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“Oh, stubble it, Daphne. You knew what I meant, which shows you to not be as pure and ladylike as you wish you were. You couldn’t have been, living with Samuel and his constant peccadilloes with various bits of the muslin company. That, dear girl,” she ended, looking to Emma, “would be whores, lightskirts and, once, when he was particularly flushed from a win at the tables, a kept woman he lost in the next run of his usual bad luck.”
“You never liked him. Your own son.” Daphne sighed deeply. “And to that, Mother Clifford, I can only say For Shame.”
Emma had enough of her mother in her to be at least marginally horrified, and enough of her grandmother in her to have to remind herself not to laugh out loud. Suddenly, Mrs. Norbert seemed a safer topic of conversation. “How…” she asked at last, “…how do you know Mrs. Norbert is a seamstress, Grandmama, rather than a…a seamstress?”
Fanny sniffed. “Her sewing basket, for one. Packets of pins and needles, a well-worn darning knob, a full set of workmanlike scissors. That basket isn’t for show, I tell you. It has been used. That,” she said, “and the fact that her underclothes and nightwear are of sturdy, oft-mended spinster quality. Meaning,” she ended, looking to her daughter-in-law, “they were never meant to see a man, just a long, cold winter.”
“So you did sneak into her room and look in her drawers,” Daphne said, slowly catching up.
“Looked at ’em, picked ’em up and inspected ’em,” Fanny said (as Emma gave in and began laughing), then downed the remainder of her port. “I had so hoped she’d been a streetwalker, even a kept woman. But she’s a demned seamstress, which makes her about as interesting as the mud fence she so greatly resembles. But I have hopes yet for Sir Edgar. There’s something about that man that screams out to be investigated.”
Emma sobered. “Grandmama, you will not be looking at his drawers, understand? I won’t have it.”
“And I’m not interested in his drawers. He’s older than dirt,” Fanny shot back. “I’ve got bigger fish to fry, gel. I just want to know our fellow tenants. Or are you looking to get murdered in your bed?”
Emma sighed in the midst of picking up shards of very fine china cup and looked to her mother, who was going rather pale. “She doesn’t really mean that, Mama.”
“Yes, she does,” Fanny said, winking at her granddaughter. “There we’d be, dreaming sweet dreams, and bam, eternal rest, with sewing scissors sticking out from between our ribs. Or maybe a pillow over our heads, pressed there by Sir Edgar, who is really a bloody murderer who, even as we lay there, cold and dead as stones, spends the rest of the night going through our drawers.”
“She doesn’t really mean that, either, Mama,” Emma said as Daphne clutched an embroidered silk pillow to her ample bosom. “Grandmama, you’re impossible.”
“And I pride myself on it,” Fanny said, standing up to go refill her glass. “Except, of course, you’re so easy, Daphne. I really wish you’d give me more incentive to tease you. But, then, I’ve got other fish to fry here in London, don’t I? And them I’ll tease to much better effect.”
Emma laid the pieces of broken china on the tea tray and sat back once more, to stare in her grandmother’s direction. “What are you planning, Grandmama? We’ve got some funds left, but probably not enough to bribe your way out of the local guardhouse. And, come to think of it, we’d first need to take a family vote as to whether or not we’d wish to spend our last penny saving you. I’d consider that, Grandmama, as I know where my vote would go, and Cliff still hasn’t quite forgiven you for making him ride all the way here inside the coach with us.”
“You should both thank me for that. You know what would have happened if he rode up with the coachman. He’d have found some way to take the ribbons, and we’d all be dead in a ditch right now.”
“Dead, dead, dead,” Daphne lamented, still clutching the pillow. “Have you no other conversation today, Mother Clifford?”
“I do, Daphne, but you don’t want to hear it. Now, Thornley told me that all social events have been postponed again because of this fog, which leaves us at loose ends this evening, again. I’m bored to flinders, frankly, so what I thought was that we could corner Sir Edgar, all three of us, and press him for a bit of his history. You know. Where he was born, who his father was, why he keeps several extremely large, heavy trunks hidden behind the locked door of his dressing room. I saw them go up the stairs when he arrived, but they’re sitting nowhere they can be seen. He has to have locked them up for a terrible reason.”
“Let’s talk about locking you in your dressing room,” Emma said succinctly, ringing the small bell on the tea tray, at which time Thornley appeared in the doorway, just as if he’d been standing right outside all along, waiting for the summons…and hearing every word the ladies said.
“You rang, Miss Clifford?” Thornley inquired, already picking up the tea tray, and not appearing at all surprised to see that one of the marquis’s priceless china cups was now in seven uneven pieces.
“Yes, thank you, Thornley,” she said, laying her damp, tea-stained serviette on the tray. “I was wondering—” she looked straight into the man’s eyes “—do you happen to know the whereabouts of Mr. Clifford?”
Thornley, eyes quickly averted, looking somewhere in the vicinity of the portrait of the late Marquis and several of his hounds that hung over the mantel, said, “I believe he is resting, Miss Clifford.”
“He’s still in bed?” Emma sighed. “It’s nearly gone five, Thornley. What time did my brother get in this morning?”
“I couldn’t really say, Miss Clifford,” Thornley said, still avoiding her gaze, even as she stood—which didn’t come close to putting her on eye level with the man, but she’d hoped to at least be able to read his expression.
But Thornley had no expressions, other than Proper, and possibly, Prudent.
“Very well, as I know he accompanied my brother, I’ll ask Riley,” Emma said, brushing past him as she headed for the stairs. She stopped, turned back toward the pair of sofas. “Mama? Do you have another penny?”
“That won’t be necessary, Miss Clifford,” Thornley said stiffly. “Riley escorted Mr. Clifford to a…a sporting event last evening, and they returned here at approximately six this morning, Mr. Clifford rather the worse for wear. Riley has been reprimanded, Miss Clifford.”
“A sporting event?” Fanny asked. “What was it? Mill? Cockfight? Oh, wait. A sporting event, you say, Thornley? Or a sporting house?”
Emma watched as Thornley’s ears turned bright red. Poor fellow. He could keep his spine straight. His expression never betrayed what he might be thinking. And she hadn’t really needed to see his eyes. Those ears of his were a dead giveaway.
“Ah!” Fanny crowed, punching a fist into the air. “Good for him, and about time, too!”
Daphne, who had come within Ames Ace of swooning into the cushions at the thought of being murdered in her bed, now gave way to the blessed darkness that swam before her eyes.
DARKNESS WOULD HAVE BEEN swimming in front of Morgan’s eyes, save for the fact that the fog wouldn’t let it. The entire countryside had turned a thick, ugly gray-yellow, slowing the progress of the pair of coaches to a crawl.
They should have reached London hours ago, he knew, snapping shut his pocket watch after checking the time. He’d returned to the coach at the last posting inn, to rest Sampson, and because he did not much care for the feel of the gray-yellow damp on his face, but it was now past his usual dinnertime, and he was hungry. Damn early country hours, where he’d become accustomed to eating his main meal long before six.
“We still should arrive before eight, don’t you think?” he asked a morose and rather pale-looking Wycliff, who didn’t seem quite at his best riding backward in the coach. “In plenty of time for supper.”
“I…I really hadn’t thought much about…about food, my lord,” the valet choked out, somehow able to speak without really opening his teeth.
“Really? And here I am, famished. As I recall the thing, Mrs. Timon always had a way with a capon. Gaston will be in charge of the kitchen while we’re there, but for the most part, Mrs. Timon does just fine. Except for the eel. Don’t care for eel, Wycliff,” Morgan said, watching the man closely.
“I…I also don’t care for…for eel, my lord.”
Morgan was being perverse, he knew it, but he had cause. Wycliff had made a cake of himself after departing that last posting inn, insisting almost to hysteria that the three harmless-looking farmers who had shared the common room with them were sure to follow the coaches, intent on slitting their throats.
Morgan would consider a figurative crawl inside Wycliff’s head, just for a moment, to see where the man’s brainbox had been wound up incorrectly, except he’d first have to fight his way through the maggots that doubtless collected there.
“No? Then, at last, we’re agreed on something. The thing about eel, Wycliff, is that rather rubbery texture when it isn’t cooked just right. Do you know what I mean? It can be swimming in the best, most creamy parsley sauce, but if you put it in your mouth and it sort of bounces off your back teeth, well—”
God was both testing him and punishing him, Morgan decided, as Wycliff tossed up his accounts all over his lordship’s shiny Hessians.
THIS WAS IT, the final test of his resolve. Edgar Marmon, Adventurer, and currently known as Sir Edgar Marmington, counted to ten to calm his queasy stomach as he stood just outside the tavern at the bottom end of Bond Street. He was getting too old for this, and knew that, if he hesitated, he would be in danger of losing his nerve.
But, as he was also in no monetary position to turn tail and run, and too aged to contemplate employing the sweat of his brow in an honest day’s work—probably because he’d never used the words “work” and “honest” in the same thought—he screwed himself up to the sticking point and soldiered on.
Once inside, his gaze roamed the place, seeking into the darkest corners, on the lookout for anyone who might see through his disguise of now snowy-white hair, a bushy white mustache, and the cane he used to support his limp, a leftover of his valiant service against the French, years earlier.
If one could count tagging after the army valiant as, for the most part, he had hidden himself in the rear during the day and left his visits to the battlefields to the dark of night, when he scavenged for any bits of loot he could find and carry away. If, not to make too fine a point on it, one could even call it a limp, as Sir Edgar, just to be sure he’d keep favoring the correct leg, placed a few pebbles in his left boot each morning, to remind him.
Sir Edgar selected the perfect small table in the corner, and carefully sat down in the chair that positioned his back to the wall. He ordered a bottle and two glasses, and announced very clearly to the disinterested barmaid that he was waiting for his good friend, the Viscount Claypole, to join him.
He’d wait a good long time for that, too, as Sir Edgar had made it his business to send the viscount a missive in the middle of the night, telling him he needs must hie himself home at once, as his father, the earl, was on his deathbed. As Claypole was located nearly thirty miles above Leicester, and the viscount was looking hard at finally inheriting his earldom, Sir Edgar was not disappointed in the man’s alacrity in obeying the summons, and waved him on his way from an alley as the viscount’s coach set north at first light.
Two or three days to Claypole. More, if this fog had drifted to the countryside. A few days’ rest as the viscount asked his father, repeatedly, “Are you quite sure you’re not dying?” A few days for the return trip.
And, by then, nobody would remember that Sir Edgar had even mentioned the man’s name.
“Oh dear, oh dear, where can he be?” Sir Edgar said several times over the next hour, as he consulted his pocket watch, as he looked anxiously toward the door to the street, sighed.
He only needed one. Two could be a problem, and three were definitely too many. More than one meant enough for a conversation, some shared contemplation, even an opening for a modicum of sense to overtake boundless greed. No, just one, that’s all.
He was considering if he should give it up as a bad job, and head for another tavern where the gentlemen of the ton thought it wonderful to rub elbows with the hoi polloi, select another target, when his last “oh, dear” finally caught the attention of the well-dressed, and fairly well into his cups gentleman at the next table.
“A problem, sir?” the man asked. Then, without waiting for an invitation, he picked up his glass and his bottle and joined Sir Edgar. “You’re waiting for someone, right? So am I, but I’ve got the feeling old Winfield is still probably hiding his head under the covers. We drank fairly deep last night, and the man doesn’t have the liver he should.” He stuck out his hand. “John Hatcher.”
Yes, Sir Edgar knew that. John Hatcher. No title, but a family that went back to the Great Fire (and may even have started it, if all his ancestors were as inept as this particular member of the Hatcher clan). Money that went back ever farther than that conflagration. Brains that had got misplaced somewhere along the way.
Oh, yes, Sir Edgar knew all about John Hatcher.
“It is a pleasure, sir,” Sir Edgar said, allowing his thin, trim hand to be half crushed in the bearlike grip of the much larger man. “Sir Edgar Marmington. I’m new to the city, never been here before, but my old school chum, Claypole, promised to…um…show me the sights. Can’t imagine where he is.”
“Claypole? Bit of a dry stick, that, don’t you think? I mean, maybe you wouldn’t know, not if you haven’t seen him since your school days, but he’s dull as…as a clay pole. Har! Har! That was a good one, eh? No, friend, you don’t want him. Claypole’s idea of seeing the sights would be a tour of all the churches, Lord help you. You’re better for him gone.”
Sir Edgar smiled, all attention. “Really? Not that I’m the hey-go-mad sort myself, understand. Sadly bookish, actually. But we’ve been corresponding, the viscount and myself, and he’d seemed so interested in my work…my travels through the ancient lands, my discovery of that old tome that told all about…”
Now Sir Edgar sighed. “I had so wanted to tell him in person that I’m wonderfully close now…at the very brink of discovery. He’s been so generous, subsidizing me monetarily in my research all these twenty years or more, you understand, for the greater end, the final reward. All I need are a few more things to complete my duplication of the monks’ experiments, the alchemist’s notes, and he’d promised—but, no, this is of no interest to you.”
“Probably not,” Hatcher said, tossing back the contents of his glass, and then pouring himself another measure of wine even while calling for a full bottle. “Don’t think I ever read a book, God’s truth. Pride m’self on that. Monks, you said? And what the devil’s an alchemist?”
Sir Edgar sat back, looked around the room nervously, then leaned in close, to whisper to John Hatcher….
“WHAT’S THIS MESS?” Olive Norbert whispered to Daphne Clifford in her booming voice (which is to say, she was probably heard in Tothill Fields, by little old ladies with brass ear trumpets), as she employed her fork to poke suspiciously at something on her plate. “It don’t look right. Looks sick.”
“More than sick, Mrs. Norbert,” Fanny said, winking at Emma. “It’s dead. And, as it’s escargot—that would be a snail, Mrs. Norbert—a snail, minus its shell, it demned well better would be dead, or I’ll be marching into the kitchens myself to ask why not. Oh, and because you’re looking as if you don’t believe me, please allow me to state this very firmly—it’s food.”
“Not on my plate, it ain’t,” Olive Norbert declared, pushing the serving of genuine French snails away from her with the tip of her fork. “Slimy things, leaving trails up the wall in the damp. Here now, you. Cart this mess off,” she commanded to Riley, doing duty at the table this evening.
“Bring me some meat, boy. Bloody red with juice. And a pudding. Go on, hop to it! I’m paying down good money for snails? In a pig’s eye, I am. Oh, and some ham, while you’re about it. It’s meat I want, and meat I will get or know the reason why.”
As Mrs. Norbert was twice Riley’s size (width-wise), and a paying guest, Riley hopped to, ready to serve, although it grated on him something awful, it really did. Mrs. Norbert was a pudding herself, a short, fat prawn with tiny, mean green eyes glinting out of a lumpy face, and with piss-yellow hair that frizzed here, curled there, but didn’t quite cover the shine of skin on the top of the behemoth’s head. She was no better than him. Maybe a whole lot worse.
“And it’s not me wanting you to try to cudgel that ugly brainbox of yours to think up a reason why, no, ma’am, it’s not,” Riley muttered under his breath as he turned to walk away.
Emma heard him, however, and kept her head down, to hide her smile. Mrs. Norbert might be crude, bordering on obnoxious most times, but she also had a point. When pinching the purse strings tight, the first thing to be sacrificed was meat. There had been many a meatless evening in the Clifford household until the next quarter’s allowance arrived from her father’s small estate.
“Um, Riley?” Daphne called timidly. “If…if I could also have this taken away? I…I think there may be eyes in it.”
“Oh, all right,” Fanny said, waving her hand. “We all want these snails gone, Riley. Might as well own up to it. Fancy is as fancy does, and I don’t really fancy chewing on these things. What’s up next?”
“I’ll check straightaway, madam,” Riley said, gathering up the “snail course” and piling the plates on his arm. “Just nip belowstairs to ask Mrs. Timon.”
“Evening, all. Started without me, I see. Riley, you rotter, you look better than me, and I consider that an insult, I truly do.”
Riley, and the rest of the company, turned in the direction of the sound, to see Clifford Clifford lurching into the room like a man who has been at sea for months and was just now touching down on dry land, holding on to chair backs until he could collapse into his own chair, beside his sister.
“About time you showed up, you pernicious little weasel,” Fanny said from her position at the bottom of the table. “Shameful, a man who can’t hold his spirits. You look terrible.”
And he did. Other than the lurching from chair to chair, Cliff’s dark hair appeared faintly greasy, and one lock hung down unflatteringly over his normally light gray but at the moment quite bloodshot eyes. His cravat was askew, his waistcoat misbuttoned, and his jacket still resided in his room rather than across his shoulders.
Daphne gasped at her beloved son’s disheveled appearance and rose from her seat, grabbing up her serviette and dipping it into the floral arrangement in the middle of the table. “Here, darling, cool water for your aching head,” she said, after racing around to the other side of the table, trying to dab her son’s forehead. “Mama will fix.”
Cliff fought his mother away by turning his head this way and that, and finally by grabbing the serviette and tossing it to the floor. “Don’t do that, Mama, I’m not a child,” he said, and Daphne, accustomed to taking orders from anyone in breeches, promptly returned to her chair and sat down. And proceeded to sulk. Over the course of her marriage, she had quite mastered the injured sulk.
“If you’re not a child, Cliff, I propose you stop behaving like one,” Emma said, resigned to her role as her brother’s keeper.
Cliff took great exception to his sister’s mild rebuke. “Child, am I? I’m head of this household, remember? I’m the man. So what’s he doing, sitting at the head of the table?”
Sir Edgar looked up from his plate—the one that now held three servings of escargot, because he was one, hungry, and two, sitting closest to Riley as he’d tried to leave the room with the rejected dishes.
“Forgive me,” he said, smiling at the ladies. “In an attempt to render myself politely deaf during a domestic upheaval that I, as a gentleman, have chosen to ignore—have I missed something? Oh, hallo there, Clifford. Mind if I pretend I didn’t see you join us?”
“Ha! Very good, Sir Edgar,” Fanny said approvingly. “Now, if you can say you likewise didn’t notice my daughter-in-law’s silly outburst, I’d say you were kin to my late husband, who could blissfully ignore me if I entered the room with my hair on fire if he thought I might ask him to put it out.”
“My thanks, madam, for being compared to your beloved husband. I am honored, at least I think I am,” Sir Edgar said, smiling as Riley laid a plate groaning under the weight of roasted beef in front of him.
“Not if you knew him,” Fanny said, winking at Sir Edgar. “Cliff, over there, puts me in mind of him most, after my late son. None of the three of them cared a jot save for their own comfort. Luckily, my late husband paid so little attention to me that I was free to find my own pleasures. Greatest pity of my life has to be that my son turned out to be his son as well. Could have gone either way, you understand. Several ways, actually.”
“Mother Clifford!” Daphne exclaimed, looking straight at Emma with a look meant to say “in heaven’s name, Do Something.”
“We missed you at luncheon today, Sir Edgar,” Emma broke in gamely, smiling at the man as she leaped toward the first thing to jump into her head. “Were you out, in this horrid fog?”
“Only for a few hours, Miss Emma,” Sir Edgar said, “and I chanced to meet a delightful man. Mr. John Hatcher. Is the name familiar to anyone?”
“No, I can’t say that it is,” Fanny said, sitting back in her chair, sorry to have the subject changed, just when she was having so much fun.
“I fear not,” Daphne apologized, still looking at Cliff and mentally rebuttoning the boy’s waistcoat.
“I knows him,” Mrs. Norbert said, her mouth full of beef. “Sent his latest fillies to our shop, to dress ’em out. Great fondness for red satin he had, John Hatcher. Paid his blunt on time, sometimes with a little extra for us in the sewing room. A real toff.”
Thornley, who had decided it was cowardly to completely avoid the dining room, heard this last bit of wisdom from Olive Norbert as he pushed open the swinging door…and immediately retreated to the kitchens. And he’d tried so hard to fit together a comfortable group for the Season. Next year, he promised himself, he would require extensive references!
JOHN HATCHER STOOD in the middle of the enormous study holding the extensive library his family had collected over the years, and frowned as he approached the wall entirely devoted to blue and green covers.
“Anderson?” he called over his shoulder to his man of business. “Be a good fellow and find me a book on alchemists. We must have one. Lord knows we have everything else.”
Anderson put down the newspaper. “Alchemists, sir? I know what they are, or what they were purported to be.”
Hatcher snatched up his snifter of brandy and plunked himself down in the facing chair in front of the fireplace. “Purported? Is that good? Tell me.”
“Well, sir, the most venerable practice of alchemy is believed, by most scholars and devotеes, to have been originally generated in—” He hesitated, realizing his life would be made immensely easier if he employed as few large words as possible. “That is, alchemists began their work a very long time ago, in a faraway country. Very wise men.”
His employer leaned his elbows on his knees, and grinned. “Wise, eh? How do you know?”
Anderson hadn’t kept his position for fifteen years without learning how to please his employer. “I…I think they wore pointy hats, sir.”
Hatcher nodded eagerly. “Yes, they would, wouldn’t they? With stars on them, I’ll wager. So where are they now? These alchemists?”
“Unless there are a few more recent adherents to the tenets, I think it would be safe to say that they’re all quite dead, sir. Although there are those who say that, before succumbing to their mortal ills, they may have succeeded in discovering a way to turn base metals into gold.”
“Ah-ha!” Thatcher said, thrusting his fist into the air. “And they probably wrote it all down somewheres, how they did it. I mean, you’d write it down, wouldn’t you? How to do it?”
All right, so now Anderson was interested. “Yes, sir. I’d write it all down. Why do you ask?”
