couldn't come to me—"

"Because I wanted to protect you. And Sarah and the children. They're the ones who need you now."

"It's not a question of one child supplanting another, Jane. You must know that. One never stops being a parent."

Laura turned her head away.

Hampson took a quick step forwards. "I wasn't thinking—"

"I gave her up," Laura said. She forced her gaze back to her father. "It was my choice."

"It sounds as though there was precious little choice about it. I could kill—"

"Don't," Laura said. "I could as well, though, as it happens, I didn't."

"My dear girl—" Hampson's face crumpled. Laura moved towards him, as though against her better instincts. An embrace at last, though it was the daughter comforting the father. Hampson's hands clenched on the gray fabric of his daughter's gown. Suzanne realized her cheeks were damp. Raoul seemed rooted to the ground.

"I'm sorry," Laura said. "I've been a terrible disappointment."

"On the contrary." Hampson drew back and held his daughter with his gaze. "I couldn't be sorrier for what happened, and I'll never forgive myself for failing you. But I don't think I've ever been more proud of you than I am now, seeing the woman you've become."

Laura's mouth twisted. "Then you don't know me, Papa."

"I'm not naive enough to believe in tidy endings," Suzanne said, "but Laura—Jane—reached out to her father more than I'd hoped. I only hope she can find a way to forgive herself."

"Can you?" Malcolm asked.

Suzanne turned to her husband. They were in a hackney on their way to see Jack's mistress, Lily Duval. "I don't in the least—"

"You blame yourself every day, sweetheart. You've been doing it every day of our marriage, I just didn't realize it until two months ago."

Suzanne reached for the strap as they rounded a corner. "That's not true. There are days together where I don't think about it at all. I'm rather horrifyingly good at duplicity."

"My point exactly."

"That I'm good at it?"

"That you called it horrifying."

Her fingers closed hard on the edge of the seat. To brace herself, because they had just pulled up in Half Moon Street.

Malcolm handed her down from the carriage without further comment. The house Trenchard had rented for his son's mistress and her child was small by Mayfair standards, though more commodious than the lodgings of most Londoners. A red-haired young woman of about twenty in a dark print dress and ruffled apron answered the door. Suzanne more than half expected Lily Duval to refuse to see them (in fact, she and Malcolm had been strategizing what to do in case of refusal), but the young woman said her mistress was in the parlor. She proceeded to conduct them to this room without taking in their cards first.

The narrow entrance hall boasted a silver box for calling cards atop a chipped table with a wooden wagon and two lead soldiers peeping out from beneath. The maid took them up the stairs to the first-floor parlor, a room hung with blue paper,that let in as much sun as the March day afforded. Framed playbills adorned the walls. Lily Duval came forwards to meet them.

"Mr. and Mrs. Rannoch. Lord Tarrington—that is, His Grace the duke—James sent word that you'd likely call."

Lily Duval was a tall, slender woman with bright gold hair dressed in a loose knot. After interviews in prison and with the recently bereaved, it was a shock and relief to see her green-spotted muslin. A paisley shawl was tossed round her shoulders. The yellows and oranges of the shawl should have clashed with the green but somehow didn't.

"Thank you for agreeing to see us," Malcolm said.

She gave a lopsided smile and waved them to chairs. "I didn't think I had much choice. I don't always make the best decisions, but I am trying hard to be sensible for Johnny's sake. My son."

"I understand he's seven." Suzanne gave the smile of one mother to another.

"Yes." Miss Duval moved to the windows. Suzanne and Malcolm followed. In the narrow strip of garden outside, a little boy with white-blond hair was tossing a stick to a brown and white puppy.

"A fine boy," Malcolm said. "He has a cricketer's arm."

"Jack played cricket," Miss Duval said.

"Yes, I remember seeing him play. He had undeniable talent."

"For some things."

In the garden below, the stick sailed over the puppy's head and caught in the vine on the fence. The puppy yapped in protest. Johnny studied the stick, tried to reach up on his tiptoes, then, when it was clear he couldn't reach high enough, bent down for a pebble and threw it at the vine. The stick fell to the ground.

"Enterprising," Malcolm said.

"I never used to give much thought to the future," Lily Duval said, gaze on her son. "More fun to enjoy the present than to think seven months in the future, let alone seven years. It changes one, having children."

"I used to think that was a platitude," Suzanne said. "I didn't really understand until I had children of my own."

Lily Duval met Suzanne's gaze in a moment of understanding.

The maidservant had come out into the garden. Johnny ran over to take the biscuit she was holding out and fed half of it to the dog. Miss Duval shook her head. "I'd never have given half a biscuit away at his age. I wouldn't have been confident of getting another."

The maidservant settled in a chair. The puppy frisked off after the stick again.

"We have a cat," Suzanne said, "but I want to a get a dog when our children are a bit older."

"James gave Johnny the puppy for Christmas. He's a good uncle."

"I understand he visits regularly," Malcolm said.

"Yes, he's very conscientious. And he always apologizes for not doing more. And insists Johnny call him Uncle James. Not everyone would acknowledge the connection." Miss Duval's fingers closed on the blue-flowered curtain for a moment. "He was here the night the duke was killed. I had asked him to come."

"And he left—?" Suzanne asked.

"Shortly before one-thirty. He wanted to get back to the country before the household was awake." She looked between Malcolm and Suzanne. "James said the duke was killed about two-thirty. So neither James nor I has an alibi. You'll have to make your own judgments about me. But you must realize James couldn't possibly have killed anyone, let alone his own father."

"You're very loyal," Malcolm said.

"I've seen what a good man he is." She shook her head, dislodging a strand of hair. "It's funny, there was a time when I'd have written James off as hopelessly dull compared to Jack. But then I never was a very good judge of men." She cast another glance at her son, who was now flopped on his back with the puppy licking his face, then gestured towards the mismatched tapestry chairs again. "We'd better sit down. I'm sure you have more questions."

Malcolm handed Suzanne into one of the chairs but remained standing, a courtesy to their hostess. "I understand the late duke had made some threats regarding your son."

Miss Duval's mouth tightened. "In truth, I've feared Trenchard's interference from the start." She sank down on the sofa. "If I could have managed on my own— but I couldn't, so there's no sense refining on it. And I wouldn't have put it past Trenchard to interfere, in any event."

Malcolm dropped into the second chair. "Has he tried to interfere a great deal?"

"Most of the time he seemed to ignore us, which suited me very well." Miss Duval adjusted the flowered silk shawl on the sofa back, which had slipped to show a frayed spot in the blue velvet. "But I always sensed he was there, waiting to pounce. James said he always felt his father was like a snake, coiled in a tree overhead or watching from the shadows."

"Did you see Jack often?" Malcolm asked.

"Oh, yes." Miss Duval pushed the loose strand of hair behind her ear. "Not that I had any illusions it was an exclusive relationship. Not that he even pretended it was. But he visited me until that whole business when he had to leave England."

"That must have been dreadful," Suzanne said, well aware Malcolm hadn't been able to discover the full details of what had driven Jack from England.

"A married woman. I never knew her name. There's a limit to the details one wants about one's lover's other conquests. Not the first married woman Jack was entangled with, but I think it was the first time a husband had challenged him to a duel."

"They fought?" Malcolm asked.

"Jack wounded the husband. He said it was an accident."

"Trenchard did a remarkable job of hushing it up," Malcolm said.

"But he insisted Jack leave the country. Jack was gone before Johnny was born. But he wrote to me from India. Until—until he died." She drew her shawl closer about her shoulders. "I miss him. He was far from perfect, but then I can hardly claim to be perfect myself."

"Do you still have his letters from India?" Malcolm asked.

"No, that's the worst of it. We were robbed not long after he died. They got the silver and most of the jewelry he'd given me and a silver christening rattle James had given Johnny. I kept Jack's letters in a silver filigree box. Plate, actually, but I suppose it looked valuable."

Malcolm flicked a glance at Suzanne. "You never learned who was behind the theft?"

"No. It was a bit odd because there haven't been other break-ins on our street that I know of, but—" Lily Duval stared at Malcolm. "You think it was deliberate? Someone was after Jack's letters?"

"It's a possibility," Malcolm said. "And in this case we have to consider every possibility. Do you remember what Jack wrote to you about the situation in India?"

Lily Duval frowned. "That it was hot. That he was bored. Eventually, that he was taking a wife. He didn't elaborate, but, reading between the lines, I gathered he didn't have much choice in the matter." She shook her head. "It's a wonder he wasn't forced into matrimony sooner. I think the only thing that saved him was his predilection for married women and opera dancers like me. He did seem excited about the child on the way." Her fingers closed for a moment on the folds of her shawl, perhaps at the realization that this child would have been a legitimate heir, unlike her own son, perhaps at the realization the child was gone. "I remember thinking Johnny would have a brother or sister he'd probably never meet. I have two sisters, one in Surrey, one in Hampstead. I see Susie twice a week and Alice at least twice a year. And we write all the time. I can't imagine— But I don't suppose any of that is why you think the letters were taken."

"It's interesting background," Malcolm said. "Did Jack write to you about his father's visit?"

Miss Duval twisted an errant lock of hair round her finger. "That he was dreading it. I don't remember him writing after the duke arrived. No, there was one letter. I've always thought he was in his cups when he wrote it. Well, even more in his cups than he usually was at the end of the evening. There was a great deal about people taking one by surprise, and not knowing whom he could trust, and some rather maudlin bits about Johnny—he only got maudlin when he'd been dipping deep. Then he said he'd discovered something unexpected, and he wasn't sure what to do about it."

"Something about his father?" Malcolm asked.

"He didn't say what it was about." Lily Duval pulled the lock of hair taut and stared at it, as though answers could be found in the golden strands. "But at the end of the letter he asked what he owed the man who'd sired him."

"What did you reply?" Suzanne asked.

"Before I had the chance to reply, he wrote back telling me to disregard his ramblings." She folded her arms across her chest. "That letter, the one telling me to disregard his ramblings, was the last one I had from him. I never thought—"

"If it did mean anything of significance, there's nothing you could have done," Malcolm said.

"You're kind, Mr. Rannoch."

"I speak the truth. Whatever happened to Jack wasn't your fault."

"But you think Jack's death had something to do with his father's? Jack died in an accident—"

"In truth, Miss Duval, the more we investigate, the less we are sure of anything. Did Jack ever mention Lord Craven?"

"Craven?" Lily Duval frowned. "The name's familiar. He was in India as well, wasn't he?

"Assisting Lord Trenchard."

"Jack must have said something— oh, yes, that's it! He called him 'craven Craven.' I'm not sure why. He isn't a soldier, is he?"

"Technically both she and James would have had time to kill Trenchard." Malcolm drummed his fingers on the seat of the hackney as they clattered back towards Mayfair.

"And it's hard to imagine a motive stronger than a mother's fear for her child." Suzanne stared at the thick rain that had begun to fall, washing the city gray. "All the same—"

"Yes?" Malcolm swung his gaze to her.

"You're going to say I've gone soft."

"I can't imagine you going soft, sweetheart."

"I could see her being driven to kill, but Trenchard hadn't gone that far yet. It was all supposition."

"As she and James tell it."

Suzanne chewed on the doeskin finger of her glove. "They aren't in on it together, or they'd be giving each other alibis. So there must be some truth in their version of what went on that night."

"Suppose Trenchard summoned her after James left. His threats about the boy escalated, she attacked."

"That's possible," Suzanne acknowledged, forcing herself to a detachment that used to be second nature. "But why would he summon her in the middle of the night?"